This is a really premium idea—via ibฤซdem—we have this highly granular mapping application of over a million podcast episodes from a host of contributors that allows one to listen-by-location and discover more about site-specific history, community news, tourism, foodways and local culture. Of course concentration and coverage is uneven and there are plenty of neglected corners of the world (perhaps you can fill in the gaps and perhaps find your podcasting niche), but given the general problem with the uptake and discoverability for the medium (as obscure and middle-of-nowhere on the dial as some of the places visited), this a perfect tool for taking a deep-dive in some local colour.
Friday 27 October 2023
Monday 9 October 2023
7x7 (11. 047)
haus zum walfisch: explore horror film shooting locations of 1970s and 1980s classics, including Suspiria filmed in a townhouse in Freiburg im Breisgau
concrete feats: a tour of Italy’s Brutalist architecture
rapid electric vehicle retrofits: an Australian student wins James Dyson Award for an inexpensive conversion kit to make gas-powered vehicles hybridearthshapes: fantastic geography from pilot Joseph N Portney
larva convivialis: the miniature dancing skeletons of Roman banquets—via Strange Company
jungian individuation: the Swiss psychoanalyst on the predictive power of Tarot cards
tune-on: veteran television producer and director on the revival of his Laugh-In spin-off five decades afterwards
31 days: a month long celebration of the Spooky Season from Laura E Hall—via Waxy
synchronoptica
one year ago: assorted links to revisit, World Postal Day plus to slander one’s good reputation
two years ago: more links to enjoy, happy birthday John Lennon, Karl-Marx-Stadt, drag queen tarot plus a visit to the Osterburg
three years ago: The Watcher in the Woods, more Phantom plus more links worth revisiting
four years ago: major military exercise in Germany planned by US forces plus other European trade colonies in China
five years ago: Trump’s legacy of failed businesses, more on the fight to save an ancient woodland plus moving Tokyo’s historic fish market
Monday 7 August 2023
walled garden (10. 930)
JWZ turns our attention to the tectonic landscape of the internet with a pair of excellent geo-political maps from Randall Munroe of xkcd (click through to embiggen here and here) which are incredibly only three years apart—with the latter being already over a dozen years old. Not sure whether it would be exactly a “fun” exercise to make a contemporary version in a unipolar world of nonoverlapping magisteria that doesn’t respect sovereignty and stokes civil war and internecine fighting but it does show that the downfall and demise of platforms is nothing new.
synchronoptica
one year ago: Come on Eileen
two years ago: St Donatus, letters postmarked from the Moon, more dazzle camo, an unpopular emoji plus “Marriage Trees”
three years ago: more on the end of a naval tradition plus wine windows are making a comeback
four years ago: flying through the Arc d’Triomphe (1919), the Fevres Ranger plus a privately-funded Moon Shot
five years ago: everything apps, a climate tipping-point, Zsa Zsa Gabor’s FBI files plus the US blocks trade with Iran
Saturday 5 August 2023
akte x (10. 926)
Our gratitude to the always interesting Maps Mania for referring us to the Anomaly Observatory has been documenting paranormal activity focused mainly on Berlin and environs since 2008 but monitoring the unexplained—from the mundane to the phenomenal—which deviates dangerously from the norm. Like with this instance with the map centred on this location on the Museuminsel recounting how one night last December a torrent of water washing away hundreds of exotic fish causing huge and disruptive flood appeared, nearly eliding over the fact that the source was the sudden and catastrophic explosion of a hotel aquarium, it is difficult to tell if it’s an earnest investigation or a facetious commentary on such endeavours but regardless wonderful weird and dedicated to urban mythos. More to explore at the links above.
synchronopitica
one year ago: Que Sera, Sera, The Piper at the Gates of Dawn (1967), assembling the globe by various demographic factors plus more city map generators
two years ago: assorted links to revisit, identifying the location of a sketch by Leonardo plus a Beatles single with an equally good b-side (1966)
three years ago: America tries to ban TikTok, the invention of telegraphy was first dismissed as a gimmick, more links to enjoy, an alternate ending to The Giving Tree plus the Portsmouth Sinfonia
four years ago: air traffic controls in the US strike (1981), the craze of purikura plus a look at the hodiernal verb tense
five years ago: a preview of Star Trek: Picard, a planned remake of 9-to-5 plus more links worth revisiting
Thursday 27 July 2023
fiรจvre jรฉrusalemienne (10. 910)
Partnering with Big Think, Atlas Obscura invites us on a tour world cities with their own signature psychological disorders. Beginning with the more familiar Stockholm Syndrome—astonishingly with the namesakes of London and Lima also falling into the hostage category—most others, like the Jerusalem Syndrome and Paris Syndrome fall into less dicey albeit overwhelming and traumatic bracket of tourists’ built-up expectations and attendant maladies under the general term Stendhal syndrome and named for the author’s account of psychosomatic reactions during a 1817 visit to Florence, the former sometimes manifesting in delusions that the travel is a character from the Holy Books so as not to fall short of expectations and preserve one’s anticipation when reality fails to deliver.
