corea: the hermit kingdom

This anthology of Korean folktales collected and retold by William Elliot Griffis from Public Domain Review is interesting in its own right for the well-intentioned desire (with notable shortcomings) to bring to a Western readership some of the country’s mythology and lore, but there’s a striking side note as well with earlier publication of the above entitled in 1882, a history of the Joseon dynasty that coined the moniker, applied to isolationist policies in general. Obviously now not new, the term gained traction and currency when invoked by US Secretary of State Hilary Clinton to describe North Korea.

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.

the lesser apocalypse

Referred to as the above with the conviction it was punishment from God alternatively for the Ottomans’ perceived inhospitality toward the Eastern Christians or for the Turks tolerating them, a powerful earthquake, with its epicentre in the Sea of Marmara, and resulting tsunami devastated Constantinople on this day in 1509. Damage and death estimates vary widely but probably took ten thousand lives and destroyed homes and infrastructure, and reportedly Hagia Sophia (previously) withstood the quake virtually unscathed, only the plaster that had been used to cover the Byzantine mosaics was shaken off the walls, revealing the Christian imagery beneath. The month and a half of aftershocks that followed did not cause significant damage but delayed recovery efforts and rebuilding.

rennfahrerin

Passing away in her adopted home of Sweden on this day in 1990 (*1901), accomplished automobile racer Clara Eleonore “Clärenore” Stinnes, accompanied by film-maker Carl-Alex Söderström and a two-person engineering crew, became the first person (see this counter-claim) to circumnavigate the globe by car. In just over two years, Stinnes crossed the start/finish line in Berlin on 24 June 1929, having completed a journey of over forty-seven thousand kilometres—with the aid of ferries—crossing frozen Lake Baikal, the Gobi, transversing the Andres and through Central America to the US and Canada and finding herself in many spots with no navigable roads to speak of. The event, with a prize of a hundred-thousand Reichsmarks, was sponsored by Adler, Aral and Bosch, titans of the German automotive industry.  After the round-the-world journey, Stinnes and Söderström wed and spent many happy years together on their farm in southern Sweden.

dateline

Born on this day in 1920, Marguerite Higgins Hall (†1966 having contracted a skin disease spread by the bite of sand flies while on assignment that turned out to be deadly) would go on to attend journalism school at U.C. Berkeley and Columbia and become a reporter and war correspondent.  Covering World War II, Korea and Vietnam for the New York Tribune and the wire services, Higgins advanced equal access for women journalists in combat zones and became the first female to win a Pulitzer Prize for international reporting. Stationed in Europe early in her career, Higgins was reassigned from the Paris bureau to Germany in March 1945 and was witness to the liberation of the Dachau concentration camp a month later, decorated for her coverage and assistance during the surrender for the SS guards. Afterwards from the German desk, Higgins reported on the Nürnberg Tribunal and the Blockade of Berlin.

6x6

fast car: the timelessness of Tracy Chapman’s ballad

call me trim tab: inspiring words from Buckminster Fuller (previously)

call of the wild: New Guinea’s singing dogs are not extinct outside of the captive population after all—via Nag on the Lake with bonus content

brick and mortem: a thoughtful reflection on the disappearing traditional high street, via Things Magazine

syncopation: time-lapse films of plants sprouting with a jazzy musical accompaniment

shine bright like a diamond: researchers in Bristol create betavoltaic batteries out of nuclear waste and gemstones that could last for millennia—see previously

happy home designer

Via Boing Boing, we discover delightfully that IKEA’s latest catalogue has been faithfully reproduced in part in the Animal Crossing (previously) game, platform, plane of existence. It would have been a monumental undertaking to recreate every page but the furniture and rooms selected are pretty impressive, especially considering the limited set of objects and artefacts there are in play. Before you get sticker shock, the items are priced in Taiwanese dollars.  The title refers to a 2015 spin-off game that focused on architecture and interior decorating.  See more highlights from Kotaku at the link above.

maya hi

Re-sampling will always cast its nets far and wide but we had not beforehand appreciated what a tempting foraging grounds that Soviet pop proofed and proved for Western hip-hop. The juxtaposition is sometimes quite  jarring with the underground group Jedi Mind Tricks’ appropriation of People’s Artist of the USSR in 1988 of Edith Piekha’s catchy hit My Neighbour (Наш Сосед).

