northwest quadrant

Not only did Washington, D.C. Mayor Muriel Bowser petition Trump to remove extraordinary police forces and military presence from the city and allow muralists to paint in giant yellow letters BLACK LIVES MATTER on the pavement leading up to the official residence, the People’s House, she also officially renamed the section of 16th Street directly in front of the White House to be renamed (see also) Black Lives Matter Plaza.

novarupta

Located in the present day Katmai National Park and Preserve covering the Kodiak archipelago, Kenai Peninsula and Bristol Bay of Alaska, the caldera and volcanic dome of Новарупта, Latin for “newly erupted” began forming on this day in 1912, expelling ash and lava over the next sixty hours in volumes that equalled thirty Mounts St. Helens.
The largest event of its kind under the twentieth century, it is only comparable with the 1991 eruption of Mount Pinatubo. One notable legacy to be found in the reserve originally established as a monument to protect the volcanic field is the Valley of Ten Thousand Smokes, hewn out by the pyroclastic flow of the eruption, which still colour the canyon to the present day, the feature having been named by a member of the National Geographic Society, Robert F. Griggs—a botanist by training, who came to study the aftermath of the volcano in 1916.

wonkavator

Though still under construction, the spectacular “horizontal skyscraper” of Chonqing’s Raffles City project in the central Yuzhong district is welcoming visitors—like its namesake development in Singapore, called in honour of Sir Stamford Raffles (*1781 – †1826), Lieutenant-Governor of the East India Company and founder of the modern city state and British Malay.
The skybridge, the Crystal, is three hundred metres long and is supported by four towers at a height of a quarter of a kilometre and features a park, a history and industrial museum of the city, and an observation platform with future plans for a lounge, restaurants, bars and an infinity pool. Within the glass and steel columns, there are spaces allotted for offices, hotels, shopping centres as well as fourteen hundred residential units.

someday i’ll have a disappearing hairline, someday i’ll wear pajamas in the daytime

Released this month in 1994, Crash Test Dummies’ “Afternoons and Coffeespoons,” the third single from the album God Shuffled His Feet (the cover art is Titian’s 1523 Bacchus and Ariadne with band members faces on the figures) considered to be the most popular song according to the alternative rock band’s fanbase and was among the highest charting in their repetoire references the 1915 T. S. Eliot verse “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock”—I have measured out my life with coffee spoons. This interior monologue of reflection and lament on estrangement, isolation and disillusioning realisation of morality resounding in both works takes on an especially resonant meaning in the latter musical tribute in these times.

Maybe if I could do a play-by-playback
I could change the test results that
I will get back
I’ve watched the summer evenings pass by
I’ve heard the rattle in my bronchi…

cool britainnia

 Via Scarfolk Council creator Richard Littler, we are directed to new public service campaign from 10 Downing Street promoting and reinforcing social hygiene practises—having just chosen to rubbish all confidence and faith in their ability to navigate through this epidemic and squandered the hard work and sacrifice of the public and essential workers—in the style of zany 1960s madcap comedies.

7x7

ppe: for the cost of one kit of battle rattle riot gear, one could fully outfit over fifty care staff

world leaders have floated the use of sanctions on officials close to president trump to help protect america’s ethnic minorities: applying the tone of reporting on foreign wars and civil unrest to the US

by-line: questioning the wisdom of New York Times’ editorial policy, via Super Punch

history will be kind to these painstaking recreations of these corrupt criminals responsible for the end of democracy: 2020 Battle for the White House commemorative chess set

harlem renaissance: the US Post Office issues stamps celebrating four important literary figures

history will judge the complicit: Fresh Air’s Dave Davies interviews historian and Atlantic correspondent Anne Applebaum on imperiled democracy

white collar jobs: Facebook will destroy society

by-line or fait accompleat

Via Cory Doctrow’s Pluralistic, we are introduced to the Giant Language Model Test Room created to detect machine learning forgeries, hybrid news items autogenerated and highlights the certain slant, intentional or capitalised upon or not, of predictive text by colour coding the output, the copy of an article based on its own protocols, as an obstacle to targeted content to match targeted advertising—which seriously threaten to undermine education and discourse and reveals what’s written by reporters and what’s writes by machines.

¤

We’re directed to an interesting survey that examines the colour of money globally of currently circulating currency, banknotes and isolates the Pantone hues that inform them, further identifying trends, occupations and professionals depicted, etc. The colour chart is an exhaustive, identifying the reference colour—for example—of the Icelandic kroner as Turquenite, Arubian florins as Pink Gecko or the Bhuanese ngultrum as Sundress. The title symbol is the generic currency sign, used to represent any or all denominations and originally employed when one keyboard didn’t have all the speciality typographical characters of another, proposed and championed as an alternative to the $.