webcollage (11. 638)

Launched on this day in 1999 by Jamie Zawinski (previously), one of the founders of Netscape and Mozilla and advocate for open-source software, the application inserts random noise into image search engines to create a pastiche of pictures—somehow with similar energy—and has been running with surprisingly minimal maintenance (given how much the web has grown since) for a quarter of century, scraping, drawing from various incarnations of internet retrieval tools. It automatically refreshes elements of the composition every minute and is also available as a screen-saver.

kyffhäuserdenkmal (11. 637)

Dedicated on this day in 1896 (on the anniversary of the coronation of the latter) after six years of construction under the direction of architect Bruno Schmitz, the colossal memorial also known as the Barbarossa Monument erected on the ruins of the medieval Kyffhauser Castle is the third commemorative ensemble in Germany (see above—we visited in April of 2010) and one of a number commissioned posthumously in honour of Emperor Wilhelm I of Prussia. 

The foundations of the imperial castle from the first millennium and associated with the reign of Frederick I Barbarossa are well preserved, such as the keep and a well that is the deepest from the Middle Ages. Heralded after his death, the Kaiser was seen as his political and culturally unifying descendant and inheritor of the Barbarossa legend, the trope of the sleeping king, king under the mountain (Bergentrücken—including lore about King David, Arthur and Charlemagne), that Frederick with a retinue of knights is not dead but half in slumber in a secluded cavern in the massif and will return again—occasionally dispatching a scout outside to check to see if ravens are still roosting, their absence being a sign that he is needed. 

During DDR times, Communist residents in the area wanted to blow up this bombastic reminder of the country’s past but its destruction was stopped by Soviet authorities, admonishing them it was time for Germans to live with their history and statues.

9x9 (11. 636)

who is this imposter: AI ruins classic, static reaction memes with animation  

🥖: the bygone baguette boxes of French Polynesia—via Messy Nessy Chic  

quantum compass: London Underground hosts trials for a subatomic sensor that could supplement satellite navigation  

crystal lake: the preponderance of 1980s horror movies set at summer camp  

ball & chain: Nag on the Lake shares a special memory from Festival Express, the touring show of Monterey Pop, when the musicians came to Toronto

message in a bottle: the dozen times humans have tried to communicate with extra-terrestrial intelligences—see previously here, here and here  

encarta: the short, happy reign of the multimedia CD-ROM as part of Fast Company’s 1994 Week—via Slashdot  

casa bonita: a 1974 amusement park restaurant reopens under new management and with a monumental wait-list 

 surgeon general’s warning: US top doctor urges health notices for social media

synchronoptica

one year ago: an AI’s take on emoji (plus synchronoptica), assorted links worth revisiting, a human computer plus Adsense (2003)

five years ago: Sweden’s alcohol monopoly, the UK Carbon Brief plus more links to enjoy

six years ago: a Banksy gallery opens, first issue magazine covers, the War of 1812, a space slingshot, more links worth the revisit plus Trump and Merkel

seven years ago: the US withdrawal from the Paris Treaty plus even more links

nine years ago: tobacco introduced to the Old World, more links, Hocus Pocus plus the nobiliary particle

r/tragedeigh (11. 635)

A conflicted, guilty pleasure has been lately scrolling through the above subreddit, thinking that oh boy—there are some doozies—and while the community is good about disabusing people of names outside of the Anglophone world, there being two sides to the discussion: traditional names with non-traditional spellings and separately trending baby names, there’s yet a sour taste in one’s mouth over the general content, leafing through elementary school students’ year books and calling out names that one disapproves of. Fresh and unranked boys’ names aside—Crockett, Rake, Wilkes, Dossett, Witten, Hallow and Bazley—these decisions, sins of the proud parents get one identified instantly and it behooves one to remember that these are children we are trolling. When I worked in healthcare I recall a particular patient named Atreu, after the alter-ego of the reader of The NeverEnding Story who was portrayed rather prosaically in the movie adaptation as Bastian, whose improving charts always made me happy and one newborn adorably named Voilà—non-conventional spelling if I remember but that’s a tough one. These tragedians should not be forced to be anonymised—nor should their names be underscored with a red squiggle as a misspelling for capitalising on the vagaries of English orthography but some of these attempts to buck convention by the parents have consequences visited on the next generation.

