step-by-step

Although it may have seemed like adding insult to injury to field-test the innovative idea of incremental architecture in a community just devastated by an earthquake to deliver half-houses, but as Kottke shares with this fascinating look into the subject, perhaps sometimes it takes a crisis to exploit and explore other option, like this neighbourhood in Chile that is not typical public housing. By furnishing a new resident with not a completely finished home but rather an on-going project that can be developed according to how one’s family grows or according to one’s trade, people aren’t just occupants—temporary or long-term—and become co-creators and invested in the building.

merseyside

The only acceptable reclama that for changing a duly christened ship’s namesake would be of course to honour a living and buoyant luminary like Sir David Attenborough. Boaty McBoatface does not go away entirely, however, as one of the auxiliary vessels of this scientific ship, now the RRS Sir David Attenborough and forever twain, is called the “Boaty.”

sietch

Working in conjunction with UC Berkeley and the Peace Corps, a San Francisco-based laboratory has produced a prototype atmospheric well that, powered by wind alone, can harvest litres of clean water. The Water Seer’s turbine push air into a buried condensation chamber (cache) to be collected as needed and is a completely closed system, requiring no extra plumbing or purification-process—very similar to the techniques that Frank Herbert described for the Fremen of the desert world of Arrakis.

filibuster

Consulting the extensive archives of Doctor Caligari’s Cabinet, we learn on this day in 1939, Frank Capra’s Mr. Smith Goes to Washington had its premiere, first shown in the US capital.

Our faithful chronicler provides the additional anecdote that when American films were banned in occupied France a couple years later, many cinemas screened the Jimmy Stewart and Jean Arthur movie as their last picture show before the ban went into effect. One theatre even played it continuously for a month leading up to the prohibition. (More here via Messy Nessy Chic on the entertainment scene of Paris under the Nazis.) You can watch the entire classic at the link up top but I’d suggest that movie theatres might treat audiences to a healthy dose of Democracy before that country votes.

where are the clowns? there ought to be clowns

As if there weren’t already enough pratfalls in politics to contend with or itches to scratch potentially violently in America with a fully-armed populace confronted with hunters of virtual monsters running across their lawns, a viral phenomenon of scary clowns lurking in the shadows, apropos of nothing, with the express intention of frightening others out of their wits has arisen—and been exported to where ever people might express their gratitude for living in a society of privilege and free from want in such ways. What do you think? Far from agents of social justice nor a group that had not already been established as creepy and menacing, professional clowns are now apparently saying their trade is being besmirched, with prominent spokes-clowns ducking out of the public-eye until this craze passes.

my mate marmite

Though it seems we have narrowly averted what could only be described as Marmageddon with the one of the main grocery chains in the UK and a major, multi-national food producer having reached a compromise on the pricing regimes of its suite of brands after an unstable currency and costs fluctuations threatened to make the country’s beloved (or reviled) breakfast-spread a little harder to obtain, the bigger and mostly unseen problem of overhead, profit-margins, product-placement and price-controls still remain.
Consumers and smaller producers without the leverage (because it’s Unilever, you see) of these titans are still not off the hook. Of course, such dealings are happening all the time and could have occurred regardless of the Brexit outcome—but that contentious milieu only made the negotiations or bullying visible—and the industry turns on the subsidies of Milk Trusts and Egg Councils and the greased recommendations that favour processed foods over more wholesome ones without the influence of vertical monopolies. What do you think? I’ll bet that this isn’t the last spat in the supermarket aisles.

zenith in blue jeans

Following the tradition marketing wisdom of the 1970s, any product could be made better once swathed in denim, as Weird Universe informs, showcasing this limited edition television model called the Sidekick from Zenith. Be sure to visit the website for more details plus a related link to a Gremlin automobile upholstered in Levi’s jeans from around the same time.