hungersteine

Weeks of drought conditions have precipitated significant drops in the water level in rivers and lakes across Europe, including the Elbe (Labe), where near the border between Germany and the Czech Republic at Děčín carved boulders, normally submerged, have been exposed. Known as hunger stones, the engravings mark historic droughts and thus failed harvests that have occurred over the past six centuries. While such memorials lends some perspective to our times, the extremes we are experiencing now and unprecedented in combination with intense temperatures that overtax the resilience of ecosystems when there’s no relenting.

press corps

Via Misscellania, we are presented with the crew at Bad Lip Reading’s treatment of the typically disdainful White House press conference. Spokesliar Huckabee Sanders is more nasty and evasive in reality than she is in this lampoon but at least she’s got a wider range of responses and comebacks than her usual blather.

иж 2125

Arms manufacturer Kalashnikov is apparently diversifying its business and has presented its version of an electric automobile capable of speeds upwards of eighty kilometres per hour and a range of three hundred and fifty kilometres per charge called the CV-1.
The chassis is based on the classic IZh 2125 (ИЖ-2125), nicknamed “Kombi,” which was produced in the Soviet Union from 1973 until 1997. Considered the country’s first hatchback, the “Комби” stood for combination but referenced the Combi coupé make and model, which in German signifies a station wagon (an estate car) though the Russian term for that design of body is universal (универса́л).

8x8

window dressing: a growing gallery of the store front of Tokyo, via Everlasting Blört

via galactica: the short-run Broadway space opera whose plot left audiences baffled

outsider art: the musical stylings of Superstar & Star

hand play: hyper-realistic digital animation from Jesper Lindborg

jornada del muerto: an arresting photographic essay of atomic tests, via Nag on the Lake

autohagiography: staging an adaptation of the first English confessional autobiography, the non-traditional saint Margery Kempe, whose first aspirations were as to become an alewife

patteran: a comprehensive primer on the coded hieroglyphics of vagrants and migratory workers (previously)

claim-jumping: meet the man who owns the Moon

customary units

Always a treat to indulge in the comprehensive, guided romps through etymology and colloquialism, The History of the English Language’s last thematic instalment was particularly interesting and just bursting with facts and anecdotes that seem glancingly familiar but are often decontextualized with trivia, like the origin of author Samuel Clements nom de plume, a bakers’ dozen, or why there are an inelegant number of feet to the mile.
For those answers, you’ll need to attend to the podcast but a bit more on the last term with the idiomatic phrase, “give him an inch and he’ll take a mile,” which was originally not so hyperbolic. Supplanting the cubit (from the Latin cubitus for elbow and retained in the word recumbent) as a measurement of length, the ell or double ell (from ulna, the forearm) came into common-parlance in the thirteenth century. Despite differing national definitions and anatomical considerations, the unit of measurement was useful in trade, especially for parcelling out bolts of fabric and measuring textiles and was one of the first to be standardised with Edward I requiring all market towns to keep on hand an official ellwand—a rod that kept brokers honest in their dealings. Metonymically a yard, the same length as an ell, comes from the stick or stave itself. An inch (from the Roman uncia, one twelfth part, that also gave us the ounce) was after a fashion something that could be independently derived as three barleycorns and scalable for reckoning greater lengths. The original saying, replaced by “mile” once the ell became obsolete, was to the effect “Give him an inch and he’ll take an ell.”