7x7 (11. 684)

fernwood 2 night: Martin Mull (RIP) interviews Tom Waits on first talk show satire  

dead heat: polls indicate that the US presidential race is virtually tied, unchanged after the debate performance 

alberta bound: the Great Canadian Song Map—via Web Curios  

tropic of cancer: some of the US falls outside of NATO’s geographic scope—see also  

moved permanently: North American telephone area codes that are also HTTP response headers—see previously—via Kottke  

shelley’s heart: Charles McCarry’s eerily prescient 1995 political thriller  

now benson, i’m going to have to turn you into a dog for a while: Taika Waititi is serialising Terry Gilliams’s 1981 Time Bandits for television

postpositive (11. 683)

Via TYWKIWDBI (indeed), we are brought back to the subject of forming the plural of compound expressions through what are also referred to as post-nominal adjectives, which in English syntax can be employed for subtly and nuance—asking to be directed to the responsible people versus the people responsible or adjacent to something versus something adjacent—and occur in a number of set and archaic phrases, usually derived from Latin and French, like midnight dreary, body politic, proof positive, and the legal term malice aforethought (premeditated, from malice prépensée).

 synchronoptica

one year ago: a marker to symbolise the start of the Anthropocene Epoch (with synchronoptica), a crowd-pirated movie plus assorted links to revisit

seven years ago: LeVar Burton Reads, open-pollination, THC regulations in the EU, a typeface combining Hebrew and Arabic plus Trump as Putin’s useful idiot

nine years ago: exploring Pluto and beyond

i’m in this to complete the job i started (11. 682)

At the conclusion of the NATO summit, held on the trans-Atlantic organisation’s seventy-fifth anniversary—overshadowed to an extent publicly and privately by speculation about the host’s health and ability to
retain high office and counter-measures to Trump-proof the alliance which detracted from business at hand including including containment of Russia and China and Ukraine’s membership question, a defiant Joe Biden participated in a rare solo press-conference, re-affirming his commitment to remaining in the presidential race, not for his own legacy, but for America and to beat his opponent. This crucial and closely scrutinised event was a strong showing, despite some gaffes including referring to Harris as vice-president Trump and Zelenskyy as Putin (Macron and Scholtz were quick to defend Biden’s address saying one could always detect such slips of the tongue with such close monitoring, and probably would not have elicited gasps from the audience were it not for the poor debate performance that intensified calls for him to bow out from his party’s nomination) but may not convince his supporters or quiet the chaos within the party.

splogoverse (11. 681)

Having previously tracked how that the zombification of dormant domains followed the cannibalisation of the oldweb and general enshittification as squats for AI-generated slop, we gave a close reading to this account involving the purchase of a long-abandoned URL of a mainly print newsletter that once hosted their contributions in order to spare their by-line from the indignity visited upon many legacy websites, coopted by prolific impostors for name-recognition (like Red Lobster being private-equitied). Like the above cannibalisation—which seems rather tame in comparison—archived content (which may be also hosted in parallel by a successor publisher) is lightly edited and updated to make it appear fresh and relevant, at least to search engines and advertisers. More from Tedium at the link above.

double-click (11. 680)

Language Log presents an interesting discussion on the latest polarising and overused corporate buzz-word in double-click—as in to focus or drill-down on some matter, which admittedly didn’t at first blush register as a term I’ve heard employed inside or outside the office but then realise that I might just have a blindspot for such phrases—moreover leading to see how quickly technological neologisms are adopted and have staying power, like way English has a whole is peppered with rather fossilised sports metaphors that can have an othering effect for non-native-speakers. Offline (as in a sidebar discussion) and bandwidth (mental capacity) have become pervasive and we use this jargon without noticing it. The article also includes an interview with the inventor of the rapid tap mousing, engineer Bill Atkinson who conceived it for Apple’s Lisa Project back in 1979, who would eschew such talk—buzzwords quickly lose their buzz—and has some regrets about the gesture he designed, thinking that a shift key for computer mice might be more ergonomic and user-friendly.

 

synchronoptica

one year ago: military weather modification programmes (with synchronoptica), The Specials plus assorted links to revisit

seven years ago: May’s Little England, more model villages and company towns plus a capital ß

nine years ago: the collective amnesia of nationhood plus imagining parallel ecosystems

ten years ago: off to Croatia

eleven years ago: graffiti terminology, images of borders plus a spyware roundup

surréalisme (11. 679)

In anticipation of the centenary of the publication of the rival manifestos of opposing factions of the art movement in October of 1924 by Yvan Goll and André Breton, we learn via PRINT magazine that there’s been a call for submissions to reinterpret modern corporate logos in the style of the multidisciplinary group following arising from the liminal space between full awareness and the subconscious (see also),
all emergent after the horrors of the Great War, the 1918 Pandemic and the popular psychiatry of Sigmund Freud. We especially liked the Magritte-inspired reimaging of the Youtube brand with reference to Salvador Dalí and the Belgian artist’s own 1929 “False Mirror,” Le faux miroir, which was also the inspiration for the American television network CBS eye logo.  Much more at the links above.

gallery of the louvre (11. 678)

On the occasion of the record-setting auction in which the pictured painting fetched an incredible three-and-a-quarter million dollars on this day back in 1982 (going to a private collector but on public display), we take a look at the artist, better remembered for his contributions to telecommunications, Samuel Finley Breese Morse. 

First establishing his credentials at a portrait artist and having a success career, several US presidents sat for him, Morse turned to invention in his late forties after encountering a fellow-passenger on a steam ship back from Europe who taught him about electromagnetism and demonstrated some experiments for him. Setting aside the subject painting in 1832 (finished the following year and contains thirty-eight miniature versions of the museum’s treasures—see also), Morse developed a single-wire telegraph, improving on European systems, and overcame the problem of signal-strength and range, a limiting factor, by the addition of relays to boost the distance transmissions could be carried from a few yards to dozens of miles. Patents were awarded but Morse’s invention was not unique or as foundational (see previously here and here) as he liked to present it. Adopted as the international standard for telegraphy, Morse would go on to contribute to his eponymous Code a few years later.  The first public demonstration was held at a steelworks in Morristown, New Jersey with an electronic missive—rather cryptically the message was “A patient waiter is no loser,” sent to a factory two miles away. 

stripware (11. 677)

Via Waxy, we enjoyed this look back at the briefly popular method of scanning code from paper from Cauzin Softstrip. A precursor to the modern QR-Code, programmes were printed in bands, highly compressed so encoding wouldn’t take up too much real estate in the periodicals that carried them (see also), most distributing computer games, like this early version of Minesweeper, Othello, Checks, Free Ski, etc. The scanning wand itself was about the size of a baguette and didn’t always produce the right output—and the games themselves in retrospect didn’t quite deliver in terms of play, though the cover art, illustrations and gaming manuals (plus a little imagination) completed the experience. More from Ironic Sans (previously) at the link above.

synchronoptica

one year ago:Django Reinhardt’s jazz band (with synchronoptica) plus assorted links worth revisiting

seven years ago: more links to enjoy

nine years ago: even more links to revisit

ten years ago: the linocuts of Edward Bawden

eleven years ago: more public outrage over mass-surveillance