7x7

70% côte d’ivoire, 66% cyprus, 65% republic of ireland: doodle world flags and let a computer guess—via Web Curios  

peaky finders: a selection of interactive mapping application still functional and chugging along a decade later  

cult of the sun: a look at the Athon, a 1980 Lamborghini concept car  

ss experiment: an unsuccessful ferry, powered by eight horses on a treadmill  

astronomia: a lovely antique deck of playing cards with celestial charts and information on the planets and stars 

flsa: US congressional representation introducing legislation for a four-day work week—see previously here and here  

google doodle: a selection of the best commemorative banners—via Things Magazine

style #5253

Dubbed the “Christmas Pattern” by factory workers as production demands for the affordable, utilitarian linoleum flooring of textured, interlocking bricks touted as the perfect choice for small kitchens (see also) guaranteed holiday bonuses during the Great Depression when most others were desperate for work, the enduring pattern with an older vintage than one expects with those harvest palettes of a later time owes its decades-spanning success to residential interior designer Hazel Dell Brown, who helped impart personal expression, ingenuity and improvisation with respect to space and budget in her innovative directions that she took the industry re-calibrated to fulfil the needs of a growing middle class. Learn more from 99% Invisible at the link above.

alternative work site

In a rollicking, wide-ranging look at the precedents for the creator economy in correspondence course—notably of our scribe stenographer Sir Isaac Pitman—and the move that originally tethered us to office space, sourced to in the Uffizi in Florence, where bureaucracy and administration were centralised in 1560 as a cadet branch of the Renaissance and Enlightenment, now a world-class gallery gifted to the city after the Medici line died out.

Afforded the opportunity to work remotely and knowing arguments for compelling staff to return are specious at best—synergy and presence packaged as the benefits we are missing out on away from colleagues I think are the opaque justifications for accountability and the passkeys of those supervisors who like to play house at the office because they’re denied it at home, the informing past is an interesting and advisable lens to re-evaluate custom and workplace culture as crisis and contingency hopefully begin to ebb. Technological advance can be regressive in its demands and requirements to fill the time. Much more to explore and contemplate at Tedium at the link up top.

chevron of chain counterchanged argent, sable, argent

Winning entrant designed by vexillologist Gracie Sheppard in a contest sponsored by a local museum to create a symbol for the region, the flag of Black County was first hoisted in 2012—thereafter on this day to mark the invention of the Newcomen steam engine in 1712 that heralded the beginning of the Industrial Revolution with a county fête.

The heavily industrialised area in the West Midlands after Birmingham has no single set of defined boundaries to the satisfaction of all with the most common being where the coal seam has come to the surface and refers to the layer of soot that covered everything from all the mining, mills and factories by the mid-1800s. Chain-manufacture was big business there, as was glass-making and brickworks. Charles Dickens’ The Old Curiosity Shop established the region’s first literary conceit as a vicious hellscape in 1841 with others upholding it including J. R. R. Tolkien’s Mordor—elvish for dark land—corresponding with contemporary accountings, with some suggestion that activist and Communist and Labour party mayor of Bilston in Staffordshire, Ben Bilboe, was the inspiration and namesake for the hobbit character, the author’s family having roots in the West Midlands.

7x7

snuck out in the middle of the night: The Onion forecasted the West’s hasty departure from Afghanistan a decade ago 

fjögurra daga vinnuviku: a pilot experiment reducing what’s defined as full-time a stupendous success in Iceland  

nine seasons: geniuses from the Hood Internet (see previously) remixed the Seinfeld theme with a hit song from every year it aired 

carriage shift: a LEGO typewriter inspired by the model of the toy’s creator  

subrident: a story told with some edifying vocabulary words  

15-minute cities: natural language map queries 

low-level pokemon, normally easily defeated, stuck guarding locations, perhaps indefinitely: augmented reality sites abandoned at Bagram Airbase

