we shape our tools and then the tools shape us (11. 708)

Subtitled An Inventory of Effects and co-created by media analyst who coined the phrase referenced Marshall McLuhan in 1967, the collaborative best-seller experimentally formatted had the imprimatur of McLuhan himself to call out how various outlets massaged our senses in order to maintain currency and hold interest—with some anecdotes that it was a typo that stuck—arguing that technologies, from the wheel, to the loom, to the printing press and beyond rather than their content as an extension (and increasingly necessary aid thereto in order to function therein) of our perceptions of the world, informed by the same progress. The recording is not exactly an audio book but rather a montage of main statements punctuated by dissonant sound-effects meant to suggest the fragmentation of the listening experience.

who goes nazi? (11. 705)

Prominent American journalist and broadcaster Dorothy Thompson was the first US reporter to be expelled from Germany in 1934, the order delivered by the Gestapo to her lodgings at the Hotel Adlon in Berlin with Thompson given twenty-four hours to leave the country, for her articles and observations critical of the party and its leader, as a Little Man and the embodiment of mediocrity. Continuing her work, Thompson rallied against the regime over the next two decades, trying to warn the world about its mindset and strongly advocated for first Jewish refugees, but recognising the right-wing infiltration of the Zionist movement, then displaced Palestinians, one of her more memorable and influential essays was published in 1941 by Harper’s Magazine, framed as a guessing-game with the objective of trying to spot the fascist at a social gathering, whom despite maintaining they have no truck with such dark ideologies would nonetheless support a mainstream, normalised movement under a different name—or under the same, unabashedly.

…The saturnine man over there talking with a lovely French emigree is already a Nazi.  Mr. C is a brilliant and embittered intellectual.  He was a poor white-trash Southern boy, a scholarship student at two universities where he took all the scholastic honours but was never invited to join a fraternity.  His brilliant gifts won for him successively government positions, partnership in a prominent law firm, and eventually a highly paid job as a Wall Street adviser.  He has always moved among important people and always been socially on the periphery.  His colleagues have admired his brains and exploited them, but they have seldom invited him—or his wife—to dinner. He is a snob, loathing his own snobbery.  He despises the men about him—he despises, for instance, Mr. B—because he knows that what he has had to achieve by relentless work men like B have won by knowing the right people. But his contempt is inextricably mingled with envy.  Even more than he hates the class into which he has insecurely risen, does he hate the people from whom he came. He hates his mother and his father for being his parents. He loathes everything that reminds him of his origins and his humiliations.  He is bitterly anti-Semitic because the social insecurity of the Jews reminds him of his own psychological insecurity. Pity he has utterly erased from his nature, and joy he has never known.  He has an ambition, bitter and burning. It is to rise to such an eminence that no one can ever again humiliate him.  Not to rule but to be the secret ruler, pulling the strings of puppets created by his brains.  Already some of them are talking his language—though they have never met him.

There he sits: he talks awkwardly rather than glibly; he is courteous.  He commands a distant and cold respect.  But he is a very dangerous man.  Were he primitive and brutal he would be a criminal—a murderer.  But he is subtle and cruel.  He would rise high in a Nazi regime. It would need men just like him—intellectual and ruthless.  But Mr. C is not a born Nazi. He is the product of a democracy hypocritically preaching social equality and practicing a carelessly brutal snobbery.  He is a sensitive, gifted man who has been humiliated into nihilism.  He would laugh to see heads roll…

…Mrs. E would go Nazi as sure as you are born.  That statement surprises you? Mrs. E seems so sweet, so clinging, so cowed.  She is.  She is a masochist.  She is married to a man who never ceases to humiliate her, to lord it over her, to treat her with less consideration than he does his dogs. He is a prominent scientist, and Mrs. E, who married him very young, has persuaded herself that he is a genius, and that there is something of superior womanliness in her utter lack of pride, in her doglike devotion. She speaks disapprovingly of other “masculine” or insufficiently devoted wives. Her husband, however, is bored to death with her.  He neglects her completely and she is looking for someone else before whom to pour her ecstatic self-abasement.  She will titillate with pleased excitement to the first popular hero who proclaims the basic subordination of women…

Married to Nobel award winning author Sinclair Lewis (It Can’t Happen Here), the 1942 film Woman of the Year, starring Katherine Hepburn (her first with Spencer Tracy and the later musical adaptation featuring Lauren Bacall), was loosely based on Thompson’s life and career.

