On this day in 1972, American activist and actor Jane Fonda was visiting Hanoi to survey the damage that bombing campaigns were having on civilian infrastructure—specifically the dams used to mitigate flooding by the Red River—and was photographed afterwards seated on a North Vietnamese Army anti-aircraft battery. The pictures were first published by a Polish newspaper before circulating widely and effectively ostracising Fonda from the entertainment industry and whilst pride for speaking out against the war was regretful over the bad optics of a momentary lapse of judgment that was both galvanising for those predisposed to hostility and jingoism and propaganda for the other side.
Friday 15 July 2022
Tuesday 12 July 2022
and her name was veronica
Also known as Berenike (Greek for the Bearer of Victory) the non-canonical saint is feted on this day according to pious traditions. Patroness of launderers and photographers, Veronica (from the Latin and Greek portmanteau of true plus ฮตฮนฮบฯฮฝ, icon—image) was in the crowd witnessing a condemned Jesus bearing his cross to Calvary and moved with sympathy offered her veil for Jesus to wipe his brow. Accepting the small kindness, Jesus returned the piece of fabric which now bore a miraculous image of his face—a story celebrated in the Sixth Station of the Cross and revered as a relic, the Vernicle or Sudarium (Latin for Sweat-Cloth). Following the extra-biblical story, Veronica is said to have gone to Rome afterwards and presented the veil to Emperor Tiberius. Reputed to quench thirst, cure blindness and raise the dead, the image became part and parcel of the Arma Christi (the traditional instruments of the Passion) in the eleventh century, there are four contenders for the Veil, one in Saint Peter’s, one in the Hofburg and two held at separate monasteries in Spain.
catagories: ✝️, ๐ท, ๐งถ, Middle East
Sunday 10 July 2022
8x8
can i pet your dog: a short-lived 1971 talk show, The Pet Set, hosted by Betty White
particle zoo 2.0: revved up Large Hadron Collider discovers three new exotic quark-pairings—via the New Shelton wet/dry
plastic mero: artwork installed on a beach in Funchal crafted on salvaged ocean waste speaks to the plight of the Atlantic goliath grouper and fellow fishonomatopoeia: a collection of nonsense words invented by bird-watchers to convey calls and songs
gol gumbaz: a resplendent seventeenth century mausoleum in Bijapur is called the Taj Mahal of Southern India
denton, denton you’ve got no pretension: a photoessay of the Texas city in the 1970s
gravitational waltz: tracing the orbits of stars near super-massive black hole Sgr A* (previously)
golden girls 3033: BoJack Horseman director Mike Hollingsworth creates an animated pilot using splices of original dialogue
Thursday 7 July 2022
8x8
did someone say beveragino: the rise of the hun culture and naff couture
to california and back again: more on the prolific, pioneering photographer Lora Webb Nichols (previously)—via Messy Nessy Chic
satanic panic: the enigmatic Guidestones monument (previously) in the US state of Georgia was demolished following blast
rats, sinking ship, you know the drill: a tranche of key minister and secretaries leave the Johnson government, demand his resignationฮผฮตฮปฮนฯฮถฮฌฮฝฮฑ: entrepreneurs from the island of Crete produce a promotional video to boost candied eggplant sales
shift happens: modifier keys and more on the history and development of keyboards, via Waxy
baade’s window: a selection of superlative photographs of the Milky Way for the Star Festival
Sunday 3 July 2022
8x8
el vehรญculo compartido: personal aerial shots by photographer Alex Cartagena in pickup truck beds reveal the hidden lives of day labourers off-duty
skate expectations: concrete sculptural parks by Amir Zaki—via Present /&/ Correct
rosรฉwave: a playlist from NPR to invoke relaxed summer afternoon vibes
press key when ready: the 1985 British children’s sci-fi series The Whizz
i am your atypical neighbour: in an exhibit, Her Window, artist Dayu Ouyang broadcasts bold statements from her bedroom’s view
