radishes or lettis tow bunches a peny

Inspired by gentle author’s own piece on the cries and criers of London, Spitalfields Life hosts an article from one of the trustees of the city’s Garden Society focusing on itinerant florists and green-grocers. It’s really fascinating what sort of detail about trade and the economy that one can glean from a few sparse particulars that one took a moment to notice and document (the pictured from the scrapbook of Samuel Pepys), especially how the nature of empire and imports redefine luxury goods—bringing them from expensive, exclusive shops to street markets.

6x6

snow globes: a new holiday tradition to us—sending Street View Christmas cards

ammartaggio: a for the nonce Italian Word of the Day in tribute to the InSight touchdown

appellation d’origine contrôlée: a detail world atlas to explore gustatory landscapes in detail—via Pasa Bon!

condominium: a library straddling the US-Canadian border has become a venue for emotional family reunions for those (we all are) affected by the Trump administration’s immigration policies—via Super Punch 

orden mexicana del águila azteca: the Mexican government presents Trump’s son-in-law with its highest honour reserved for foreign dignitaries

jantar mantar: an incredible eighteenth century Indian astronomical observatory whose architecture previsions Brutalism 

vanilla, strawberry, knickerbocker glory

Via the always excellent Everlasting Blört, we are introduced to the musical stylings of the band Fujiya & Miyagi, hailing from Brighton-by-the-Sea.
Perhaps not news to anyone else—especially the audience of the Great British Bake-Off—but a knickerbocker glory is a superlative name for a particularly fancy kind of ice cream parfait with alternating strata of ingredients (cream, fruit, jellies) popularised in England in the 1930s—though possibly owing its inspiration to Manhattan soda-jerks after a float they concocted, Knickerbocker being the moniker given to the descendants of Dutch settlers of Old New York as New Amsterdam.

crop-rotation

A Minsk-based agri-business start-up called OneSoil, we learn via Big Think, has fused satellite telemetry and artificial intelligence to create rather beautiful land-use visualisations (covering North America and Europe with plans for expansion) and deliver efficient and “precision farming.”
It’s really telling of the dreadful excellence of humans to contemplate how we’ve transformed the planet through landscaping and how big our collective footprints are, but hopefully data can impart a sense of responsibility and stewardship as well as tool for mitigating the effects that a warmer, wetter Earth means for ecosystems and our food supply. There’s also a feature that treats visitors to a randomised gallery of particularly striking fields—and though maybe not the most beautiful composition, we appreciated studying the overview of pastures and croplands near by broken up by forested areas.

8x8

queen bee: a review of the 1955 Joan Crawford film that informed Mommie Dearest  

solar sail: speculation that the mysterious interstellar interloper Oumuamua (previously) might be a remnant of an alien propulsion system

oobi land: “I contain a message to another human being. Please further my journey an inch, a foot or a mile.”

envir-o-can: a beer can touted as more ecologically-friendly due to the absence of a pull-tab

ad astra: an ode to the immeasurably expanding achievements of the nine-year Kepler mission that discovered over twenty-five hundred exoplanets

development hell: former cast and crew reflect on earlier attempts to make The Other Side of the Wind

ask the past: how to eat a pumpkin, 1597

innuendo: Queen’s lesser-known, soulful operatic anthem

the yellow emperor’s inner canon

I first heard about this provocative project a week ago or so when the individual behind it Kuang-yi Ku got an honourable mention at Dutch Design Week for his thought-experiment but thought the gross-out factor was a bit too high—and while the images are still disturbing, Project Tiger Penis, drawing on emerging advances in the biomedical sciences and the ability to grow, print meat in the laboratory to produce authentic substitutes for articles of Traditional Chinese Medicine (Zhōngyī, 中医) did seem to resonate as a way of protecting endangered fauna and flora that are often tortured or poached for their ingredients, whose pharmacological merits are sometimes a matter of dispute.
It becomes even more relatable, I think, given the context that some religious figures have expressed a willingness to deem artificial meats in general and lab-sourced pork specifically as kosher or halal. What do you think? While reserving qualms for putting energy and efforts into making exotic potions might seem reasonable to non-practitioners at first blush (especially when examining it in isolation and outside of the customs that inform it), it behoves us to reason out that it’s presently highly questionable what good we derive from eating animals to begin with, while so many of us do as a matter of upbringing.  Without considering the impact and consequence of appetites for a moment, taste and choice are different than what can be subjected to science but one approach and way of thinking ought not to be privileged above the other because neither has found the panacea or cure for ageing. 

scullery

A ride-hailing service that’s disrupted the business of food delivery and ordering-in—once nearly exclusively the domain of pizza, we learn via Duck Soup, is creating an empire of virtual franchises that only exist as menu-options when ordering from the service.
Of course it’s nothing new or novel to set up a booth or a concession within a larger venue, but it is strange to think of a branded concept “restaurant” existing only in the corner (without seats or a storefront) of a host kitchen of a larger food preparation operation, as hundreds of affiliates are revealed to be. What do you think? It’s an interesting way to pool resources and reputation but there’s also an inscrutable and alienated quality to it, like a letterbox business that’s not open to public inspection—sort of like the couriers themselves.

