6x6

miracle on thirty-sixth street: the tangled story of the popularisation of Christmas lights by a Thomas Edison hanger-on, via Strange Company

ground level ozone: following Rotterdam, Beijing has installed an air-pollution scrubbing tower that is improving atmospheric quality and reducing smog, via Nag on the Lake 
gentlemen only, ladies forbidden: for a taste of what a Trump administration might mean for America, one should look to his golf resort in Scotland, via Boing Boing

biomediated structures: Martian rover Spirit has stumbled across a landscape that looks a lot like terrestrial hot springs and may be a sign of ancient life

facepalm: an illustrated 1644 treatise aims to codify the universal language of hand gestures

eat an apple every day then see the doctor anyway: an appreciation of the art of the fruit sticker plus a calendar for this ephemera that might encourage healthier eating habits

colour by number

Far more than just previsioning the popularity and therapeutic nature of the colouring book for grown-ups, British illustrator Walter Crane was one of the most prolific and influential of his generation and really embodies the spirit of the Arts and Crafts movement.
Crane’s contributions were numerous and across many different formats, but Crane found himself increasingly isolated and was blacklisted for his Socialist leanings, his work appearing in many anarchist and social justice publications and scandalised himself by defending his American cousins who incited the riots that lead to the Haymarket Massacre. Unable to curb his compulsion to draw and create—with or without a public outlet, Crane turned to children’s literature, including this 1889 Painting Book of fairy tales and nursery rhymes. Although denied a proper voice among his contemporaries, Crane inserted his thoughts on design and composition and what the æsthetic of the age ought to be within the details of his complex and allegorical illustrations.

muckraker

Ahead of next year’s national elections in both France and Germany and just days after accepting Obama’s tacit challenge to the Chancellor to keep on rocking in the Free World and announcing her intent to run for a fourth term, the administration of Angela Merkel is crafting plans to make the acoustics better in the echo chamber of phoney news and scare-mongering.
Of course we can’t really alleviate the situation until or unless we can see ourselves individually as at fault as much all those anonymous demographic, test-audience pastiches of useful idiots or that muckraking and yellow-journalism (I tend bundle all these terms together and toss in carpet-baggers and robber-barons as well) have always been around—just with a higher bar to hurdle to curry interest beyond small groups—and it’s our responsibility to use the same platform to defuse or at least navigate the minefield of exaggeration and slander. One legislative reform—which might be long in coming or a dangerous dismantling of freedom of speech—the German government is open to would be regulating social media in the same way as it does the press, making forums responsible for the veracity of the material that they host. What do you think about that? Social media platforms are our course private entities whose most uncensored model has mostly been profitable for them up until more and not the guarantors of freedom of expression. In as such, they have not been charged with the same degree of integrity and responsibility as traditional journalism. What does independence from government interference mean when an organisation does not need to look after its own repute? Does it become an arm of the state media then and something with an off-switch? If the campaign strategists behind this populist furore in the US are already plotting their succession plans for European elections, perhaps a judicious nudge for democratic principles is in order.

rapprochement

Over pledges to endorse the return of capital punishment within its borders and fully drain the swamp after staged coup attempt of the summer, Turkey is vocally protesting EU misgivings about the prospect of every joining the economic bloc over its poor human rights record and the way things are tending that run counter to the principles that Brussels tries to uphold—threatening to throw open its frontiers and no longer impede transit of refugees on to EU territories.
The Turkish government, furthermore, is not pleased with the slow manner in which the EU is disbursing the three billion euro aid package agreed upon in exchange for Turkey’s care-taking and triaging of the refugees. Detecting the potential for corruption, the EU has been judicious in remitting these alimony payments, issuing them in small instalments and directly funding projects rather than paying Turkey to manage it. As uncivil and incredulous as this is and people are being used as pawns in the purge and in the surge, it was as precocious to believe that Turkey would live up to its end of the bargain as it was for Turkey to believe that it could ever really ingratiate itself and be given membership. “Throwing open the floodgates” sounds ominous but I don’t think that Turkey was doing a very good job controlling its borders in the first place—and probably more walls will follow in response. Perhaps with everything else going on in the world, those B-List whingers and their demands, fulminations will be dismissed as merely obnoxious and not to be engaged with diplomacy or plied with politics.

turkey in the straw, turkey in the hay

Reeling collectively still with the news of the untimely but recent natural death of Courage—the first turkey that was graciously pardoned by President Barack Obama in a strange ceremony that annually reasserts the dominance of humans over overfed domesticated fowl, we learn, via a historical newspaper clipping spotted by Weird Universe that the tradition of clemency (and I’d like to see a turkey that could commit capital crimes) is a fairly recent one.
Until the administration Ronald Reagan, turkeys presented to the White House were in general not allowed to retire to greener pastures and were dealt their death knell at the hand of the president. I had believed it was at least as storied and established as some of the other strange folk-practises that the US has cultivated—seemingly for lack of the mythos of other, older nations, like having a groundhog forecast the weather or Columbus Day. On the occasion of Eisenhower’s gala feast, as the article states, an animal psychologist urged him to subject the sacrificial birds to hypnotism in order that they be killed more humanely and so they’d taste better, having not been seized with a rush of adrenaline before going in the oven. With the long life of Tater and Tot secured just yesterday, Obama has set free his last turkey and I wonder if going forward, whoever goes afoul of the court won’t be able to count on its mercy.

hoppípolla

The legendary Icelandic band Sigur Rós will be remixing one of their most popular songs (which in its original version accompanied the 2006 launch of the first Planet Earth series hosted by Sir David Attenborough) for the next iteration.
Very particular about commercial ventures, the band was however all too pleased to rework one of its signature tunes for the sake of environmental awareness and showcasing some of the spectacular creatures that our presence is imperilling. See teasers for the latest instalment and listen to the song at the Grapevine above and if you’ve not yet seen it, check out this amazing, nail-biting iguana vs snakes chase-scene from the pilot episode of Planet Earth II here.

old glory or oconus

Via Hyperallergic, we’re treated to a gallery of submissions for the radical redesign of the US flag in 1958 in order to accommodate and highlight the incorporation of Hawaii and Alaska as the forty-ninth and fiftieth states as by President Dwight Eisenhower, perhaps as a symbolic end to America’s imperial aspirations—having gone from sea to shining sea and then some.

More than three-thousand entries, some variations on the same theme and others highly abstract, hopeful, patriotic and provocative, came in at the time and though the bulk has gone unseen since examined, considered and dismissed by the jurors, all the designs have been conserved in the archives of the Eisenhower Presidential Library in Abilene, Kansas. A new coffee-table book has collected some of the best of them for your consideration.  Check out the link up top for more information and alternate flags.