hot slot: the escapingly small feasibility that Jeff Goldblum could have uploaded a computer virus to alien technology and win Independence Day plus other dei ex machinis
friend-shoring: reprioritising globalisation and a metallic NATO to ensure critical rare-earths supply chains are kept viable
a rising tide lifts all boats: laid out in a grid meant to resemble brain coral from above and protected by the sinking atoll, the Maldives is building an ingenious floating city that will rise with the oceans as perhaps a model for other threatened communities
Friday 24 June 2022
daytrip: bacharach am rhein
For a work-outing, we took a cruise on the Rhein from Rรผdesheim to the picturesque village dominated by the twelfth century fortified castle, Burg Stahleck, overlooking the Steeg gorge and Lorelei valley, and once residence to the advocatus (Vogt) of the archbishop of Kรถln but now a youth hostel. We spent the afternoon on the portico taking in the view, having hiked up from the river bank. Along the way we passed not so much as an architectural folly—though it looked the part and the castle itself was destroyed during the Thirty Years War, abandoned and not restored in its present form until 1927 (see also) and pointedly as a retreat for Hitler Youth and re-education centre, in the Gothic ruins of the Wernerkapelle, the unfinished chapel preserved in this state as a reminder of Germany’s and Christianity’s rampant, historical intolerance of other peoples and other faith traditions, the shell of a structure itself originally dedicated to the memory of a youth supposedly murdered by the region’s Jewish residents who were in turn expelled and their property seized—a common ploy and false excuse at time, and put into context with a dedication and prayer from Pope John XXIII, asking for forgiveness and reconciliation. It was a bright and glorious day out of the office by the privilege of the photogenic ought not sanitise the past but rather enhance our understanding of it.
catagories: ๐ฉ๐ช, ✝️, ✡️, ๐ฐ, ๐ท, ๐ข, Middle Ages, Rheinland-Pfalz
Saturday 18 June 2022
proboscis
We weren’t quite sure what attracted this Aglais io—Peacock butterfly a member of the anglewing tribe, see previously here and here, to our windowsill long enough to photograph (click to magnify) but this individual probed around for quite a few moments before flitting away, tolerating our curiosity on the other side of the glass pane. The eyespots are the most obvious defensive mechanisms for passerine predators—also see above—but they also apparently emit a hissing sound that deters hunters.
Friday 17 June 2022
7x7
accepting payment in magic beans: professional scammer who bilked people and companies out of hundreds of thousands by posing as a German heiress turning to NFTs
closed captioned: indexing video subtitles by any phrase of one’s choosing—via Waxy—perfect for creating a supercutgreat choice: award-winning short comedy-horror by Robin Comisar, via Super Punch
the brautigan library: a repository of unwanted, unpublished manuscripts
not reading the room: consumption and consumerism overshadow commemoration
cat righting reflex: รtienne-Jules Marey’s 1894 short is the first motion picture to feature a feline, demonstrating how it lands on its feet—see also
web3 saint laurent: digital cosmetics for one’s avatars and more metaversal makeup from Web Curios
Wednesday 15 June 2022
sallie gardner at a gallop
Using a battery of dozen cameras capturing a single image in rapid succession, shutters activated once an object crossed a trip wire and broke the electromagnet circuit, Eadweard Muybridge (previously) created the first motion picture at the race track of the Palo Alto Stock Farm. The horse belonged to former governor, businessman and philanthropist Leland Stanford and the site of the photo session is now part of the campus of his namesake university who had commissioned Muybridge to document his estate and to prove his theories on equine locomotion—that in fact all four hooves are off the ground at the same time. Projected later with his zoopraxiscope, Muybridge’s technical achievement inspired Thomas Edison to create the kinetoscope, an early type of movie camera.
