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demon-haunted world: the inscrutable internet of things conspires to keep us from knowing its secrets

box car: the machine-readable bar-code had its origins with freight trains

forge and foundry: the creation and destruction of one of the world’s loveliest typefaces, Doves Press

mechnotherapie: gym-culture in the late nineteenth century

strange women lying in ponds distributing swords is actually a pretty good basis for a system of government

Via Dave Log we learn that whilst trying to escape the oppressive heat vacationing in Cornwall, a young maiden named Matilda went wading in Dozmary Pool and recovered a four-foot long sword—the same place that tradition holds King Arthur returned his blade Excalibur to the Lady of the Lake after being mortally wounded and before being taken off to Avalon. Suspicions that the sword is not authentic and could perhaps be a film prop or a gift left in homage and probably does not confer regency has not detracted from the excitement of finding the artefact.

in-flight entertainment

Fascinatingly, we learn via Just a Car Guy, that the 1925 silent film “The Lost World,” featuring a cameo by its writer, Sir Arthur Conan-Doyle—perhaps better known for his character Sherlock Holmes, was the first in-flight movie screened to commercial passengers in April of that year during a hop from London to Paris. An eccentric takes his team of explorers to search for a lost expedition through the Amazon rain forest to a remote plateau in Venezuela and encounter a sheltered population of dinosaurs and other prehistoric beasts. As clever as this technically challenging act was and how we might take it for granted today, the fact that the reels were highly flammable nitrate carried aloft on a wooden-framed aircraft seemed particularly ill-advised stunt to assay. Luckily, nothing happened on this trip—otherwise, cinemas in the sky might have never taken off. And condemned to infamy, The Lost World might have not gone on to inspire King Kong and the Jurassic Park franchise.

little ben or gmt +1

With its bigger, more famous big brother having gone silent for the next few years, perhaps residents are paying more notice to the clock tower’s commemorative copy on a traffic island by Vauxhall Bridge near Victoria Station.
The cast iron replica was first built in 1892 and subsequently de-commissioned, re-commissioned and moved venues several times. A rather unsettling design choice—especially for an already harried commuter rush to catch a train connection—is that the time-piece is permanently set to Day-Light Savings Time, so that for five months out of the year, it’s displaying the wrong hour. The original thought behind this rather baffling decision seems lost, but is now explained as a gesture of Franco-British solidarity, with a rhyming couplet titled Apology for Summer Time: “My hands you may retard or may advance / My heart beats true for England as well as France,” a reference to how it shows the correct continental time when it behind domestically during the winter months.