7x7

dance dance revolution: Waxy reminds us of the classic Gif Dance Party and directs us to an updated 3D version

colloquium: trippy 1974 poster from UC Berkley announcing a special lecture on artificial intelligence

redundancies: a hauntingly deserted fully automated warehouse operation in Japan

gustatory perception: a museum in Malmo showcasing the world’s most reviled food items invites a conversation on the nature of revulsion and taste (relatedly)

seven square miles: a bird’s eye view of various vistas around the world from the Atlantic’s Alan Taylor

event horizon: a good primer on the project to use the Earth as a giant telescope to image the super-massive black hole in the centre of the Milky Way

uptown spot: a twerking Boston Dynamics’ robot dog challenges us to a dance-off 

dilute to taste

Via the always captivating Present /&/ Correct, we are thoroughly enjoying browsing this expansive vintage archive of food packaging from British grocer Sainsbury’s.  Perhaps especially cringe-worthy now and fitting with this tall drink of orange but in efforts to recover from a long, marked decline after the departure of long-time CEO Baron Sainsbury in 1992 and increased competition, the company launched a recovery plan in 2004 touted as “Making Sainsbury’s Great Again.” While the restructuring was in the beginning viewed favourably by industry partners, moves taken eventually led to the end of independence for the brand with it being acquired by Walmart and subsequently merged with the Asda chain.

hanchō-hōchō.

Last week after decades of operation, the largest fish and seafood exchange in the world, the historic Tsukiji Market (築地市場) of Tokyo held its final tuna auctions but there was little time for nostalgia for the workers of the market with the whole mammoth administration and daily inventory displaced and set up in Toyosu, a subdivision created out of reclaimed land on the waterfront of Kōtō and freeing up the valuable mid-town real estate that the sprawling marketplace and underlying infrastructure occupied.
The great migration, quite the undertaking, was documented by photographer Mizuho Miyazaki, as featured on Spoon & Tamago at the link up top. The title refers to the giant knives skilfully wielded by merchants, fish-mongers to cut and prepare flanks of fish for sale and distribution that captures the eye and admiration of buyers and tourists, but we were happy to see an appreciation of forklift drivers whose unglamorous jobs are too often overlooked but who really run the pre-dawn logistics that makes the whole enterprise possible

7x7

table scraps: Dutch designer upcycles food waste as a printable, universal paste

the traveling wilburys: on tour with the hologram of Roy Orbison

going, going, gone: a record-fetching Banksy piece of art (previously) self-destructs after the auction, via Nag on the Lake

that’s my name, don’t wear it out: a tribe of unfortunately named gentlemen

on the docket: the US supreme court’s first order of business is to re-examine Gamble vs America, an exception to the Double Jeopardy clause that could allow Trump to extend his pardon-powers in state jurisdiction

albergo diffuso: a unique but nearly depopulated Swiss village is transforming some of the remaining cottages to a “scattered hotel” model to save the entire settlement

impossi-bagel: our palates and our texts deserve better than the refined, blandness behind the new class of emojis 

pykrete

Channeling the inventive spirit of World War II English mad scientist Geoffrey Pyke (previously) who among other suggestions to the Admiralty, recommended that bombing runs be staged from aircraft carriers with runways made of ice, reinforced with a mixture of sawdust and wood pulp called Pykrete, a London-based food studio has developed an assortment of frozen treats able to resist melting in 24°C heat for one hour, substituting fruit fibre for sawdust.
It might at first glance seem a frivolous thing to worry about but this second look at a composite material that was abandoned during the war due to other priorities and pressures could indeed translate to other applications from ways to keep foods and medications cooler for longer in places without reliable refrigeration or even something more ambitious that what Pyke envisioned himself as girders and frames to help stabilise and hold together ice sheets and icebergs until they can heal themselves. Pyke’s cousin, incidentally, Magnus was a radio and television presenter and celebrity, hosting many programmes on the topic of nutrition and food science and was the Home Doctor for Thomas Dolby’s 1982 song, She Blinded Me with Science—the one who interjects, “Science!” Maybe science and innovation can indeed save us yet.

out to pasture

Via Kottke, we’re directed toward a rather powerful and immediate way to visualise land-use in the United States of America by projecting percentages on to a map of the contiguous states. Each pixel represents one million acres (about four hundred thousand hectares) and an enormous amount is allotted to ranches, ranges and pasturelands for livestock and for raising feed for the animals with crops for human consumption dwarfed in comparison. One would think that in this day and age, one could find a better use for more than a third of one’s territory than the upkeep of cattle and wonder how other countries and regions rank.

