brave little toaster

At a Geneva automotive showcase, Volkswagen unveiled its autonomous, self-driving concept vehicle that’s being called Sedric (an abbreviation of “SElf-DRIving Car”) whose boxy chassis is being characterised as looking like an angry toaster bearing down on traffic. I find its appearance to be pretty endearing but I don’t know if I could adjust to being chauffeured around on a comfy sofa, the cockpit stripped of all controls. If I wanted that experience, it’s readily available at little to no cost and it’s called the bus. In any case, I would imagine that the notion of car-ownership will undergo a pretty radical change not long after these first prototypes are rolled-out.

june bride oder baumbastik

Amusing Planet has a nice profile and appreciation of the Bridegroom’s Oak (die Bräutigamseiche) of the Dodauer Forest of Eutin—north of Lübeck, a tree with its own postal code (Postleitzahl) and recipient of human correspondence and secret-keeper.
While the tree’s origins might be conflated with myth and the message of missionaries, the tradition of letter-writing can be traced back to historical star-crossed lovers. A forester’s daughter and the son of a Leipziger chocolatier used the oak as a letter-drop cite for their liaisons—to their parents’ initial disapproval. Later the parents relented and the pair was wed under the trees boughs in June 1891. Their fame spread by word of mouth and people began writing to the tree in hopes of finding true love. Letters deposited in the tree’s trunk are open to public-inspection and several matches have been made over the years. The Bridegroom’s Oak was itself married to the Holy Ghost horse chestnut (die Himmelgeister Kastanie) in April of 2009—across Germany in the Ruhrgebiet near Düsseldorf. The two seem to be handling their long-distance relationship quite well.

backscattering

Apparently all those deputised to keep the US borders safe at boarding and departures ought to aspire to be as frisky and handsy as Dear Leader himself with the Transportation Security Administration implementing new, more invasive pat-down methods, as Boing Boing reports, that are so aggressively gratuitous that public-relations ombudsmen are already girding themselves for the coming raft of sexual assault cases.
The TSA also ought to be prepared for legal action on the part of the airlines whose experience was already made pretty awful and now even more so. There are far bigger battles to fight but at work we’re still contending with the knock-on effects of a sloppily worded civilian hiring freeze (plus a hierarchical farce that makes me see almost see why there might need to be such purges—though not carried out this way) and we find it the irony of ironies that among the few jobs that are automatically exempt are the Sexual Harassment/Assault Response and Prevention (SHARP) officers and unit victim advocates. I thought under Dear Leader’s at least that might be one annual, mandatory training we’d maybe get out of.

typeface, space-race

Previously, we’ve looked at the creative application of æsthetic principles to pull together a compre- hensive, “corporate” face for the National Aeronautics and Space Administration but we failed to realise that there was an entire movement throughout the 1970s behind it that marked the US federal government’s embrace of graphic design and style. One of Richard Nixon’s advisors, Leonard Garment, persuaded the president that support for the arts made for good politics and to establish a National Endowment for the Arts and the Humanities (the NEA and the NEH). The attention to presentation was championed by new cabinet appointee and chairperson Nancy Hawks, with the mandate that good design facilitated communication both between agencies and to the public that the government served. Good design also of course has an intrinsic value of its own and creates icons inseparable from the message and responsibilities of the office.