easter acclamations!

folie à plusieurs

On this day twenty years ago, the Columbine High School Massacre occurred in an unincorporated community of Littleton in the state of Colorado resulting in fifteen fatalities including the perpetrators who took their own lives with far more grandiose plans ultimately unrealized.
While the incident has internationally become a metonym for school shootings and an eponymous effect that has seen its export and proliferation, the tragedy netted no significant change in legislation pertaining to gun ownership domestically. Despite opening up dialogue on weapons culture, bullying, vicarious violence and the confessional nature of the early internet, public reaction of America created scapegoats and palatable narratives that is heir to a sacrificial steady-state hell-scape that gladly accepts those offerings. Sadly, we all know the drill.

a l’egs-istential quandary

Using such a figure-ground confusing optical illusion as this impossible pachyderm (like the blivet but imaginary instead of an anatomic violation) as a heuristic tool to explore mental rotation and how generalisation emerges in learned behaviour (judging distance and sequence), the creator, cognitive scientist Roger Sheppard, offers something unique in the visual dissonance ever advancing with one foot or leg always unaccounted for.

chiaroscuro

We remember number five of this series of the disorderly conduct on the streets of Manchester at New Year’s Eve from a few years ago but the other alluring photographs that managed to—likewise inadvertently in most cases it seems—pass themselves off in the same painterly style (derived from the Swiss term malerisch) did really strike us as Renaissance paintings and merited closer examination to convince ourselves otherwise.

apiculture urbaine

Understandably not the first concern to leap to mind, but thanks to Parisien correspondent extraordinaire Messy Nessy Chic, we are happy to report that rooftop colony of bees kept in three hives (ruches) at Notre-Dame de Paris has miraculously also survived the fire, residing on a portico one level below the ancient wooden timber frame that was engulfed in flames. The hives are part of a very successful network of some three hundred kept in the city to contribute to the urban ecosystem, pollinate plants and offer humans surplus honey, populated by a docile breed of honey bees developed at the Buckfast Benedictine Abbey (also for its fortified tonic wine) in Devon in the 1920s. Learn much more at the link up top and spread the consoling news.

urban legend

Our intrepid explorers at Atlas Obscura lead us to a deliriously crowded, Mid-Century Modern style annotated map of New York City, drafted in the early 1950s by Nils Hansell. Filled with local-lore, infamy and tall tales that we cannot necessarily vouch for, “The Wonders of New York” features over three hundred exclusive haunts and happenings of yesteryear to consider, the landscape having transformed considerably despite the layout basically remaining true-to-form.
Visit the link above to zoom in greater detail and discover what’s changed about the character of each neighbourhood. Rogues’ galleries and hyperbole aside, I wonder if in the not so distant future, people will find equally preposterous that a certain quarter had flea circuses, livestock and stevedores.