6x6

message in a bottle: researchers tagged plastic waste with electronic trackers to monitor their journey—from the same team that brought us Mister Trash Wheel 

pfizer-biontech: British nonagenarian first to receive the coronavirus vaccine  

wunderpus photogenicus: deep sea diver photographs an incredible infant octopus with a transparent head

toot your own horn: more butt trumpets and other bizarre imagery in manuscript marginalia 

catsa lander mark-1: a gorgeous space-age cat bed—though our feline friends would be more pleased with a shoebox

2014-076a: Hayabusa2 (previously) successfully returns its asteroid sample to Earth

o tannebaum

Much like that bellwether tree stood up in Rome four years ago, the poor sacrificial spruce (with stowaway, another climate refugee) left to slowly desiccate and die at Rockefeller Center, already bedraggled and reflective not only of this dreadful year but of our seemingly incipient and insurmountable toxic relationship with the environment, ought to be accorded the single dignity of being the last offering to this tradition born out of bleak austerity into this genuflexion before capitalism and conspicuous consumption. We could deck the place with a nice hologram instead.

fortuna favet fortibus

Controversial and polluting Indian energy-extraction concern Adani, which operates the Carmichael Coal Mine in Queensland and has proposed a channel through the Great Barrier Reef for coal export announced in a sort of “under new management” charade that it would be changing its name for Australian operations to Bravus—presuming it was Latin for brave. This false-friend however means rather the opposite, signifying something crooked, with principles for sale like a soldier of fortune or hired assassin and fortis (already taken) seems to be what they were going for. Incidentally the plaudit bravo/brava (huzzah) originally carried that same sense of mercenary, cut-throat boldness before it was reduced to praise for a job well-done.

the past is another country

Two years ago—after the mid-terms—the Centre for American Politics and Design conducted a meta-survey of recently concluded political races and challenges for all types of public office to better understand the role of typography and graphic design in voting and campaigning, and are doing the same for every jurisdiction and elected official on the tickets for 2020. Explore some of the data and sample the logos (from president to dog-catcher and everything in between) included at Print Magazine at the link.

8x8

politicians are not engineeringly-minded: an unrealised but extensively planned and covered technocratic utopia that the media dubbed Laboratory Land 

not enough hours in the day: an interesting look at the way people around the world keep time 

karen and donald are out of the running: a look at popular (perhaps too soon) baby names for 2020—via Miss Cellania’s Links    

swan song: sad footage of the last Kauaʻi ʻōʻō singing to attract a mate that will never come—more on Endlings here 

u-kiyoe: the lovely drawings of Kitao Masayoshi (北尾 政美)—via Things Magazine    

narrowing, widening, metaphor, metonymy: a refreshing reminder to revisit Merriam-Webster’s time machine (see previously) to see the year words first appeared in print 

prickly business: maintaining this hedgehog network binds a village in Oxfordshire together—via Messy Nessy Chic (with much more to explore on their latest aggregation, curation)  

oh brave new world with so many goodly creatures: Facebook’s Prospero I solar array (see also) will fuel fracking operations in Texas—via Super Punch

atmospheric sciences

Hyperallergic curates the stunning honourees of the Royal Meteorological Society’s annual Weather Photographer of the Year. Not to bury the lede, the selection of this iteration’s winner in Tina Wright’s 2018 image “Final Stand” captured outside of Phoenix, Arizona is quite arresting—even in this era of orange skies. Normally the competition is limited to entries taken in the calendar year but that requirement was relaxed due to social distancing restrictions. Peruse the whole gallery at the link up top.

embargo

On this day in 1973, OPEC (then OAPEC, the Organisation of Arab Petroleum Exporting Countries despite Venezuela being a charter member) ministers came to a consensus to use their cartel powers to influence the West’s materiel and monetary support for Israel during the Yom Kippur War when the country made incursions into Syria and Egypt, advancing towards the economic and strategically important Suez Canal (see previously) and retaliated against Canada, Japan, the Netherlands, the UK and the US by a crippling quadrupling of prices, a shock to markets that precipitated the 1973 Oil Crisis.

Geopolitical antecedents factoring into this stand-off included the decrease in American petroleum production post-war and the rise of OPEC, the decision to float world currencies—unpegging them from the price of gold—with the US unilateral withdrawal from the Bretton Woods Accord in 1971 and subsequent recession, plus the never neglected opportunity for proxy warfare between the US and its allies and the Soviet Union on a new frontier. Because the embargo, which lasted until March 1974, failed to change the West’s stance on the Arab-Israeli conflict, history judges it as ineffective despite the long-term effect it had on international economics and gradually over the ensuing decades pushed the US towards more domestic exploration of fossil fuels and towards energy independence and globally pressured reforms for financial institutions to control for inflation.  Intermediate effects included fuel rationing, a slow-down in factory-orders, a shift in preference for smaller automobiles and a pivot towards China for manufacturing. 