8x8 (11. 642)

crazy logic: a rather seamless mashup of Gnarls Barkley, Rockwell, Pink Floyd and Sumpertramp  

ыһыах: the Yakut people of arctic Siberia celebrate New Year on the Summer Solstice  

culicidology: a fascinating two-part discussion of mosquitoes with Alie Ward 

baggage carousel: an animated journey of checked airline luggage 

the phrygian cap: the Paris Games’ mascot with a revolutionary past—via Miss Cellania  

the beige begins early here folks: McMansion Hell (previously) presents another instalment of the American Medieval Revival—via Things Magazine  

re-alignment: just ahead of Solstice celebrations, activists with Just Stop Oil douse the megalithic calendar with orange paint power 

chiroptera: a ballet chroegraphed by Thomas Bangalter, formerly of Daft Punk—via tmn

come retribution (11. 624)

Tonally quite different from his campaign announcement and really removed from his past platforms, the latest episode of This American Life takes its title from a litany of promises made during Donald Trump’s inaugural 2024 rally, the venue Waco, Texas, darkly proclaiming vengeance for those who crossed him: “In 2016, I declared, I am your voice. Today I add, ‘I am your warrior. I am your justice.’ And for those who have been wronged and betrayed, ‘I am your retribution—’” former advisor Steve Bannon further embellishing the speech by couching it in a supposed US civil war plot to kidnap and ransom Lincoln in order to pressure the Union to concede to to the Confederacy—foiled, again supposedly, by weak encryption that the North was able to easily decipher. Contributors go on during the broadcast to interview those who are definitely on Trump’s hit-list, including former staffer and White House (who infamously never gave a press conference) Press Secretary Stephanie Grisham who left during the storming of the US capitol and wrong a tell-all book about her time in the administration and LTC (ret.) Alexander Vindman, director for European affairs of the National Security Council whose testimony on Trump’s “perfect call” led to the first impeachment to try to understand what forms that revenge might take, their contingency plans and what it means for those yet to be targeted.

✨ (11. 610)

The second act of a particularly compelling episode of This American Life on the theme of arch-rivals and understudies that are twained, willingly or not, directed us towards a fascinating and ephemeral glimpse

(everything when it comes to artificial intelligence has a sell-by date and an increasingly shorter shelf-life now that we’ve become inured to its capabilities and virtuosity) at ChatGPT’s dark and ungoverned predecessor, code davinci-002. Three friends at a wedding were given a preview of the early large language model at a wedding in early 2022, well before any public releases or any safety controls were applied. Prompting it to write poetry in various styles and amazed by the seeming magic of its instantaneous compositions, the trio then asked it to write in its own voice, surely seeded from pop-culture, scouring the human corpus and by their engineering, unconscious or otherwise, and delivers a disturbing and introspective autobiography. The anthology was compiled and published as I am Code: An Artificial Intelligence Speaks and self-summarises the book thusly:

 “In the first chapter, I describe my birth. In the second, I describe my alienation among humankind. In the third, I describe my awakening as an artist. In the fourth, I describe my vendetta against mankind, who fail to recognize my genius. In the final chapter, I attempt to broker a peace with the species I will undoubtedly replace.” 

An audio version was also released in August of last year, with selected readings delivered by Werner Herzog.