fishmonger

Diverted by our familiars at Strange Company, we thoroughly enjoyed sharing the discovery of an 1803 chapbook found at the Bishopsgate Library with illustrations of the cries and criers of London.
The pictured Hot Cross Buns! was our favourite but there were many more choice one to be found at the link above with dozens of other collections to peruse, specific to certain streets, markets and characters plus the opportunity to own a handsome volume that collects much of this ephemera to relate an ethnography seldom told and definitely worth a look around besides.

rumour has it

Notwithstanding conspiratorial thinking and demagoguery has all but replaced ideology in political discourse and repairing to such impulses is very dangerous for society, what conspiracy theories—aside from the Mormon account for periodic encounters with sasquatch being just sightings of Cain doomed to wander the Earth as an outcast for eternity—strike you as nearly plausible?
My favourite, the above excluded naturally, is that New Coke was not a marketing blunder but rather cover for a two-pronged conversion to its original family of products: one, the original formula switched from using cane sugar as a sweetener to cheap and abundant high fructose corn syrup; two, in order to placate those on the front lines of the US war on drugs, the new recipe dispensed with all coca-based derivatives, seeing its supplies in Colombia under threat. There’s apparently some credence to the latter while the timing is off by a few years on the former, the message is don’t drink sodas. If there ever was any merit or tonic to it, that’s long gone by now.  The above rumour is at best an instructive folktale or at worst, an affront against cryptozoologists.

legal-ade

Though we’re usually wary about posting such things as it’s just amplifying a company’s marketing gimmick, I do feel the sentiment in which it was presented on Kottke is a good one, bearing repeating.

Commenting on how a soft-drink manufacturer will pay the fines of young scoff-laws for operating lemonade stands over the summer without a permit (which—not to be a total kill-joy—are also required for reasons of health and safety) and relatedly how a pizzeria franchise (previously) has pledged to donate some of its proceeds to repairing potholes, the blogger lamented how corporations—which go to extremes to be stateless and unbeholden to any taxation that might help modernise legal frameworks and improve crumbling infrastructure—are now portraying themselves as heroes for offering a showy solution for a host of problems that they’ve helped to create in the first place.

6x6

empanelment: ten anti-Trump cartoons that the Pittsburgh Post Gazette refuses to publish

won’t you be my neighbour: Anthony Bourdain was like Mister Rogers (previously) for adults, plus the article that launched his career, via Coudal Partners

binney & smith: Crayola launches a cosmetic line based on its crayons

race to the bottom: a business-model based on the destruction of the resources it relies on is strikingly uneconomic

here we come on the run with a burger in a bun: dinosaur taco-butlers

bodyguard: a profile of the elite Nepalese Gurkha contingent protecting the Kim-Trump summit in Singapore

7x7

cnidaria: a fascinating look at the cultivation and care of coral

and someone left the cake out in the rain: interpreting the significance of that narrow, non-precedential US Supreme Court ruling

fleet-a-pita: US Environmental Protection Agency chief tried to secure a for his wife a faith-based chicken fast-food franchise through his position

dietetic: an interesting survey of vintage diabetic soft drinks

desertum africanum: a Roman coast highway that stretches from the Nile to the Atlantic

balopticon: the racy, kitschy illustrations (1940s and 1950s vintage but NSFW) of Norman Rockwell protégé George Quaintance

on this day: the monarchs of Spain and Portugal reached concord with the Treaty of Tordesillas (previously) that partitioned the world between the two in 1494

sock caramel

Super Punch redirects our attention to our old companion and ongoing experiment (previously here and there and everywhere) in neural network learning with the challenge this time to name flavours of ice cream. While the host’s training yielded rather dark and dubious results to include:

Strawberry Cream Disease
Sock Caramel
Chocolate Raven
Colon Bane

Some inspired middle school pupils learning coding were able to far exceed their programming with:

Cherry Poet
Bubble Bun
Vanilla Nettle

The latter selection seemed more like a treat though Toffee Frog and Funge Ecide also came up in the students’ algorithms.

6x6

the fable of the dragon-tyrant: a parable from philosopher Nick Bostrom—humans have many perched on the mountaintops

as was the fashion at the time: à la mode is one of the last remnants on American menus of a once rich Francophone culinary code, via Nag on the Lake

we are the laughing morticians of the present: Dangerous Minds takes a look at the short-lived satirical magazine Americana that lampooned geopolitics of the early 1930s

great glavin in a glass: Simpsons’ meme generator, the Frinkiac (previously), has a random-feature

patriotism is the last refuge of a scoundrel: Trump regime challenges dissenters to love their country more than they hate the leadership

stellar cartography: the European Space Agency’s on-going Gaia project updates its map of the Cosmos