We are treated to another example of persuasive cartography (previously) in this 1931 map of the Isle of Pleasure published by Houston, Texas draughtsman and architect H. J. Lawrence, two years before the experiment with Prohibition in the United States (1920-1933).
Artist Dima Yarovinski has created a rather visually arresting illustration of the contractual boilerplate that we pretend to give our assent to in her installation called “I agree” in the form of colourful unfurled scrolls.
Currently on display at the Aalto University of Helsinki, the footnote to each scroll gives the word count and the average time commitment it would take to read, comprehending the jargon or not, what terms that the user was accepting in exchange for their dalliance. Incidentally, the longest scroll is for Instagram and runs just over seventeen thousand words, which would take approximately an hour and a half to read through. Fine-print has consequences despite the innocuous reputation it likes to cultivate for itself. I appreciated too how in the spirit of full disclosure, the source site in the discussion posts its parent publisher’s terms of service in full and with bullet points
We’re enjoying catching up by working our waythrough back episodes of the quiz-show podcast Go Fact Yourself created and hosted by frequent Wait, Wait Don’t Tell Me! panellist Helen Hong and J Keith van Straaten. Clever and educational, each instalment is like every superlative sketch of Saturday Night Live celebrity Jeopardy! but with teachable moments, especially when players’ self-styled category of special knowledge take a deep-dive and are assessed against guest subject matter experts. I’d recommend beginning with the first episode but one really stand-out early podcast involved Disneyland and Michael Jackson is also a good place to start. Tell me what you think and about your own area of expertise.
The old footbridge features—as do many bridges across Europe—a statue of John of Nepomuk, a fourteenth century saint who was royal confessor and counsellor to the Queen of Bohemia. Despite threat of death, Nepomuk refused to betray the privilege of priest and confessor to a jealous King Wenceslas who ordered Nepomuk cast into the Vltava (Moldau) for being obstinate.
The martyr’s most famous representation is the figure on the Charles Bridge (Karlลฏv most) in Prague on the spot where he was drowned. Because of his fate and discretion, John of Neomuk is the patron saint protector from drowning and floods as well as respect for the seal of attorney-client privilege, doctor-patient confidentiality and comparable arrangements.
Not without controversy on both sides of the debate, Venice installed turnstiles (tornelli) and gates to limit access and control crowds, suggesting that priority would be given to residents over the throngs of tourists and holders of public transportation passes.
In practise, the move was probably more symbolic and resulted in few bottlenecks or people being turned away entirely and probably did send the signal that perhaps tourists should try to book off-season or head for less popular areas. What do you think? The gates’ detractors argued, however, that perhaps more ought to be done to dissuade cruise ships from dominating the port or cheap flights from flocking to regional airports and divert visitors well before they arrive and such queuing and quotas make it seem like the authorities are affirming and reinforcing the amusement atmosphere already associated with heavily-visited areas.
Having recently been reminded myself how damaging and disruptive the practise of palm oil harvesting can be for society the ecology, this interview with artist and activist Ernest Zacharevic from Colossal struck us as quite resonant and important.
Zacharevic has partnered with an array of international and local artists to raise awareness of devastation that what has been portrayed as a sustainable industry has caused for the people and environment of Indonesia—the former by short-term employment opportunities and a one-time infusion of revenue in exchange for selling off the lands of indigenous peoples and part of the country’s patrimony and the latter by habitat destruction, monoculture and eventual desertification—all exacerbated by the popularity of coconut oil, sourced from the same plant and plantations, and palm oil as a bio-fuel, diverting more agricultural resources from nutrition towards green-washing.
Despite having muddled through for the past seven-hundred years of letter deliveries and liaisons without the regiment of named streets and numbered addresses, the medieval French town of Sarlat-la-Canรฉda in Dordogne is finally bowing to pressures from telecommunication providers, who demand that municipal authorities adopt formal street names and put up signage for its pristine fourteenth century old town.
The ten thousand residents of Sarlat, a contender for inscription on UNESCO’s rolls, are rushing to find fitting namesakes for a surveyed two-hundred nineteen avenues and alleyways by the end of May in order to have fibre-optic cables installed. Here is an alternative proposal for a system of geolocators, or rather INSEE (Institut national de la statistique et des รฉtudes รฉconomiques) code, that the request and reform reminded me of. Local guests—the town being the backdrop for a number of historic cinematic protrayals—and national heroes are among the nominees.
We’d heard of renditions of songs being made with outmoded media players beforehand and of efforts to curate the endangered sounds of technology before for coming generations that might never appreciate the satisfying clangs and clunks of mechanical relays or baud versus bandwidth. We had not, however, sampled the repertoire of any of the artists behind this preservation movement until being introduced by Things Magazine to Paweล Zadroลผnia and his extraordinary Floppotron.
