Priest and Franciscan friar and Doctor of the Church, Anthony of Lisbon (*1195 - †1231 in the commune west of Venice) is one of the most popular and quickly canonised among the cult of the saints and was acclaimed in his lifetime for giving powerful and persuasive sermons, even keeping a school of fish in rapt attention once and reputation for care for the poor and sick. Invoked in the name of lost things—credited first with the restoration of his own psalter full of notes when Anthony feared it was gone forever—his extensive patronage (see previously) includes things prone to going missing like mail, mariners, shipwrecks, travellers and lost souls, though not all who wander… Anthony in the extended sense is also the protector of the elderly, fisherfolk, amputees, Native Americans, harvests, watermen, horses, travel hosts and counter-revolutionaries.
Sunday 13 June 2021
Saturday 29 May 2021
santa bona
Early eleventh century Augustinian nun venerated on this day, Bona of Pisa, helped conduct pilgrims on their journeys and is considered the patroness of tour guides, couriers, flight attendants as well as her well-touristed home town. Her father a Crusader in the Holy Land, Bona made no fewer than four sojourns there to visit him and see to his well-being and after being taken hostage by pirates and necessitating a ransom and rescue by her compatriots, redirected her focus to the route of Santiago de Compostela, undertaking the arduous trip ten times and leading others along the way.
Tuesday 11 May 2021
sleeper car
Via the always interesting Maps Mania, we learn more about the happily resurgent phenomenon of night trains (previously) whose network could once again connect the continent and in response to shifting attitudes, expectations and environmental awareness—including legislation to outlaw short-haul flights where alternative and less polluting modes of conveyance are possible. There’s an informative article and even an interactive route-planner to plan one’s future over-nighter and experience waking up in a new city.
Sunday 2 May 2021
9x9
why are you still here: our houses get sick of us never leaving too—via Nag on the Lake’s Sunday Links (lots more to see here)
fake id: the unfortunately inevitable rise of counterfeit vaccination credentials
disaster girl: meme as NFT (previously) nets a half-million dollars at auction
comically overwrought: an oral history of the Crying Dawson gifresident evil village: games company produced a musical, gory puppet show to promote its latest instalment
sunshine state: Florida will make it illegal for social media to deplatform politicians, with a especial carve-out for Disney—via Slashdot
euphonium: found poetry in the history of acoustic waves
web curios: Waxy lets us know that the fine and well-connected newsletter returns after a sabbatical of nine months with the folding of Imperia
windows on the world: artwork by Liam Cobb that fills one with Wanderlust—via the morning news
Saturday 24 April 2021
antimeridian
Courtesy of the New Shelton wet/dry, we are directed towards this helpful and thorough-going comparative resource of map projections (see previously here, here and here) from Jason Davies that covers the range of interrupted maps, two-dimensional flatten of the globe focused on choice areas of less interest that go far beyond the Spilhaus or transverse Mercator projection that’s a favourite television news studio wall-hanging to butterfly maps, the Berghaus Star, Foucaut’s Stereographoc equivalency globe, the loxodrome and the pictured geopolitical bounding box with animation and interactive features.
Thursday 1 April 2021
vss imagine
Expanding its fleet of suborbital space planes with a third vehicle, Virgin Galactic has commenced test flights with its chromed, mirrored craft that’s reminiscent of a space ship from Buck Rogers or Perry Rhodan and has a superb retro-future aesthetic. More at Design Boom at the link above.
Saturday 27 March 2021
tenerife airport disaster
Prompting strict enforcement of standardised instructions, safety protocols and English as a common-working language for air traffic controllers and flight crews, the deadliest accident in aviation history occurred on this day in 1977 when two Boeing 747 passenger jets collided on the runway in foggy conditions on the Spanish island. Five hundred eighty-three people were killed. Members of the Canary Islands Independence Movement had planted a bomb at the larger Gran Canaria airport and called in the threat, this terrorist incident causing planes to be diverted to the smaller regional Los Rodeos airport in the northern part of Tenerife, causing the taxiway to become congested and arriving and departing planes sharing the single runway had to wait their turn in deteriorating weather conditions. A mutual misunderstanding tragically caused the KLM and Pan Am flights to start at the same time.
