10x10 (11. 852)

analogical harmony: Edwin Babbit’s Principles of Light and Colour (1878)  

riding the rails: a guide to a cross-country trip on America’s Amtrak

world level zero: how well travelled are you—see previously  

porifera: an appreciation of the barely understood sea sponge  

me and my aero: one inventor invented both the flying ring frisbee and an innovative coffee press—via Kottke  

type tuesday: Microsoft’s new default font (see previously here and here) and more typographical briefs  

the cry of cthuthu: Poseidon’s Underworld reads the July 1979 anniversary issue of Starlog—see previously

small world: kinetic microphotography captures biological processes and microbes in never-before-seen ways  

road trip: charting the longest possible drivable distance through Eurasia  

come up off your colour chart: Taylor Swift lyrical swatches

synchronoptica

one year ago: faithless electors (with synchronoptica) 

seven years ago: the stage play that coined race plus a legitimising veneer for populist prejudice

eight years ago: a visit to the Hessen Landtag

ten years ago: Roman emperor Hadrian 

eleven years ago: a photographic scavenger hunt in Leipzig plus gifting votes

7x7 (11. 838)

the hemicycle: an exhibition on the European Union parliament’s plenary sessions from 1952 to the present—see also here and here 

i’m feeling lucky: to google as a verb losing traction, younger users preferring search—I have to watch my stories 

matrix: a split-screen tool that converts video to ASCII characters—via Web Curios  

buzz-bar: a global roller coaster database—via ibīdem  

we have no idea the ripple effects we will have in this world: the revolutionary Waite-Colman Smith tarot deck—see previously  

palimpsest: multispectral imaging the Voynich Manuscript (previously) might reveal clues about its origins

holiday creep: US government facing another shutdown showdown ahead of the coming fiscal year, reporting earlier than usual

synchronoptica

one year ago:  a Russian-North Korean summit (with synchronoptica)

seven years ago: the new town square

eight years ago: microbeads and microplastics, the extinction illusion plus the thematic apperception test

eleven years ago: bees still under threat plus a US imposed clearing house for all international bank transfers

twelve years ago: corporate hegemony, banking secrecy plus a consortium of European museum collections digitised

222 west 23rd (11. 835)

The historic Queen Anne Revival accommodations in the Manhattan neighbourhood of Chelsea was originally a housing cooperative through the early 1980s before being gentrified into its present form, and the residential hotel was home to many up-and-coming luminaries until such time, including Jack Kerouac, Andy Warhol, Sherwood Anderson, Henri Chopin, Quentin Crisp, Ethan Hawke, Miloš Forman, Joan Baez, Leonard Cohen, Marian Faithfull, Bette Milder, Isabella Rosallini, Eddie Izzard, Jane Fonda and numerous others. In 2011, we learn, a lesser-known but long-term resident, Jim Georgiou and his dog Teddy, was evicted for failing to pay his rent and was temporarily unhoused. The following year during renovations on the building, he saw construction workers tossing out some of the old, white-washed and graffitied doors, which Georgiou managed to salvage and research, connecting them to the suites of different neighbours. After years of work, fifty-two doors were auctioned off, with the proceeds going to organisations that help New York City’s homeless in 2018.

7x7 (11. 830)

cat lives matter: US vice presidential candidate JD Vance propagating false and inflammatory rumours about migrants abducting and eating family pets 

beany leeky greens with greeky rampy beans: recipes and foodways becoming a bit less twee, more straightforward—via tmn  

an agony, in eight fits: James Earl Jones (RIP) reads Lewis Carroll’s The Hunting of the Snark  

may the gods give you everything you asked for: backhanded benedictions and predictions about what AI does next 

 esh: how AITA took over the internet

a melodrama in three acts: Five Star Finale and other pre-code screenplay original sources  

crowd size: Harris-Walz campaign advertisement airing on Fox News

 synchronoptica

one year ago: assorted links worth revisiting (with synchronoptica)

seven years ago: silphium, more on the Voynich Manuscript plus a visit to Trump’s ancestral home

eight years ago: Birobidzhan oblast,  fantasy doubles tennis plus the 1970 movie The Phynx

nine years ago: more links to enjoy 

ten years ago: WWI periodicals a century on 

mss (11. 824)