Monday 6 June 2022
sort sol
Revisiting an arresting and formative moment from his childhood in western coast Denmark, as the Guardian reports, photographer Sรธren Solkรฆr is exhibiting a portfolio of mesmerizing murmurations of starlings on the wing from the Wadden Sea to northern Spain. These flocks of hundreds of thousands of birds can blot out the sun (the dark sun of the title, referring to the accompanying coffee table edition), and it remains a mystery how autonomous individuals achieve this degree of mass-coordination for these majestic manoeuvre.
Thursday 2 June 2022
7x7
phillumeny: venerable Japanese matchbox manufacturer shuttering after almost a century
fpoty: Pink Lady’s finalist gallery of superlative food photographs in its annual competition—via Everlasting Blรถrt
posidonia australis: researchers determine that a giant patch of ribbon weed in Shark Bay Australia a
singular, ancient and expansive plantshadow gradient: expanding hole optical illusion is a touch trypophobic—via Boing Boing
metamorphosis: late fifteenth century ecologist and artist Maria Sibylla Merian who was among the first naturalist to closely observe insects and understand their life cycles
casein chipping: more on cheese heists and ways to stop them
philately: a travelogue of postage stamps of imaginary places—see also
Saturday 21 May 2022
motacillidae
H snapped a very good picture of a avian pal who’s been visiting and running about on the deck lately, Bachstelze or more descriptively a pied wagtail (Motacilla alba—a mistranslation of the Latin term “little-mover” from the medieval notion that cilla meant tail). I had seen these passerine birds on the path that runs by the pond (= Bach) with their distinctive gait, swift but halting after a few paces to bounce their tail feathers, but they hadn’t before ventured to our backdoor—apparently they prefer the bare range of pavement for foraging where it can best see and pursue and the deck met these conditions too. This comical, constant tail wagging is observed in all related species but the behaviour is poorly understood—possibly a tactic to flush out prey or signal vigilance to potential predators.
Tuesday 17 May 2022
metameres
Renowned physicist, engineer and mathematician who could elucidate our understanding of electromagnetic radiation and demonstrated that light, magnetic attraction and electric conduction were manifestations of the same phenomenon, James Clerk Maxwell, also shared an interest with most other fellow scientists at the time in optics and colour theory (see also) and presented on this day in 1861 the first durable colour photograph. Reasoning that as Sir Isaac Newton demonstrated the deconstruction of white light into its constituent parts with a prism, Maxwell proposed that a series of monochromatic images taken through red, green and blue filters and projected on a screen would be perceived by the human eye as a faithful reproduction of the colour of the original object. Despite the lack of pigmentation of any type and only subtle differences preserved as information on the refractive qualities in black-and-white, the crucial and pleasant outcome realized before a lecture before the Royal Institute with a swath of tartan ribbon photographed by Thomas Sutton—inventor of the panoramic and single reflex camera.
catagories: ๐ด๓ ง๓ ข๓ ณ๓ ฃ๓ ด๓ ฟ, ๐ก, ๐ท
Friday 13 May 2022
6x6
sagittarius a*: the Event Horizon Telescope captures images of the Milky Way’s Black Hole—previously
sluggo: “Music from Nancy”—via Waxyclick-wheel: with the announcement that the last iteration of the iPod is being discontinued after two decades (see also), enjoy this first commercial advertisement
anamorphic camouflage illusion: the Phantom Queen optical effect
รผbersetzer: Google Translate adds languages using Zero-Shot Machine Translation, now facilitating communication among one hundred and thirty-three different languages
white dwarf: astronomers witness a nova in real time
Wednesday 4 May 2022
8x8
saved: Diane Keaton’s coffee table book of quirky photography
broadacre city: Frank Lloyd Wright’s experimental community of the future—via Nag on the Lake
23 skidoo: enhanced footage of flappers from 1929
senator palpatine needs to flip just five seats to take back power: a fund-raising solicitation from the galactic majority leader (previously)
spelunking: surveyors discover the largest cave system in North America
they’ve got an awful lot of coffee in brazil: the novelty song as performed by Frank Sinatra
homage to the squares: a rhythmic revisiting of the art of Josef Albers via Pasa Bon!