Wednesday 10 February 2021
safe countries of origin
Wednesday 27 January 2021
ten and two
Things Magazine directs our attention to directed to a thoroughgoing and informative appreciation of the engineering and triangulation of technology, style and their limitations, constraints that have gone into the Apple Watch, including a lesson of the anatomy of classic watchmaking (lugs, bezel, face and hands) and a historical inventory of the iconic dials that inform and inspire Apple’s gallery, including the “error-proof” California Dial trialled by Rolex, the evolving chronograph with an array of complications, diving watches and models coordinated with Greenwich Mean Time, introduced by Pan Am realising that their pilots and crew needed to reference multiple time-zones.
Wednesday 6 January 2021
if your friends don’t mask—and why they don’t mask, well they won’t fly this airline
Though I think it is going to take a lot more than a catchy commercial to restore my confidence in plane travel, we did like this promotional piece from Alaska Airlines, whose residents are arguably more reliant on that form of travel than many of us—via Pasa Bon! to the tune of Safety Dance. I admire their energy and commitment to mitigating as much risk as possible, in any case. If you let the video play through and forward to the next, there’s a quit good supercut of 1980s television spots for the carrier to watch.
Saturday 12 September 2020
arrivals and departures lounge
Though it was endearing to see a family undertake a cancelled trans-Pacific vacation or to tour airports with a sense of nostalgia and Wanderlust, Singapore Airlines’ plans to take travellers aloft on actual flights to nowhere both starting and ending at Changi airport (the city state bereft of domestic travel opportunities) seems wasteful and perverse. What do you think? Circling the runway is very resource intensive and an economy that need to maintain such circulation seems childish and like a bit of grifting that we’d do better to move beyond and not let a cloying attempt to save a market with no rehabilitation further take down the environment with it.
Thursday 30 July 2020
omiyage—voyage, voyage
This Japanese word for souvenir (ใๅ็ฃ) are representative meibutsu (ๅ็ฉ, literally famous things) applied to regional specialties and are often exchanged among work colleagues and family members upon the return of one who was away not just as a keepsake but as a way to apologize for one’s absence and a consolation for those whom did not get to make the trip this time. Via Present /&/ Correct we are directed towards this rather brilliant and wonderfully granular map of the country from Haconiwa design studios. One can explore on any section on the grid to learn about local delicacies and take a virtual vacation. Much more to explore at the links above.
Thursday 16 July 2020
8x8
houstonia: a century of the Texas city told though iconic photographs—via Things Magazine
bovine flatulence: a strange fast food campaign touts its efforts to reduce greenhouse emissions and improve animal welfare
triple word score: a Star Wars round-up including Scrabble tiles in the script of Galactic Basic, Aurebesh (previously)
eggs over easy: an introduction to Britain’s influential pub rock scene of the 1970s and its lasting legacy
when she walks, she’s like a samba: a deconstruction of the complex Girl from Ipanema (see also July 2019), the second most covered song in history
le vetture tranviarie: engineer Arturo Tedeschi redesigns a tram car for social distancing (see previously)
eponymous first album: quarantined residents in of a senior assisted living centre recreate iconic record covers
unclaimed baggage: more on the small town Alabama store (previously) that resells the world’s lost luggage—via Duck Soup
Thursday 2 July 2020
we have clearance, clarence
While—courtesy of our faithful chronicler—it’s worth noting the anniversary of the general release in North America on this day in 1980 of the supremely silly Jim Abrahams and Zucker Brothers comedy for its own sake, it does strike me as hard to reconcile the rapidity of contemporary riffs, among them the mostly overlooked meta-reference that the action-drama franchise Airport (1970 – 1979, based on the Arthur Hailey novel and became the epitome of the disaster genre of the decade) had just concluded and cycled out of theatres.
