7x7

pyroclastic flow: paintings of the 1776 eruption of Mount Vesuvius (previously)—via Everlasting Blört  

don jumpedo in the character of harlequin jumping down his own throat: an apology for the man in the bottle

twist and bend: superlative balloon art recreating iconic classics 

eisenbahnbetriebsfeld: a model railway in Darmstadt used to train train traffic-controllers  

store-brand: Kmarto table wine  

licorice pizza: a trailer for a 1970s coming-of-age film set in California’s San Fernando Valley—via Waxy

social justice: artist Kerry James Marshall designs new stained glass windows for Washington’s National Cathedral to replace Confederate ones

your daily demon: halphas

Our thirty-eighth spirit is an infernal Earl who rules from today through 2 October, and whilst presenting a dove—a symbol of peace—has the office of building up platforms and machines of war and sending soldiers into battle. Halphas commands twenty-six legion and is countered by the guardian angel Haamiah.

distinguishing signs of vehicles for international traffic

From tomorrow on (28 September, 2021) and with no official reason cited though one suspects it is in show of support for Northern Ireland, the United Kingdom is switching its national identifier decal for cars and lorries from GB (Great Britain, the nations nominally to the exclusion of NI) to UK. License plates which also currently bear the GB identifier and the circle of stars on a blue field representing the European Union will also require a change, to UK above a Union Flag. The new stickers, needed for travel outside the UK but not applicable to Gibraltar or other overseas territories, will be available for £1.50.

l’train à grande vitesse

The first public, commercial run of France’s intercity high-speed rail service, TGV, transversing the some three-hundred and seventy kilometres between Paris and Lyon in just under three hours began on this day in 1981 with some seven hundred seventy passengers. To combat the conception that the train was meant to be a premium for business travellers, initially the tickets were offered at the same price as parallel conventional lines, which would have taken the better part of a day to make the crossing, and hailed with the promotional slogan that “Progress means nothing unless it is shared by all.”

bundestagswahl 2021

Germany is holding a national ballot to elect the members of the twentieth Bundestag, the federal parliament. With Angela Merkel having chose not to run after sixteen years as chancellor, this vote marks the first time in modern Germany history that the incumbent is not seeking reelection.  Seven top candidates from Germany’s forty-seven listed political parties are vying for top position and the mandate to form a coalition government and reach a power-sharing agreement with the opposition.  

unknown foods

Also growing up with grocery store chains named Piggly Wiggly, Food Lion, Safeway and Skaggs Alpha-Beta (wherein items were originally stocked and arranged in alphabetical order for ease of location and retrieval), we could appreciate this exercise from AI Weirdness (previously) that trained various neural networks on generating suggestions for naming supermarkets. We especially enjoyed how quickly it picked up on real world marketing conventions and served them back to us. Some of our favourites in addition to the entitled included: See How Much! Jumbo Boost Built in Juice, Fair-Oil Edible Foods and Little More Large Brook. Discover more about the methodology behind machine learning and be sure to subscribe to Janelle Shane at the links above.

disco ball ceiling, i whisper quietly to myself.

As fellow internet caretaker Things Magazine informs, delightfully McMansion Hell’s yearbook project (previously) has reached 1980 with a piece of real estate on Staten Island whose relatively tame and unified exterior (at least when viewed from the street) conceals a real nightmare going on inside that gets progressively more terrifying as one descends into the house’s depths. More at the links above and be sure to follow Kate Wagner so as to never miss an update.

biosphere 2

Under construction since 1987, the environmental research facility in Oracle in the US state of Arizona host to the largest closed vivarium—that is sealed ecosystem—ever built, more than a hectare in size and meant to demonstrate the viability of artificial and self-sustaining life-support systems in outer space, began its first forty-eight month mission on this day in 1991, with a crew of eight impounded under the dome. With the crew enduring oxygen deprivation and near starvation over the two year trial and not all biomes that were to represent the different regions of Spaceship Earth thriving plus pests, lessons were learned and changes implemented, although by the time the second mission was to commence, there was vicious fighting amongst the project managers and accusations of bad science and bad methodology, including the engagement of Steve Bannon who put the programme into receivership incorporated under the name Space Biosphere Ventures. All this took place outside of the framework of competitive reality television and the era of business sectarianism. Since 2007, Biosphere 2 has been owned and operated by the University of Arizona, conducting experiments in atmospheric research, soil geochemistry and climate change and holding special week-long space-camps for students.