vacansopapurosophobia: an assortment of very cromulent vocabulary
catagories: ☕️, ๐, ๐ท, architecture, Star Wars
Thursday 28 April 2022
7x7
elizabeth tower: a tour inside of Big Ben—see previously
the nine octave harp of the universe: outside scientist Walter Russell—for whom Nikola Telsa said the world was unprepared
weblog: a nodal map of some of the blogosphere—via Things Magazinequilting bee: everyday signage as fabric mosaics by Jeffrey Sincich
the panic office: fantasy arcade game casings
๐ฃ: a gallery of of beautiful 1920s Japanese postcards
dangerous intersection: decades of traffic collisions and other corner happenings captured by a young photographer (see also)
Tuesday 19 April 2022
kodak moment
Whilst preparing for renovations, the new owners of an ensemble of buildings on the Eastman-Kodak Business Park campus in Rochester, New York have uncovered a brilliant mosaic hidden behind the drywall of a conference room in an R&D building out of sight for decades. Absent any living memory of the installation to consult, architects and employees of the film company are realising that the hand-hewn tile decoration is an homage to photography with references to exposure and developing. The new tenants will showcase this work in their own research hub.
catagories: ๐ท, architecture
Friday 15 April 2022
7x7
who’s in your wallet: personalities and personages on banknotes—via Waxy (who is turning twenty)
simoom: a decade of dust storms
hurrian hymn: paean to Mesopotamian goddess Nikkal is the oldest know surviving work of notated musicfound photos: saved from oblivion and shared—via Things Magazine (plus a lot more to check out)
alphabet truck: the whole ABCs on the backside of lorries captured by Eric Tabuchi—via Pasa Bon!
meme-maker: Dutch national library offers a tool to scour medieval illustrations and marginalia—see also here and here
the colour of money: a survey of banknote hues from the archives
catagories: ๐ช, ๐ถ, ๐ฑ, ๐, ๐ท, libraries and museums, Middle Ages, Middle East, The Simpsons
Tuesday 5 April 2022
bridgehead and bastion
Taking another stroll around the neighborhood during my lunch break (see previously) and with the subterranean pedestrian passage reopened I explored the Reduit—the redoubt that originally hosted the soldiers’ barracks of the fortress of Mainz across the River Rhein—the connected to rest of the Palatinate via a pontoon bridge of ships lashed together at the time of completion in 1834 when the garrison hosted troops of the German Confederation which included forces of Austria and Prussia.
The semi-detached caponier, separated by the inner courtyard, is a defensive feature to extend the protection of the fort’s curtain to outbuildings and beyond—and is derived from the French term caponniรจre for chicken coup.Damaged during World War II and not fully restored, today it is the seat of several local clubs and organisations and an open-air venue. The connecting tunnel is reserved as the Brรผckenkopf Kastel Graffiti Hall of Fame and features more gigantic street art murals.
catagories: ๐ท, architecture, Hessen, Rheinland-Pfalz
Saturday 26 March 2022
7x7
the hay-bailer, that chain-maker: an assortment of highly satisfying precision industrial machines at work
mars & beyond: a 1957 Disney film narrated by Paul Frees about extraterrestrial life
pelagic zone: the highly specialised eyes of the strawberry squid (see previously)
nymphรฉas: often dismissed as victim of his own popularity and over-exposure, Claude Monet’s Water Lilies series was far from a tame variation on a theme but rather a memorial to lives lost in the Great War
aerial photo explorer: historic birds-eye-view images of England—see previously—via Things Magazine
tired vs wired: a Twitter bot that generates aphoristic comparisons between Web 2.0 and the Web 3.0 to come, via Web Curios
vertical parking: towering garages to remedy congestion