peanut gallery

French artists and pro- fessional food photographers Pierre Javelle and Akiko Ida have an exhibit of macroscopic images of tiny people carrying on against landscapes of food, capturing in funny and inspired ways. Colossal features a series of their work, also to be found on their website MINIMIAM, a play on the French word miam, meaning delicious, and in person later next month at the Paris Agricultural Expo. I especially like the golfers putting the sugar binkies that top doughnuts and the cyclists waiting for a brood of chickens to cross their path over a terrain formed from a clutch of eggs, so be sure to check out more at the links and compose your own dioramas.

bucket list

As we go on together to explore some of the world's wonders this year, the brilliant and intrepid explorers at Atlas Obscura present a thoughtful gallery of some of the world's strange and unique places lost to progress in 2013. The tribute includes the Mid-Century Modern marvel of the Pan Am Worldport terminal at JFK Airport in New York, which was sadly razed this past autumn to make way for an airplane parking-lot.  I bet that there were time-travelers present to witness this unfortunate loss.

This list is by no means exhaustive and a lot of architectural and cultural treasures the world-round are endangered or have been already been paved over without wide-spread outcry—like the East Side Gallery remnants of the Berlin Wall, but it is worthy of note that all these particular monuments were located in America or China. Is there something slated for demolition in your community that you believe is worth preserving? What can you do to fight for it?

vapid or cig-a-like

In the European Union, there is a hat-full of regulations regarding the legal status of electronic-cigarettes, regarding sales, taxation, possession and whether such devices and activity is to be classed with restrictions on tobacco-products or bans on smoking. The activity itself has been dubbed by word-smiths in the United States as vaping—from the vaporising chamber that the cig-a-like devices use to heat up a liquid mixture to deliver the nicotine and produce a little puff of odourless smoke for effect.
There is, I understand, a new e-cigarette lounge at Heathrow Airport, and though I have seen such devices for sale in Germany, I have not yet seen them yet being embraced by bars and clubs, which have seen a down-turn in patronage, supposed, over smoking restrictions. What do you think? Vaping surely is it a wholesome or value-added habit but certainly seems better and safer than other natural methods for satisfying a craving, be it physiological or psychological. I wonder if there will be two-tiered culture of addiction in the future, with vapeurs and synthahol-drinkers unable to abide the company of their traditionalist counterparts.

anachronism

Via Boing Boing, a physics professor and a graduate student have embarked to scour the Internet in such of evidence for visits from time-travelers.

They employed parameters that would point to prescience, either direct or indirect that suggest a fore- knowledge, inquiries whose parameters seem to defy causality and too I suppose people claiming to be from the future were investigated. The study found no conclusive evidence, with the admission that this does not prove or disprove anything. Some thinkers postulate that it would be impossible to travel backwards in time to a point before said conveyance, the time-machine, had been invented.  The thesis too has a limited scope, aside from trawling the Internet for clues, in that it only looked for tourists to the past—not individuals native to it and traveling to their future.
I wonder if there might be some similar paradox at work that makes those living in the present somehow blind to things anachronistic—or to view them as a genre, like retro, steam-punk or Gothic, or that time-travelers from the future have returned to the past but to a parallel reality that we cannot experience directly, only as said trends from an alternate dimension.  Widely publicized time-traveler conventions have been held by academic institutions since the 1980s but have apparently failed to attract any genuine venturers. There is also the possibility that stealth and caution have made such journeys impossible to detect—at least through tried means, and maybe time-travelers only need the projects and papers of a professor and his companion like this to tip them off and allow them to cover their tracks.