worshipful company of fishmongers

Indubitably superior to any cookbook or restaurant guide, the cataloguers at Mental Floss present a superb and saintly calendar of various patrons of food and drink. Though often times the association is lost, it’s really interesting to learn about the better angles of our cuisine and maybe to whom to turn for intercession for both cooking and greater crises.

the phantom toll-booth or intersecting rings

In response to horrible traffic snarls that converged on the town of Swindon between Bristol and Reading, civil engineers installed this intimidating-looking but ingeniously effective array of roundabouts in the early 1970s.

Probably without the aerial view of this anti-clockwise clockwork, called the Magic Roundabout, I’m sure the layout directs drivers quite naturally and would result in no hesitation or panic. It was a challenge for me at first and I’m still content to circle a few extra times until I get my bearings, but I have learned to embrace the Continent’s shared fondness for the traffic circle to regulate cross-roads. I won’t forget, however, our shock and uncertainty upon the first time we came to Ireland together and leaving the airport in a rental car were confronted with a roundabout a few lanes deep. Maybe that first hurdle was intentional to remind visitors of the rules of the road.

zeichenträger

Designed by Gerald Herbert Holtom a few months prior, the first public appearance of the Peace Sign occurred fifty-five years ago today, at a rally against the proliferation of atomic weapons in the UK. The simple sign was quickly adopted as a banner by activist groups around the world. Although some point to much old and mixed origins of the symbol, including signs of Christian persecution and intolerance, anarchy, the Petrine office, and even as a unit badge by a Panzer division during World War II that led the advance into Russia and Hungary—which surely experienced distress to see the sign paraded and celebrated. The artist may or may have not known and been influences by these past associations but the popular legend has it that the Peace Sign is a overlapping of the semaphore signals for N and D—for Nuclear Disarmament. Whatever the true history, the icon is now universally recognised as a sign of outreach, engagement and reconciliation.

numbingness

Tom Stafford, psychological writer for the BBC and expanded gorgeously on his own blog Mindhacks, reflects on the newly named state of mind called Autonomous Sensory Meridian Response (ASMR) which is a sort of euphoria brought about by indulging mundane, boring things registered with a measurable galvanic response. I don’t think this phenomena, not fully limned nor described and entered into the annals of common experience, is merely an expression of the over-stimulation of the internet but perhaps rather identified and shared through it. There are blind-spots, naturally, in any trade but we like to think that psychology has been fairly thorough and that remaining discoveries are either ornamental or intolerably idiosyncratic. What do you think? Synestheia, the melding of perceptions, used to be dismissed as nothing communicable but now if Thursdays have an assigned colour or certain scent, that’s valid though not universal as well. Is it possible for a new sense to arise by motley consensus or is the new confessional attitude contagious?