♄ viii

Discovered by Italian astronomer Giovanni Domenico Cassini in 1671 and later dubbed after the titan Iapetus after the naming convention established by William Herschel—with the antiquated adjectival form of Japetian that points to the conflation of the deity with Japheth, brother of Moses—and explored more thoroughly during the 2007 mission named after its discoverer, the satellite of Saturn first loomed large in human imagination when on this day in 1981 the Voyager 2 probe relayed the featured image back to Earth. The prominent equatorial ridge, named the Voyager Mountains after the photograph are among the highest in the known Solar System, and ring the object almost perfectly, giving rise to the theory that the feature is a reabsorbed ring and the probable but yet unseen occurrence of sub-satellites.

wadi musa

Familiar to only a few locals and unknown to the West until its rediscovery on this day in 1812 by Swiss explorer Johann Ludwig Burckhardt, the capital of the Nabataeans called Raqmu by its denizens is commonly referred to Petra (Al-Batrāʾ) after its designation as a client state of the Empire after Rome annexed their kingdom as Arabia Petaea.

The settlement in southern Jordan between the Dead Sea and the Gulf of Aqada is only accessible via a narrow gorge and was a major regional trading hub in antiquity, controlling routes from Gaza to Damascus and onto the Persian Gulf. Accustomed to privation and periods of drought and deluge, the Nabatean city includes advanced methods of gathering and storing rainwater and flood control, allowing the population to thrive and supporting numbers approaching twenty-thousand residents at its height. A marvel of engineering and with many cameos in popular culture, in most years, Petra greets over a million international tourists annually.

dziesmotā revolūcija

Beginning in 1987 after the introduction of the policies of glasnost and perestroika that rolled back certain limitations on political expression heretofore imposed on Soviet constituent member states outside of the core of Russia, the Baltic satellites staged a peaceful Singing Revolution that culminated for Latvia on this day in 1991 declaring its independence in the midst of an attempted coup to unseat Mikhail Gorbachev from his leadership position. One of the more popular songs of the freedom movement was the trilingual (also with verses in Estonian and Lithuanian) The Baltics are Waking Up!, composed by Boriss Rezniks for a protest two years prior commemorating the fiftieth anniversary of the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact of August 1939, which defined German and Soviet spheres of influence in the region, with defiant ralliers’ joining hands and forming a human chain stretching across the three countries.

scunthorpe dilemma

In tribute to a dear friend recently deceased, one individual has pledged to make a sojourn on moped across a circuit of UK settlements and in some cases streets with what’s generally deemed the rudest toponyms and odonyms to be found on the map in order, we learn via Strange Company’s Weekend Link Dump, to raise funds to combat the cancer his friend succumbed to.

The charity tour begins in the ancient hamlet of Shitteron in Dorset whose name means “farmstead on a stream used as an open sewer.” Be sure to check out the links above to see the entire itinerary and explore a global map of unfortunate, purple place names, including Fucking, Austria and how you can support their cause. The title refers to the over-zealous censorship of internet traffic monitors flagging substrings of text (the above and others) out-of-context.

6x6

1:1: a growing collection of architectural models appearing in film and television—via Everlasting Blört

brutsch 200 spatz: an unproduced concept microcar trialled in 1954  

hej, hello: the first episode of a Finnish television programme that taught English language skills featuring two very British bobbies and a cat on the Moon 

subway: a comprehensive map of subterranean Washington, DC—via Things Magazine  

purple prose: the 2021 Bulwer Lytton (previously) literature prize winners and dishonourable mentions—via Web Curios  

demosaicking: a biographical history of the pixel and its correspondence to reality

miniature life

Courtesy of the always excellent Kottke, we really enjoyed the chance to revisit the creative tiny landscapes of Tatsuya Tanaka (田中 達也, previously) crafted daily out of everyday objects in a way that makes us regard our microcosm and macrocosm differently and peopled with proportional figures. Be sure to check out the link up top to see a video of Tanaka at work and connect to calendar pages, diary-entries dating back to 2011.

davy jones & the lower third

Released on this day in 1965, singer-songwriter David Bowie was billed for the final time under his birth name with the title band’s single “You’ve Got A Habit of Leaving” to avoid confusion with Davy Jones of the Monkees (previously). The performer adopted the stage name after the romanticised version of nineteenth century American mercenary and pioneer James Bowie, famous for the eponymous style of combat knife.

saulė

The solar deity in the Lithuanian pantheon, the goddess’ name is also the common name for the sun and the celestial bodies, including the Earth (Žemė) are a familial constellation of the seven daughters of her consort the Moon, Mėnulis.The other offspring reflect the planets known to Antiquity with Venus represented twice as the Morning Star, Aušrinė, and Vakarinė—the Evening Star—that prepared her mother for bed. The asterism Ursa Major was as Grigo Ratai interpreted as a chariot for Saulė procession across the celestial sphere. The Houses of the Zodiac are regarded as liberators, having rescued the Sun from captivity in a high tower by an evil and powerful king seeking to subvert the land. The representative idol is near contemporary reproduction based off ancient totems.