Saturday 8 July 2023
๐ (10. 865)
Owing to the population distribution of the Earth (fewer people live at the North Pole so after the June solstice once the Sun has slipped a bit further south toward the more populous equator), the different definitions of sunrise, sunset and twilight—civilian, nautical and astronomical and the underestimated size (half the globe) of the Pacific Ocean, on 8 July annually about ninety-nine percent of the people of Earth will be under the sun, experiencing daylight after a fashion at the same time. Despite the two hemisphere and the progression of the seasons, during the northern summer, this sunny side phenomenon can occur for a couple of minutes each day from mid-May through mid-July—charted out after some fact-checking on what seemed like an outrageous but somewhat true internet claim, and while it might be a bit more intriguing to have found it a singular instance on the calendar when only one percent of the world’s population was (temporary—Oceana and Baja California still get their daylight hours, just after the rest of the world’s dusk and dawn), it’s even more remarkable that it happens over a span of sixty days.
synchronoptica
one year ago: the Roswell Incident (1947), more on the Trolley Problem plus the animations of Sam Lyon
two years ago: your daily demon: Ipos, a hierarchy of merfolk, uncombable hair syndrome, top-selling albums (1958) plus the death of Percy Bysshe Shelley (1822)
three years ago: St Kilian and companions, more adventures in Moselle wine country plus the fortifications of the upper Moselle valley
five years ago: a treasury of southwest Native American folktales, the colossal art of Thrashbird plus the street photography collection of Barry L Gfeller
six years ago: a trove of historical data uncovered in teletext pages, the Hamburg G20 plus taking action against contrived obsolescence
Tuesday 13 June 2023
a gift to those who contemplate the wonders of cities and the marvels of travelling (10. 804)
Departing his native Tangiers and embarking on a twenty-four year journey that would ultimately take him from Timbuktu to Beijing, exploring Africa and Eurasia, on this day in 1325 (725 Anno Hegira), scholar and adventurer Ibn Battลซta, a Berber from the Maghreb whose travels far surpassed those more famous members of his pre-modern cadre of explorers like Marco Polo (twenty-four thousand kilometres) and Zheng He (with about fifty thousand) with a total of one hundred seventeen thousand kilometres travelled over the course of three decades, embarked on an extended hajj to see the Muslim world. Returning home in 1354, the ruler of Morocco to write down his travelogue for posterity, with the short title of the Rihla (ุงูุฑุญูุฉ, The Travels).
catagories: ๐, ๐บ️, Middle Ages, Middle East, ⓦ
Monday 24 April 2023
9x9 (10. 696)
precariat: the antithesis of job security—via Miss Cellania
le jeu de monde: a seventeenth century geography-themed board game
sell ∀ ∃ as ∃ ∀ scam: AI “prompt engineering” distilled—via the new shelton wet/dry
ad infintum: a survey of the websites that ChatGPT and other large language models glean from to appear smartly confident
fox and friends: rightwing ideologue Tucker Carlson abruptly announces he is leaving the network
reductio ad hilterium: fake diaries to go on public display after forty years since their spurious authorship
mister hepster: Cab Calloway’s jazz lexicon
tea and sympathy: the Teasmade museum—via Messy Nessy Chic
permission slip: inside the wave of American legislation looking to overturn laws restricting child labour
Sunday 23 April 2023
8x8 (10. 692)
caspar milquetoast: Public Domain Review presents Shy Guy (1947)—starring Dick York—via Nag on the Lake
wicksy’s cocktails: a selection of non-alcoholic drinks from a 1986 Easter Enders’ cook book
birdsite: the continuing rapid unscheduled disassembly of the platformhere is a map to give you pleasure, a town reduced to your mantel’s measure: poetry on maps—via the Map Room
ganja & hess: an under appreciated vampire film reexamined on its fiftieth anniversary
smigadoon: virtual ghost villages in the clouds that have become the haunts of tourists
rolling through the produce and said, now that’s a better buy: Toni Basil’s “Shopping from A to Z”
schools of the air: a retrospective look at broadcast continuing education—see previously
Saturday 8 April 2023
10x10 (10. 662)
never fearing guns or numbers like a tiger to its meat, the stranger then attacked the pirate fleet: a space-age sea-shanty by Duane Elms of Carmen Miranda’s Ghost, courtesy of Shadow Manor