7x7

blood pudding: British public reject Magnus Pike’s (see previously) modest proposal as taboo  

urban jungle: artist employs banana fibre cocoons for the Milan of our over-heated future  

a fungus among us: Public Domain Review explores fungi, folklore and fairyland

object lesson: a 1937 experiment with remote learning to contain a polio outbreak 

those speedy clouds: Alvin and the Chipmunks cover Phil Glass’ Koyaanisqatsi—see previously  

maybe i’m immune: James Corden performs a soulful parody of the Paul McCartney ballad 

 the cask of amontillado: Spanish navy upholding tradition of ageing wine at sea, transporting a buttload of sherry around the world

9x9

patim, patam, patum: font specimens of Patufet, a typeface inspired by the Catalonian Tom Thumb 

ace of cups: Summer of Love all-female band that played the Avalon Ballroom and appeared with Jefferson Airplane, Jimi Hendrix and the Grateful Dead release a new double-album 

leaf-peeping: Swiss fall foliage map 

franking privileges: Finnish studio mints climate change stamps with heat-reactive ink 

backyard safari: highly detailed journal documenting encounters with wildlife—via Nag on the Lake 

space 1999: scenes from the sets of the iconic British scifi series that ran from 1975 to 1977—via Messy Nessy Chic 

pacomobile: a modified VW snail camper—via Things magazine  

sălaj county: a brilliant assortment of flag redesigns for Romania’s forty-two regions to celebrate the country’s diversity 

 cannonball aderley: jazz record sleeves from Reagan Ray (see previously) feature the typography of the artists’ names—via Kottke

alpha-beta

Not since the 2005 Atlantic hurricane season (see alternatively) has the World Meteorological Organisation run short of names for storms for the year, having issued a list of twenty-one names with forecasters now predicting up to twenty-five significant events. 2005 called for the first six letters of the Greek alphabet—through Zeta (Ζ / ζ).

It being 2020 or that last best year with things only downhill from here on out, depending on how one frames we can halt and reverse climate change, we’ll see if that’s the Alpha and Omega. As history is yet good council even in these unprecedented times, today also marks the anniversary in 1971 when Hurricane Irene, having made landfall in Nicaragua weakened and dissipated, reconstituted herself (the first known instance since we had tracking capabilities) and remerged as cyclone Olivia, crossing from the Atlantic to Pacific coasts (see up top), raining out over Baja California. More recently, on the same day in 2017, Hurricane Maria made landfall on Puerto Rico.

september 2020

Via Laughing Squid, here is more drone footage of the fiery orange skies—which many automated lenses and filters try to correct for to the frustration of those trying to urgently document and communicate the apocalypse—over San Francsico in a short clip set to the musical accompaniment of Hans Zimmer’s soundscape of Blade Runner: 2049. I wonder for how many more iterations that that dystopian sequel will be advanced—2099… Many more frightening images at the link up top, juxtaposed with this Los Angeles montage from earlier this summer.

morgenrot schlecht wetter droht

Kottke curates a growing selection of arresting photographs of American western skies tinged an unreal red by uncontrolled wildfires fuelled and made more intense by climate change and global warming that is a direct consequence of human activity and mismanagement. These images were captured during the day, not at dawn or dusk though the smoke blocking out the sun might suggest otherwise. Abendrot, schlecht Wetterbot.

march march

Via Nag on the Lake, we are directed to the powerful protest anthem with accompanying music video that rallies all of us to be agitators and allies from the band The Chicks, who fortunately for everyone DID NOT just shut up and sing. “If your voice held no power, they wouldn’t try to silence you.”

watermelon snow

While first puzzling naturalist contemporaries of Aristotle and fairly a common occurrence in Alpine and arctic coast regions during the summer, the phenomenon caused by a type of cryophilic (cold-loving) green algae—sometimes referred to by the above as the blooms can express in green, red and pink—is spreading due to global warming to Siberia and the Antarctic, raising the possibility of the rise of new and unpredictable ecosystems.

Called Chlamydomonas nivlais is a liminal organism, thriving at temperatures hovering around the freezing point and have recently been attracting more notice of climate modellers, since while providing an additional energy source in extreme but thawing areas and act as a sink for carbon dioxide, their suspected role in lowering albedo at the poles—that is, the ability of the surface to reflect solar heat back out into space since the snow is less white, may counteract or accelerate any greenhouse gas offset.

making waves

Having achieved the goal the group was originally constituted for, the Don’t Make a Wave Committee—established in British Columbia in October 1969 to protest underground nuclear weapons testing in a wildlife refuge on the Aleutian Islands by the US government and halted further tests, the founders revaluated their mission and the power of organising and broadened it to officially be known as Greenpeace from this day onward in 1972.
The devastation of the 1964 Alaskan Earthquake still fresh in residents’ minds, there were fears that the tests could trigger further quakes and tsunami, sparking the initial rallies under the banner “It’s Your Fault If Our Fault Goes”—which failed to stop the US from detonating the bomb but accrued support for the opposition, which eventually prevailed, the protesters blocking the access to the island chain with a flotilla of private fishing boats, including the eponymous trawler, that stood up to the US navy.