white ford bronco suv (11. 635)

Their murdered bodies discovered shortly after midnight on the thirteenth, OJ Simpson was identified immediately as a person of interest in the stabbings of Simpson’s girlfriend Nicole Brown and her friend Ron Goldman in the courtyards of Brown’s condominium complex in the Brentwood neighbourhood of Los Angeles, in the same community as Simpson’s mansion. Arranged through his attorneys, Simpson had agreed to turn himself into the authorities on this day in 1994 for questioning, but failing to appear as scheduled, Simpson was spotted in the passenger seat of a vehicle traveling the 405 intercity freeway, drove and belonging to a friend and former team-mate. A low-speed police chase ensued, pursuers cautious as reportedly Simpson was threatening to shoot himself, with the spectacle shown live on virtually every television station and tens of thousands of spectators gathering on the shoulders to watch the action. Simpson surrendered from his driveway.

al di meola (11. 634)

From an era when instrumental arrangements not only got music videos, but those performance pieces also received air-play, we quite enjoyed this track from jazz fusion guitarist from New Jersey with Italian root’s 1983 album Scenario, with keyboardist Jan Hammer and drummers Bill Bruford and Phil Collins, which gets exponentially weirder and better as the music progresses. The reoccurring drum sample was later incorporated into Hammer’s theme for the television series Miami Vice.

*    *    *    *    *

 synchronoptica

one year ago: NASCAR Pride (with synchronoptica) plus the exorcism of a werewolf demon (1983)

five years ago: the founding of independent Iceland (1944) plus proposals for a euro supplementary currency

six years ago: a day-trip to Frankfurt plus a pair of mythological prodigies

seven years ago: denizens of the deep, RIP Helmut Kohl plus Trump’s chief council

nine years ago: assorted links to revisit plus social networks in China

then they showed me a world where i could be so dependable, oh, clinical, oh, intellectual, cynical (11. 633)

Rising to number six on the US Billboard Hot 100 on this day in 1979 (the seventh spot in the UK charts), the lead single from Breakfast in America (see previously) was a deeply personal reflection by Supertramp’s singer-songwriter Charles “Roger” Pomfrit Hodgson, honoured with the Ivor Novello prize the following year for best song, both musically and lyrically, about his decade away from home as an adolescent at boarding school and an indictment on the priorities of the educational system for eroding individuality. The critically acclaimed song’s instrumentals feature castanets, saxophone and the tackle sound-effect from a Mattel electronic football game. The version by German techno band Scooter—as Ramp! (The Logical Song)—from 2001 peaked at second place in the United Kingdom, topping the charts in Norway, Ireland and Australia.

*    *    *    *    *

synchronoptica

one year ago: assorted links worth revisiting, Screaming Lord Sutch, chicken orbs plus the exorcism of a werewolf demon (1983)

two years ago: Ziggy Stardust, the monkey puzzle tree plus Bloomsday

three years ago: your daily demon: Bathin, Psycho (1960), more links to enjoy, a summit in Switzerland plus a guide to hurricane name enunciation

four years ago: the sacking of Cambridge (1381), trends in house numbers, renaming US army bases, the first woman in space plus CPT Picard Day

five years ago: microplastics in our bodies, a field of poppies plus graphic designer Otto Aicher

six years ago: purging the Deep State, a visit to Burg Sonnenberg plus black hole solar systems

seven years ago: the Dunning-Kruger effect, IKEA cookery plus experiments in human-dolphin communication

eight years ago: denying a platform to dissenters, Funeral Parade of Roses (1969), coats-of-arms for same-sex couples plus Frankenstein and the year without a summer

8x8 (11. 632)

anabolics: the mainstreaming of casual steroid use  

cover model: the identity of the individual on the iconic Duran Duran album revealed four decades on—via Miss Cellania  

rank and file: a woodland-themed chessboard that rolls up into a log 

the imitation game: researchers claim that GPT-4 has passed the Turing Test—see previously 

london underground: spelunking through the strata of the ancient city  

non-playable character: determinism versus emergence and the question of free will  

ticino: a cache of five-thousand photographs spanning from 1900 to 1930 taken by a poor seed-peddler captures life in a remote, Italian-speaking Swiss canton  

food that makes you gay: stereotypes and gender in what we eat—via Web Curios