balum balum (10. 943)

Via Fancy Notions, we enjoyed this short of the La Linea (previously) created by cartoonist Osvaldo Cavadoli accompanied by the background tune composed by Franco Godi. Because the characters of this interstitial talk in grammelot (see above), responsive gibberish used to convey teasing and frustration, it’s hard to say if rabbits habitually mock humans that they encounter but the exchange brings to mind the murderous bunnies of medieval manuscript marginalia.

synchronoptica

one year ago: Some Enchanted Wavelength (1978), assorted links to revisit plus Tears for Fears with the brass section

two years ago: the historical Macbeth, kaleidoscopic mandalas plus “I Got You, Babe” (1965)

three years ago: assorted links worth revisiting, Saint Arnold, the second major book printed in the West plus a bookshelf that can be transformed into a casket

four years ago: TopPop

five years ago: the Blackout of 1968, The Rocky Horror Picture Show (1975), more links to check out plus the history of the Turner Broadcasting System

sunday drive: talsperre lütsche (10. 942)

On the way back from some window-shopping, we took a detour through the Geratal to Frankenhain for a stroll around the second biggest artificial lake in the region (previously). Dammed in 1935 by the Deutschen Reichsbahn in order to provide a source of water for stations in Erfurt and Arnstadt, by the time the reservoir (Stausee) was completed steam-powered locomotion was being superseded and it was converted to hydropower—and today the same supply-system to cool data centres in Neudietendorf and for brewery operations connected to the train stations that have repurposed the cisterns. The tributary rivers have their source near the winter sports destination Oberhof, whose ancient volcanic composition of quartz porphyry were also the quarry for the retaining walls. Used primarily for recreational activities currently, it was certainly a nice walk down to the beach and good to visit the area again.

(pronounced 'lĕh-'nérd ‘skin-'nérd) (10. 941)

Released on this day in 1973 some nine years after the southern and blues rock band formed, their debut studio album contains some of their best songs—including “Free Bird,” which elevated their profile to stardom. Most of the tracks were already well established in the band’s repertoire in their circuit of the Florida and Georgia music scene but the record exposed the work of Ronnie Van Zant, Allen Collins, Bob Burns and Larry Junstrom to much wider audience and a subsequent tour as the opening act for The Who propelled their success, with the correctly IPA pronunciation guide rendered as /ˌlɛnərd ˈskɪnərd/, saw the album certified Gold by December 1974 and Double-Platinum by the summer of 1987. The 1973 original recording was inducted into the Grammy Hall of Fame in 2008 and has become a snowclone for audience requests and encores (famously with MTV’s Unplugged 1993 of Nirvana), regardless of the artist or style of music being performed.

synchronoptica

 

one year ago: KC and the Sunshine Band plus the Angelus prayer

two years ago: your daily demon: Astaroth, building the Berlin Wall (1961), assorted links to revisit plus a flying Winnebago

 

three years ago: the Roman holiday Vertumnus, Saint Cassian, the Inception Sequel, The Hunting of the Snark, luring a cautious public back to the movies, an isolation odyssey plus pandemic border restrictions

 

four years ago: the design of the Japanese flag, Italian car design plus the script of the Saanich people

 

five years ago: an update on the TWA Flight Center at JFK Airport

7x7 (10. 940)

glas musterbuch: an unending catalogue of antique glassware 

bob hope presents the chrysler theatre: a star-studded television anthology airing from 1964 to 1967  

ziff-davis: more on CNET’s culling, content-pruning internal memo  

numa numa: Gary Brolsma recreates the viral dance video to the O-Zone song nineteen years later—via Waxy 

if you’re not paying, then you are the product: Zoom’s new terms of service agreement grants it perpetual rights over the contents of your meeting in exchange for turning it into an email with AI  

take two: slant board setting that allowed actors to rest in between shooting without getting out of costume

ti 5100: before the iPhone, calculators were regarded as aspiration personal electronics—see also

barrel traps or buoy knife (10. 939)