Having a bit of a preoccupation with the discipline of diplomatics, we enjoyed going through this collection of missives from Letters of Note when correspondence becomes self-aware and ashamed, feeling the need to excuse itself for bad penmanship—the motor control and coordination to commit words to a page (undiminished we agree by their appearance however verging on the illegible) an important feedback loop in the exercise that’s not much practised lately, and lamented in this vintage selection. Particularly telling is this letter (not pictured—that’s Franz Kafka) from American poet laureate Louise Bogan addressed to essayist and New Yorker magazine editor William Keepers Maxwell with the post script, “Isn’t my handwriting queer? I lost my old one, typing for years; and this one showed up last winter. Odd!” Much more from Sean Usher at the link above.

9x9 (11. 814)

unpodcasted: one hundred ninety nine ideas about etymologies, idioms and eponyms that Helen Zaltzman has not produced an episode for—yet  

book club: Oprah Winfrey’s upcoming special on Artificial Intelligence with Sam Altman, Bill Gates and other AI-evangelists has critics of the tech sector up in arms  

blue chip index: Intel’s earnings slump could see it removed from the Dow, possibly putting a wrench in plans to increase US domestic manufacturing

sleepy grendel’s mother: Beotrump by Christopher Douglas  

jevons paradox: even if autonomous vehicles worked perfectly, they will still lead to more pollution, congestion and accidents—see previously—via tmn  

oslo—is it even a city: a wonderful bit of anti-advertising for the Norwegian capital plus more news and jokes 

intel inside: Pentium microprocessor as Navajo weaving—via Waxy 

nanowrimo: the organisation behind National Novel Writing Month criticised over labelling aversion to generative texts as classist and ableist 

unblogged: fellow flâneur Diamon Geezer lists a month’s worth of explorations not posted

 synchronoptica

one year ago: The Eye of the Tiger (with synchronoptica),  Kenneth Anger’s first film plus hot labour summer

seven years ago: the Little Ben of Victoria station

eight years ago: a visit to Churfrankenland plus an ant colony thriving in nuclear waste

nine years ago: assorted links to revisit plus algorithmic eavesdropping

eleven years ago: Germany votes plus pirate patches

the tour of dr syntax through the pleasures & miseries of london (11. 806)

Published anonymously in 1820 but believed to be authored by William Coombe and illustrated by Robert Cruikshank (see previously), the popular comedy epistolary series is about a rural school master and pastor who attempts to make his fortune by travelling and then writing about it. Coombe—or often Combe—was himself an adventurer produced most of his works from debtors’ prison, with his first success dispatch from behind bars was a satire called The Diaboliad that attacked and defamed his creditors with thinly veiled allegory, and due to others trying to capitalise and plagiarising his Dr Syntax character (including as Derby porcelain figurines), the author, in the style of Cervantes and the false Don Quixote, put out a collection of spurious letters attributed to the fictional late Lord Lyttelton of Syntax’ continuing misadventures aboard—the plagiariser’s supposed correspondence taken as an admission to seditious speech against the government of King George III but later scholarship confirmed it was another tout to push pamphlets. More from Spitalfields Life at the link above.

republic of letters (11. 802)

Via Super Punch, we are reminded of the notoriously weird and incongruous book covers (previously) of academics publisher Routledge, founded in 1836 to capitalise on the market of holiday by train and known as the “Railway Library” and later acquired the rights for printing the collected works of Edward Bulwer-Lytton before after flirting with insolvency entered the scholarly field buying out the the backlists of several university presses and journals and acquiring the imprint of several influential humanities and social sciences titles. The image references last year’s meme about the frequency among men thinking about Ancient Rome.