Enjoying three sequels—with the first two being big box office hits—the final flop Airport ’79…The Concorde (even called Airport ’80 in some markets due to the distribution schedule, whereas Airplane’s sequel didn’t fare so well), it reminds me how the Kennedy White House took the metonym Camelot not because it was particularly courtly or chivalrous in its own right but rather due to the concurrent popularity of the Broadway play.
Friday 26 June 2020
6x6
morning edition: artist paints sunrises on newspapers as a dawning juxtaposition to the headlines of the day
free parking: aerial views of grounded planes at the Frankfurter Flughafen—see previously
b&b: designs for a horizontal hive with human sleeping compartment
๐️๐๐️:the ubiquitous string of emoji signals a tautology
if it ain’t baroque: another in a growing chain of art restoration failures, via Miss Cellania’s Links
2020: a spa odyssey: a day retreat in Caracas inspired by Stanley Kubrick’s aesthetic
Wednesday 24 June 2020
status non gratis
As cases of COVID-19 again surge in the US after the rush to reopen, the European Union mulls adding America to its no-fly list—along with Brazil and Russia, all countries which have not only spectacularly failed in containing the pandemic within their borders, have through their neglect and mismanagement been net exporters of virus and its deleterious effects.
According to twenty-seven-member block’s epidemiological threshold for designating a country safe zone, all three still exhibit dangerous levels of new infections which threaten to overwhelm the healthcare infrastructure should more be imported. In mid-March, the Trump administration imposed a foreshadowingly reciprocal travel ban (since lifted) covering all of Europe, excepting the UK and Ireland, though that carve-out might get Britain similarly blocked. Talks are ongoing but failure to reach consensus could result in more internal border controls and restrictions on regional travel.
Sunday 7 June 2020
jetway 707
Having a cameo in no less than All the President’s Men featuring Dustin Hoffman as Carl Bernstein and clocking in at an impressive eight-and-a-half metre length, via Things Magazine, we’re pleased to be acquainted with the wonderfully outlandish airport stretch limousine (produced from 1968 to 1970) from Oldsmobile and its subsidiary American Quality Coach designed to shuttle VIPs (seating twelve to fifteen) and their luggage from the terminal to the tarmac (see previously). Much more to explore at the links above.
Thursday 12 March 2020
march madness
Tuesday 10 March 2020
black monday
Already jittery and fragile in the face of the evolving thread and response to the efforts to contain the spread of the novel coronavirus, world stock markets experienced a sharp, precipitous decline—a drop fast enough to trigger a breaker-switch that suspended trading on Wall Street for a quarter of an hour to give investors a chance to regroup, when the mood was yesterday exacerbated by an oil war that erupted once Russia and OPEC were unable to come to a consensus on the right production numbers to ensure fuel retain value as a commodity during a steep decline in demand due to disruptions in shipping, travel and manufacture over said pandemic.
Friday 21 February 2020
7x7
en nat pรฅ bloksbjerg: the incredible art work of Dutch illustrator Kay Nielsen—see previously, whom contributed to Fantasia but Disney let go
band camp: an overlooked and not unlistenable resource: Can This Even Be Called Music?—via Kicks Condor
theire soe admirable herbe: English colonist discover what the natives have been smoking in seventeenth century India
winter stations: interactive installations of Toronto’s beach to encourage outdoor play in the cold months
cabin-crew: the JFK retro TWA terminal hotel (previously) turns the body of a vintage jet into a bar and museum space
salon d’automne: a neural network trained on cubist art produces an infinite stream of paintings, via Waxy
a parade of earthly delights: scenes from recent annual aquatic celebrations of Jheronimus Bosch (previously) held on the waters of ‘s-Herogenbosch—the next event begins in mid-June