8x8

autobus park № 7: explore Kyiv’s derelict modernist transportation hippodrome—via Things Magazine  

blue: listen to rediscovered demos and outtakes from Joni Mitchell’s album on its fiftieth anniversary 

i’m chasing martian: excellent auditory illusion illustrated—see previously—from chanting fans  

dark matter, dark fish: the overwhelming biomass of Earth’s ecosystem is essentially undetectable for us (see also) yet we claim the right to rubbish it  

warriors of the zenith, warriors of the nadir: a 1904 ethnograph of Zuni ritual masks  

work-life balance: Japanese government proposes four-day work-week  

shareware: a look at the App Store’s predecessor, Software Labs  

private viewing: the collectors who saved modernist Soviet masterpieces

daylight robbery

Once again via Things Magazine, we quite enjoyed this series of photographs from Andy Billman of bricked up windows from buildings across London that evoke the interesting and immediate aesthetic (see also) that falls into the category of being a Thomasson—that is, a preserved architectural relic without apparent purpose or historical significance—plus the contextualisation in the form of a window tax enacted the late seventeenth century, meant to be a progressive levy on the mansions of the wealthy but instead misapplied to tenement dwellings and prompted the restriction of light, view and ventilation, contributing to squalid conditions and spread of disease. Much more to explore at the links above.

6x6

lp: an over-sized mural of well-used record sleeves adorns a corner of a Reno brewery

it’s impolite to point: helpfully finding one’s cursor with an array of candid photos—via Things Magazine

kokedama: an installation of a floating forest (根洗い, root wash—no pot) by Nomad Studio 

zeckenalarm: Ze Frank (previously) delivers true facts on the dangerous little tick 

the amusement park: a long-lost 1973 public service announcement from Dawn of the Dead creator George Romero about the nightmare of ageing in America  

bierdeckel: various graphic designers create coasters capturing historic moments from the UEFA European Football Championship

we here at weyland-yutani corporation would like to wish a happy pride month to all of our lgbtq+ colonists on lv-426

Via JWZ and ourselves just seeing the Y in the corporate logo for the first time, we are rather enjoying this show of corporate solidarity from villainous, fictitious companies including Umbrella Corporation, Tyrell and Cyberdyne Systems, makers of Skynet.  No official statements yet from their real world counterparts regarding Pride Month and often fleeting and hollow-ringing shows of support irrespective of however a person might identify themselves or whatever association is foisted on them.  

fulfilment-by-amazon

Examining the anti-trust lawsuit filed against the e-commerce giant and the inextricably integrated logistics that makes marketplace and membership one in the same, it’s noteworthy how anti-competitive incentives are introduced by shoehorning French regulations into the conversation—the country has not only been the first one to boldly reform its tax regime to make digital overlords pay more of their fair share (see previously here and here) and very early on a prohibition against social media privelging and the invitation to follow on Facebook but rather “search the internet” for French businesses—with the ban on free-shipping to protect physical retail stores as well as other online boutiques. Amazon—with its captive patrons—has built the most robust and inescapable walled-garden, though it is arguable that anyone sets out with such intentions.

werewolves of jack london

As Super Punch informs, years prior to achieving literary success with epics such as The Grapes of Wrath and novellas including East of Eden and Of Mice and Men, John Steinbeck wrote in 1930 a manuscript entitled Murder at Full Moon about a coastal California town beset by shapeshifting lycanthropes. Despite pressure from academics and the general public to publish the rejected full-length horror mystery, it remains in a university archive, unseen except by the executors of Steinbeck’s literary estate, who cite that the author tried to sell his work under a pseudonym and the fact the he never revisited the story even after his accomplishment telling the narrative of the Great Depression and migrant workers, as evidence that he wished not to see it in print and intend to respect those desires. Scholars urging its publication point out that Steinbeck did not burn this unpublished manuscript as he had done others he had disavowed.

generational brokering

Via Kottke, we are referred to this data visualisation of the past century of American generations represented as stacked, staggered bar chart which while reinforcing the reality that all ages come into being and pass and no one’s scheme for immortality has yet worked out and we’re not the first to think ourselves on the cusp of change or bemoaned our own cohort, or those past and future cadres and the factors that limn them. Questions of intergenerational equity aside and the real and perceived firewall that tips the scale in favour of lingering demographics—important as those questions maybe—these stair-step histograms also reveal, with a certain kind of elegant immediacy (see also) is the progress made in terms of life expectancy and quality of life. More at the links above.

