7x7

bathdoom: interior remodelling as a first-person shooter game

philosophical zombies: the Turing Test for AI consciousness

waste management: budget cuts are rubbishing recycling programmes and good intentions on the municipal level in the US and elsewhere, via Digg

das botenkind: a radio host who broadcasted for the US Army in West Berlin had her sobriquet translated as “Newsbabe”

human hoberman: an mesmerising synchronised dance on a slick floor

brick-and-mortar: gorgeous letterpress posters of artful arranged Lego reminiscent of printed circuit boards

lotus eaters: parrot junkies are having the poppy harvest in Madhya Pradesh

covalence

On this day (Old Style, 18 March 1869 on the Gregorian Calendar—it’s nice that this anniversary comes around again), one hundred fifty years ago, Professor Dmitri Mendeleev having previously formulated the Period Laws formally presented his Periodic Table as a way of arranging and understanding the elements to the Russian Chemical Society, titling his presentation The Dependence Between the Properties of the Atomic Weights, positing that the element arranged according to their mass exhibit an apparent periodicity of properties and to expect the discovery of yet unknown elements from gaps in his schema.

always-ready absent present

Our sincere thanks to Things Magazine for the bit of disabuse that comes in knowing that we are not so alone in begrudging our sense of nostalgia and feeling conflicted over it through the knowledge that the concept and discipline of hauntology did not originate with its champion and evangelist Scarfolk Council but is rather an invention with some provenance as being coined by Jacques Derrida.
Though dating back to the early 1990s, the term has really flourished lately with the recycling of familiar and retro themes that feels sometimes to the exclusion of anything risky or original, the concept is the ontological burden of disjointed time, as a ghostly apparition is only properly so in the moment it manifests and separated from its historical association though we as the haunted might see past relations as persistent things. What are some examples that have awakened in you that fit this category? Please do share.

port-of-call

In a delightful piece for Lapham’s Quarterly—which comes to us via Coudal Partners’ Fresh Links—Elizabeth Della Zazzera ponders that: “The Odyssey, if you strip away enough allegory and myth, might serve as a travel guide for the Ægean Sea: which islands to avoid if you hate escape rooms, which cruise to skip of you always forget to pack earplugs, where to get that beef that angers the gods. But how does Odysseus’ trek across the wine-dark sea map onto an actual map of the Mediterranean?”
As much as scholars might debate the merits of trying to map a myth, the places mentioned along our hero’s circuitous route for all their fantastic inhabitants and the weight of allegory and iconography are real and readily identifiable. Though an abundance of wholly serious academics have undertaken the task of creating gazetteers (long before Troy was rediscovered as a real place and not some Homeric conceit) and more recently cruises commissioned only semi-cynically for the literary criticism crowd that trace Odysseus’ odyssey and journey home exist to attest to the allure of charting a narrative, one has to wonder what one misses with interpretations and readings that adhere too closely to the text and correspondence to places one can visit.

man on the street

We enjoyed reading this bit of reporting on the news genre of “Florida Man,” derivatives of an archetypal incident from 2015 that involved a launching an alligator through the window of a drive-thru fast food joint which share a few common traits to the trope—alcohol and drugs, animals, theme parks, etc.
The frequency of occurrence prompted one Miami business, the Injury Claim Coach (not a spoof name), to conduct a scientific meta-study and developed a scoring system, the backronym Firearms, Locations, Objects, Reason for Arrest, Injuries Drugs and Alcohol, and Animals, to rank the finest examples. Check out some of the textbook crimes and misdemeanours at NPR at the link up top.

parcours du combatant

Building on the training regime developed by French naval officer Georges Hébert at the turn of the last century, which espoused people be above all limber and spry—as indigenous tribes hunting in Africa he observed whilst stationed there—father and son Raymond and David Belle codified a range of movements to overcome obstacles by the path of least resistance during the 1980s before proliferating into popular culture as parkour.
The philosophical component of reclaiming spaces and individual humility in practise and challenge surpass the athleticism of leaping (pylometrics are study of jumping and the like) and vaulting of the participants—a traceur or traceuse, as they trace a path through the course. It’s of course something that takes a lot of slow, deliberate training and not something one just dives into without risking injury, so be careful out there but it’s certainly something to fantasise about and work towards bouncing off walls and scaling buildings like a stunt-double.

textilkunst

Born 5 March 1897, Swiss textile artist Gunta Slölzl (†1983) had a formative and fundamental role in leading the Bauhaus school’s weaving workshop.  Find more posts about the movement and its principals here, here, here and here.
Having joined the movement just after its inception, she became a full master (the first female to achieve this level though the atmosphere was rather lacking in collegiality with most of the directors dismissing fabrics as craft and women’s work) in 1928 and revitalised the weaving and dyeing studios, mentoring many students and experimented with synthetic materials. A gallery of Stölzl’s works can be found here along with other Bauhaus disciplines cab be found at the link here.

+44

Installed at the beginning of the month and in place for twenty-eight more days until the UK’s scheduled departure from the European Union, the always brilliant Nag on the Lake informs that artist Joe Sweeney has placed a telephone booth on Dungeness beach on the south east coast of England that invites public comment and for a forum (telephones can be intimate and powerful props and prompts indeed) for people to share their feelings on Brexit. Designed to be weathered by the elements over the following span of just weeks, the project’s title (one can see it live and leave a message here too) refers to the international dialling code for the UK and the Crown Dependencies.