reference desk

Recently distinguished as Everlasting Blört’s curated pick of the day, we are finding this data visualisation from Hat Note both relaxing and engaging.
In real time, Listen to Wikipedia (best performance on mobile devices) signals changes to its articles, new entries and subtractions with plucks and peals and one can fine tune the criteria to track the new and novel as well as what’s possibly the target of vandals or subject to propaganda.

mechanical turk

Via friend of the blog par excellence Nag on the Lake, we find ourselves confronted with an interesting installation to help one better visualise one’s hourly salary.
This machine can be calibrated in a number of ways—illustrating, as in this configuration, how many turns of a crank it will take for the contraption to yield up a penny and by projection, the endurance and drudgery it takes over the course of an hour. The menial isn’t mindless of course and it’s not important whether it’s the floor or the ceiling so long as it’s a living wage. What do you think? Is tedium a luxury for those that struggle for fulfillment from a job? While perhaps unrewarding, there’s no pretense in doing this task, whereas other career-paths (with the support of professional sophists) do a good job of covering up that business of estrangement.  Someone will reinvent capitalism and undercut the competition with a machine like this. 

deustch-amerikanischer tag

Observed under the auspices of Public Law 100-104, 101 Statute §721 and proclaimed by Ronald Reagan on the two-hundredth anniversary of the landing back in 1983, German-American Day marks the 1683 arrival (see also) of thirteen families from Krefeld near Düsseldorf and Duisberg in Philadelphia, founding the settlement of what would eventually become Germantown, Pennsylvania.
The occasion was commemorated from the seventeenth century onwards and held in other parts of the colonies and country with German diaspora but was discontinued during World War I. This first group of Mennonite families had fled Prussia for religious freedom and established the Pennsylvania Dutch identity and were among the first, along with the Quakers, to petition for the abolition of slavery in 1688. Though coinciding with Oktoberfest, the largest celebration of German culture abroad, German-American Day predates the first Wiesn of 1810 by several decades.

detail & parody

Via Kottke, we find ourselves challenged to a bit of scansion and poetic graffiti in physician and writer William Carlos Williams’ (*1883 – †1963) 1932 modern, imagist kitchen table note “This Is Just to Say.”  Its perfectly self-consistent typographical structure, which reads more like the accidental symmetry of found poetry, makes the intensifier seem out of place anywhere. Williams’ wife, Florence (Flossie) née Herman (*1891 – †1976), herself penned a “reply” some years later—which I think far and away is the best “none-of-the-above” responses:

Dear Bill: I’ve made a
couple of sandwiches for you.
In the ice-box you’ll find
blue-berries—a cup of grapefruit
a glass of cold coffee.

On the stove is the tea-pot
with enough tea leaves
for you to make tea if you
prefer—Just light the gas—
boil the water and put it in the tea

Plenty of bread in the bread-box
and butter and eggs—
I didn’t know just what to make for you. Several people
called up about office hours—

See you later. Love. Floss.

Please switch off the telephone.