Via Messy Nessy Chic’s latest turn around the internet, we are directed towards the traditional Japanese art of confectionary, wagashi (ๅ่ๅญ), through this seventeenth century sampler of sweet snacks. The designs of seasonal flowers, animals, cultural icons and landscapes emerged during the Edo period kneaded from bean paste and coloured and flavoured with sugar, yams and other ingredients. Fuelled by a stable domestic supply in sugar (wasanbon, ๅไธ็), its cultivation encouraged by the shogunate, consumption of such finely crafted delicacies was no longer reserved for the wealthy. Over the centuries, signature styles and varieties were developed, as with sushi, and are classified primarily by moisture content as that factor affects shelf-life for the creations.
Wednesday, 3 September 2025
nerikiri (12. 695)
Tuesday, 28 January 2025
10x10 (12. 191)
i saw, i cut, i applied: a retrospective of the textile art of Ayako Miyawaki (ๅฎฎ่็ถพๅญ) at the Tokyo Station Gallery
hadron therapy: researchers at CERN are collaborating with oncologists to develop precision treatment that last a fraction of a second—via the new Shelton wet/dry
drag and drop: the development of tools that easily move data around with confidence it would not be lost
shวusuรฌ: an exhibition on community resilience through helps gird one for the trying year ahead

oreoboros: a round-up of recently introduced snacks and treats—via MetaFilter
comparative entomology: an 1879 study in the colour patterns in moths and butterflies
object impermanence: a glitchy and broken AI knock-off of Minecraft makes for a strangely compelling experience
experimental advanced superconducting tokamak: an artificial sun burned for nearly eighteen minutes at the EAST plasma physics lab in Hefei—a significant milestone for sustainable fusion reactions—via Boing Boing
the little loomhouse: the history and evolution of an ensemble of Kentucky cabins to a thriving arts community
Thursday, 26 December 2024
8x8 (12. 112)
carnian pluvial event: that time it rained for two million years
acme corporation: eight technological failures of 2024

๐: how the world of ant geopolitics mirrors that of human colonisation and globalisation
9.3 mw: the Boxing Day Tsunami that cost a quarter of a million lives twenty years on
royal warrant: chocolatier to British crown Cadbury is delisted after generations for continued business operations in Russia
woty: the Fritinancy edition—via Kottke
wax wings: researchers awaiting telemetry back from the Parker Solar probe (previously) after historic approach to the Sun
synchronoptica
one year ago: DJ Earworm’s annual (with synchronoptica), The Glass Menagerie (1944) plus assorted links worth revisiting
seven years ago: a banger to time for New Year’s
eight years ago: a charging stretch of road, outer space vodka plus 2016 in review
nine years ago: 3D printing as a cottage industry, Quentin Crisp shares their favourite gangster films, Jesus in Japan, lions and lionesses plus Aleister Crowley’s manor
eleven years ago: Second Christmas plus a tuxedo vest
Thursday, 29 August 2024
8x8 (11. 799)
heatwave toolkit: applying yogurt to one’s windows to cool homes and offices
calculating empires: an exploration of the genealogy and evolution of technology and power from the fourteenth century on—via Pasa Bon!
better than binary: a look at the potential for base-three in computing applications and security—see previously
coriander, comfits, confetti: Italian cuisine, shifting tastes and etymology
campaign photo op: Trump staff had a violent altercation with Arlington National Cemetery officials—see previously
chaos rainbow: an unusual monochrome optical meteorological phenomenon over a baseball stadium
license to travel: the three thousand year history of the passport, linking bureaucracy with our hopes and aspirations
sรผรwarentechnik: Swiss researchers discover a way to produce chocolate using the whole cocoa fruit rather than discarding most of it
synchronoptica
one year ago: assorted links worth revisiting (with synchronoptica)
seven years ago: an optimised crash-test dummy, the backstory on the distracted boyfriend meme plus a villa modelled on the White House in Germany
eight years ago: moving a museum plus Calais’ Jungle encampment
nine years ago: the reproducibility crisis, more links to enjoy plus a squishy map
eleven years ago: Italian Ghostbusters
Saturday, 20 April 2024
supercrema gianduja (11. 500)
The first glass jar of the cocoa hazelnut spread by the confectionary manufacturer Ferrero left the factory in Alba on this day in 1964 and marketed throughout the continent became almost an instant international success, having reformulated the recipe several times prior to commercial release, originally a solid block composed of the region’s famous filbert (nocciola) harvest before pitched as a paste, initially twenty percent chocolate and seventy percent hazelnut butter but now the remainder of palm oil and sugar has taken over—to the grave consternation of purists along with other tweaks to the ingredients.