Though it kind of seems otherwise, we know we haven’t dedicated more reportage to the Texas governor’s pontoon-bridge to deter immigration from México than Trump’s bombastic Border Wall. The prop is political pandering of course to worst elements of the Republican Party’s constituents assembled by subcontractors and will likely break apart and damage infrastructure or be disassembled as a violation of international law. We did not know, however, that between the orange buoys, there’s a circular saw, nearly hidden from sight. Barbaric and overly-aggressive, calling this modern enhancement medieval is unfair to our pre-Enlightenment progenitors, and as with machines of torture back then, there was no industrial push to equip every castle with chamber of horrors with threat and rumour being more coercive and corrective and the surplus of such devices the handiwork of enterprising tour guides. Something as gruesome as the Iron Maiden was misconstrued reconstruction of the much tamer—yet humiliating Schandmantel (Coat of Shame—a wooden vessel sometimes lined with metal on the inside to be worn for punishment) which has an analogue in the image of the bankruptcy barrel. The Texas implements of inhumanity are very real. 

synchronoptica

one year ago: Scientology’s Sea Org Day, the first Model-T (1908) plus assorted links to revisit

two years ago: Willy Wonka (1971), the closing ceremony of the Los Angeles 1984 Olympics, an exhibit of ephemera from events cancelled due to COVID, a Roman fast food kiosk, a WikiHow illustration worth a thousand words, a handbag inspired by a pasta box plus Avon paperbacks

three years ago: more on the new US Space Force, the Democratic ticket, the first IBM PC plus the martagon lily

four years ago: preparing to revisit the Bretagne  

five years ago: the cart before the horse, silver thistles plus a photograph from Art Kane featuring the Harlem music scene

multihyphenate (10. 938)

The term new to us as well despite being accustomed to its employ when the dual-hatted careers of creatives and academics—singer-songwriter and director-producer for example plus considering our particular pension for zealous double-barrelling and dashes as punctuation—and so we appreciated the induction through “multi-hyphante spaces,” in other words a new and hyper-hyphenated way to describe mixed-use zoning for residential and commercial campuses and neighbourhoods with terminology that’s been in circulation for decades.  More discussion at Language Log at the link above including hybrid and unhyphenated identifications.

riverfront brawl (10. 937)

We are directed to a circumspect reflection on the ugly racism on display in Montgomery, Alabama and the social media response that demonstrates that Black Twitter is irrepressible no matter how it’s rebranded over a group of white people shamefully accosting a riverboat captain asking that the partygoers of a pontoon move their vessel so they could dock in its assigned space. One individual came to the rescue with a folding chair, invented by a Black man called Nathaniel Alexander patented in 1911 for use in auditoriums, churches and schools and other places where “considerable sitting is done.” Be sure to watch the outro for Good Times and other associated memes at the links above. Dynomite!

content pruning (10. 936)

Via Waxy, we learn that the venerable, global publisher of reviews and news on consumer electronics CNET is culling thousands of older articles in a possibly misguided attempt to improve its SEO rates and game Google search performance. Following developments that the media outlet—like many others—is cutting writing staff and turning increasingly to generative content, CNET believes that it is being penalised in the contemporary web ecosystem by hanging on to dated articles and would better appeal to search-engines by refreshing or deaccessioning “depreciated” stories. Once deemed irrelevant, older content will be no longer live on the site but rather archived and available on the Wayback Machine. Google itself—famously obscure about how the algorithm for optimisation works so one cannot game the results any more than they are by catch-penny operations—recommends against this practise and that of course older articles as a matter of public record have value and any attempts to game a platform that’s just as opaque and inscrutable to its own handlers is probably a losing proposition. Let’s hope that this sort of gamble doesn’t inspire the same from other organisation, putting more pressure on under-supported operations like the Internet Archive or worse yet just jettisoning old stories. We dredge up the old, outdated and cringe-worth on a daily basis and might not be the most relevant or flattering but it’s sometimes an interesting insight into a small part of the Zeitgeist. 

 synchronoptica

one year ago: C’est Chic plus the FBI searches the private residence of Donald Trump

two years ago: Ghostbusters! plus assorted links to revisit 

three years ago: more links to check out, scales of cosmological magnitude plus the start of the Mayan Long Count Calendar

four years ago: Clair the Obscure, the maps of Dan Mills plus lousy souvenirs from ancient times

five years ago: training birds to pick up litter, Vitis vinifera, the Marquess of Anglesey plus Robert G Ingersoll and the Free-Thinkers