lido deck

In addition to knowing how to keep their owners’ yachts ship-safe and seaworthy, captains and crews now expected to have better than rudimentary knowledge when it custody of priceless works of art.
As Super Punch informs, there’s a trend among the ultra-wealth to keep their masterpieces on board, prompting conservators to instruct shipmates on the art protection and preservation. While it is ostensibly better that the work is enjoyed rather than locked away as a store of value, it does seem to court disaster and a quick means to bring about ruination.

open access

We enjoyed perusing the curated, select gallery of some of the highlights from a trove of over thirty-four thousand artworks and artefacts that the venerable Cleveland Museum of Art has just released to the public wholly royalty-free and without restrictions.
While such proclamations are common-place and some may doubt their newsworthiness—arguing that the institution is just catching up with a movement that ought to have been universally practised long ago, but such events are not just laudable but also a gateway to explore and inspect a happily crowded field. Take this image—for example, of Nathaniel Olds by local resident Jeptha Homer Wade, an itinerate portrait painter whose interest and salesmanship grew out of experiments with early daguerreotypy and synthesised into an interest in the burgeoning technology of the telegraph. The industrialist and eventual philanthropist, benefactor of many educational and cultural institutions as was the exhibiting museum itself, was one of the foundered of Western Union. We’ve yet to uncover anything about the subject—however. Much more to explore at the links above.

the day the music died

On this evening in 1959, a chartered 1947 Beechcraft Bonanza (the six-seater light aircraft still in production, making it the longest continuously distributed model in history), took off in blizzard conditions from the Mason City Municipal Airport, piloted by Roger Peterson. Shortly after takeoff, the plane crashed into cornfield outside of neighbouring Clear Lake, Iowa, killing the pilot and compliment of passengers, Ritchie Valens, Buddy Holly and the Big Bopper—J P Richardson.

la fête de la chandeleur

While parts of the world are obsessing with weather prognosis as determined by a groundhog, in France (and other Francophone parts, I’m sure) Candlemas (the presentation of Jesus at the Temple,
inducting the infant into the Jewish faith and community) is attended with the Festival des Chandelles. In addition to a rainy day (quand ii pleut) signalling further forty more days of stormy weather (depending on who you ask), the days is also marked by making crêpes and galettes, which symbolise the waxing Sun, harking back to pre-Christian syncretism, and the coming spring after a long winter.

social capital or the dunwich horror

As social media behemoth Facebook is proving that bad behaviour does indeed pay, profits up and still the darling of uninventive advertisers, grifters and undermining elements despite the disdain it has for its critics and its users’ privacy and well-being, more and more studies are demonstrating the positive benefits of cutting the platform out of your routine.
“The most merciful thing in the world, I think, is the inability of the human mind to correlate all its contents.” It has not been quite a year yet since I was persuaded to deactivate my account—rebuffing the cloying pleas to come back—and there was a time early on that I thought that the platform could have if not reformed and redeemed itself could merely demonstrate that it wasn’t something sinister and merely a wanton utility, an agnostic force majeure like other technological giants, but it’s since squandered that hope and I’ve not regretted the decision. “An isolated person requires correspondence as a means of seeing his ideas as others see them, and thus guarding against the dogmatisms and extravagances of solitary and uncorrected speculation.”