synchronoptica
one year ago: a failed rocket launch plus tiny voxel shops
two years ago: Germany’s Congress for Internal Medicine, a tribute to Freddy Mercury (1992), an un-redaction challenge plus ratings for everything
three years ago: your daily demon: Amon, rope-making, superlative toponymy plus assorted links worth revisiting
four years ago: spot the difference games from museum collections plus Dutch curses
five years ago: the Columbine High School Massacre (1999)
Thursday, 29 February 2024
world of pure imagination (11. 390)
As with other disastrous and disappointing venues, last week’s fiasco surrounding what was billed as an immersive family event organised by the House of Illuminati did not fail to garner a viral attention over this sad and pricy—up to £ 40 for a group ticket and spurring angry visitors to call the police and shut down the attraction that same afternoon (I recall similar reportage over dull and expensive Christmas Carnivals and Winter Wonderlands—Willy Wonka Chocolate Factory Experience. Contrary to an advertisement campaign aggressively enhanced by AI, the venue was in a largely empty warehouse in Glasgow sparsely festooned with a few candy-themed props, a bouncy castle and some vinyl printed backdrops from the above ad guided by poorly costumed actors. One photograph that emerged of this Oompa Loompa, looking herself rather humiliated to be party to this all around flop, adding insult to injury by framing her as some dreary technician at a meth lab, but awarding (or cursing) her with some standout meme-treatment and twice interviewed about the mortifying few hours. Rightfully skeptical about the gig posted on a jobs site, the professional actor, children’s entertainer and yoga instructor, she walked into a slapdash production not fully thought out but couldn’t back out of the contract (none of the cast was paid ultimately) and hope she might bring a little redemptive fun to the show. Much more from Super Punch at the link above.
catagories: ๐ซ, ๐ญ, ๐ด๓ ง๓ ข๓ ณ๓ ฃ๓ ด๓ ฟ, ๐ฅ, ๐ผ
Saturday, 24 February 2024
back-end analytics (11. 377)
Though tacking the prefix smart on appliances and/or connecting them to the internet of things has a mixed record and has raised many alarms over privacy concerns, this scandal revealed by a glitch in a vending machine, one of an array of banks of automats installed at the University of Waterloo in Ontario really illustrates how—as with contracts for delivery robots surveilling other campuses to collect dragnet data in jurisdictions with less stringent protections—innovation is just a cheap veneer for marketing and demographic stockpiling. No one was expecting, much less consented to, being subject to a facial recognition programme when it came to this transaction. The smart snack dispensers are being replaced with more traditional and less sinister ones, hopefully something more tried-and-true that take coins and display their selection behind glass, rather than on screen.
Thursday, 26 October 2023
fun-sized (11. 076)
Our trusted AI wrangler Janelle Shane has been running experiments on generating trick-or-treating goodies (see previously) and sorting them by what one might like to keep or swap, to gauge the capabilities of various platforms and monitor improves, both marginal and significant. The latest iterations are much improved and are generally more accurate and less glitchy with the printed word but still have some way to go. In what’s described by Shane as the ‘kitten effect,’ where one specific example might turn out passably accurate, all these models tend to seize up and degrade when asked to produce multiple individuals—one cat as opposed to a basket of kittens. It’s nonetheless a relief that there’s some weirdness left in the wrappers. Smndy or Cearbiers might be good to try, but the best houses give out the full-sized candy bars. Much more at the links above.
Saturday, 5 March 2022
achtung baby!
We thoroughly enjoyed this episode of The Allusionist podcast that explores the ephemeral nature of warnings obilge and the limits of translation through the lens of the of the cautionary statement—in thirty-four languages—included with the toy prize as small-print pamphlets in
Kinder Eggs/Kinder รberraschung produced on a global scale, though still unavailable in certain jurisdictions in this format, by Italian confectioner Ferrero (as Kinder Sorpresa or Ovetto Kinder) as examined and considered by sociologist and ethnographer Keith Kahn-Harris. What makes the cut internationally as a language for inclusion in one’s corner shop? What counts as correspondence in this regulatory, disclaimer tone? More food for thought below.
Monday, 22 November 2021
mary’s boy child
Thursday, 12 August 2021
veruca salt
Released in cinemas in the United Kingdom on this day in 1971, Willy Wonka & the Chocolate Factory starring Gene Wilder and Peter Ostrum was a commercial success, the box office taking in more than the film’s budget in its first run and was produced over the course of five months at the City of Mรผnchen gasworks in West Germany, costs at the time being significantly cheaper than elsewhere with the final sequence of the Wonkavator flying over the rooftops an aerial shot of Nรถrdlingen, the town built in an ancient meteor crater. The author of the original story, Roald Dahl, ultimately disowned the finished product with the over-emphasis on Wonka rather than Charlie and the addition of musical numbers outside the Oompa Loopa choruses, including Ach, so fromm from the romantic opera from Friedrich von Flotow’s Martha during the rather terrifying Wonkawash segment, appearing in Phantom of Opera, re-worked as a swing song, performed on the Disney short “The Whale Who Wanted to Sing at the Met”.
