tara on techwood

Built originally to house a community centre for the Russian-Jewish diaspora of Atlanta, Georgia in the 1940s, Curbed contributor Lisa Napoli presents a fascinating profile of the historic, stately structure that became the unlikely first headquarters of a new and novel venture from 1980 to 1987 when the operation relocated from midtown to the Omni Centre: a round-the-clock cable news network with nation-wide reach. The first journalists to work for CNN were relegated to studio space in the basement, while more prestigious programming had the upper storeys and founder Ted Turner himself occupied a loft apartment. Though no longer a hub for twenty-four hour reporting, the old mansion remains part of CNN’s campus.

8x8

aurora: a primer for the Parker Solar Probe’s mission to touch the Sun, seeking answers regarding the solar winds and corona posed decades ago

banana for scale: an exponential (previously) romp through the Cosmos that will help one to appreciate perspective

of podcasts and puppets: an interview with the handler for MST3K’s Crow T Robot speaks on how novelty acts inform culture

wiigwaasabak: wanting to boost confidence and interest in preserving and using native languages, a First Nations young man took the initiative to dub his favourite cartoons in Anishiaabemowin and Cree

dugout: via Slashdot, a visit to the remote Australian opal mining town where people live underground

maccoin bubble: enthusiasts in China are trading commemorative tokens (whose face-value is a hamburger) issued for the fast food franchise’s fiftieth birthday at greatly inflated prices

bride of frankenstein: actually she’s Trump’s monster

strandbeest evolution: Dutch artist Theo Jansen engineers giant kinetic Jabberwockies that travel the beach powered only by the winds

science fiction/double feature

Management reminds that this is not a blog about commemorations and anniversaries but marking some occasions are difficult to forego, like the debut on this day in 1975 in London of The Rocky Horror Picture Show, based on the popular musical stage production of two years prior. Technically still in limited release (at any given moment, playing in a cinema somewhere), after over four decades, it is the longest-running theatrical release in history, despite its exposure to wider audiences.

blackout

Fifteen years ago over the next two days a massive disruption to the power grid in the northeast United States and Ontario left some fifty-five million without electricity, caused by a software bug at the control room of a single monitoring station that failed to compensate for an overloaded transformer (a fallen branch) that cascaded quickly across the entire network.
These memories of 2003, absolutely crippling metropolises like New York City, illustrate how delicate, brittle our infrastructure is and how quickly things fall apart and an important reminder how important it is to have a contingency plan for when things go wrong.

departures and arrivals lounge

As Curbed reports, the restored 1962 Eero Saarinen’s iconic TWA Flight Centre—originally designed as the terminal for the Trans World Airline’s hub at the John F Kennedy International Airport of New York City—the “Grand Central Station of the Jet Age” to be revitalised under protective status (not all were so decorously spared) as a historic landmark (Saarinen also designed the Gateway Arch of Saint Louis, Missouri) as a conference space and hotel that reference the Mid-Century Modern trappings of its inception is, construction work continuing a pace since 2016, already accepting bookings for a projected opening date early next year. Check out more photographs of the interiors with retro furnishings, skyboxes and other amenities at the link up top.

a great day in harlem

On this day in 1958, Esquire Magazine photographer Art Kane, famous for his iconic framing of many musicians and figures in the fashion industry, assembled fifty-seven jazz performers with some of the children from the neighbourhood at a brownstone between Fifth and Madison Avenues for a group portrait, which remains one of the most important cultural and academic artefacts in studying and understanding the impact of the genre.
Among those assembled include Count Basie, Lester Young, Dizzy Gillespie, Thelonious Monk, Milt Hinton, Charlie Mingus, Gene Krupa, Maxine Sullivan and Sahib Shihab. Visit this website to learn about each person pictured and hear a sample of their music.  The photograph became the subject of a documentary film which was told in the form of overlapping biographies of each of the subjects and went on to inspire many homages, like 1988’s “A Great Day in Hip-Hop” or the 2004 and 2008 “A Great Day in London” and “A Great Day in Paris” that celebrated artist of Caribbean, Asian and African descent living and working in those cities.

carlina acaulis

Taking a walk through the woods, I noticed in a few select spots, along the verge of the path and outside the places dappled by shadow a sort of silvery thistle that while sticking me as somehow very familiar seemed still an exotic treat. Afterwards I learned that these flowers are indeed called a silver thistle (die Silber- oder Rhöndistel being native to Alpine regions and this area), differing from their more common, stalked relatives due to having no stem (a-caulis), an incidence of what’s called inflorescence where the blossom comes directly out of the leaves.
Wanting to protect its relatively exposed pollen supply safe until a bee or butterfly comes along, the thistle will close up the flower presaging rain showers as was a traditional way of forecasting the weather—especially as the plant is likely to flower in August through September. The plant, as with other thistle varieties, was important for folk medicine for its recognised antimicrobial and diuretic properties, as well as being edible—the thistle being the undomesticated version of the artichoke.
I also realised where the image of the flower came from: for years we’ve been using up a particular notepad for shopping and to-do lists whose edges are printed with patterns in Nature, with the silver thistle as one of the examples of precision engineering and design.

horseless carriage

Although very much retold from an America perspective, it was nonetheless interesting to consider the etymological journey we embarked on to get to the colloquial term car (from cart)—automobile, a French convention ultimately with Greek roots, being a technical, industry term (similar to the formal German PKW—Personnen Kraftfahrzeuge) that’s only used in North America. Of the early trade names suggested before reaching a critical mass and adopting a standard name, early media coverage referred to prototypes as the Motorig, Buggyaut, Tonneau, the Diamote and the Mocole—among others.  Be sure to visit Jalopnik at the link above to discover more car-related cul-de-sacs and points-of-departure.