10x10 (11. 783)

zener cards: the phenomenon of population stereotypes help mentalists seem genuine to their audience—via The New Shelton wet/dry 

null island: the nation of Kiribati (see also, see previously) straddles the four hemispheres  

mycobbuoys: a natural anchored float to help ween aquaculture off of plastics and keep them out of the oceans  

gisnep: a hybrid jumble, Connect-Four and cross-word game—via Neatorama  

vanquish surveillance, not democratise it: California legislators’ deal to have Big Tech sponsor local journalism causes concern it may affirm monopolies rather than break them up  

who’s telling trump he might be seeking one of those black jobs: former US first lady Michelle Obama taunts the GOP candidate for his comments about immigrants taking away supposed targeted employment opportunities 

seven-segment display: the fast technological progression from the incandescent numitrons to the liquid crystal display—see previously  

dishonourable mentions: winners of the annual Bulwer-Lytton fiction contest—see previously  

veni, vidi, vici: discover Roman antiquities in your area—via Satyrs’ Link Roll  

miss cleo knows the truth: confessions of psychic hotline operator—via tmn

synchronoptica

one year ago: a classic from Gary Numan (with synchronoptica)

seven years ago: staunch Prohibitionists

eight years ago: cross-species friendships, taxidermied instruments plus healthy microbiomes

nine years ago: the scramble for the poles plus asylum problems in Germany

ten years ago: Pallas’ Cat

omnis cellula e cellula (11. 781)

On this day in 1858, the Berlin publishing house of August Hirschwald released the foundational work Cellular Pathology by esteemed physician, sociologist and anthropologist Rudolf Ludwig Carl Virchow, which informed modern medical thought. Not only recognising the mechanisms behind disease, injury and healing broadly, Virchow was the first to describe and name ailments and disorders, including coining terms like leukaemia, thrombosis and spina bifida and helped to formalise the practise of autopsy and forensics. Drawing on his interest in ethnography and archeology (accompanying Heinrich Schliemann during some of his Trojan expeditions) and adopting it into his medical research, while teaching at the University of Würzburg, Virchow coined the maxim that medicine “is a social science, and politics is nothing more than medicine on a large scale,” pioneering public health campaigns to counter outbreaks, and perhaps aligned with this guiding aphorism rejected the germ theory of infections (believing that they were symptoms rather than causes and that poverty was the biggest cause of sickness and death—although contributing a lot to the study of macroscopic parasites) and adamantly disagreed with Darwinian evolution—recognising natural selection but rejecting the emergent theory as flawed—see the above teaching tenure. Also opposing the social Darwinism ideas of his student Ernst Haeckel as dangerous propaganda, Virchow—for all his drive to classify and categorise—went against popular contemporary thinking by declaring race to be a social construct and thus denying anyone their designs of primacy through a large-scale study of ethnic communities across Europe and beyond.

synchronoptica

one year ago: Wattstax (with synchronoptica), assorted links to revisit plus the first school strike for the climate

seven years ago: the first FedEx delivery van,  Total Eclipse of the Heart plus grace and favour appointments

eight years ago: an exoplanet in the Goldilocks Zone, Team Refugee to get its own Olympic flag plus trying to sprout Indian Bean Trees

nine years ago: an antique look at four-dimensional space

ten years ago: disruptive natural and unnatural disasters, Netpolitiks plus Gaulish conquests

8x8 (11. 755)

hillbilly eulogy: the producer’s apparent misjudgement in adapting JD Vance’s memoir—and suggestion that Ron Howard might be playing the long-game to torpedo the MAGA ticket’s chances of ever returning to power—via Miss Cellania  

feint and parry: Ukrainian incursions into Russian territory catches Moscow off guard  

rarissima: bibliolyte, a destroyer of books, and other bookish terms  

veepstakes: the question of casting the nominees on the upcoming season of Saturday Night Live—see previously  

grit and glitter: new Museum of London logo of a pooing pigeon is dividing opinions—via Strange Company—see previously  

schrimp jesus: the origins and drivers (including Meta’s own incentives) of Facebook AI slop—see previously   

human shields: Israeli air strike on Gaza school sheltering the displaced leaves almost one hundred dead—the IDF claiming the building was being used by Hamas agents 

tim walz will teach you how to parallel park: the VP pick’s Midwestern dad energy plus the not so Midwestern origins of ope