fig leaf

Writing for Æon magazine prehistorian Ian Gilligan from the University of Sydney proffers an interesting alternative theory to the rather labour-intensive and leisure limiting congress of development of agriculture and animal husbandry that it emerged not out of a need for sustenance—hunter-gatherers were happy campers in the above regard (see below) and it was more efficient and less taxing on the environment—but rather out of an urgent need for fibre and pelts with layering and insulation being what brought humans to the other side of the last ice age with an expanded range that would eventually dominate the whole Earth—though the dinosaurs and their highly-achieving avian ancestors might take exception to that claim. Because threads of evidence would quickly fade away, much of this proposal is speculative but rings true and seems like a plausible catalyst to protect our relatively hairless bodies from the harsh elements and lend us to the attendant toil. More at the links above.

billiard balls & bowling green bowles, turnt correctly

We quite enjoyed perusing these antique furniture trade cards (see previously) from the shops and emporia of old London—reportedly discovered in a secret drawer of a hypothetical cabinet. There are carpenters and casket-makers, upholsters as well as looking-glass and chair manufacturies. 

doppelhaushälften

Via Present /&/ Correct, we quite enjoyed meditating on this series of larger family properties converted into duplex units in the heavily industrialised region of the Ruhrgebiet (previously) as captured by photographer Wolfgang Fröhling as a consequence of the departure of the younger generation as mining and factories close and are repurposed. The defiantly contrasting exteriors of the cleaved homesteads draws one into the lives of the respective residents. More at the links above.

reeperbahn

We quite enjoyed this peek into the industries of rope-making and yarn-spinning that gave Cable Street of the East End and Whitechapel through the lens of the late eighteenth century company of the Frost Brothers when it was documented in illustrations and photographs in 1905. Like the above-titled way in Hamburg, the area began as a straight grounds where hemp fibres were twisted into ropes for the ships that would anchor on the Thames between London Bridge and the kilns at Limehouse.

port authority trans-hudson

Though entertained throughout the 1940s and 1950s as a vehicle for urban renewal and to stimulate development, New York governor Nelson Rockefeller felt he had not gathered the sufficient and sustaining political and public will to sign the bill directing the construction of a World Trade Centre for Manhattan until this day in 1961 and fraught with zoning and controversy, not completed until twelve years later—almost to the day. The project, intended to rehabilitate the Port Authority where ridership was declining, displaced New York City’s Radio Row, a warehouse district that had existed since the 1920s which hosted many electronics goods stores and was a driver of innovation by proximity and saturation as well as affecting many tenants and small businesses in the dense waterfront neighbourhood. Many of the affected protested that the city should have gotten involved in a prestige project masquerading as social stimulus.

married to the sea

Via Strange Company, we were introduced to the missionary felines of the Seamen’s Church Institute of New York and the cats were delights in themselves of course, brave Bosun, Seaweed and her family and other seafaring companions, but the history of this organisation with its fleet of floating churches would be engrossing enough in itself.

Established in 1834 by the American Episcopal Church and still in operation, it is the biggest advocate for sailors, longshoremen and merchant mariners providing educational, legal, union representation, hospitality and pastoral services for the ports of New York and New Jersey, sending chaplains and sponsoring events such as Christmas at Sea (more recently shopping and arranging supplies through gangway exchanges for those stranded by COVID-19) and training and safety programmes and supporting studies on more effective ways to approach piracy, stowaways, refugees and shore leave. More at the links above.

7x7

disaster capitalism: paintings of banks alight and other artworks by Alex Schaefer (previously) via Everlasting Blört  

convergent evolution: sea life becomes the plastic that is polluting it 

do geese see god: a documentary about the world palindrome championship  

full-stop: punctuation can really set a tone—see also  

№ 2 pencil: a fantastic Eberhard-Faber catalogue from 1915 

r.u.r.: online sci-fi dictionary (see previously) sources the term robot to 1920

living with the consequences: government austerity raises COVID deaths

notions

Via Nag on the Lake’s always splendiferous Sunday Links (lots more to explore there), we are directed to a wonderful collection of antique trade cards of various London emporia for all one’s clogg, peruke, bunnbaking needs and more—retail or wholeſale. Developed at the end of the seventeenth century parallel to rise of cheap priniting, the advertising ephemera were business cards of a sort and included specific, detailed directions to the merchants’ stores, referencinf signage that could be quite elaborate, as no standardised system of street addresses existed at the time—see also. Be sure to check out Spitalfield’s Life bookshop for more treasuries of old London.