dingos ate my baby

Though more likely the mother cried to her husband, “A dingo took my baby,” the phrase attributed to Lindy Chamberlain-Creighton originated tragically on this night in 1980 whilst the couple were out camping at Uluru (Ayer’s Rock) with their two-month old daughter, Azaria.
Though the media and authorities found the claim incredulous initially and the grieving parents were prejudged and stigmatised, the coroner’s inquest later corroborated the mother’s account. In addition to the 1987 Coen Brothers’ Raising Arizona, there have been a whole host of cultural references—mostly with the implication that the assertion is unbelievable (myself included), like the excuse the dog ate my homework.

nostalgia for the mud

Our thanks to Digg for having us circle back around and dally, indulge in the surreal treasury of the self-conscious captured in this series of composite images from Chase Middleton.
These intersectional collages are strange and random but all seem to evoke this feeling of awkward incantation—a conjuring as we imagine it in our heads informed by on-screen depictions but that we pull off ham-fistedly and manage to muddle through somehow. See a whole gallery at the links above or at the artist’s website.

where are they now?

Via TYWKIWDBI, we are treated to a brief profile of the schoolboy band known as The Hectics, formed by five pupils of an English boarding school called St. Peter’s in Pamchgani, outside of Bombay (Mumbai) and active from 1958 through 1962.  One might recognise at least the centre lead vocalist, guitarist and pianist as Farrokh Bulsara, whom later adopted the name Freddie Mercury (*1946 – †1991, previously). Far left is Derrick Branche who had starring roles in My Beautiful Laundrette, Blake’s 7 and Father Ted Mysteries.

flora, fauna, fire

Via Maps Mania, we are directed to an engaging and impactful look at the devastation that Australia’s wildfires brought at the beginning of 2020 in the form of this interactive scrollytelling presentation that shares stories of recovery, prevention and links to the toll it has taken on 119 representative plants and animal species, whom may face extinction without human intervention. Though 119 is the number for firefighters and emergency services in many other jurisdictions, it’s triple zero you want to dial on the continent.

9x9

rewritten by machine on new technology: record industry going after a neural network called Weird A.I. Yankovic that generates parody songs in the style of its namesake—via Slashdot

my beautiful laundrette: elderly couple dress up and model the apparel left in their laundromat—via Nag on the Lake

an atmosphere for simple communication and dating: once Russia cinema reopens, the Ministry of Culture is banning drama and dreary movies until at least the spring of 2021

it’s portraits all the way down: an Inception of self-portraiture—see previously 

search history: a New York Times styles reporter documents and annotates everything term she researched online for a week—via Kottke

be the first to like this post: pigeons look for other career options

the tetris effect: a film about the game’s origins is in production but it won’t be another Battleship—via Miss Cellania’s Links 

karen alert: they keep getting worse

good guy: Billie Eilish’s song Bad Guy performed in major key—see also—via Kottke

belau rekid

Though human settlement on the group of islands extends back millennia, Palau (see previously) is a young republic, observing annually its founding on this day since 1981 with Constitution Day, the referendum voting for independence for this former US territory after most Pacific islands fell under the administration of America as Trust Territories, having previously been a Spanish colony governed from the Philippines, administered as German New Guinea, then becoming part of the Japanese-ruled League of Nations’ South Seas Mandate, choosing not to join Micronesia, an association compromised of recently decolonised neighbours. Modelled in part of the US constitution, Palau’s uniquely prohibits all atomic applications, be it for warfare as a testing-site or for energy-generation as a dumping-ground for nuclear waste—as well as specifically banning biological and chemical weapons.

operation cyclone or charlie wilson’s war

Though exponentially expanded under the Reagan administration, US president Jimmy Carter secretly authorised for the first time on this date in 1979 measures that would aid and underwrite the resistance efforts of the mujahideen in Afghanistan against the occupying Soviet troops and the USSR’s client state, the secular and liberalised Democratic Republic of Afghanistan.
The decade-long undertaking is the largest and most expensive known operation of the Central Intelligence Agency (the UK’s MI6 ran a parallel one), budgeted at seven hundred thousand dollars during its first year and upwards of six-hundred million by 1987—to incite insurgency and eventually bankrupting the Soviet Union and precipitating a violent civil war in Afghanistan. Carter reluctantly agreed to lend initially non-lethal support to the Mujahideen in part under pressure from nuclear neighbour Pakistan—believing the US should try to make amends with regional partners especially after its involvement in the unrest in Iran—though arguably, the secondary US motivation was to draw the Soviets into a quagmire, like the one the US had only recently extricated itself from with Vietnam. Ultimately financing jihadists and undoing the social and economic reforms that the country had aspired to effect and then abandoning it as a failed narco-state once it had served its purpose, resulted in consequential, inevitable blowback.

