… (12. 446)

At the end of last month, one of the few remaining telegraph stations in China prepared to shut down, thousands traveled to Hangzhou in far eastern Zhejiang province to pay their respects and dispatch last missives (see previously). We enjoyed the shared memories of workers and patrons as told through the story of one individual who undertook a rather epic journey on a slow train east to send his first and last messages. Writing out their notes by hand, character by character, people sent telegrams to themselves, friends and relatives both yet to be born and departed and operators recalled the echoing cadence of the office and specific numerical sequences used to encode words and phrases. The once vital communications network has all but disappeared, although during the last day of operation, the station, which had in recent years only been sending an average of twenty-five a year, processed nearly six-thousand telegrams. Memories are not so far removed as China has had telegraphy technology since the nineteenth century, it remained popular and the only guaranteed method of reaching someone urgently until peaking in the late 1980s when more than forty million messages were sent annually, individual stations handling on average a hundred thousand each.

push-pin studios (12. 406)

Print Magazine’s Daily Heller invites us back to The Peculiar Manicule (see previously) to peruse through the curated collections of semi-retired graphic designer David Day’s mod and Day-Glo-adjacent artefacts and ephemera, particularly the series of psychedelic calendars produced by the Hallmark greeting card company in the 1960s—under the influence of illustrator R Crumb—growing chronologically more abstract and subversive as the months and years passed until the aesthetic, parallel with Mid-Century Modern, changed and an unexpected part of the company’s portfolio. Much more at the links above.

8x8 (12. 231)

shiroposuto: the last of Japan’s discrete adult reading material disposal boxes 

reinfection: bovine testing for bird flu virus suggests that the H5N1 is spreading silently—see previously   

with guns as my retirement and war as mistress: more protest anthems from Jessie Welles   

in the meantime, i am seriously considering cultivating stupidity, to the exclusion of everything else, as a way of life: the correspondence of Edward Gorey and Tom Fitzharris   

remember the giver: an assortment of Valentine’s Day letters   

tipping point: how things change slowly—then all at once, as illustrated by Kiki and Bouba   

morbidity and mortality weekly report: US Centres For Disease Control see research and outreach efforts hampered by Trump’s assault on the agency—see previously, see also   

enmusubi: the gathering of eight million gods play matchmaker for human relationships in this seaside prefecture

synchronoptica

one year ago:  1924’s Die Niebelungen (with synchronoptica), the endless news cycle plus assorted links to revisit

seven years ago: photographing a single atom, the illustrations of Giovanni Fontana, retro social media platforms plus street name diplomacy

eight years ago: more links to enjoy plus Germany votes

nine years ago: developing the .jpeg format, contention over US Presidents’ Day plus holograms to discourage non-disabled drivers taking handicapped parking spots

eleven years ago: forensics and biometrics plus pop culture Ottoman miniatures

7x7 (12. 222)

vandalising purposes—in this economy: one hundred thousand eggs are stolen in Pennsylvania 

we stand on guard: a ten year old graphic novel about a US invasion of Canada is surging in popularity  

narrow meaning: a love poem revealed by holding the page level with the eyes, foreshortening the characters—see previously here and here 

sandbox game: an omnibus appreciation of The Sims on their twenty-fifth anniversary—via MissCellania  

antipodes: an exploration of obscure islands  

read-ahead: a pre-summit release from the Munich Security Conference (previously) suggests that due to its imperial aspirations, the US no longer a trusted partner 

the price of eggs in china: inflation and rationing in America

be my valentine, charlie brown (12. 190)

Premiering on this day in 1975 on the CBS television network, the thirteenth prime-time animated special based on the Peanuts comic strip, deals with the subject of rejection and heartbreak when Sally first misinterprets Linus’ heart-shaped box of chocolates for his teacher as an overture for her non-requited affection and our protagonist receiving only one treat, a chalky candy heart with the message “FORGET IT KID!” during the class party—the teacher departing early with her boyfriend. A belated greeting arrives from the Little Red Haired Girl and Charlie Brown gets a regifted card from Violet. Optimistic that these pity Valentines might sustain a trend and he’ll get more next year, but Linus warns his friend not to get his hopes up. The score with the opening theme “Heartburn Waltz” was recorded by Vince Guaraldi’s Orchestra. The card which Sally reads and acted out by Snoopy is the entirety (see also) of Elizabeth Barrett Browning’s Sonnets from the Portuguese (№ 43), which opens with “How do I love thee? Let me me count the ways.”