sorcerer’s apprentice: angry to have been out-manoeuvred by Disney’s lawyers, Florida governor declares all-out war against the theme park
sea life: a 1923 chessboard designed by Max Esser for Meiรen—via ibฤซdemshelling out: a gallery of vintage Easter confections family album: being first on the scene to document shipwrecks is a generational business
the tiffany network: an all-star roll for the 1978 fiftieth anniversary of the Columbia Broadcasting System
blogoversary: a belated congratulations to Map Room as it reaches the milestone of twenty years of blogging
late-stage sea-monkeys: targeted ads are generally promoting the worst possible version of a product
bohemian grove: the secretive club back in the headlines after revelations of US Supreme Court Justice Thomas’ gifts included a trip to the exclusive retreat
falmouth: the annual, international festival of maritime music returns in June
Wednesday 29 March 2023
true south (10. 643)
Via Miss Cellania, we are treated to vlogger CGP Grey’s enthusiastic primer on the succession of banners bestowed on the world’s largest condominium, the continent of Antarctica, territory of no nation despite competing claims and the presence, albeit it temporary, of research outposts that like to plant their own flags. Designs and proposals flown as at least semi-official ensigns have been around since the 1930s and with a vexillologically complete presentation in 1978 that chose a highly contrasting international, aerospace orange and an 2018 contender by Evan Townsend that seems to have traction with the negative space of a compass arrow pointing to the geographic nadir and invoking bergs and mountains and thelong days and nights of the planet’s extremes.
Wednesday 22 March 2023
8x8 (10. 628)
springfield, usa: a map of places in America with the same names with a locus of which locality most likely meant—via Kottke
koลciรณล: modern and Brutalist churches of Poland
panspermia: researchers studying samples from the Ryugu asteroid find traces of a RNA component, supporting theories that the building blocks of biology were incubated in spacebefore karen, there was nellie oleson: the propagandising of homesteading in Little House on the Prairie
gemรผths- und augen-ergรถtzung: the microscopic illustrations of Martin Frobenius Ledermรผller
reliable sources: Microsoft and Google’s chatbots are using each other as professional references, calling into question the ecosystem of the internet’s information
quo vadis: a monastic brotherhood outside St Stephan’s in Vienna has set up a tattoo parlour—see also
bracket: a more relatable March Madness
Friday 17 March 2023
9x9 (10. 614)
telegeography: the current map of submarine cables connecting the world
blogoversary: a belated birthday greeting to Fancy Notions
rightish: Microsoft touts AI’s factual errors as “usefully wrong”
goldenes buch: German communities’ official, historic guest logs are a chronicle of the times and Zeitzeugnissemedia matters: if journalists cannot call out propaganda—what’s even the the point of coverage—via Kottke
gวutรณu mฤo nรญng—literally dog’s head, cat’s meow: cute Chinese animal transcriptions for English salutations
seoul ring: the world’s largest spokeless ferris wheel being built in South Korea
linkrot: more thoughts on three broken links and internet conservation
mappa mundi: the thirteenth century chart of the mundane and exalted—see previously
Monday 6 March 2023
9x9 (10. 596)
destination berlin: a Royal Military Police guide to the divided city from 1988—see also
geodomesticeerde: one Dutch rancher spearheading the protest against livestock reductions
gado gado: the Indonesia version of the cult Cobb salad that may be the best in the world—via Digg
fret and fingerbรธard: a guitar nearly exclusively sourced from IKEA furnishing elements—via Clive Thompson’s Linkfest paratethys sea: the ancient lake that stretched from the Alps to the Arals was the world’s largest lakeflorilegium: botanical collages by an eighteenth-century septuagenarian—via Kottke
mar yousef’s: the “pizza church” of Jordan imparting Iraqi Christian refugees with marketable skills—via Miss Cellania
heritage graziers: regenerative agriculture, no farmstead required
orange alternative: how a diminutive graffito helped bring down the Soviet Union
Thursday 23 February 2023
8x8 (10. 566)
scoby: manufacturing electronics out of a kombucha culture
ngc 1433: more incredible infrared imaging of neighbouring galaxies from JWST
meanwhile back at the manse: documenting changing American architectural aesthetics in Barbie’s Dream Homerecalculating: Karen Jacobsen—the original GPS voice multi-modal: code-switching in texting in Hong Kong
