6x6

ah, but a man’s reach should exceed his grasp: the three decade mystery of the Toynbee tiles that urge mankind to aim for the impossible in order to survive

muchołapka: unfinished and abandoned Nazi construction project in Poland that may be the landing platform for die Glocke or the skeleton of a cooling tower for a reactor

tobacconistas: interesting back to back postings on cigarettes with the taste and aroma of marijuana (but not the high) and lettuce smokes for those wanting to quit

defying the laws of gravity: for what would have been his seventieth birthday, Freddie Mercury has an asteroid named after him

if IKEA made SUVs: a flat-pack all-terrain vehicle

slate and shingle: omnibus of clever chalk board art that drew in more and more patrons

even old new york was once new amsterdam

Our faithful chronicler Doctor Caligari informs among many other things that occurred on this day, the Dutch surrendered the settlement of Nieuw Amsterdam (formerly Nouvelle-Angoulême, claimed for the French crown by a Florentine explorer) to the British in 1664 after the Duke of York (the future James II) invaded by sending a fleet of warships to the harbor, under the auspices of his brother, Charles II.
 Somewhat ironically residents were unhappy with the puritanical strictures of their current governor Peter Stuyvesant and welcomed English rule and the territory was handed-over without a fight. A decade later, however, New York was re-christened New Orange for a brief period of time when it was re-taken by the Netherlands during the Second Anglo-Dutch War.

clairvoyance

The gang at Hyperallergic take another field trip to a museum exhibition—this time to see the ink and watercolour abstract paintings of Georgiana Houghton in London. These swirling scrolls strike me as very modern and surreal—almost like the visions of electric sheep in Deep Dreaming but less nightmarish—but were produced in Victorian times, with Houghton’s brush acting as a medium for the missives of angles and saints or sometimes channeling old masters.
Far ahead of her time, the reception of the public was confused at best as the works went against all the accepted artistic conventions of the time—despite the strong interest in spiritualism and séances in England at the time. Although largely forgotten and overshadowed, awareness of Houghton’s contributions and insight is again gathering notice. Clairvoyance in the context of the paranormal or extra-sensory perception simply means “clarity of vision” but there are terms for all the senses plus intuition (claircognisance): clairsentience—psychic through feel and touch to include knowing an object’s provenance and future just by holding it, clairofactus—psychic through smell, clairaudience—psychic through hearing noises or voices, and clairgustance—psychic through taste. I wonder if there were psychic chefs back in Victorian times, as well.

7x7

etaoin shrdlu: a documentary of the final edition of the New York Times printed with hot metal typesetting

miner ‘49er: Street View of Old San Francisco recreated with thousands of archival photographs

quick response: generate animated QR codes that are fully machine readable

parts of speech: we unconsciously follow a certain order of precedence when using adjectives

true colours: friends describe colours to a girl who was temporarily blind and really touch all the senses, from Nag on the Lake


dynamation: the evolution of stop-motion special effects, via the Everlasting Blört

shotgun wedding: the story of the tiny Scottish border village that was the destination for eloping couples of the nineteenth century

old dutch master

There is a curious museum in Vienna dedicated to counterfeit works of art right across the street from the very genuine Hundertwasser Haus, that I regret we missed, but will be sure to visit next time—if for nothing else by the even stranger case of one of the museum’s contributors, Dutch painter and forger Henricus Antonius van Meegeren. A skilled but perhaps uninspired painter in his own right, van Meegeren’s contemporaries dismissed his work as too derivative and unoriginal, and so the artist turned to making copies of masterpieces. While Europe was embroiled in World War II, the Nazi command was acquiring enormous amounts of treasure and art work from all over Europe, and reportedly there was somewhat of a rivalry between Hitler and Reichsmarschall Hermann Göring to amass the finest collection.
Göring was surely pleased as punch to have acquired a Vermeer from an art dealer in Amsterdam before his boss. After the war, this painting of Christ and the Adulteress was traced back to van Meegeren, who was summarily thrown into prison for collaboration and for selling a priceless piece of the Netherlands cultural heritage to the Nazis. This crime carried the death-sentence, but in his defense, van Meegeren proclaimed, “I didn’t sell that dirty Nazi a Vermeer, since I painted it myself.” The authorities were doubtful because art experts had vouched for the painting’s authenticity, but van Meegeren was allowed demonstrate his talents with an easel, canvas and palette brought to his jail cell. Experts reexamined more supposed Vermeers—including some hanging in the Rijksmuseum purchased dearly by the Dutch government to prevent them from falling into enemy hands—and found that van Meegeren had duped dozens of people out of millions of guilders. The charges for forgery and fraud didn’t carry as severe penalties and his sentence was commuted to a year in prison. Opinion polls conducted in 1947 after van Meegeren’s release placed him among the most popular war-time heroes of the Netherlands, one cunning enough to fool the entire art world establishment plus the commander of the Nazi armed forces, Göring—who on learning that he had bought a counterfeit acted as if he realised for the first time that there was evil and dishonesty in the world.

memory alpha

To celebrate the thirtieth anniversary of the debut of the Star Trek franchise in 1996, NBC concocted a special cross-over with the then top rated television programme and the present incarnation of the space-western, with sheriff CPT Janeway and the cast of the series Fraiser (without Kelsey Grammer being unfortunately already engaged in being CPT Morgan Bateman of the USS Bozeman stuck in a time-loop for nine decades). Though not as epic as a true cross-over episode like Phyllis Diller hailing on Gilligan’s Island with the Harlem Globetrotters on the Love Boat meet the Scooby Gang nor quite as cringe-worthy as a Very Star Wars Christmas, watching this is nonetheless pretty fantastically awkward.