continuum

As an antidote to the frenetic pace of world events and ploys for attention monumental artist Krista Kim has staged a soothing mediation synchronised across the over ninety blaring electronic billboards of New York’s Times Square (see also) with this cleansing, reflective colour gradient. Their contribution is part of Midnight Moment—the long-running digital art exhibition that takes place nightly from 23:57 to the stroke of midnight in the city that never sleeps.

chipping norten

On the heels of London’s announcement to belatedly amend for years of courting and suffering oligarchs parking their money in real estate that’s out-priced everyone else and another leak regarding the secreted bank accounts of the wealthy and powerful, Things Magazine presents a medley of tone-deaf and ill-timed revelations on past injustice and the debut of a planned, Palladium Garage Mal Hal neighbouring Blenheim Palace, which is only in the range of said above bad actors.

postpositive

Having previously (see here, here and here) sustained a run-in with the proscriptive, unspoken rules of adjectival order from the Elements of Eloquence by Mark Forsyth and the so called Royal Order of Adjectives, we quite enjoyed this panel discussion on the topic that demonstrated not only do the exceptions make the rule but also the convention is no fraught mandate or inconceivable mnemonic to commit to memory of the precedence of opinion, size, age, shape, colour, origin material, purpose and then the subject noun but rather in terms of distance and proximity by what’s most to least adjectival and least to most noun-like as well as a fascinating insight into natural language and habit. Come up with some examples and how you would say them.

i like crunchy, i like meaty, tender centres satisfy completely

Observed on this day in Japan (8 August in Canada and the UK and 1 March in Russia) due to the date’s resemblance to the feline vocalisation nyan, nyan, nyan, National Cat Day is celebrated to raise public awareness for the welfare of cats and promote cat adoption, and kept since 1978, traditions include posting pictures of cats with their humans and restaurants serving cat-themed cuisine.

7x7

orientation: Ivan Reitman’s (RIP) student film

times contrarian: Neil Young (previously) publishes his own digital newspaper

le docteur qui: Bill Bailey (previously) reinterprets Dr Who theme as swinging Belgian jazz  

twosday: a once in a life-time quirk of the calendar—be sure to celebrate this mirror day 

a notoriously unpredictable english tetragraph: all the different ways to say -ough  

genehmigung gestoppt: German halts approval process for pipeline (previously) bypassing Ukraine after Russia invades 

 mother-in-law-doors: elevated thresholds in Newfoundland have a questionable origin (see also)—via Miss Cellania’s Links

the week that changed the world

Having arrived the night before with an audience of sixty million viewers in the US alone (despite the time difference with the three main broadcast networks pooling resources to cover the eight-thousand dollar per hour cost of satellite usage for the eight day event), Richard M. Nixon (see previously here and here) became the first US president to visit the People’s Republic of China, signalling a thaw in almost a quarter-century of hostile relations with his strategic outreach and overture. Normalising trade with the capitalist West, the summit with Mao Zedong and other senior leadership had the immediate result of straining cooperation between communist China and the Soviet Union.

clearly define “militia” just in case that becomes relevant in a century or two

We thoroughly enjoyed the marginal notes and correction marks for James Madison’s Article II of the United States constitution—which establishes the executive, presidential, branch of the federal government and defines the Treaty Clause, Appointments Clause and the Emoluments Clause, and the process of Impeachment as graded by a high school teacher by McSweeney’s contributor Alice Lahoda. Lose the electors and please define your terms to prevent any confusion down the line. D-

the shape of things to come

Via our faithful chronicler, we are informed that on this day in 1936, the adaptation of the H.G. Wells’ dialectical novel Things to Come had its cinematic debut, outlining the social and political predictions set forth by his 1933 work from the perspective of a twenty-second century diplomat examining the consequences of a nascent second world war continuing well into the 1960s with belligerents having well forgotten what’s at stake and what they are fighting for. With civilisation exhausted and entering a new Dark Age (with zombie plague included, a generational feud of the Passworthys versus the Cabals), a technocracy of fighter pilots struggle to preserve and advance human knowledge, leaving the confines of this globe for the wider Cosmos.