sufganiyot!

Via Miss Cellania for the Festival of Lights (which begins at sunset today, 25 Kislev) and runs through nightfall on 10 December), we are treated to the musical styles of a cappella group Six13’s rendition of “Bohemian Chanukah,” which includes some historic and cultural background of the holiday. The first verse begins:

Is this the eighth night
We light with the family?
Recall with great pride
Our escape from Greek tyranny?

Kindle the lights
Remember the Maccabees
How did those five boys
Lead us to victory?

5x5

village détruit: exploring nine ghost towns in northern France—via the inestimable Nag on the Lake 
   

¤: : a short animation celebrating the obsolete coins of the member states now using the euro

no longer part of the squad: the art of unfriending prior to social media—via Things magazine

onomatopoesie: a conservancy for endangered sounds—via Coudal Partners’ Fresh Signals

holidays are coming: a primer on Advent season—a movable, malleable fest

my beautiful laundrette

On a quiet day with a peaceful overcast pall, between walks I visited a derelict shopping centre which has a working but very much under-ultilised laundry room attached.
I am happy that it’s there for my personal use.

It’s usually pretty deserted at any time but this day profoundly so and I took the moment to appreciate the aethetics of empty spaces and the symmetry in repetition and redundancy.

I think the fact that was never afforded a glimpse of this place, in contrast, as somewhere bustling or inadequate for demand—just a convenience not yet swept away, makes the stolid lines of machines, prone to breakdown and only now have the “out of order signs” placed by the maintenance staff and angry patrons now gone, just and mostly, and the facilities fully rehabilitated resound as an unintentional art space itself.  I got the washing done in more tranquility than usual.

orgelpositiv

Having enjoyed the framing and composition of Robert Götzfried beforehand in his series on German bowling lanes, we appreciated learning thanks to our fellow peripatetic Things Magazine that the intrepid photographer is still very much active with new collections including some truly outstanding specimens of pipe organs with other subjects to be found at the referring links above.
A positive or box organ is one built to be more or less mobile if not march—from the Latin ponere “to place”—and wouldn’t be part of the elaborate interior facades of buildings—which themselves were a Mid-Century Modern revival in church and concert hall symphonic architecture (called the Orgelbewegung, the Organ Movement) that was especially strong in the US and Germany in the 1950s.

pirate radio

Digging through the archives (always an advisable course of action) Waxy finds and shares this monograph from Kotaku recalling how listeners in Bristol within the sound of the broadcasted squelch of data could “download” computer programmes to the cassette drive from the Radio West’s show Datarama during the early 1980s.
Can anyone remember doing this?  I certainly recall running a programme from a cassette tape but never one captured on the airwaves.  This and similarly transmissions became a forum for sharing programmes, games, MIDI music and even digitised images before the development of modems and more advanced storage formats for home computing.  Relatedly, I came across another neologism that came a bit after this phenomenon in the form of prosumer—a term that sounds at least to my ears as a more disdainful way of describing an enthusiastic early-adopted.  Carrying some negative connotations of being amateurish and readily surrendering money on something untested, expect through test-marketing, I am kind of glad glad it fell out of use.