frauentag

Associated with socialist movements until championed by the United Nations in 1975 and this year (the UN sanctioned theme being “Think Equal, Build Smart, Innovate for Change”) Woman’s Day is still mostly observed as a holiday in Communist or former-Communist countries—albeit a big swath of the planet—and has historically been mostly ignored in the West.
Though some source the day back to a likely apocryphal protest (possibly suggested out of a desire to connect its origin with America, like with the First of May) on the part of garment workers in New York City, significant protests that marked the beginning of the February Revolution (on the Julian Calendar) of 1917 in Saint Petersburg with women textile workers staging a strike for “bread and peace” cemented the date. Coinciding with the centenary of the first general election in the country in which women could vote and stand for office, the federal state (Land) of Berlin has declared the day an official holiday for the city, German states setting their public holidays independently, with a “Frauenkampftag.”

too school for cool

Fusing the Tiny House movement with the culture of Van Life, we are introduced to a new but growing subculture of post-modern nomads called Skoolies, who live in refurbished buses, retired from the fleets that service public schools and municipalities. Correspondent for Curbed Britta Lokting infiltrates an encampment and delivers an interesting and insightful profile of some of the members of this tribe, their homes (which are far from rustic and austere) and their lifestyle.

думай иначе

Curated by the always interesting Things Magazine, we are finding ourselves quite capitvated with the visionary, revolutionary prototype computer system conceived and presented by Soviet computer scientist Dmitri Azrikan of the VNIITE (ВНИИТЭ, Всероссийский научно-исследовательский институт технической эстетики, All-Union Scientific Research Institute of Industrial Design) campus in Leningrad in 1987.
Never commercially available, the device known as Project SPHINX would nonetheless prefigure the smart homes of three decades later and ought to be a recognised precursor and would have been a major industry disruptor had we been ready for the idea of mobility and collaborative computing, with the design to integrate automation into domestic life and the work place with tele-conferencing capabilities as well for use as home entertainment, expandable memory modules, the redundancy to support several terminals and a remote control that could be used as a handheld device, different wireless components connected via radio waves, but the whole system dialled up to the rest of the world via modem. More technical specifications and more to explore at the links above.

gashlycrumb tinies

Noted macabre humourist and illustrator, Edward St John Gorey (*1925 - †2000, previously here and here) was also quite the fashion plate and his eye for style would have translated well to the rack and runway.
Though the overview focuses on costuming and his person sense of style it reinforces how all aspects of his the artist’s personality and outlets brought forward the anxieties and preoccupations (fantods—from the Welsh) of the Victorian and Edwardian Eras through unsettling, vaguely (or rather explicitly) menacing situations.

7x7

bathdoom: interior remodelling as a first-person shooter game

philosophical zombies: the Turing Test for AI consciousness

waste management: budget cuts are rubbishing recycling programmes and good intentions on the municipal level in the US and elsewhere, via Digg

das botenkind: a radio host who broadcasted for the US Army in West Berlin had her sobriquet translated as “Newsbabe”

human hoberman: an mesmerising synchronised dance on a slick floor

brick-and-mortar: gorgeous letterpress posters of artful arranged Lego reminiscent of printed circuit boards

lotus eaters: parrot junkies are having the poppy harvest in Madhya Pradesh

covalence

On this day (Old Style, 18 March 1869 on the Gregorian Calendar—it’s nice that this anniversary comes around again), one hundred fifty years ago, Professor Dmitri Mendeleev having previously formulated the Period Laws formally presented his Periodic Table as a way of arranging and understanding the elements to the Russian Chemical Society, titling his presentation The Dependence Between the Properties of the Atomic Weights, positing that the element arranged according to their mass exhibit an apparent periodicity of properties and to expect the discovery of yet unknown elements from gaps in his schema.

always-ready absent present

Our sincere thanks to Things Magazine for the bit of disabuse that comes in knowing that we are not so alone in begrudging our sense of nostalgia and feeling conflicted over it through the knowledge that the concept and discipline of hauntology did not originate with its champion and evangelist Scarfolk Council but is rather an invention with some provenance as being coined by Jacques Derrida.
Though dating back to the early 1990s, the term has really flourished lately with the recycling of familiar and retro themes that feels sometimes to the exclusion of anything risky or original, the concept is the ontological burden of disjointed time, as a ghostly apparition is only properly so in the moment it manifests and separated from its historical association though we as the haunted might see past relations as persistent things. What are some examples that have awakened in you that fit this category? Please do share.