kbbl: music streaming service is offering AI hosts with generative chatter—via Super Punch
55 cancri ๐ฟ: a collection of the most bizarre exoplanets discovered so far
fomes formentarius: introducing the fungus that has the potential to replace plastics
Wednesday 22 February 2023
tratado de adams-onรญs (10. 565)
Also known as the Florida Purchase, the agreement that ceded the peninsular territory to the United States and defined the border between the USA and New Spain, a continual point of contention, was signed on this day in 1819 and going into effect two years later, it came at a time when Florida was becoming a liability and indefensible for the colonial power (see also) and amidst of wars of independence in Latin America. Negotiated by John Quincy Adams, then Secretary of State under President James Monroe and the diplomatic envoy of King Ferdinand VII, Luis de Onรญs y Gonzรกlez-Vara, it was considered a decisive if not exploitative victory for the US, having already annexed the western part of the territory and the counter-intuitive support for the break-away province of the State of Muskogee, briefly tolerated as a refuge for escaped enslaved people, Native American organisers and outlaws massing in Spanish Florida as a destabilising factor until their purpose was served.
Sunday 19 February 2023
7x7 (10. 559)
wolf-whistle: the lexical corpus of canines and US supreme court justices
deportment: how to act around books
meres, lochs and llyns: regional variations in names for alleys and narrow walkways in the UK
linkboy: living in a Dark Sky area, we enjoyed reading about the first town’s to be certified embracing that honour—via Nag on the Lake’s Sunday Links—which is also the source of the expression ‘cannot hold a candle to’official state crap: legislature of New Mexico introduces a bill to create a state aroma, the first of its kind
cher and charo: a duet of “America” from West Side Story—see previously
nachtrรคglichkeit: Jude Stewart on sticking with German and the pursuit on bilingualism
Wednesday 1 February 2023
9x9 (10. 515)
wickies: Fisheries and Oceans Canada is hiring assistant lighthouse keepers
the montessori method: a look at the world’s most influential school system
little moving splat: Ze Frank (previously) covers the strange and wonderfully intelligent behaviour of plasmodial slime moulds
unitar: a selection of one-string music—via Pasa Bon!blue harvest: a history of the spoiler alert—see also
what is a map: an awful educational short from 1949 given the MST3K treatment
dead as a dodo: a de-extinction company gets a one-hundred fifty million dollar investment
the free-market tree: non-felonious children’s literature editions for the state of Florida
coast guard: a collection of lighthouses of North America
Monday 30 January 2023
7x7 (10. 510)
loft apartment: a unique flat inside St Louis’ City Museum up for rent—via Miss Cellania
relaxed minimalism: a happy medium combining clarity and comfort
namensverbreitungskarte: an interactive maps illustrating the distribution of surnames in Germanynocebo: even when the patient is aware of taking an inert pill, a substance designed with no therapeutic value can lessen feelings of guilt and loathing—via the new shelton wet/dry
synodic and sidereal: the question of lunar standard time is a challenge—particularly with multiple missions operating at once—via jwz
kurashi: tidying guru Marie Kondo have accepted messiness after the arrival of her third child
arragon mooar: the purportedly the most complicated home ever built—by inventor John C Taylor—on the market—via Things Magazine
Sunday 15 January 2023
st john’s wood (10. 419)
Once (and yet) regarded as an assault against navigation devices and by turns an assault against proper punctuation and orthography (see also here and here), we appreciated learning about the selective preservation afforded to a number of thoroughfares, parks and venues (with a short biography) of London via our trusted flรขneur. Making note of the non-possessive exceptions that make the rule—as opposed the exclamatory figure of speech used in stagecraft to break off from the audience, “O happy dagger!,” we’re also introduced to a colourful term ‘anorak level tube apostrophe history’ to describe and prescribe the changing style to sibilant endings. Anorak, chiefly a Britishism, incidentally refers to an enthusiast dedicated to the point of obsession with a very niche subject—first to describe fans of pirate radio who would charter crafts to go out to visit the boats, whom like trainspotters, were often unfashionably but appropriately attired in parkas.