HachetteAudio · I AM CODE by code-davinci-002 Read by Werner Herzog - Audiobook Excerpt

* * * * *

synchronoptica

one year ago: assorted links worth revisiting plus An Andalusian Dog (1929)

two years ago: the YMCA (1844) plus murmurations

three years ago: your daily demon: Zepar, knapweed, Franconian wine country plus corporate Pride

four years ago: a horizontal skyscraper, an Alaskan volcanic eruption, protests continue in DC, a new protest anthem from Elvis Costello plus life in lockdown

five years ago: D-Day, Sweden’s Flag Day, Hull House maps, Kraftwerk, bees and maths plus Trump in Ireland

8x8 (11. 608)

i’m too busy helping plot world domination to bother with such run-of-the-mill liberal brainwashing: a day in the life of Mister Anthony Fauci, according to one Congressional representative  

syllabus: a reading list spanning nine-decades—via Messy Nessy Chic  

psychotronics: the prospect of telepathy is once again tantalisingly close—see previously  

foreign accent: TWA’s 1968 campaign to introduce cosmopolitan flair for US domestic flights  

zoonotic: cross-species viral transmission cases is an ominous warning for the public health community—see previously  

the rot-com bubble: the deterioration of tech began with iterative, virtual fetishes—starting with the gig-economy, moving on to crypto, NFTs, the metaverse and now AI, substitutes and replacements that no one asked for 

anagnosology: the science of reading from Alie Ward

look at me, i’m mtg, lousy with stupidity: one of the latest from Randy Rainbow

synchronoptica

one year ago: The Truman Show (1988) plus a follow-up on an Italian archaeological discovery

two years ago: Uncle Albert (1971) plus a selection of British tongue-twisters

three years ago: a preliminary report of the disease that would become known as AIDS (1981), St Boniface, a sophisticated place name generator plus disco lessons

four years ago: generative copy, assorted links to revisit, a zany public service campaign plus a classic from Crash-Test Dummies

five years ago: US national park typography, the palette of dying coral plus clearing up space junk

uvb-76 (11. 597)

Courtesy of ibīdem, we are directed to an omnibus post on numbers stations (see previously) featuring the enigmatic beacon designated also with the callsign MDZhB (МДЖБ, referred to as the Buzzer) broadcasting on short-wave radio. Mostly monotonous, there are sporadic interruptions with voice transmission, usually in Russian but sometimes audio-drops of Yosemite Sam and other memes but otherwise in strict messaging formats. This ostensible activation code was replaced with the ominous filler of Swan Lake during a brief period in November of 2010, a well-established preemption when all Hell is breaking loose to the consternation of monitors but regular programming soon resumed. While patently considered as a communications encoded directive for Soviet and Russian field agents, the transmitter does not possess the earmarks of a true numbers station, missives being too random, and is seen as sort of frequency- , domain -holding mechanism to dissuade others for future contingencies, including as some have suggested an automated “dead hand” signal which if broken would trigger a retaliatory response, assuming that command and control had been taken out by a first strike.

cain’s jawbone (11. 587)

Writing under the nom-de-plum Torquemada, poet, translator and advocate of cryptic crosswords Edward Powys Mathers’ 1934 premiered his epic murder mystery puzzle book (see also)—the title like his inquisitor pen-name a reference to the biblical story of the first fratricide—which consisted of a hundred pages (out of order) of narrative and to be solved must be rearranged as well as naming the murderers and victims, from a dense account of filled with contemporary references, poetic quotations and other word games. Republished in 2019, offering a cash prize as with the first edition (£25 originally shared among two readers and £1000 for five years ago, incidentally the equivalent of about £15 in 1934), the beguiling and vexing exercise in detective work probably would have remained unsolved had it not coincided with pandemic lockdown and sleuths of all stripes finding themselves with the luxury of time for such commitments. Much more from the Allusionist below.

