kreuzstich

Once again Colossal commandeers our attention the work of the crafty Swiss artist Ulla-Stina Wikander who lovingly and ceremoniously retires household objects by enveloping them in cross-stitch.  Here’s an alternate tradition for recognising the career of long, faithful service of domestic artefacts from Japanese folklore. Like a bronzed baby shoe, is there some everyday item that you’d like to have encased and memorialised in such a fashion? See a whole gallery of her creations plus her personal collection of traditional, inspiring patterns at the links up top.

shōgatsu

Since the late nineteenth century, Japan’s official civil calendar has followed the Gregorian, Western one but retains many traditional elements of the luni-solar cycle, including dispatching new year’s greeting cards, often based on the zodiacal character of the coming year.
Beginning 16 February, we leave behind the Fire Rooster and enter the time of the Earth Dog. Spoon & Tamago have nearly completed a whole cycle of animals, having rung in the season by posting an assortment of post cards for a decade and among their selection this time, we really liked this salutation from Individual Locker whose kanji arrangement of the characters for 2018 suggest a rising sun over Mount Fuji.

urban blight

Via Messy Nessy Chic, we’re introduced to the digitally enhanced photography of Bucharest based Andrei Lacatusu whose series called Social Decay depicts social media platforms as run-down neon signage. I wonder if these realistic relics aren’t a prelude of a coming shift away from the attention-economy.

stará, stará night

Inspired by more venerable horologes in Prague and Rouen, the village of Stará Bystrica (stará means old) in Northern Slovakia incorporated an astronomical clock into its central square under major reconstruction in 2009.
The modern clockwork is satellite- and radio-controlled, informed by atomic clocks and is the most accurate of its type, with an astrolabe displaying the phases of the Moon and the march of the constellations. The rippling, billowing design of the tower is a stylised form of Maria Dolorosa, patroness of the country and the tolling of the hour is accompanied by a procession of saints connected with the area—including brothers Cyril and Methodius.

border stories

Always with a weakness for unusual ways of interpreting and expressing territoriality (read more about exclaves, enclaves and such here, here and here), we really enjoyed this brilliant chart by a Reddit contributor courtesy of Nag on the Lake that illustrates the world’s ten shortest national borders and a bit of the geographic, climatic and historic context that went into their creation. Click on the image to zoom in. Rückslag near the German town of Konzen is close enough for a visit and it looks like an away-mission will be organised soon.

carhop

In order to make visiting a charging station less of a chore and more of a treat (though I imagine that such a congregating place might be short-lived with exponential improvements to battery life and duration of recharging times), the entrepreneur behind Tesla electric vehicles and several other enterprises besides will transform one of his service points in the Los Angeles area into a classic bit of Americana, making it into a drive-in restaurant, complete with a (robotic?) waitstaff/pit-crew on roller skates. That’s a pretty clever idea—we think, the set-up is already familiar and seems conducive to powering-up one’s car and we wonder if a resurgence of drive-in theatres might not be in the offering soon.

8x8

mother will protect you: Billy Butcher re-imagines Black Mirror episodes as comic book covers

memory hole: the fickleness of contemporary media and format-shifting could create a digital dark ages for future historians

attitude polarisation: the elusive nature of the backfire effect

gorillas in our midst: despite how plausible it may seem, White House staff did not fall over one another to create a custom entertainment channel for Dear Leader

to tell the truth: ladies and gentlemen, Miss Kitty Carlisle

dammit janet: become an flight attendant for the US’s most secret airline, the one that shuttles employees between Las Vegas, Nevada and Area 51

take two of these and call me in the morning: vintage Bank of America spot for “Instant Money”—caution auto-play

much amaze: a crypto-currency based off an internet meme created in 2013 has a market-capitalisation of over a billion dollars, via Slashdot