bunny-rabbit style (13. 505)

Via Kottke, we are directed to a decades long, well maintained passion project that has reliably remained the go-to destination on the internet for educating oneself about shoelacing and knot tying. There’s a wealth of useful and practical advice here with contributions of fans and enthusiasts spanning years. New to us, we happily don’t arrive here too late to find it retired, archived or worse zombified, a fall that befalls many inactive sites that once had a following as a landing page for catch-penny SEO, or even worse succumbed to enshittification by the platforms and infrastructure that undergird such veteran webpages, but there is a tinge of sadness to learning about Ian’s Shoelace Site, a dying breed whose likes are disappearing from the web, resilient to the above symptoms that make the internet brittle and anaemic it’s still susceptible to the sleek plagiarism and repackaging that erodes the quality of the lessons, not only with AI scrapping and TikTok artists reposting content without attribution but also usually get things wrong. I am going to learn some new, satisfying knot techniques and wish I had known years before in protest to the heartbreaking hunger that the web has developed.

synchronoptica

one year ago: assorted links to revisit (with synchronopticæ)

twelve years ago: travels in Liguria 

thirteen years ago: flooding in the Danube 

fourteen years ago: mood rings and classroom metrics plus EU economics rollercoaster

from inca to excel

Via Æon, we quite enjoyed this introduction to the system of knotted fibres called khipu (see also) as an accounting and record-keeping tool of the Wari peoples and spread across the Andean region some fourteen-hundred years ago. Decoded by specially-trained khipukamayuqs, these mobile ledgers were periodically recalled to court authorities to lodge tax-compliance, census numbers, commerce, genealogy and inheritance—and with only a small proportion of museum-holdings deciphered, some holdout the possibility that these data-points were a means to encode the fulness of language.

reeperbahn

We quite enjoyed this peek into the industries of rope-making and yarn-spinning that gave Cable Street of the East End and Whitechapel through the lens of the late eighteenth century company of the Frost Brothers when it was documented in illustrations and photographs in 1905. Like the above-titled way in Hamburg, the area began as a straight grounds where hemp fibres were twisted into ropes for the ships that would anchor on the Thames between London Bridge and the kilns at Limehouse.

the bitter end

The New Bedford Whaling Museum of Bristol County Massachusetts is hosting a special exhibit celebrating the authoritative guide to knots and knot-tying, written and extensively illustrated by native son Clifford Warren Ashley. The sailor and knot-expert proctored with many crews and crafts people (from butchers and bakers to electricians and veteran knitters) to document knotting skills that were often very idiosyncratic and did not exist outside of their trade and are systematically classified—by later scholarship—according to their Ashley numbers along with histories and contributions to general terminology. As opposed to the standing end that is the free part of a cable, the bitter end is in ropeworker’s speech the part of the rigging tied down to the mooring (the bitt) and has taken on a figurative sense as well. Be sure to visit Hyperallergic at the link up top to learn more and perhaps to practise one’s own dexterity.

able i was, ere i saw elbe

Here are a few parting-impression of our little trip to Hanseatic Hamburg, one of three of Germany’s city-states but unique in many ways. Though our exposure was limited to the usual tourist-experience, it struck me as quite livable, more so than other metropolitan areas—though there were distinct signs of gentrification and I had the feeling that denizens were cleft if not to their class but to the demographics of their boroughs, a truth about gentrification that was probably peppered by the voting Sunday and campaigning in the air.
It was also quite striking to me how this city, this inland empire, as close to the Baltic as to the Atlantic, controlling only the narrows of the Elbe for trade, has retained its dominance, even as many other knots only over-land and over-sea routes have faded.
It seems a lot of naturally endowed infrastructure, staging has been forgot, whereas Hamburg remains an attractive force. There are outposts, once regaled in the same way, along the roads that once brought trade between the great cities, usually anchored to the seaways, but have only memories to show for their strategic locations. I am grateful, however, that Hamburg preserved its heritage and has only grown its capacity for import-export, without regard for how the paradigm of trade might have changed.
There’s a genuine character that’s formed and sustained the famous Reeperbahn (named after the street where the rope-weavers lived) and Saint Pauli, despite the tourists but maybe because. Not far afield from its renowned football-pitch lies a brutal-looking WWII era anti-aircraft tower. The finely- tiled old Elbe tunnel is buried deep underneath the river and the narrow lane is open to cars during rush-hour and not just foot traffic.
The bureaucracy has created a unique skyline, as has the corporate headquarters and the prestige-projects, like the newly added Elbe-Philharmonic, that are terriors of the shipping business that remains as big and prominent as ever. With some two-thousand four-hundred bridges, Hamburg has the most crossings of any city on Earth and has more canals than both Amsterdam and Venice combined.  I am not sure if that figures in number or volume, as Venice did seem to be unsurpassed in the quirkiness of its waterways.

The architectural heritage of the city, blocks of warehouses that until recently characterised a free-trade zone, are really transfixing when set against the history and machinery—the cranes and cargo containers, and, as office-space for any business wanting a foothold, still are prized real-estate and without, out-priced, denigrating where one might hang his shingle.  I am really glad that we had the chance to visit and spend a few days discovering, and I am looking forward to going back in warmer weather, even if that means braving the crush of other visitors and not having the place all to our selves.

hitch and bight

Laughing Squid features a splendidly executed teaching diagram of various knots and their application. The infographic, writ large at the link, is from the design studios of Fix and is called Tying the Knot. The expression “hanging on to the bitter end” and derivations like ‘til the bitter end is from rope tying terminology, referring to the working end of the rope, the length being worked and specifically secured to a bitt—the metal block on a pier. The opposite section of rope that’s not the anchor is called the standing end. I got the merit badge, I think, but I am not sure if I am the best visual learner when it comes to this skill and probably would need some hands-on instruction.