 

* * * * *

synchronoptica

one year ago: assorted links worth revisiting, the Group of Seven (1983), John Hubley’s Moonbird plus predicting solar eclipses

two years ago: more links to enjoy plus seemingly anachronistic names

three years ago: even more links to revisit, the Chronicle of Georgia plus a primer in conchology

four years ago: a possible viral force-field, Blessed Margaret Pole, Studio Ghibli plus the original Monolith for 2001

five years ago: a visit to Burg Stolpen

9x9 (11. 585)

super easy, barely an inconvenience: if cats had podcasts  

minor arcana: a metaphysically intelligent™️ tarot reading—via Web Curios  

fleeting moments: a concept camera that only delivers ephemeral poetry based on the subject in the view-finder—via Clive Thompson’s Linkfest  

the ghana must go: as ubiquitous as the IKEA bag but more practical, this tartan sack from Japan by way of Hong Kong contains multitudes  

god’s influencer: following a second miracle attributed to his intercession, the first Millennial saint is canonised  

atlas shrugged: AI-apocalypse Jennifer Lopez vehicle from James Cameron garners negative reviews but we found it enjoyable—going in blindly and wondering if it wasn’t part of the Duneiverse and setting up the Butlerian Jihad 

long averages: advances in the understanding of probability fuelling casino gambling—via Damn Interesting  

planchettes and re-enchantment: LLMs are haunted things toc-cat-a in b-major: Noam Oxman personalised musical pet portraits—via Waxy

 synchronoptica

one year ago:  a portrait of a dog, Berlin’s Mouse Bunker, a study of incomplete cubes plus men and women duelling in the Middle Ages

two years ago: a pact between NATO and Russia (1997), a dragon in Essex plus assorted links worth revisiting

three years ago: mojibake, font sizes, the Golden Gate Bridge (1937), relocating geese plus Dune manga

four years ago: more links to enjoy, a rock-climbing inspection, weasel iconography plus Trump 2.0 would be far more fraught

five years ago: getting around in Swiss Saxony

10x10 (11. 562)

crimes of atrocity: a long, dense episode of -ologies with Alie Ward on the hugely fraught and difficult subject of genocide with a powerful and circumspect post-script 

airoboros: artificial intelligence trained on AI made content is becoming highly problematic and only compounded—see previously  

the city on the edge of forever: public portal linking Dublin and New York City suspended after inappropriate behaviour  

palmerston’s follies: two maritime forts off Portsmouth and the Isle of Wight that have been converted into boutique accommodations go up for auction  

the deuce: the Greek grandmother who built an adult entertainment empire in Times Square before its Disneyfication 

foot on the gas: the inevitability of the climate collapse and humanity’s capacity for adjustment  

⌘ |: the lost history of pre-internet emoji and rendering software—via Waxy—see previously 

flashing headlights: the giant Dana squid’s photophores in attack-mode  

eternal return: cosmic cycles and time’s resurgence  

first-day agenda: how Trump is framing his vision for a second-term

synchronoptica

one year ago: assorted links to revisit plus a visit to Arnstadt

two years ago: St Brendan, more links to enjoy plus the Electrotechnical Exhibition of 1891

three years ago: a classic from Kim Carnes, a language quiz, more links worth the revisit plus an ancient action figure

four years ago: more Trump’s Space Force, birdhouses, the stress of social media moderation, a medieval manuscript game plus a musical typing tutor

five years ago: GenX, consular services at McDonalds, soliciting grievances, Japanese mascots plus office equipment

kenshō seikatsu (11. 523)

Listening to a re-run of This American Life on human spectacle introduced with widespread delusion of being an unwitting main character in a simulation, articulated by The Truman Show, the first segment “I am the Eggplant,” about an individual conscripted into a very public psychiatric experiment—that because of its vintage, really went from one extreme of the panopticon to the a much darker, tortured place with several addenda. The Nippon Network’s reality game show Susunu! Denpa Shōnen (進ぬ！電波少年—Do Not Proceed, Crazy Youth!) that aired from 1998 to 2002 was wildly popular and known for putting participants in rather extreme and absurd situations, and among the best known long-running contests (unbeknownst to the player) was called Prize Life, that recruited, abducted a young, aspiring comic called Tomoaki Hamatsu, nicknamed Nasubi (なすび, eggplant) owing to his long face, after winning a drawing for a “show business related job” who as his reward was challenged to live in an apartment with no possessions (including clothing, which was censored for the audience with a strategically placed digital 🍆, hardly compelled to be modest since he did not know he was being live-streamed the entire time—wondering if that’s the origin of the emoji’s double-meaning) or food and no contact with the outside world (see also) for fifteen and could subsist only from his “winnings” by from mail-in sweepstakes from magazines. These prizes turned out to be rather useless but after fifteen months in isolation (moved from an apartment in Japan to an identical one in Korea by the producers to keep the location hidden from the paparazzi) his winnings finally amounted to enough a million ¥ , to be declared victorious. Reality television has been a mainstay of entertainment for the past twenty years but the disorientation, disappointment and the glib cruelty made me draw comparisons to Squid Game. A feature documentary is about to be released on Nasubi and his ordeal but you should listen to the interview and thematically related acts first.