13x13 (11. 744)

hot clipmalabor summer: a Scots language translation of the latest trend 

the pudding: AI makes a data-driven visual story—via Kottke  

désolé! taking a mental health year: American vs European out-of-office auto-replies  

the paris games: a look back at the other times the French capital hosted the Olympics—via Nag on the Lake

faustian bargain: Russian “Tiergarten Killer” released as part of prisoner-swap 

the lord house: a tour of a home designed by architecture Richard Neutra—see previously 

take me to the water: James Baldwin and the roots of the Palestinian-African American solidarity movement 

hop, skip and a jump: e-bikes for one’s legs  

dressage: Snoop Dogg as head Olympic cheerleader 

securing the peace: US mobilising to shore up defences in Middle East 

minoritarian rule: US in democracy self-destruct mode  

yay newfriend: a linguistic look at the new AI pendant companion 

emdunks: the internet’s infatuation with the Second- and possibly future First-Gentleman

amusing ourselves to death (11. 699)

Using the 1985 bestseller by educator Neil Postman, which draws on the dichotomy of the dystopian futures envisioned by George Orwell in 1984 and Aldous Huxley in Brave New World with the public stripped of rights by totalitarian governments in the narrative of the former and people voluntarily self-medicating and foregoing their liberties in an induced and voluntary state of blissful ignorance in the

latter, Boing Boing contributor Mark Frauenfelder presents an analysis of this dilution, delusion of news, culture and politics repackaged as commodities in our present forms of media, our soma. Presentation and format—“the medium is the metaphor,” see also—makes everything entertainment and a passive and non-critical one at that, written at a time when another celebrity held the office of US president, impressed on the general psyche not in words but in glancing television images and photo opportunities and carefully staged soundbites. Frauenfelder’s excerpts, like the below citation are addressing the fragmentation-effect of network news but accord perfectly with social media as well, TikTok substituted here:

“Now … this” is commonly used on radio and television newscasts to indicate that what one has just heard or seen has no relevance to what one is about to hear or see, or possibly to anything one is ever likely to hear or see. The phrase is a means of acknowledging the fact that the world as mapped by the speeded-up electronic media has no order or meaning and is not to be taken seriously. There is no murder so brutal, no earthquake so devastating, no political blunder so costly—for that matter, no ball score so tantalising or weather report so threatening—that it cannot be erased from our minds by a newscaster saying, “Now … this.” The newscaster means that you have thought long enough on the previous matter (approximately forty-five seconds), that you must not be morbidly preoccupied with it (let us say, for ninety seconds), and that you must now give your attention to another fragment of news or a commercial.

Much more at the links above.

patience worth (11. 646)

Via Weird Universe, first contacted on this day in 1913 after reluctantly taking up the Ouija board at the insistence of her neighbours, we learn of the correspondence with the above departed soul who lived from the mid- to late-seventeenth century in Dorsetshire (migrating to colonial America only to be killed by Native Americans) and thoroughly ordinary and unambitious (her biography giving those traits special emphasis) Pearl Lenore Curran of Missouri, whose channeling and mediumship eventually produced for this amanuensis several novels and much prose and poetry that was published and well-received. Dictation at first came slowly through the planchette one letter at a time but eventually Worth furnished whole paragraphs telekinetically. There were of course skeptics and accused Curran of the authorship but the phenomena coincided with the infatuation with spiritualism on both sides of the Atlantic.

synchronoptica

one year ago: new London Underground safety posters (with synchronoptica) plus a disappearance in Vatican City

six years ago: Cantril’s Ladder, money-laundering plus Seth Godin’s blog

seven years ago: surveying Mars, lèse-majesté, more on soundscaping, the Deseret syllabary plus Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? (1966)

eight years ago: the importance of numeracy plus transposed pottery

nine years ago: Arab scholarship links the Ancient and Modern, the right of panorama plus digital displays

space crone (11. 641)

Via tmn, we are directed to an attempt to better understand the pioneering science-fiction author Ursula K Le Guin (†, previously)—and more generally all writers through their routines, chapbooks and other faded ephemera—and chancing upon her digital demesne in her websites, one curated by her estate and the other archive-only, as reflection of an author’s public-facing persona, from a time when websites took effort and imagination and no standard templates were available or enforced and provides insights how people want to be remembered extra-cannon. More from Dirt contributor Meghna Rao at the link above.

