it depends on what the meaning of the word ‘is’ is

Breaking a story that Newsweek had delayed publishing on the liaison, Matt Drudge first brought to the public news of the Clinton-Lewinsky scandal (previously here and here) on this day in 1998. The on-line aggregator not acknowledged by the established press until four days later when the Washington Post following up on the scoop that investigative reporter Michael Isikoff’s editors had sat on and then killed.

6x6

a perfectly pleasant man but with a name of a bumbling villain from a Charles Dickens novel: the final resting place of Mister and Missus Skeffington Liquorish, via Super Punch 

glass-bottom: a transparent kayak with rainbow LEDs  

a line in the sand: Saudi Arabia plans a one hundred-seventy-kilometre-long belt city of net-zero, walkable communities (see previously and also here)  

beyond the poseidon adventure: the namesake blog reviews the forgettable sequel that came seven years later starring Karl Malden, Michael Caine, Sally Field and Telly Savalas 

 beauty, loss, confusion, hope, division, grace and grandeur: a ten thousand mile photographic essay of in the form of a long, lonesome look at America by Stephen Hiltner—via Nag on the Lake’s Sunday Links 

mother nature: artist Tomáš Libertíny recreates the bust of Nefertiti (previously) in honeycomb with the help of bees

motown

Via the always excellent Things Magazine (with several other utopian visions to explore and debate in this instalment), we learn about Sir Geoffrey Jellicoe (*1900 – †1996), town planner, landscape developer and architecture and his 1959 project Motopia, which despite its automobile-centric name, really was dedicated to the prevention of sprawl and spill-over and the preservation of green spaces where no car or lorry could encroach—see also. Instead what Jellicoe envisioned was a grid of mixed-used residential towers connected by elevated jetways, whose intersections were all roundabouts following the roofline of the blocks with the option to spiral down to one’s home or office, leaving the land below pristine and even wild. Though never realised according to plan, districts like Shanghai’s Oriental Pearl Radio and Television Tower were informed by Jellicoe’s design. Much more at the links above.

strange bedfellows

One could be excused for thinking that we were nearly done with Trump after his corporate donors had distanced themselves from that dumpster fire, but one rentier entrepreneur whose business acumen and ambition seems somehow complimentary—if not pandering—who we also thought it safe to assume would not be making an encore appearance, the MyPillow guy (see previously) has remained loyal and showed up at the White House on Friday to share some thoughts about declaring martial law, excerpted from his MyPillow Plan™ playbook thanks to a telephoto lens.

temptation of saint anthony

Venerated on this day, itinerant and chief amongst the Desert Fathers, Saint Anthony of Alexandria, has had his enduring supernatural visitation during his sojourn through the wilderness of eastern Egypt depicted in many forms, giving way to lurid and bizarrely embellished interpretations beginning in medieval times up to the present day with greater emphasis on the mental states of individuals over demonic temptation.
One of the most iconic portrayals, aligned with the fantastic and nightmarish landscapes of Hieronymus Bosch (previously) is the 1650 work by Flemish painter Joos van Craesbeeck of Brabant, who had produced many a quick and circumspect study of the dissolute and down-and-out with his cautionary tavern scenes. A colossal screaming head—that resembles Craesbeecck’s self-portraits, spews forth an allegory of obscenities, the meanings lost to the ages and the symbolism subject to guesswork whilst Anthony calmly is seen on shore trying to keep his sanity.

тысячи

First articulated out the Cyrillic script (see previously) in the Bulgarian Empire in the tenth century following a long established Greek, Ionian convention to differentiate numerals from letters when context was not exactly clear with spacers, dots and a diacritic over the glyphs called a titlo ҃ or as a prefix signalling a long string of numbers to follow ҂, like a tilde or macron. Still sometimes seen in Slavonic Church publications and in old monuments and coinage, the system was in use until the civil reforms (see also) of Peter the Great in the early seventeen hundreds when Hindu-Arabic representations were introduced and because of this centuries-long custom continued well into the early modern era, elaborate signs were developed to express powers of magnitude and in terms of both a long and short scale (lesser and greater count multiplier) for accounting and scientific purposes. Align with the Greek (rather than alphabetically), one through ten, correspond with the Cyrillic letters: А, В, Г, Д, Е, Ѕ, З, И, Ѳ and І. The pictured powers of ten using the older alpha form, with the Myriad (Тьма) encircled    ⃝   either ten-thousand or a million and Many Myriad   ꙲   either one billion or 10⁵⁰.

cornershop

Manx illustrator Jay Cover has created a uniquely triangular series of stamps for the Royal Mail, Isle of Man Post Office, which celebrates the Lunar New Year and upcoming Year of the Ox (see previously). This set of hopefully postage is the distillation of some earnest research and illuminating fact-checking undertaken by the artist into the Chinese zodiac to ensure he was making the most of his embracing and honouring new traditions on a tiny yet representative canvas.

past imperfect or picking up on a pattern

We quite enjoyed these contemporary irregular verb conjugations by McSweeney’s contributor Elizabeth Preston. For instance, the infinitive to smile: 

Simple past: I smiled. 

Present tense: I smize behind my mask. 

Present progressive: I am squinting jovially and half-nodding at strangers on the sidewalk.

Future tense: I will miss this mask-acquired acne not one bit. 

Future perfect: I will have forgotten how to smile without grimacing like a toddler who’s asked to say cheese. 

More at McSweeney’s Internet Tendency at the link up top.