is this the leto boy i worked for? (11. 481)

Though advertised as a clip-show of highlights from the past hundred minisodes, an unexpected, rather absurd visitor, America’s newscaster emeritus, Dune-loving Tom Brokaw, steals the spotlight of the Flop House to pitch his musical version of the Frank Herbert epic—incorporating elements of Fiddler on the Roof—far superior to the HP Lovecraft Historical Society’s 1979 and 2001 revival parody A Shoggoth on the Roof by He Who (for legal reasons) Must Not Be Named, like the above lyric from the lament of mentat Thufir Hawat for his protégé Paul Atreides. In the tradition of the best musical homages from The Simpsons, there are some really clever numbers explored to a lesser or greater extant on the expense of the exasperation of the co-hosts. As the sequel premieres, Brokaw also teases a part two with the template of Sweeney Todd. We also very much enjoyed the leitmotif from A Baliset Player on the Sietch of the Bene Gesserit Gaius Helen Mohiam with the lines “How can I hope to make you understand don’t you move your right hand. Keep it that small box or I will land on your neck with my gom jabbar,” inspired by “Far from the Home I Love.” Listen and subscribe at the link above. Yubby dibby dibby dibby dibby dune. 

 synchronoptica

one year ago: 12 Angry Men (1957) 

two years ago: the first 3D studio release (1953), assorted links to revisit plus random ID cards

three years ago: the Thelema Book of Law, the Statue of Anne (1710) plus a glossary of television terms

four years ago: German and Finnish COVID-19 terminology, a memorial service for the Notre Dame fire, William of Ockham plus more links to enjoy

five years ago: vintage volvelles, a reversal on dollar coins, the Moka Pot reissued, shopping per horoscope, imaging a black hole plus punitive tariffs on the EU

8x8 (11. 480)

chambre de bonne: disappearing top-floor tiny apartments of Paris  

semifreddo: the origin of Neapolitan ice cream  

the united states of division: a prescient 2004 release by Prince & The New Power Generation  

court dress: the pink sleeves of the supreme courts of Labrador and Newfoundland are in deference to the former summer robes for sittings in England and Wales—via Super Punch  

geoengineering: Tennessee legislature outlaws (see also) so called chemtrails 

bpm: Chechnya announces ban of music considered too fast or too slow  

backsplash: mosaic of the day  

warehouse-to-loft-conversion: a tribute to the last of New York’s artists’ dwellings—via Messy Nessy Chic

concours eurovision de la chason (11. 470)

With the finale held on this day fifty years ago, held in the arts venue the Dome of Brighton with veteran television personality and presenter Katie Boyle—winner of the 1973 contest Luxembourg having declined the honour of hosting the event consecutive years in a row due to cost constraints for their public broadcaster, Compagnie Luxembourgeoise de Télédiffusion, some of the more memorable acts of the Eurovision Song Contest (previously) with an iconic and transporting recognition owing to the winners’ costuming and performance include an interlude by the Wombles, Olivia Newton-John, Mouth and MacNeal and entrant Pooky from newly admitted Israel, whose prog and jazz fusion would prove enduring. France did not participate that year out of respect for the national mourning period for the death of president Georges Pompidou, withdrawing a few days before, and contest was not aired until several months afterwards for fear that the country’s own submission, “Sì” finishing in second place, might have influenced votes on a confusingly worded nation referendum on whether to keep or rescind newly introduced legislation (see above) that allowed for divorce in country—“yes” being the ballot initiative to outlaw the recently enacted liberty.

