Tuesday 28 January 2020
font specimen
express limited
crate-digging
catagories: ๐ฎ๐ณ, ๐ถ, networking and blogging
Monday 27 January 2020
๐
As Boing Boing informs, the New England state of Vermont (see previously) may possibly join Queensland, Australia in allowing drivers to include a selection of emoji on their custom automobile registry plates (see also) after introducing a bill to that effect.
Counter to the trend of admitting pictograms into courtroom exhibits or the fact that a smiling face crying tears of joy might strike one as something more memorable than an alpha-numeric string in a traffic accident dispute, whatever emoji chosen would be an addition to the identifier and not considered one in isolation. What do you think? What vanity plates would you choose?
diacope and deposition
People—especially those who are disenfranchised—will glom onto any minutiae no matter how trivial or incredulous if they detect an advantage and can imagine how it might leverage their team, but what’s even more surpassingly unbelievable, as Geoff Manaugh ponders and invites us to come along, is the magical thinking with which we make totems and talismans out of blandishing characterisations that cling to the margins of justice and framing policy.
Sunday 26 January 2020
nipkow disks
With an improved scan-rate of twelve-and-a-half frames per second (over that of the first transmission back in October of a ventriloquist’s dummy’s head at a rate of five), Scottish engineer John Logie Baird (see previously) made the first public demonstration of his mechanical television on this day in 1926 to members of Royal Institution and reporters from his Soho workshop and studio on Frith Street.
His pioneering live video recordings—though rudimentary at first advanced at a galloping rate—and were within a year being transmitted via telephone lines with signals being broadcast across the Atlantic shortly thereafter. Baird went on to invent the first colour television and picture tube, aside from producing some of the world’s first programming.
In the summer of 1930, the BBC—with Baird’s input—selected the one-act drama by Luigi Pirandello, The Man with the Flower in his Mouth (L’Uomo dal Fiore in Bocca) to be the adaptation of its first experimental telecast, the exchange between a man dying of a malignant growth in his throat (il fiore in bocca) and a relaxed business man who missed his train connection and is content to wile away his time until the next comes was chosen for its running-time of thirty minutes, small cast and lack of scene changes. As it was a live transmission, no record of the original exists.
catagories: ๐ด๓ ง๓ ข๓ ณ๓ ฃ๓ ด๓ ฟ, ๐ก, ๐บ
k67
Designed in 1966 by Slovenian architect Saลกa J. Mรคchtig, his modular, reinforced polyfibre kiosks quickly became vernacular standards across Eastern Europe, housing news-seller stands, copy-shops, Imbiร, security booths and stationers’ shops—some seventy-five-hundred of the pre-fabricated units made and distributed have grown a bit endangered in recent years. Once seen as architectural misfits and eye-sores of a bygone era, many were culled but there’s some newly found affection and nostaligia. Joining other conservation projects, Luke Litten, we learn via Calvert Journal, has assiduously documented the remaining and often repurposed through several iterations stands in hope that their legacy and utility will survive for future generations to patronise.
Saturday 25 January 2020
the wedding march
Originally written as a piece of incidental music for productions of Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream around 1842, Felix Mendelssohn’s processional in C Major did not become standard matrimonial canon until when on this day in 1858 it was selected by Victoria, Princess Royal, for her marriage ceremony to Friedrich (“Fritz”) Wilhelm, Prince of Prussia and future albeit short-reigning king—in 1888, the Year of the Three Emperors.
The recessional piece played on the pipe organ is often accompanied with the chorus from Richard Wagner’s Lohengrin (Treulich gefรผhrt but colloquially known as “Here Comes the Bride) or baroque composer Jeremiah Clarke’s Prince of Denmark’s March (Prins Jรธrgens March or Trumpet Voluntary) to play in the bride. Though the first tune may be the most culturally resonant, the last was used as the signature tune and introductory first few bars used by the BBC during broadcasts directed toward Nazi-occupied Denmark during World War II, the march being a symbolic connection between the two kingdoms. For decades afterwards, it remained the call sign of BBC World Service for Europe and was for the Soviet public BBC’s station identification for its Russian language programming. A selection of the melodies are below: