5x5: link roundup

the hand-held’s tale: fascinating essay from Æon magazine would we went from a world where the powerful and elite only deigned to hold and handle symbols of power (ceremonial orbs and scepters) to a world where the slave and tycoon wield the same gadget

it’s sew easy: DIY Space Invaders kimono

avenida diagonal: Parisian graffiti artist’s huge mural on an apartment block in Portugal looks like a portal to another dimension and reminds us of disruptive camouflage

mirabilia: gallery of images from a thirteenth century Arabic treatise called “Marvels of Thing Created and Miraculous Aspects of Things Existing”—mirabilia being the genre of study that aims to help explain some of the world’s geographical and cosmological puzzles

obvious plant: in efforts to make museum visitors slow their frantic pace and take time to really appreciate the art, British galleries are turning the experience into a scavenger hunt of sorts to find the fakes hidden among the masterpieces 

antication or computer says no

Though am I certain that more frequent- (and more sadly, first-time) fliers have far worst horror stories with far more invested and every once and a while we all need the rough reminder why it is that we have a splendid little caravan to ramble about in and have mostly forsaken the air-carriers for what they are (great-attractors of dormant Icelandic volcanos and terrorism), it was really sobering to experience one’s weekend holiday plans so transformed into their opposite.
Albeit air-travel might only be about reassurance (since there’s little else outside of the engine-room and shipyard that one can do) and the industry ought to attract such people with a native talent for customer-service, or at minimum—deflection, I cannot really blame the ground crew, since their silence and distain were clearly products of the received kind, fearful of losing their jobs if they went off script, it was extremely challenging not to be in the here and now when information was withheld about incremental flight delays until it was too late to find alternative transportation on one’s own.
This crowded and copy-cat market of discount providers has brought a lot of amateurs to the field, and I do assign blame to the business model whose overhead is on the knife’s edge and any cost-cutting measure, opacity and intimidation being foremost because they’re free, will be deployed. Admitting culpability is an expensive prospect, though the rioting mob of declined vacationers both coming and going either for business or pleasure whose simple request were rebuffed was incorrigible. Security was called in as angry fliers breached the counter and took pictures of the staff, distracting them while another captured what was on their computer screens. No goon-squad dispersed the lingering throngs but the host airport did not do much to correct the conduct of this under-performer. I would recommend doing research in one’s carrier’s track-record except that these issues are far too common-place, whether it be a discounter or a private jet. This was the first time that security-theatre was not the most harrowing part of flying, and for the privilege of being born aloft, for the time it took, we well could have driven there. Besides the employees themselves, I feel especially sorry for those who couldn’t have.

atlas obscura

Messy Nessy Chic shares her discovery in a beautiful and winding gallery of the amazing art nouveau backdrops of Belgian illustrator François Schuiten.
Son to a dual-architect family and with echoes of the surreal, Schuiten was able to conjure up fantastic urban landscapes the graphic novel series Les Cités obscures that debuted in the early 1980s and whose franchise—with spin-offs and with different collaborators over the years—continues to this day about the splintering of a parallel humanity into sovereign city states that fosters unique cultures and styles—sort of like the future that some internet tycoons have imagined of ocean-plying floating islands (or lassoed asteroids) of independence and popular consent. Schuiten’s imaginative artwork is furthermore a revolt (especially in the volume called Brüsel) against the phenomenon known as Bruxellisation, one not exclusive to his native city and perhaps a rejuvenation effort that his parents were complicit in (or rallied against), wherein historic district were demolished in favour of utilitarian, almost brutally so, modern buildings—perhaps the vision of the above tycoons. Browse the extensive arcade of images and learn more about Les Cités obscures and their contributing civil engineers at the link up top.

rectified readymades or metamix

Sometimes the remastering gets to be a little too much, like those list of factoids, listicles or treacly stories of unlikely animal friendships (like the very special but short-lived relationship between a grizzly bear and a pastrami sandwich) or zombified anything, for me at least. This gallery of “Twelve Disney Princesses Reimagined as Cats Reimagined as Sharks that are not Disney Princesses,” courtesy of Kottke’s Quick Links, perfectly captures that descend into absurdity and perhaps dankhood.

bathing beauties or adult-swim

From around the mid-eighteenth century through the Victoria Era, females wanting to take the sea air and enjoy a day at the beach were wheeled out past the maddening crowd of potentially gawking and leering males in personal stage-coaches, as Presurfer informs.
Etiquette and modesty (though these rules were recent impositions and far different from the practise of mixed skinny-dipping) dictated dictated that women bathers would enter a mobile changing booth, “bathing machines,” in formal street garb and disrobe, doffing her dress in for an equally concealing swim-suit and in the shallows, be allowed to frolic on a tether or at the strong hand of attendant. After this experience, the swimmer would be escorted back, drying off and donning her street clothes again for the sake of decorum. Maybe this production is less showy and less inclusive than a burkini.

lingua franca or brexit, stage left

To the disdain of the Maltese and Irish—whose concerns are being downplayed as they elected to make their first official languages Maltese and Gaelic, respectively, some in Brussels want to see the use of the English language in official parlance scaled back. Although there’s no legal status accorded to the “working languages” of the European Union and French and German are only spoken by tradition, some feel that the UK should take its linguistic and cultural dominance with it. What do you think of this proposal? I am already a little fearful that a large percentage of the world might forget about Europe as some byzantine amalgam that’s just alien and just the end of some long, strange continuum of foreignness without the Anglo-Saxon element.

gort-appointed attorney

Though I’ve always dreaded the day when torrents of tut-tutting virtual attorneys scour the internet like ambulance-chasers seeking out and perhaps even provoking legal contests, as yet another presence that is liable to force people from the web, I do tip my hat to the young individual who has created a rather Turing complete electronic barrister that has, pro bono, appealed nearly of a quarter of a million parking-violations, winning far more than half and getting human (and perhaps robotic ones too) drivers out of four million dollars in fines in New York and London. I suspect, however, the metropolises might turn litigious in kind.

books—check ‘em out!

The Vault’s Rebecca Onion has a nice appreciation of the Mid-Century Modern posters of Mary Joan Egan and Cynthia Amrice, commissioned as part of the US Congress’ Library Services and Construction Act of 1962 that sought to provide federal assistance to public libraries in order to expand their services—especially in blighted and rural areas. Sadly, due to shrinking budgets, the initiatives have been all but discontinued since the mid nineteen-nineties, but this gallery is a nice reminder of what libraries were (and are) capable of and, beyond their educational value, makes one appreciate how technologically astute these neighbourhood institutions could be with micro-film readers, photo-copiers, typewriters and film projectors and reach back to a time when office equipment seemed more magical and curious.