Monday 2 May 2016

filmography

The fabulous Madam Jujujive’s Everlasting Blรถrt features this excellent gallery of celebrity animations created by artist and illustrator Prasad Bhat that distils the evolving careers of some of the most recognisable actors costumed as some of their most iconic character roles, like the many incarnations of Matt Damon. The host website, Design Boom, is also an aggregator of other creative digital animators, including some presented on PfRC previously.

Sunday 1 May 2016

the valley of heart’s delight

Rebecca Onion presents a fascinating look at the history of California through the lens of trade-mark applications, which the state introduced before their was any federal framework for branding and intellectual-property, in order to regulate the boom in commerce that came with the Gold Rush. Not only are the heraldic devices of private enterprise (drawn from some of the highlights that the brilliant BibliOdyssey, now mostly active on Twitter, curated) indicative of the wildlife that has been lost—grizzly bears and condors and the aboriginal populations expelled, but there are also subtle and not so subtle codes for supporting white labour over Chinese entrepreneurs for produce, tonics, cigars and other staples.
The post’s title refers to the original name of the San Francisco Bay area before the orchards and vineyards were displaced in the 1970s with the coming of Silicon Valley, whose inventive spirit probably owes a debt of gratitude to this trove of patent applications and the machinery behind it. One can browse the extensive digital archives here.

liiketoimintaryhmรคt

Going postal has a quite different meaning for the letter-carriers in Finland, where for the traditionally low-volume summer months—and fearing their jobs might be in danger of redundancy with fewer people bothering with mail-service—Posti, for a modest fee, will offer to mow the lawns of customers on their beat.
Utilizing existing knowledge and a neighbourly familiarity hard to reproduce, the Finnish government has more pilot projects for the postal-service in community outreach, including detailing mail men and women to check on the elderly and to conduct security patrols. I think that this is fantastic, and an example for other struggling postal networks—which generally only partner with their commercial-competitors, and starkly opposed to the endangered rural outposts in America that can no longer even provide basic financial services where there’s a need and a banking vacuum because of the influence of predatory lending agencies.

punti morti dei telefoni cellulari

As the internet infrastructure of Italy turns thirty, some wonder if it is robust and wide-spread as it should be, but the coverage gaps don’t seem to bother the some four hundred, mostly elderly residents of the small commune of Civitacampomarano in the Molise region, who’ve made due with more traditional outlets and have been outfitted by artist Biancoshock (previously featured) to illustrative the virtues of the non-virtual. All the installations are pretty clever but I especially liked the old village gossip and storyteller standing before her shingle labeled Wikipedia.

anti-marder

Earlier this week the triumphant powering-up of CERN’s Large Hadron Collider after a lengthy but deserved sabbatical was cut short when, reported, a small weasel-like animal (a marten oder Marder ou fouine) sabotaged the whole operation. These creatures are infamous for sneaking under the hoods of cars and gnawing on wires, but this poor luddite apparently not in favour of Man unlocking the secrets of the Universe did not survive, zapped out of existence and is now an anti-Marder.

on top of spaghetti

Via the ever-intrepid Atlas Obscura, we find out that American stockpiles of cheese and other dairy-products are at the highest level in three decades, thanks to a coalition of factors that have glutted the market with European imports to the detriment of domestic products.
I don’t feel that this is an imbalance something like the dreaded TTIP would solve to either party’s satisfaction, as you cannot punish an exporter for making (and we’re partial) a superior product, from cows whose welfare is better looked after. Perhaps the US Dairy Council just needs to get more aggressive in their campaigning and make Wisconsin Colby the new bacon, a flavour touted almost as a condiment for all those years, or craft-beers or the backlash against the anti-gluten leagues.

redrum

Via Kottke’s Quick Links, we discover a wondrous homage to all things appertaining to Stanley Kubrick’s masterpiece of modern horror The Shining from the caretaker of the Overlook Hotel. The driven snows from Hoth, we know already were recycled from the neighbouring film set, but who knew that much of Blade Runner’s aerial footage was also courtesy of the Torrence family as well?