Friday, 29 November 2019
uplifting stats
Via Pasa Bon!, we discover a yearlong campaign by Information is Beautiful (see previously), inspired by among other things the disabusing trends illustrated in Hans Rosling’s Factfulness, to release an infographic daily that features enlightening good news and positive trends (trajectories and the headlines not necessarily being the same thing). From their recently featured charts we glean among other things that Iceland had legally mandated equal pay for equal work for men and women, the precipitous fall of the cost of renewable energy, Africa and South America is quashing malaria and there is now a fourth type of chocolate aside from dark, milk and white with ruby.
Thursday, 1 August 2019
rรผtlischwur
Inspired by the Federal Charter dated to early August of 1291 when three Alpine cantons committed to a pact of allegiance, the Old Swiss Confederacy, something semi-legendary and romantically depicted in Friedrich Schiller’s William Tell—since 1891 and codified as a public holiday in 1994 Switzerland has set aside this day (Schweizer Bundesfeiertag, Fรชte nationale suisse, Festa nazionale svizzera, Fiasta naziunala svizra) to recognise its founding. The Rheinfall waterfall is illuminated for the observance and the Rรผtli meadow on the shores of Lake Lucerne where the oath is traditionally believed to have been sworn hosts an organised celebration as do municipalities across the land.
Monday, 10 June 2019
luftbrücke
Calculating out the ration of food and fuel (nearly two-thirds of the total cargo of some two million tonnes was coal) that each citizen and soldier required, thousands of missions—at their highest tempo, some fifteen hundred sorties per day, brought food, materiel and rotations of soldiers in and out of Tempelhof from a dozen sending aerodromes. It is estimated that the US heavy bombers repurposed as the largest capacity carriers travelled one Astronomical Unit in all during the course of the year—that is, the distance from the Earth to Sun, one hundred fifty million kilometres.
The event included an air-show with formation flights of vintage aircraft and other military vehicles and equipment, reenactors, numerous exhibits on the history and context of post-war geopolitics and aid to rebuild Europe, including the Marshall Plan and the CARE programme.
There was also a USO revue that in part recreated the 1948 troop show that Bob Hope hosted held in the same hangars for the pilots and crew in Wiesbaden, a Big Band performance plus special guests, including witnesses to history along with Colonel Gail “Hal” Halvorsen (*1920)—known as the Berlin Candy Bomber (der Rosinenbomber) for his Operation Little Vittles that parachuted chocolate parcels to the children of the divided city.
Wednesday, 10 January 2018
plat diagram
Via Present /&/ Correct, we’re treated to these clever and cosmopolitan bars of chocolate that are partitioned out to match the layout of world capital cities’ centres. Inside the wrapper there’s a legend to the map of landmarks.
catagories: ๐ซ, ๐บ️, food and drink
Monday, 30 January 2017
taste the rainbow
Sunday, 31 January 2016
Thursday, 8 October 2015
humbug or the great pumpkin
catagories: ๐ซ, ๐, food and drink, myth and monsters
Tuesday, 20 January 2015
poki-poki or irregular polygons
I did not realise that Japanese has a wealth of onomatopoeic words that not only mimic the sound of things but also the texture and shape of things—sort of like zig-zag in English but I imagine more evocative, and much less did I guess that they could be expressed so intuitively, in chocolate form.
Phenomimes (gitaigo ๆฌๆ
่ช) they are technically called, those words that manage to impart this sort of directional, tactile meaning. That, however, is precisely the geometric proof given by the award-winning design studio, nendo, in the Parisian trade show annual competition, Maison et Object. At the link, you can learn more about this textured words and how their meanings ring perfectly in context.
Thursday, 14 March 2013
cracker-jack
I’ve always thought that candies, like colas (and more adult beverages too), attain this strange sort of nostalgic immortality and despite insolvency, changing tastes, and increasing competition seem to remain on-offer, even if in a subdued, bottom-shelf sort of way.
Disa- ppointingly, the product, which side-steps the arcane proscription by designing the eggs to be split apart and isolating the prize inside with a protective membrane so no one could choke on it by accident, is not from the same makers and surely won’t have that Dyson’s Shell made with the same quality. The fact that the American producers include “Choco” as part of their name makes me fear that the quotation marks are deserved. I do wonder what nutritive content might be encased in chocolate, but nonetheless, the carapace is important. The other story concerned the reanimation of the Twinkie planned by Hostess’ successor company. While it is surely hard to keep an incorruptible, indestructible snack off the shelves, I wonder if for even the most avid fans whether this is a positive development, since some experiments in should maybe be allowed to expire gracefully.
catagories: ๐ฉ๐ช, ๐บ๐ธ, ๐ซ, food and drink, holidays and observances