castillo del diablo (10. 184)

While visiting Rosarito in Baja California, friend of the blog, Fancy Notions, stumbled upon a most usual six-storey beach house bedecked with gargoyles and monstrous statuary and crammed to the brim with antiques that is yet uncompleted obsession of a real estate developer called Tony Wells. This Gothic residence chocked full of period furnishings, coffins and chandeliers has become quite the draw for tourists and there are plans to convert property into a museum, relenting to the throngs of visitors who wanted a peek inside. Much more at the link above.

the new people (10. 183)

Produced for a single season and clocking in at forty-five minutes per episode (a rarity for regularly-scheduled programming), the 1969 Aaron Spelling and Larry Gordon collaboration for the ABC network was developed by Rod Serling (under the pseudonym John Phillips—see previously) and centres around the struggle for survival of a group of American college freshman returning from a trip in Southeast Asia (to present as goodwill ambassadors during Vietnam) whose plane crashes on a deserted island in the Pacific, which had been slated and provisioned for a nuclear-test that never took place. Foreshadowing the later ABC series Lost, it explores rather melodramatically the premise of Lord of the Flies, killing off all of the adults and letting the young fend for themselves—plus the counterculture adage of the time not to trust anyone over thirty—and is echoed in Logan’s Run and the Star Trek episode “Miri.” Here is the pilot with the full series available online:

accession treaties (10. 182)

In a wide-ranging address that included the annexation of the regions of Kherson, Zaporizhzhia, Donestsk and Luhansk (newly-appointed governors pictured) in addition to Crimea as well as the concession that his partial mobilisation was an unpopular imposition for many, Vladimir Putin delivered one of his most combative speeches yet, threatening to use all forces at his disposal to ensure the protection of his ill-begotten new territory. In response, the West, which Putin characterises as ‘satanic’ and determined to undermine Russia with Kleinstaaterei, responded with condemnation and more targeted sanctions and Zelenskiy announced his formal application for NATO membership.

please confirm that your surname is indeed St&252;vel (10. 181)

Hard to believe that there is still no work-around for otherwise sturdy legacy software that goes all fragile over apostrophes and accent marks (not to mention the so-called smarter algorithms that vex users with the Scunthorpe problem), but as this gloss from Language Log relates the ticketing programme used by national carrier Aer Lingus won’t accept ostensibly the most common Irish last names like O’Connor and O’Brien, a state of affairs that has been a known dilemma for quite some time, which the airline apologies for. What do you think? Have you had to contend with such constraining inputs? We wonder how domestic equivalents might fare.

7x7 (10. 180)

ron’s house: a bid to save an immersive, eccentrically decorated apartment—via Strange Company’s Weekend Link Dump  

hermetic students of the golden dawn: an honest-to-goodness magic duel between William Butler Yeats and Aleister Crowley—via Boing Boing  

there’s a hole in my head where the rain gets in: medieval wound man, a medical diagram meant to assist surgeons of yore—see also  

it’s been zero days since the last catastrophic hurricane: more stats from Neal Agarwal (previously)  

self-paced: an AI powered language learning tool—via Web Curios  

photosculpture: a century before 3D printers, there was the rotoscoping technique M François Willème  

mid-management mezzanine: a tour of the S.C. Johnson Wax Headquarters building designed by Frank Lloyd Wright

qualifying life event (10. 179)

Via Waxy, videographer Brian David Gilbert, American with lapsed health coverage commissioned Louie Zong to compile a retro treasury of corporate music (see also) as accompaniment to his expert, genuinely helpful explainer (and insightful indictment) of the dread and kafkaesque jargon and fraught terminology of the US insurance industry as an aid for the next hapless soul to find themselves in this situation.

<…> (10. 178)

Initial specifications first published on this day in 1980 by Xerox in association with Intel and the Digital Equipment Corporation (standardised by the Institute for Electrical and Electronics Engineers, IEEE, in 1983), Ethernet technologies are based on a shared medium of communications, similar to the common platform of radio systems and takes its name from the disproven proposal of a luminiferous aether as an omnipresent, subtle and rarefied propagator (see also) of electromagnetic waves and enabled the first collaborative networks of computers.

the mayak disaster (10. 177)

Referred to as the Kyshtym incident in contemporary sources since the above site as part of Chelyabinsk-40 did not appear on maps until 1994 and the closest known village was chosen as the namesake, the catastrophic explosion of a plutonium production facility and nuclear fuel reprocessing plant, occurring on this day in 1957, released twice the amount of radiation than Chernobyl but due to the subsequent coverup (the full scale of the disaster was not disclosed until 1982) and isolation of the site—around ten thousand workers and residents of twenty-two surrounding villages had to be evacuated.