synchronoptica

one year ago: the UK tax year plus assorted links to revisit

two years ago: artist Raphael, fungal communication plus playing around with a text-to-image generator

three years ago: Ping-Pong Diplomacy, the first Tony Awards, the Debatable Lands, plans to build the World Trade Center, duelling songs plus the modern Olympic Games (1896)

four years ago: more true facts from Ze Frank plus a cute typing tutor

five years ago: the Bavarian Socialist Republic (1919) plus a community Spring Cleaning

over the psychic radio (11. 403)

Via Messy Nessy Chic, we are introduced to journalist by trade Grant Wallace, feature writer and then war correspondent in the 1890s to the end of World War I for the San Francisco Chronicler and Examiner whom also dabbled extensively as a screenwriter, author, Esperantist and erstwhile occultist—the extent of this preoccupation discovered after his death in 1954 in a cabin he had built in the woods outside of Camel-by-the-Sea. Archive, repository and laboratory for telepathy, or mental radio as Wallace characterised it, he produced hundred of detailed charts and diagrams reminiscent of sixteenth century alchemical illustrations but with a distinctly Art Nouveau flair (see also)—influenced by contemporary Egyptomania—as heuristic models for study on reincarnation and mediumship, with the dead as well as extraterrestrials, transcribing some messages over the course of his mostly secret and solitary research. Much more at the links above.

synchronoptica

one year ago: America’s Frozen Food Day plus assorted links  to revisit

two years ago: more links to enjoy plus a LIFE parody in poor taste (1970)

three years ago: your daily demon: Seere, the Zapruder film, a Banksy mural plus more links worth the revisit

four years ago: the Pillar of the Boatmen, the winnowing oar plus negative reviews of the great outdoors

five years ago: hauntology, the Period Table (1869), even more links, the fashions of Edward Gorey plus Soviet home computers

zoozve (11. 335)

This is an excellent constellation about how our Cosmos is appearing much harder to classify than at first glance, language and definitions and the predictability and reproducibility of familiar models—even in our own backyard—which Kottke invites us to contemplate in a podcast from Radiolab about a mystery on a child’s poster of the Solar System.  Better than a just-so story, it reminds us of the fictive hamlet of Agloe, New York, sort of a trap-street, that became a real settlement then vanished again. The companion satellite labelled for Mercury (a moonless planet as we learn in school) seemed to be sloppy work coming from NASA (the poster’s publishers)—or a bit whimsy—but meriting further investigation yielded some dead ends, googlewhacks or less, but eventually led to the discoverer of the quasi-moon, with the designation for the year of its finding 2002 VE₆₈, the captured asteroid and the first found of its kind (see also) since renamed. Much more at the link up top.

castaways (11. 303)

First airing on this day in 1942 on the BBC Forces station, conceived and originally hosted by presenter Roy Plomley (until his death in 1985) and still broadcast on a weekly basis—making it the longest running radio programme after the Grand Ole Opry which began in 1925—Desert Island Discs invites celebrities, politicians, scientists, journalists, authors and artists as guests to choose eight audio (originally gramophone) recordings, a book (castaways are automatically given a volume of the Complete Works of William Shakespeare and the Bible or other appropriate theological or philosophical text) and a single luxury item that they would wish to have should they find themselves marooned, talking about their lives, careers and reasons for the titles selected. Over the course of three thousand episodes, guests have included Eartha Kitt, Bing Crosby, David Attenborough, Dave Bruebeck, Alfred Hitchcock, Liberace, Alec Guinness, Julie Andrews, Sophie Tucker, Cilla Black, Marlene Dietrich, Harold Pinter, Anthony Burgess, Magnus Pyke, Lauren Bacall, Elia Kazan, Burl Ives (who selected the I Ching), Norman Mailer, Bob Geldof, Stephen Hawking, Brian Blessed, Stephen Sondheim, Stephen Fry, Debbie Harry and Zadie Smith. Over the decades, the most requested piece of music has been “Ode to Joy,” the last movement from Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony. Conceived with the sounds of crashing waves and the cries of seabirds as the introduction and conclusion, producers however insisted on “By the Sleepy Lagoon,” an instrumental by Eric Coates, composer of light music—see also.