synchronoptica

one year ago: USA for Africa’s We are the World (with synchronoptica) plus the zombification of the abandoned internet

seven years ago: pedometers and privacy, Thamesmead Housing Estate plus Aloha Wanderwell

eight years ago: governance per Tweet, assorted links worth revisiting plus Little Englanders

nine years ago: a time-capsule apartment in Chicago, ranking passports plus the game Go

ten years ago: hydrophobic materials plus a superb cartographical collection

so call me maybe (12. 169)

Via Quantum of Sollazzo we are directed towards a really insightful, disabusing and longitudinal study that demonstrates that romance is not dead from The Pudding. There is a significant decline but on balance the frequency of the love song has remained steady as a genre once one admits tastes have undergone a paradigm shift from the serenade to ballads of heartache, breakup and amour-propre. The interactive data-driven treatment is loaded with playable clips, from Lesley Gore’s “You Don’t Own Me” to Lizzo’s “About Damn Time,” “Angel of the Morning” from Merrilee Rush & the Turnabouts to the collaboration from Cardi B and Megan Thee Stallion, as examples of tracks charting from 1958 to 2023.

comet and cupid (11. 347)

Via fellow internet peripatetic Messy Nessy (much more to dsicover there), we are introduced to the eighteenth century artist Michelangelo Maestri and his school through his series of water-colours of putti, cherubs driving chariots pulled by various creatures as an allegory to depict different types and stages of love—agape, eros, xenia, philia. Inspired by the frescos of Ancient Rome, especially the then recent excavation of well-preserved examples in Herculaneum and Pompeii, his studio’s works were extremely popular and produced en masse and were often purchased as souvenirs by those on their Grand Tour.

synchronoptica

one year ago: spec scripts for Star Trek: TNG plus a webring to check out

two years ago: more Excel art, West African musical artists plus separated by a common language

three years ago: assorted links to revisit, a dinosaur park plus animation techniques

four years ago: more links to enjoy

five years ago: out-of-place archaeology, Sony World Photography winners, Mandombe script plus more links worth revisiting

sweethearts (11. 344)

Our intrepid AI wrangler, Janelle Shane, repeats a battery of experiments—this time using magnitudes more computational power—by having Chat GPT-3 design those chalky conversation confectionaries with an inscribed message. Far from the quirkiness on order it seems to illustrate the struggle that machine learning has with text, even if more orthographically plausible, and labels but begs the question, even that chatbots are recursive and have probably mined data from Shane’s earlier popular iterations, if it is not drawing from those and influencing the outcome. “Soe Coed,” “I ll Sont, ” “Le Yas,” and “Lov Shov” are pretty good but nothing could ever top Mouthy Hamster.

saint mél (11. 329)

Son of Saint Patrick’s sister Darerca and eventually accompanying his uncle to Ireland for missionary work, this itinerate bishop with no fixed see during his ministry, this patron of Ardagh and Clonmacnoise, supported himself through manual labour and subsistence farming, residing with his aunt called Lupait during a portion of his ministry. In order to quell rumours and preserve the good reputation of their evangelising work, Patrick went to investigate himself, with both aunt and nephew producing miracles (carrying burning coals and fishing a fish from a field) to prove the innocent and chaste nature of their relationship, and the two went to live apart—following the patriarch’s suggestion, who also raised the great hill called Bri Leith between their respective new settlements in Mél’s home parish and Druimheo, further east where Lupait relocated, they separated. Invoked by those falsely accused of incest, the feast of Saint Mél, venerated either today or on the seventh, has become a local holiday of singlehood (there being quite a few other saints devoted to the unpaired but all with the designs of marrying well) with customs including sending cards to oneself ahead of Valentine’s Day and hosting mixers that extol the good things about being confirmed bachelors and bachelorettes.

