coin-op or waxing-nostalgic

Do you remember these?

I can distinctively recall summoning up some aquamarine elephant with a Mold-A-Rama vending machine at the zoo in Oklahoma City as a little kid. One could choose from a whole variety of souvenir animals and even dinosaurs, hot from the extruder. At the link, watch one at work from a recent visit to the animal-park in San Antonio.  Three-dimensional printing is potentially revolutionary but maybe nothing particularly new or novel in application, considering the mania introduced in 1962 and with these free-standing legacy machines still in action at zoos and other venues across America.

romance dies at the touch of dishpan hands

Iris, you need to work on your you-know, your S.A.—stocking-appeal. Marketers are still pretty blatant about appealing to our insecurities, both private and socially-acceptable ones. Just think of think of all the wonderful pharmaceutical advertisements that one is able to enjoy on his-and-hers envy-of-the-neighbourhood 3D, ultra-high-definition big screen television sets.
 Maybe one day such medical, ideological, litigious and consumptive assaults will appear was antiquated as these outrageous vintage ads—really an assault against humanity, especially the feminine variety, brilliantly curated in Collectors' Weekly gallery on selling shame from the 1950s and beyond and the exhibitions of the outstanding artist and collector behind the blog Do I offend? but it's hard to imagine what more well need to outgrow to top these.

odelay or hindsight is 20/20

On the way home, noticing the dramatic contrasts of skies and the still green pastures and lapping brook of the village of Döllbach on the border of Hessen and Bavaria at the foothills of the Rhön, I stopped at the seventeenth century church dedicated to Saint Odile (auch Ottilia oder Odilie). Just opposite there was a spring, the source of the nearly over-flowing stream, also named after the saint traditionally from Alsace (Elsass), and having learnt a bit about her legend and hagiography, wondered if it was not so named with respect to some healing properties of the waters.
The story goes that Odile was born blind to an aristocratic family and her father, rejecting a disabled child, sent her to be raised by peasants. Baptised at the age of twelve (around the year 670), she miraculously had her vision restored, and after her canonisation was popularly venerated in France, Germany and Switzerland as the patroness of eye-sight—especially at the time before the invention of corrective lenses. Now sighted, Odile's brother brought her back to the family estate—which made Odile's father so angry he killed the brother, accidentally, and still rejected his daughter, the duke fearing that the church and monasteries were a threat to his power and embarrassed to disclose to his subjects that he had banished his daughter, whom the faith had made whole.
She restored her brother to life and the two fled across the Rhine to Basel and her father gave up pursuit. Father and daughter were ultimately reconciled years later, after the duke's health started suffering, and he constructed a convent, Hohenburg Abbey, in the Bas Rhin for her to oversee. The duke, Eticho of Alsace who was the founding-father of the Hapsburg family line, is too venerated as a saint for this death-bed conversion, a popular example, especially for the nobility, perhaps with the message that secular powers and piety could be harmonised.

hieroglyph or non verbis, sed rebus

There is a long and well-established history of substituting symbols for words and alphabets are classed as such by linguists. In the fourteenth century, the rebus sentence was introduced first by French word-smiths as a playful and endearing way of sustaining a dialogue, adopted by many following epistolaters.  The related article above from Kottke has many keen images documenting the evolution of the form. How do you think symbols are altering communication? Compare this antique example of dialogue to an exchange using smileys, short-hand and the like.

ne pas être un vide-poche à l'origine

Via the intrepid and inquiring Nag on the Lake, a single one of Intel's latest batch of innovations introduced at the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas has captivated the public above others. This so called smart-bowl is basically a vide-poche, a place to deposit the contents of one's pockets at the end of the day, which generates an electric field to transfer energy from the bowl to a cellular phone or some other battery-operated gadget within via induction and without wires. Though inductive charging is not the most efficient method and only works at a very close range, the idea is pretty clever and maybe will led to improvements in the technology, particularly for something like electric cars that could charge passively without plugs and cables.