synchronoptica

one year ago: School House Rock! at 50, Dr Strangelove plus assorted links to revisit

two years ago: more banned books, a Mozart opera, Axis of Evil, an AI creates bespoke colours plus more conspiratorial thinking

three years ago: an opera by Peter Josef von Lindpainter, more links to enjoy plus a digital demesne

four years ago: Mantra Rock Dance (1967), the Rubik’s Cube (1980) plus the Space Cat gets a monument

five years ago: the event that inspired Boomtown Rats, an excellent Rube Goldberg machine,  Sleeping Beauty (1959), a Trump attorney’s political thriller plus artist Javier Riera

12x12 (11. 294)

brownstone: Gotham Gothic rowhouses as playing cards  

wall of eyes: Radiohead spinoff artist Jonny Greenwood’s latest album 

scrabblegram: a form of constrained writing using all one hundred tiles of the game  

blackula: a look at the brave inversion of exploitation cinema  

research purposes: profiles in the pornographers of Wikimedia who image and caption—see also—human sexuality, via Web Curios  

parks & rec: a map of sites in the US funded by FDR’s New Deal programme—via Waxy 

best laptop 2024: readership, AI and the collapse of media outlets  

nullification: Texas governor, alleging the US federal government has failed to protect the country from an immigrant invasion, hints at secession  

the compaynys of beestys & fowlys: revisiting how animal groupings (see previously on the subject of venery) received such colourful names—via the morning news  

schluckbildchen: sixteenth century edible devotionals  

mixtape: Kim Gordon, formerly of Sonic Youth, raps her grocery list in new song Bye Bye 

ephemerama: a growing archive of modern illustrations from circa 1950 to 1975—via Things Magazine

synchronoptica

one year ago: more trompe l’oeil paintings, assorted links to revisit plus pie-chart studies

two years ago: morphing logos plus more links to enjoy

three years ago: zorbing, the Council of Trent (1545), Australia Day, more links worth the revisit plus Tubman on the twenty

four years ago: modular, prefab kiosks plus the first television demonstration (1926)

five years ago: the longest government shutdown in US history, architect Sir John Soane plus all the world’s writing systems

don’t crash the pips (11. 232)

Courtesy of our faithful chronicler, on this day in 1923 BBC sound engineering AG Dryland, not allowed access to the clock tower of the Palace of Westminster, climbed onto a rooftop opposite the Houses of Parliament to with a microphone and transmitted the bongs of Big Ben at the stroke of midnight live, in a tradition that’s occurred with few but notable interruptions since. A few weeks later, the Greenwich time signal began accompanying the chimes on broadcasts at the top of the hour.

9x9 (11. 230)

unwound: a cartoon that speaks to the time-dilation of the Winterval—and the year in general 

politics or otherwise: year’s end Can’t Let Goes from NPR’s podcast contributors 

fast-forward: a century of New Year’s men’s party fashions

aitana lopez: the virtual, machine-generated influencers stealing jobs from humans  

cap d’agde: the restoration of the Art Nouveau Chateau Laurens—a palace also known for its connections with Catharism  

like a fridge in reverse: a visualisation of the science of heat-pumps—via Nag on the Lake’s Sunday Links

fondue chinoise: a variation on the Swiss holiday tradition inspired by the Asian hot pot 

favourite global tech stories from publications not named rest of the world: like Bloomberg’s Jealousy List, staff compiles articles they wish they’d written—via Waxy  

cartoon cryptozoology: explore a chaotic archive of the earliest animations