7x7 (10. 905)

home taping is killing record industry profits: the 1981 moral panic over mixtapes  

lisa lionheart: labour force participation through the many careers of Barbie  

swipe left: patrons of 1920s Berlin nightclubs could flirt via pneumatic tubes—via Messy Nessy Chic  

the rivers and harbours act: Texas Department of Justice sues governor for refusing to remove a stretch of buoys that violates federal and international law—see previously  

sickbay: the Pirate Surgeon’s Journals—via Strange Company  

comeuppance: it’s time for the annual census on the River Thames—see previously 

a lot of skill, hand-eye coordination—it’s cheap and legal: video arcade addiction was seen as a threat to prevailing social values in 1982

 synchronoptica

one year ago: Ullapool and environs plus Wester Ross

two years ago: a colour advertisement on black-and-white TV (1967), Einstein on the Beach (1976), Thomas à Kempis plus a mosaic along the Thames

three years ago: Trump’s mental fitness, proto-Wikipedia (2000), more on the US Space Force, St Cucuphas, Nixon in China vis-à-vis today’s relations plus more on stock characters and archetypes

four years ago: RIP Rutger Hauer plus a doctored presidential seal

five years ago: a neo-classic Delphic festival (1927), a student project that may have unwittingly identified targets of value in the Gulf War, anti-social media, Mid-Century Modern minimalism plus the hunt for subsurface water on Mars

9x9 (10. 901)

effective altruism: FTX lobbyist tried to purchase the island nation of Nauru as a doomsday bunker and create a genetically enhanced human species  

getting drunk at a disco: 1977 found footage of an evening not necessarily going downhill 

this is not a love poem: a round-up of favourites that are not all lovey-dovey—via tmn  

rambler: a collection of illustrated exteriors of California ranch homes—see also

1975: Kuala Lumpur authorities shut down the Good Vibes festival after headliner Matty Healy criticised Malaysia’s anti-LGBTQ+ laws  

point of no return: time is running out on the Climate Clock  

stooping: trend adopted by Chinese young people involves decorating with cast-off furniture left by the curb 

smokey, this is not ‘nam—this is bowling, there are rules: Big Lebowski (previously) inspired bowling alley via Nag on the Lake’s Sunday Links (lots more to explore there) 

typoglycemia: bypassing chatbot’s ethical subroutines using word scrambling and transposed letters

((DV)) (10.541)

In an annual tradition tradition, the team at NPR’s Planet Money takes a moment to consider the things they love and dispatch valentines accordingly. While we really enjoyed the opening segment and the affection for venturing down a logistics and supply-chain rabbit hole with ImportYeti, a website that aggregates bills of ladening and customs sea shipment records and yields exacting insights on where component parts and completed goods come from (give it a try with any product marked made in China and drill down on the details), we would be compelled to send our overtures as well to Audio Description (see also)—something we’ve tried and will continue—for film and television programmes—a feature mandated by regulation and very prevalent but that affords all audiences the chance to attend in all circumstances, as if watching in company, closely and turns every episode into a podcast experience and narrated play-by-play.

roses are red (10. 534)

In an ongoing and evolving experiment, our AI Wrangler Janelle Shane (previously) has again essayed and assigned generative chat bots to create increasingly sophisticated greetings and indulged their versical graps by taking suggested illustrations, verso and recto—including on the back ‘Excleeze Me” below a red heart. It’ funny how the algorithm focuses on pagination equally with presentation and notably addressing recipient Jack as a carnivorous plant. In its dreadful excellence our old romantic ChapGPT rendered “Roses are red / Violets are blue / This card may be old / But my love for you is brand new,” optimised for fluency and familiarity above all other sentiments.