we have met the enemy and he is us

First observed on this day fifty years ago and now celebrated in every polity around the globe as the largest secular holiday of them all, organisers in colleges and universities brought out roughly twenty million individuals into the spring sunshine to peaceful demonstrate for environmental reform.
The original impetus was a devastating oil spill of the coast of Santa Barbara, California that was responsible for the deaths of tens of thousands of marine creatures during the previous winter with city solemnly marking the one-year anniversary of that disaster in January with an Environmental Rights Day, further advancing the idea for a day of action generally for ecological responsibility and justice. For the occasion, illustrator Walt Kelly created an anti-pollution poster with his comic strip character declaiming the above quotation, parodying a missive sent by Commodore Oliver Hazard Perry (older brother of Commodore Matthew Perry) to General William Harrison on his victory, more confident and less contrite, in the Battle of Lake Erie—another environmental mess we are trying to remediate—“We have met the enemy, and they are ours.”

over a barrel

Though this extraordinary development has not yet translated to free petrol at stations, the total collapse in worldwide demand for oil and full reserves and reservoirs with no excess storage capacity, a key valuation benchmark in the market has inverted the price per barrel, failing to a negative thirty-seven dollars, meaning that traders looking to offload shares would be paying a premium to do so. The situation has been exasperated by America increasing domestic production through fracking, becoming a full-fledged, failing petrostate and glutting the market in the process and a price war between Saudi Arabia and Russia and highlights yet another problem with non-renewable fuel sources that’s a least been partially redress on the renewable market—that of portability and shifting energy and resources to where and where it’s needed.

(d/p) · 10ⁿ

Not to discount the suffering of anyone or prematurely make assumptions on how this pandemic will conclude, it is refreshing that we are more willing to discuss death in perspective and possibly lose tolerance for any of loss caused by avoidable behaviours.
We don’t have the luxury of being precious. For example—via Slashdot—one study suggests that the government imposed lockdown and the general aversion to travel and socialising and the attendant net reduction in air pollution may in the end save more lives than limiting the contagion itself through distancing. Estimates place the annual fatalities worldwide from travel related pollutants at seven million. Divergent as these threats (albeit years of overexposure to smog probably put more at risk of developing COVID-19 by compromised lung function) are, it is worth investigating why we react so differently to each vector and let the latter support the sustainment of the former.

zoonosis or jumping the shark

Though we would be wrong to blame bats or any other wildlife for bringing illness where it is our behaviours that invite in and exacerbate the spread of new disease, it is worth considering how our chiroptera friends have evolved an immune system parallel and attendant to the corona viruses that have accompanied them for countless generations.
As flying mammals, a lot of their metabolic processes are given over to keeping them aloft and because of the stress, wear and tear that come with it, their immune system is more tolerant of infections and endures them rather than reacting in a violent, exclusionary manner. Humans, on the other hand, with little exposure to such pathogens—bats being themselves nearly as mobile and wide-ranging as people—have a hyper-vigilant approach to combating contagion which has normally served us well but can result in a life-threating condition called sepsis when the immune response is pushed into overdrive and harms the internal organs and tissues. There isn’t much that one can do to alter those sorts of responses but there are a host of pre-emptive measures that are even more effective—like maintaining one’s distance and proper hand-washing that’s not a duck-and-cover exercise as a little soap and elbow grease and discipline out of the consideration of the wellbeing of others, especially for the vulnerable among us does chemically wreck the virus and commute it towards something harmless, keeping healthy in general and getting vaccinations and immunizations as prescribed even if the glamourous cure we are waiting for does not seem so commiserate with the chore of prevention. The inflammatory reaction that follow the onset of infection can result in pneumonia and low blood flow and proves fatal—from all causes of septic shock, for about ten million worldwide per year. A number far greater, like the pathology of season influenza often cited, than the number of case of the corona virus likely to prove deadly but maybe that signals that it is time that we find all these numbers unacceptable and work towards societal and medical interventions to reduce its occurrence.

klimahysterie

The Unword of the Year (Unwort des Jahres, see previously)—selected by a jury independent since 2011 Gesellschaft für deutsche Sprache—is the above term for climate-hysteria, a rhetorical ploy invoked by some businesses, news outlets and politicians to discredit and defame those who forward the discussion and urgency of the environmental emergency of our own making as having some sort of collective psychosis. The runner-up was “Umvolkung,” a Nazi-era term used to describe assimilation as a way for the Volk to shed their national identities and join the Reich, which is sadly being reinserted into common-parlance.