colophon

Via the ever outstanding Kottke, we are treated once again to the imaginative creations of art Roberto Benavidez (previously, channelling the bestiaries of Hiernoymous Bosch in piñata form) whose latest project consists of a series of legendary creatures and chimera that populate the illustrations and marginalia of the fourteenth century illuminated volume called the Luttrell Psalter as metallic ornaments. The intricate drawings of hybridised avians transformed into sculpture that accompany each psalm are referred to as grotesques.

6x6

cloud № 81: Dangerous Minds’ Richard Metzger interviews “prophet of the piano” Lubomyr Melnyk 

eviation: the electric airliner revolution may be here sooner than we think—via Slashdot

opera chirurgica: from our antiquarian, various anatomical charts to contemplate

stupid, twitsy remainers: found-footage from the Prime Minster’s residence

whitey sense: the unfortunate trend of calling out people minding their own business

yule log: an assortment of relaxing fireplace videos—previously

hallmark holiday or that’s what christmas is all about, charlie brown

Our faithful chronclier, Doctor Caligari’s Cabinet, informs that today in 1843—coinciding with the serial publication of Charles Dickens’ A Christmas Carol which very much rehabilitated the festive season in England and beyond, industrial designer and museum administrator Sir Henry Cole (*1808 - †1882) too busy to pen personalised messages to all his friends and colleagues for the holidays commissioned Royal Academy illustrator John Callcott Horsely to create for him a set of pre-printed greetings on cardstock.
Still working out its franking system—the first postage stamp only introduced two and a half years earlier, Horsely also designed pre-paid postages envelopes that allowed well-wishers to post the cards for a penny throughout the Empire. Also on this day in 1965—perhaps with this bit of history in mind, CBS first aired the A Charlie Brown Christmas Special. Reportedly, producers and the network were convinced that the special would prove to be a monumental failure and threaten the Peanuts franchise, fretting over the pacing, tones, lack of canned laughter (a television standard at the time), the unconventional, jazzy soundtrack and the rather incongruent moment of reading Bible verse. The first commercial Christmas cards were mired in controversary and considered blasphemous in part for depicting a child imbibing an adult beverage along with his parents, probably contributing to their commercial success. Enjoy the Vince Guaraldi Trio perform the Linus and Lucy suite and other songs for the programme.

barbarastollen

Our ever intrepid adventurer over at Amusing Planet takes us on a surprising tour of an abdandoned mine tunnel converted during the early 1970s under the Hague Convention for the “Protection of Cultural Property in the Event of Armed Conflict” into a bunker for historically significant documents, dating back to the tenth century up to modern times with some one and a half million contextual artefacts (originals like the blueprints for the Dom zu Köln or Pope Leo X’s communique threatening to excommunicate a monk named Martin Luther) contributing from archivists across Germany coming in annually.
This shelter, called the Barbarastollen, named after Saint Barbara—the patroness of miners among others—and for the support beams of the unfinished mine shaft, which the Christmas, like the traditional German fruit-cake like Christmas bread, Stollen, is  near Freiburg im Breisgau in the Black Forest, and one of five world-wide with the others being Vatican City and three vast underground chambers in the Netherlands, has foregone modern formats which could surely accommodate the breadth and depth of human knowledge up to the moment in the seven hundred metre long stacks, instead keeping with the tried and tested method of document storage and retrieval, barrel upon barrel of microfilm—the media positioned to weather a nuclear war and at least a millennium, readable by means only of a magnifying glass and a little sunshine. Read more at the link up top.