6x6 (10. 433)

shift happens: a comprehensive history of keyboards by Marcin Wichary—via Waxy  

luni-solar: the people who are living in multiple timelines—see previously  

poly canon: a showcase of strange, experimental architectural students senior projects at scale  

hydraulic press interpretive dance: the impressive choreography of Sarah “Smac” McCreanor—see previously  

nangajo: prominent figures of the Japanese design community present their greeting cards for 2023 (see previously), the Year of the Rabbit 

franklin ace 100: the Apple clone (see previously) with a bizarre users’ guide—via Waxy

may all jollity lighten your christmas hours (10. 413)

For Second Christmas, our AI wrangler Janelle Shane (see previously) hit upon another ingenious application for generative networks, remedying in one fell prompt the inscrutability of Victorian greeting cards and the relatively anodyne nature of contemporary cards, to enliven the iconography and sentiment for the industry. Yearly good tidings and descriptions were issued by machines fed on the corpus of inaccessibly weird cards, and where possible, illustrated by our programmer. The unrenderable caption that goes with the above 1889 motto calls for “a jester puppet with magic hat holding a leaping, toothed bird which brandishes a cane as it leaps.” Another favourite was for 1890—May You Feel Sturdy and Gay—picturing an elegant naiad lifting a pianoforte and wearing a striped bathing suit. Much more to explore at the links above. 

modernmas (10. 393)

Courtesy of the Everlasting Blört, we really enjoyed this re-introduction to the portfolio and biography of graphic designer, architect and Modernist Master Paul Rand through this collection of hand-painted original Christmas cards. Rand was one of the first American commercial artists to adopt and champion the International Typographic Style (otherwise known as the Swiss Style), whose hallmarks were asymmetrical layouts and legibility.  Much more at the links above.

9x9 (10. 299)

enḫeduana: the fourth incarnation of the four-thousand year old Mesopotamian priestess who is the world’s first named author 

rip: founding member of the Clash and Public Image Ltd Keith Levene passes away, aged 65—via Nag on the Lake  

this is jim rockford. at the tone, leave your name and message. i’ll get back to you. [beep]: the mid-1970s detective drama intro faithfully recreated in LEGO  

spitalfields life: Peta Bridle illustrates her tour of London with her daughter 

tic-toc—let’s talk: Watch Dog and a nightmare clown teach children to read an analogue clock  

hush city: interactive mapping applications to chart out one’s urban soundscape and mark out those quiet spots  

51/49: Democrats retain control of the US Senate with a win in Nevada and the run-off election in Georgia ahead  

hawkwind: space music pioneer Nik Turner has died, aged 82  

the civilisation of llhuros: an artist exhibited, convincingly, a mock Iron Age culture with fantasy folkways and artefacts—via the New Shelton Wet / Dry

7x7 (10. 284)

big bounce: some astrophysicists suspect that things were happening in the Cosmos prior to the Big Bang—via Damn Interesting’s Curated Links  

nogoodnik: Russia reactivates its bot and troll army to muddy the US mid-term elections  

fivethirtyeight: mapping out when individual voting jurisdictions announce results  

jazz harp: the musical stylings of Turiyasangitananda—a.k.a. Ms Alice Coltrane—via Messy Nessy Chic

false prophets: a denunciation of America’s Christian nationalism—via Miss Cellania  

battleground states: artists reflect on the consequential American election 

hero’s journey: avoiding the perils of the monomyth in storytelling

world postal day (10.207)

The Universal Postal Union (see previously here and here) has designated this day for the annualcelebration on the anniversary of the establishment of the UPU in 1874 in Bern—the first commemorative congress called in 1969 in Tokyo. Since then, themed campaigns have been held under the auspices of this UN agency to underscore the civic importance of a reliable and accessible mail system and recognises the best postal services in a global competition.

6x6 (10. 151)

teenage rampage: 70s sing-a-long pop was edgier than one thought   

on tyranny: twenty lesson on unfreedom and defending democracy

heptominos: geometric magic squares from Lee Sallows—see also

cross-hatched: dozens of security envelope patterns  

quiet quitting: these scenes of office drudgery are a form of protest

rainbow quest: Pete Seeger’s 1960s folk music television show