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.”

parish polity

Not realising that the historic church at the intersection of Wall Street and Broadway had such an extensive real estate endowment and remains one of the chief property-holders in Manhattan with a significant acreage and Hudson Square in its portfolio, we really enjoyed reading this well-researched article on New York City’s Trinity Church.
Originally Dutch-held farm land of New Amsterdam, the area was conferred to the English Crown in 1671 and chartered by Queen Anne in 1705 as a royal grant for the establishment of an Anglican church for the Episcopal Diocese. Though more enlightened and civic-minded presently, the church once had the reputation of a predatory slumlord and an engine of gentrification—with the later still being a perennial source of contention. When Queen Elizabeth II and Prince Phillip visited in 1976, the vestrymen of the church paid off nearly three hundred years of rent in arrears in peppercorns.

sisyphean task

The always engrossing Kottke directs our attention to a classic, low-tech solution to a very modern problem with renewable energy generation: an innovative Swiss demonstration project that illustrates the efficient storage of energy in stacking heavy blocks.
We’ve previously explored how surplus energy (the excess over and above demand when the sun is shiny or it’s windy) can be “saved” for the doldrums by converting it from kinetic to potential energy, a controlled surrender to the struggle against gravity hard won in times of plenty with other applications—including dams and the Sisyphus Train—but this proposal which involves constructing and dismantling a tower seems especially precise and calibrated to needs. In its fully-charged state, a central crane would be surrounded with a block tower it built up using excess energy and when the power supply runs low, blocks are removed one by one and descend to the ground slowly, churning out electricity with a turbine in the process.

ultragoth

Thanks to a clever member of the Twitterati, we learn to our delight that there was a sixth century consort of the king of the Neustrain Franks of the Merovingian dynasty (previously here, here and here), wife of Chodebert I who ruled Paris and the western part of Gaul, called Ultragoth.
Charitably, Childebert is credited for bringing Roman Catholicism to Spain, at the request of his sister Chlortilde who claimed she was being berated and abused for her faith by King Amalaric of the Visigoths (an attested follower of Arius), who brought an army to settle this domestic dispute and invaded the peninsula, ousting the heretical Visigoths in favour of a dynasty more closely aligned with the Church.  Childebert also plundered some relics from Spain, including the dalmatic vestments of Saint Vincent of Saragossa, which Ultragoth found suitable homes for. Likely spelt Ultrogothe (or Vulthrogotha, which is also cool) in Franconian, not to be a spoil-sport, there’s no indication of frequency or popularity for the name but other female regnants and consorts (which seem to never be repeated) included Ermengarde, Himiltrude, Chimnechild, Radegund, Amalberga, Bilichild, Waldrada, Fulberte, Wulfegundis and Wisigard. Nothing else is known of Childebert’s wife other than that she, having failed to produce sons and therefore heirs, and her daughters, Chrodoberge and Chrodesinde, were sent into exile after the king’s death—as was their custom, and his share of the kingdom reverted to his younger brother, Chlothar.

split-screen

As former Trump attorney Michael Cohen pled guilty to eight charges levied against him including silencing two women that Trump had affairs with (implicating Trump in the deed in violation of campaign finance rules) in a federal courthouse in Manhattan, nearly simultaneous a jury in Washington, DC announced its verdicts for Paul Manafort, finding the former campaign chairman guilty on eight of eighteen counts.
Declaring mistrial on some of the accusations—those he was found guilty for include tax evasion, obtaining lines of credit on false pretences and bank fraud—speaks to the fairness of the court proceedings and impartiality of the jurors. Next on the docket for Manafort, he will stand trial next month for failure to declare himself as acting on behalf of a foreign agent when he lobbied for Ukrainian president Viktor Yanukovych, ousted by the Orange Revolution of 2014 and wanted in the country for crimes of high treason, malversation and murder. While the later had less to do with Trump than the former, the outcome does confer more protections on the Special Council’s investigation into ties between the Trump campaign and Russia against interference on the part of Republicans who would like to see the matter closed by demonstrating conspiracy and the charges materialised and were substantiated directly as a result of the Special Council’s work.

rolling stock

Via Londonist, we are treated to the handiwork of Matthew Sommerville who has made a real-time map of the trains moving through the London Underground. Each yellow dot represents a carriage winding its way from station to station, drawing its telemetry from the same public data sets that inform time-tables and station information boards, and will at a click reveal more information about its route and one can toggle between geographic and schematic projections.