hiermit hermit

Previously, thanks to Futility Closet’s excellent podcast, we learned of the curious eighteenth century custom among the landed gentry and hopeless romantics of England of employing individuals as professional hermits to lend their estates certain airs, but I never before made the connection that the caretaker of a hermitage is also a hermit, until informed that a divorced, former police officer will be taking up solitary residence at the bottom of Verena Gorge. According to tradition, the venerated saint that the Swiss valley is named after passed through the area, having traveled from Egypt. A contemplative theologian in retirement, the new hermit won’t be able to abandon his manners and social graces altogether, however, as quite a few hikers come through, and in fact the last incumbent resigned her commission over the amount of tourists.

6x6

utopia planitia: Elon Musk’s seven year plan for colonising Mars

working-title: David Lynch was once considered as director for Return of the Jedi, originally called Revenge of the Jedi

sepia: amazing true colour slides of America in the 1930s and 1940s

dangerous minds: trading cards of thoughtful and revolutionary intellectuals

forced perspective: one dedicated individual’s mission to document vanishing ghost train ride attractions

pen pineapple apple pen: a bizarre but catchy musical performance by singer-songwriter Pico Taro

photobomb

Via the always entertaining Everlasting Blört comes a gallery of early contenders for the Comedy Wildlife Photography Awards, a competition celebrating the amazing diversity and overwhelming silliness of the animal kingdom. Begun just last year and hailed with much fanfare, the competition also benefits the Born Free Foundation, which works to keep wildlife in the wilds. The 1 October deadline for entrants is fast approaching for those shutter-bugs out there.

freedom of disinformation act

The inquiring and persistent Matt Novak, writing for Gizmodo’s Paleofuture, brings us the Cold War curiosity called the United States Information Agency, superseded by the State Department’s Broadcasting Board of Governors, whose media and divisions were charged with the mission advocating US policies and values abroad—in other words, propaganda or counter-propaganda.
Perhaps the most memorable public-relations campaigns that the organisation ran is the still extant Voice of America radio service (although a 1976 act mandated that the content be fair and balanced and news-casters had to get a little more creative with their message amid human-interest allegories) and a series of spaghetti-Westerns produced covertly and at astronomical expense called Project Pedro meant to make the neutral, rather laissez-faire government of Mexico to take a stance against Communist ideologies infiltrating Latin America, but by way of introductions for the doctrinaire and indoctrinating USIA, there was also a fictitious by-line (nom de plume, nom de guerre), a prolific polyglot economist Guy Sims Fitch, that was a catchment for pro-American monetary policy and distributed to news outlets all over the globe, usually as cheerful op-ed pieces in praise of the wages of capitalism (maybe such shill articles today might be in praise of TTIP and the like)—except in domestic papers, that is. Novak’s FOIA filing to retrieve some information on those writers and editors that wrote under this pseudonym was foiled owing to a technicality that the successor intelligence agencies cite for secret identities, since there’s no way for government to confirm or deny the consent of anonymous, unidentified authors to having their private writing given public attribution.

neighbourliness or service interventions

Courtesy of Kottke’s Quick Links, I am pouring over this list of one hundred and one small civil- and civic-engineering hacks that one could apply to any community to improve it. Just a few select ideas that could be pitched to municipal-councils or could shame city governments into action:

66. Turn snow piles into sidewalk ice bars
79. Host a movie out-of-doors
98. Map your public produce—stray fruits and vegetables that go unharvested
13. Guerrilla gardening revolution
71. Become a tour guide and showcase your neighbourhood

What do you think? Was there one idea (or a hatful) that resonated with you that you will try? Surely all of us can try a little urban exploration, at minimum.

wintertuin ou hôtel particulier

Thanks to Messy Nessy Chic for piquing my curiosity with this divinely art nouveau glimpse of the Hôtel Hannon in Brussels, a Hôtel Particulier being a grand, detached townhouse in French. A wealth and successful petro-chemical engineer named Édouard Hannon in 1902 commissioned an architect friend to design him a home in the city. The house was transformed into a showcase for some of the finest art of the period, with fine frescos and mosaics, stained-glass from the Tiffany tradition and Émile Gallé, who contributed lamps, vases and other bric-a-brac. Tragically, the family only were able to reside there a couple of years and the mansion was left to decay, until having purchased the property, the borough opened house as a museum in 1989 after extensive restoration.