the uncola

I really enjoyed reading this history of 7Up from Collectors’ Weekly and learning how a succession of marketing campaigns that brilliantly, verging perhaps on plagiarism sometimes, helped the UnCola distinguish itself from the cadre of competing tonics by making the soft drink resonate the movement of the times, echoing Peter Max (especially his playfulness), psychedelia and the Yellow Submarine.
It’s really worth browsing the entire gallery of billboards, posters and merchandise amassed by a few dedicated collectors that helped the beverage survive—including covert and overt references to protests of the Vietnam War and illicit hallucinogens. The only thing missing from the account is the effervescent story behind its original, secret recipe—which contained lithium—and is named in homage to the pep (or rather mood-stabilising effects) that that element with the atomic mass of seven can impart.

glass menagerie or radial symmetry

Hyperalleric invites us on a field-trip that they’ve helped to curate themselves to the Corning Glass Museum to marvel at the exhibit of antique glass models of deep sea creatures—tube worms, squid, corals and anemones—crafted in a nineteenth century workshop in Dresden from the stacks and storerooms of Cornell University, having acquired a sizable amount of them in the late 1800s for instruction in marine biology.
The glass-workers were quite skilled and came from a long line of artists, and in response to wide-spread interest in natural history at the time, turned their attention away from jewelry (though having gotten quite talented at making glass eyes for taxidermists) and tried to accurately capture the look of these delicate specimens that usually disintegrate once taken out of their native environment. The gorgeous creations were shelved and forgotten with the advent of photography, and later rediscovered and mended—nearly as fragile as the invertebrates they represent, displayed not just as other-worldly chandeliers and beautiful baubles but also studied as record (a novel sort of fossil) of the loss of biodiversity in the oceans over the ensuing century and a half.

huldufólk

Boing Boing furnishes us with an update on the follies of human civic engineers and the grave repercussions of incursions onto elfin habitats.
Numerous times, road construction has been rerouted or scrapped altogether by human advocates for the preservation of elf heritage (possibly even influencing the US Navy’s decision to abandon its base in Keflavík), since—nearly as many times, such ill-fated trespasses have not gone unpunished. The accidental burial of a sacred stone by highway workers riled the elves and their supporters (who sometimes construct wooden façades for them in order to help the more oafish of our kind realise that they are there), and after a series of mishaps were hurled at the offending stretch of road—the boulder was exhumed with due ceremony.

gas, food, lodging

Thanks to the resplendent Kottke, we learn about one man’s personal odyssey and motivational master-class to escape the tethers of mortgage and utilities and being roped to particular plot of real estate (the German and French terms Immobilie betray its Latin roots as something that can’t be moved) and live off (or along perhaps) the grid with a custom camper van.
The entire process is assiduously documented for any of those that might be inspired to do the same, plus follow on adventures cross-country. I particularly liked the poetic juxtaposition in that one of the places he visited was the Winchester Mystery House in San Jose, California—not only for the sheer delight in realising and then reveling in the fact that one probably would have never seen this place if not for a motoring lifestyle—articulated and embellished endlessly by the heiress to the rifle manufacturer’s fortune in order to confuse and confound the spirits of those who had been killed by fire-arms that haunted the mansion with stairwells to nowhere and labyrinthine architecture: minimalism in contrast to interminable elaboration. Of course, Lady is in a class by herself—but this installation is nearly, nearly as well outfitted.