fashion icon

Continuing a very fine tradition of celebrities dressed as a range of a certain thing, the always excellent Everlasting Blört presents an extensive and growing thread of Lady Gaga as mushrooms. The paired gilled fungus is called the Pleurotus citrinopileatus (the Golden Oyster Mushroom or Tamogitake), edible and all-around useful, it is also being studied for its analgesic and anti-inflammatory properties which could be harnessed for future health applications.

root directory

A happily reactivated Present /&/ Correct shop blog (do check out their sundries) brings us this interesting series of studies curated by Wageningen University of hand renderings of root systems (see also here and here) of trees and plants whose subterranean presences and connections can be far more substantial and wide-reaching than we surface-dealers can fathom.

man-from-mars radio hat

Via the always outstanding Sunday Links from Nag on the Lake, we are introduced to the predecessor to the Walkman and the earbud in the dual tube radio fitted into a pith helmet debuted in March 1949 by inventor Victor Hoeflich—most of whose work consisted of novelty items and making the Hawai’ian lei more ubiquitous through his machine that churned out paper versions of the traditional wreath. Aggressively advertised and memorable, the mobile device did not sustain sales nor attract and retain early adopters with the marketing campaign winding down the following year. With the development of the transistor, pocket radios would become possible some five years later. Much more at the links above.

supernintendo chalmers

Via Kokatu we discover that a clever programmer has turned the segment from 1996’s “22 Short Films About Springfield” (a reference to the biopic Thirty-Two Short Films About Glenn Gould from 1993) wherein Principal Skinner invites his boss over for lunch, proceeds to ruin the meal and tries to convince Superintendent Chalmers that burgers are called “steamed hams” in upstate New York into a graphic adventure. Download the game or view the playthrough at the links above, which include more detail on the episode, the meme it inspired and other fan-made Simpsons arcade games.

elk cloner

Among the first computer viruses released in the wild—that is, not restricted to a single laboratory or network, and contagious in the general population, fifteen year old student Rich Skrenta created on this day in 1982, developed the year prior, self-propagating code as a prank, doing no harm to the host computers, the Apple II models, nor their vector, shared floppy disks with computer games and other software passed around by members of a local computing club, eventually becoming an irksome bug revealing itself after a set number of iterations of running the programmes—having already taken up residence in the host and infecting subsequent disks inserted with the user witlessly spreading it. Cheeky and harmless as it was, this experiment boded of vulnerabilities ahead.

the troubles

On this day in 1972 in the Bogside neighbourhood of Londonderry, British paratroopers massacred a

group of unarmed civilians staging a protest march, rallying against internment without trial—codenamed Operation Demetrius, mass arrest and detention of those suspected to be members or supporters of the Irish Republican Army, torturing some of the internees. Fourteen of the twenty-six marchers were killed on what’s been called Bloody Sunday—the military’s action ultimately ruled after multiply investigations and re-litigation in 2010 as “unjustified” and “unjustifiable” though no prosecutions proceedings have been yet successfully launched.

westanamerica

In a development as outrageous and unhinged as the so called Pizzagate conspiracy theory—which (take a deep breath) in case you had forgotten that madness posited that the hacked cache of emails of Hilary Clinton and other prominent Democratic Party officers contained coded messages that implicated them in a human trafficking ring run out of the Comet Ping Pong pizzeria in Washington, DC—the National Butterfly Sanctuary on the US-Mexico border is forced to temporarily shut down due to “credible threats” logged in connection with an upcoming Trump-adjacent political rally. Accusing the centre of facilitating illegal border crossings over the Rio Grande/Río Bravo, money-laundering and using butterfly swarms to dispose of bodies, the rumours are being propagated by a fund-raising committee hoping to privately finance the Wall.

laser beige

Revisiting one of their first experiments—certainly one that caught our attention—our Resident Artificial Intelligencer, Janelle Shane (previously) tasks a new generation of neural networks with not only naming a palette of bespoke colours but also to define the colour coordinates. It was hard to pick from such a comprehensive swatch of choices but a few of our favourites were Whiskerboard—a nice slate hue that seems fitting for a hipster barber shop or cocktail bar—complemented by Lucky Chalk or Indecent Taupe. Also among the top contenders were True to the Narwal, Well Pencil and a nice olive Mocking Cloud Candy. Tag yourself or at least your colour scheme.  More at the links above.