emily post

Fancy Notions informs of the superstitious etiquette that the best way to rid one’s household of vermin or other pests (like today’s practise of leaving an anonymous notes on the windshields of car to comment and correct the atrocious parking job of others—or the phenomena of pet-shaming) is to take down a letter and put them on notice. For rats, the Ancient Greeks recommended a threatening tone, whilst households of nineteenth century New England took the approach of laying out to the rodents the distinct advantages of decamping their homes and instead taking up residence at their neighbours.

serçe saray

Colossal directs our attention to a photo-essay by Caner Cangül whose work skilfully brings to the fore architectural elements and embellishments that might be lost in the monumental scale of some the buildings and bridges where his subjects are found.
The detail of this particular greebling are the surviving examples of Ottoman-era avian palaces, meant to give shelter to pigeons and sparrows in urban centres that might be lacking in safe accommodations for birds. Not only were households eager to host such guests, the additions also ensured that the façade of the surrounding structure was spared from birds roosting all over the place. These mansions are certainly grand ones and many designers lavish attention on the architecture of birdhouses but we suspect that the next talent showcase—prestige project will be in insect hospitality. Check out the link up top to learn more and see more of Cangül’s photography.

strongly-worded letter

The copier company has a well-established history of resisting efforts to make its brand a proprietary eponym and not to use it in a generic way—like Kleenex or Q-Tip or Zipper or google—but this letter (via Nag on the Lake) that a long-time literary correspondent for the The New York Times received is surprisingly stern in tone. Ms Kakutani (misidentified as a mister in the missive) is berated for having used the company’s as a verb and in lower case for an article she wrote (now the trademark appears in lower-case since 2008 and with this logo, which itself may be a copy). The veteran reporter is penning a memoir and found the letter among other ephemera whilst researching for her book.

g-mark of approval

In celebration of supporting six decades of competition to improve ergonomics and functionality the Good Design Awards (here’s one of last year’s winner) has opened up a boutique store in Tokyo that features a expertly selected range of the annual contest’s best in show.
With some forty four thousand honoured entrants, the shop couldn’t accommodate the entire inventory but this emporium is surely going to be a place to go to for inspiration. The awards have its origins in the mandate by the country’s Ministry of International Trade and Industry in 1957 to establish a rating system (the G-Mark) to recognise, commend and promote excellence in design and the chief factor for inclusion is whether an object or concept can make people’s lives more prosperous and enriches society as a whole. So many abstract and otherly-versioned things get transformed into amusement park rides, put on stage or otherwise repackaged with questionable judgment but this idea—to showcase talent in a retail setting that’s closer to a museum-going experience—strikes me as brilliant and inviting.

tabula rasa

Why you never wear GREEN on TV🤗 pic.twitter.com/IsC8TuE3Ei

— Jesse McLaren (@McJesse) July 28, 2017

Apparently not heeding Her Majesty’s earlier wardrobe malfunction, the otherwise unhelpful White House deputy press secretary is giving us the public service reminder not to wear green in front of the camera, lest one tempt public reaction—which I suppose also might be an intentional strategy.

wayback machine

Brilliantly, as Waxy informs, the Internet Archive (previously here and here) is curating daily snapshots of a dozen of major internet properties (CNN, Reddit, YouTube, Amazon, the BBC, Yahoo! News, et al.) of how these web sites looked a decade ago. The historical chronicle elicits a sense of nostalgia and contextualises where we stand now.

motorama or à la kart

Messy Nessy Chic brings us the profile of George Barris, the late, legendary designer of custom cars who was responsible for nearly all the iconic vehicles featured on film and television throughout the 1960s and 1970s.
Though perhaps the contribution of his workshop that’s most easily conjured up would be the original Batmobile, Barris also brought us My Mother the Car (a much maligned sitcom that was premised on the idea that an attorney purchases a used Porter touring car that his mother has been reincarnated as), the dragsters from Mannix, the Dukes of Hazzard and the Banana Splits as well as the signature cars of the Munsters and the Clampetts and another sentient automobile in Knight Rider’s KITT plus his nemesis. Barris’ studio also recreated many novelty vehicles for special exhibitions and designed custom cars for celebrities, including Zsa Zsa Gabor, Elton John and Elvis Presley.

dot-dot-dot

A suspension point—or an ellipsis comes from the Greek term for omission or falling short and has paradoxically transformed as punctuation mark to signal a continuance rather than a trailing off (aposiopesis, a figure of speech whose literal translation is becoming silent) or something suggestive of an unspoken alternative thanks in part to that shit gibbon occupying the Oval Office who’d prefer to legislate from the bully pulpit in one hundred and forty character conniptions.
Dear Leader’s latest chained but unhinged affront to reason and dignity and human kindness, the ban on transgender personnel from serving in the military, is not indicative itself of course of any larger agenda or policy shift in itself and was only a ploy to secure funding for his Border Wall and more immediately a distraction from the health care debate and the ongoing investigation into Russian interference and collusion. He does not care and has no strategy, but that does not mean his deputies won’t seize on the action to discriminate and discharge whole classes of service members en-masse and won’t continue with their goals of ideological course-correction that will push America to a much darker place that’s far bigger than the volunteer army. Another sad irony of Dear Leader’s announcement was that it fell on the sixty-ninth anniversary of Harry S Truman’s issuance of Executive Order 9981 which abolished racial discrimination and segregation in the Armed Forces and on the fifty-fourth anniversary of the institution of the policy that forbade service members and federal workers from patronising businesses or institutions that practised discrimination, opening up the route for greater equity and social justice in the country as a whole.