synchronoptica

one year ago: compilation albums (with synchronoptica), more marketing tie-ins for 2001 plus academic SEO

five years ago: the Munker-White optical illusion

six years ago: the Coconut Song, the EU enacts Article 13, electronic assistants for hotel rooms, the US withdraws from the UN Human Rights Council, Canada legalises recreational marijuana use, unique churches in southern India plus reflections on World Refugee Day

seven years ago: assorted links worth revisiting plus the unwritten rules of the English language

eight years ago: sense of direction and handedness plus conserving the historic record in the digital age

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

9x9 (11. 598)

on covfefe day no less: a meme roundup on Trump’s felony conviction  

canine rainbow: dogs’ visual spectrum and how they see perceive the world 

love exposure: the acclaimed, sprawling 2008 comedy-drama by Sion Sono  

the scary ham: proper late rites for an aged cut of pork

leftovers: five thin volumes on post-apocalypse Briton

nondescript fern: researchers find the largest genome (fifty times the genetic material of humans) in a small plant on an Australian island  

why be dragons: the origins of the universal mythological creatures  

evening standard: venerable London newspaper to suspend daily publication after almost two hundred years—see previously  

today is my birthday, please like me: a Twitter feed of some the revolting, disturbing but morbidly compelling AI-generated slop inundating Facebook—via Web Curios

synchronoptica

one year ago: Crazy Frog (2005) plus Adobe’s Generative Fill

two years ago: Scotch whisky (1495) plus the Stresa Convention on Cheeses (1951)

three years ago: your daily demon: Eligos, The Ship of Fools (1497), more on monopolies and monopsonies plus a Simon and Garfunkel classic

four years ago: seasonal dormancy, more King Ubu, St Rónán plus elections matter

five years ago: re-creating TV living rooms with IKEA furnishings,  Japan’s first folklore museum, the Lennon-Ono Honeymoon Suite plus a robot job interviewer

deutschland und die deutschen (11. 591)

Delivered in the US Library of Congress on this day in 1945, the lecture by Thomas Mann (auf englisch, appointed a docent of the institution) came a few weeks after the capitulation of the Nazis and in the milieu of the end of World War II in the European Theatre and assayed the German character of inwardness (Innerlichkeit), previously revealed by the Reformation and Romanticism, as a way to understand the complicity of the population in National Socialism. Setting out on this daring and too-soon undertaking, Mann aimed to address the “German problem” and try to unriddle the the vice and virtue of the nation, “which has undeniably given the world so much beauty and greatness and has repeatedly become a burden to it in such a disastrous ways,” portraying the German psyche as a Faustian bargain through figures as Goethe, Bismarck, Luther and Riemenscheider. Concluding with the formula that the victory of cosmopolitanism over tribalism would be the saving grace that the world in general needs. While criticised for over-simplification, universalising and self-promotion, quoting from his own works as something quintessentially German, it was the timing and the those very abbreviations that invited confession and reflection.

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

a compilation of reliable recipes with a casual culinary chat (11. 576)

Originally self-published in 1931 as means of coping with the loss of her husband, the jacket design which captured the popular poster, cut-out style of the day was created by the author’s daughter Marion Rombauer Becker, who helped write subsequent editions. The Art Deco cover features Martha of Bethany, the patron saint of Home Economics, vanquishing the dragon of domestic drudgery—according to the Golden Legend, the Tarasque, a fearsome chimera that tormented the people of Gaul, that Martha tamed with her faith, though once obedient and docile was unfortunately beset by angry villagers with rocks and spears until it died. Rombauer Becker was the director of the Art Department of a school in Ohio and the typeface is inspired by a Cassandre specimen of the contemporaneous excess of the decorative font Bifur. In print continuously since with over twenty-million copies sold, it is considered the quintessential American cookbook, its popularity sustained by Julia Child, and is a snowclone for many topical overviews.