distinguishing signs of vehicles in international traffic

Aside from a brief period in the tumult of the 1980s when the Republic was coerced into an uneasy compact with other Polynesian nations formerly claimed under the domain of the United States and treated as a trust territory, receiving development assistance in exchange for hosting nuclear testing and forward operating bases, when national plates were issued since devolved again to the responsibility and oversight of the several states, each island and atoll group of Palau is free to design and determine the conventions of its vehicle registration system.
Varying highly by composition, remoteness and population, fourteen out of sixteen states have populations of under five hundred and there are a little over seven thousand cars and trucks registered and roadworthy. This sample from the state of Ngiwal (population 282) and features the coat-of-arms and the registry number—all of which begin with the prefix K79, first K for the native Kiuluul people and their reputation as gourmands, reportedly eating seven meals and nine soups daily, having originated from the stomach according to legend from a mythical figure known as the Insatiable Uab. A parable on sustainability, especially from an insular perspective threatened by sea-level rise, the creature with the prodigious appetite had to put down, dramatically exploding into the map of Palau after seeing the effects of his greed. There’s a gallery of plates to explore at the link above, in that same constellation and further afield as well, but none I think with quite such a developed narrative.

o-double-good

File under justice deferred—I suppose—and perhaps voter disenfranchisement made right but the South Korean branch of a cereal giant is releasing a green onion (쪽파 ) flavoured version of one of its signature brands in response to the results of an online “election” held back in 2004 in which breakfast fans held a run-off ballot between duelling candidates Chekkie and Chaka—with the former pledging to bring more chocolate to the cereal and the later added scallion.
Sixteen years ago, Chaka, according to exit-polls, pulled into an early and decisive lead, leading the cereal company, rather nonplussed with the prospect to purge over forty-thousand votes from the results, citing security reasons. The company (see previously) had committed similar election tampering in its Japanese market too by again siding with chocolate even though wasabi was the people’s choice by a landslide. Advance taste-testers of the limited edition that will be available in supermarkets from 1 July laud this small victory for democracy and a good idea (I wish we could annul this orange drink and I know where my partisan affiliations lie) but find that the cereal lacks the distinctive savouriness, umami (감칠맛) that the real article conveys

graveyard of empires

Though whether any of these contracts were acted upon or directly jeopardised ongoing peace-talks and plans for eventual withdrawal, there is an overwhelming cause for concern that the Trump administration not only failed to act on intelligence reports that Russian operatives were placing bounties on foreign troops deployed (including US soldiers) to Afghanistan, Trump publicly reacted in the opposite fashion and instead proposed to gift Russia a restored seat at the G-7 summit and promised to withdraw a significant amount of troops from bases in Germany. Both concessions were offered after the briefing in late March. Incidentally and unironically, many historians cite the expense of being mired in a protracted war in Afghanistan (with Americans materially aiding the same Taliban against a common enemy) as what broke the Soviet Union, leading to its downfall and dissolution.

6x6

ningaloo canyons: incredible footage from the previously unplumbed depths of the sea off western Australia

sea bass on a bed of contact lenses: hilarious mistranslation of French haute cuisine (see previously)

working lads institute: an antique gallery of portraits of those rehabilitating at the White Chapel Mission of London

cooper black: a look at the history behind the ubiquitous typeface, via Messy Nessy Chic, whose other finds are well worth checking out too

now is the time: raising the first new totem pole on Haida Gwaii (see also) in generations

geocities to neocities: the illustrious cabinet of hypertext curiosities of Mx van Hoorn, via Kicks Condor  

corrugated community: the vernacular architecture of Tīrau, New Zealand

अन्ताराष्ट्रीययोगदिवस

Celebrated annually since 2015 after its nomination and adoption by the United Nations General Assembly the year prior, this day has been set aside for reflection on the ancient practise and its practitioners of healthful and mindful, spiritual aspects of yoga. It is an occasion to perfect one’s exercise and perform essential asanas—poses—and the meditative quality of the session. See if you can improve your form and awake body and mind.