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| May 19, 2026 |
- That's the Eads
Bridge spanning the Mississippi in St.Louis, the wonder of its age,
ten years before the Brooklyn Bridge and now the oldest bridge on the
river. Can you appreciate its triple span, tubular metallic arch
construction?
- JSTOR Daily on the Cagots,
the
Forgotten Untouchables of France. Someone
conjectured that the Cagots were related to Medieval guilds
associated with woodworking, rope-weaving, and masonry; a
little like the Japanese Burakumin: butchers, leather workers, and
undertakers.
- More AI fun, this time, from PreMake Movies:
1937
Robocop preview,
1940s
Ghostbusters, with Cary Grant and Spencer Tracy, and a
1954
Terminator with Charleton Heston.
- Another candidate for my links page:
Watching
America - news
and views about the US, published in other countries.
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| May 16, 2026 |
- James Wallace Harris wonders what this 1929 pic is all about in
an
essay at Classics of Science Fiction. It's surprising how often you
see this cover on the internet. I think the artwork is both ugly and
bizarre. Why would people be wearing helmets with video screens for
the faceplates? To find out why, I went and read the cover story
of this 1929 issue of Science Wonder Stories. Not remarkable
to me, they're just flat-screened manifestations of what I call Tubeheads;
but the story's really something related to the nonsense of
Past Life
Regression.
- It's worth parsing through all of
St.Petersburg's pictures at Wikipedia, some amazing places there.
Not included in that set of photos is their pecuiliar, pedestrian
Bank Bridge
with its copper-winged griffons, the suspension chain-cables
emerging from their mouths. The similar
Lion
Bridge is nearby, spanning the same canal.
- Overlap between
10 Brilliant
1970s Sci-Fi Films That Everyone Unforgivably Forgot and
11 Underrated
Hard Sci-Fi Movies That Deserved Way More Love:
"Silent Running" - "Colossus:Forbin" and "The Andromeda Strain."
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| May 10, 2026 |
- On MetaFilter, grieving people speak of enduring The Weight,
which reminds me of a) this
Ken
Brown
postcard; and b) the
"Music From Big Pink" track by The Band, one of the first
Playing
for Change Around the World mixes I saw,
the one with
Ringo. Speaking of, he has a new video/song:
Life's a long, long road
That leads us somewhere
It's a heavy load
When you're trying to get there
- Adrienna Matzeg's Embroidery of Kyoto, Tokyo,
and Seoul storefronts, at This Is Colossal.
- Derrick Rossignol on
Let's Go Away for Awhile, at Paste.
Scroll down for the 25 Greatest Beach Boys Songs.
- Concerning
the
shoyu-tai problem in Australia, where those little plastic soy
sauce bladders, like one gets with take-out sushi in Japan, aren't
recyclable.
- "Miracle Mile" deleted
scenes, and there's so much material, arranged chronologically,
it's almost an alternate telling of the story.
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| May 9, 2026 |
2013 Swatch advertising - Scuba Libre |
| May 3, 2026 |
random Harvey Pekar encountered while searching for "Sid's Detroit Job Interview"
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| April 19, 2026 |
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| April 14, 2026 (updated) |
Cluser Transmissions, 1925
- Back in the late 1970s I used to love browsing the glossy European art
magazines, at the library. This Vintage Everywhere image dump scratches that same
itch: Niklaus
Stoecklin, (1896–1982), a seminal figure in 20th-century
Swiss art, widely regarded as a master of New Objectivity and a pioneer of
modern poster design. More of his paintings at Hauser & Wirth.
- Atlas Obscura:
former
Soviet sanatoriums.
- Float the moment. Fly Zeppelin.
Sightseeing over the
Bodensee, from Friedrichshafen, just like Count
Zeppelin, a hundred years ago.
More
info at airships.net.
- A
realistic weekend of a single woman living in China. To be
clear, that's someone in Shenzhen, the most highly developed, a
first-tier city. Granny Dancing at ~7:30.
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| April 7, 2026 |
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| April 5, 2026 |
- Happy Easter!
Repost from two years back,
Pysanky
designs at Present and Correct.
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| March 29, 2026 |
I Like The City
- Today's pic from a 1956 children's music book which passed
through my collection briefly, while I was living in Hermosa Beach.
At that time I didn't realize it had a 'Country' counterpart.
Discovered again, like so many things,
in
the Internet Archive.
- Yuki and Mei make atmospheric videos of Japan, for example
Discovering
retro neighborhoods in Tokyo; and
Kyoto
in Heavy Snow.
- Exploring two old artists, new to me:
Ivan
Shishkin (1832-1898), for his forest paintings; and
John
Rogers Cox (1915-1990). While on business in the early 90s I once
watched Sister Wendy talk about his 'Gray And Gold' on my hotel room TV.
- In Wired,
How
American Camouflage Conquered the World. You'd never catch me
wearing the stuff but the technologies are interesting.
(archive link)
Camouflage
at Wikipedia: Clothing with a camouflage
design is illegal for civilians in some countries, including
Barbados, Jamaica and Saint Lucia. Hard for some to believe,
but it's like flying your national flag: in some countries, illegal,
unless you're with the government.
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| March 18, 2026 |
-
Austin Bell
photographs Hong Kong basketball courts (of which there's quite a
few) with aerial drones, and assembles the results into
matrices -- detail, above.
- I saw
the
Antietam Arm in 1966, back then it was known as the Withered
Arm, and it looked like a stick.
- Loved the yellow-bordered National Geographic,
and its green, continental competitor, which attempted an
American edition in the late 1970s: GEO,
sub-titled A New View Of Our World.
The Internet Archive has one you can page through,
the
December 1997 French issue.
- 5D, Hot vs Cold Data, and
Why
We Are Going Back to Optical Storage -- with glass.
- Another new psychological acronym:
HPP --
High Places Phenomenon -- what I call Edge Fear.
|
| March 15, 2026 |
-
Iran's
only Van Gogh: ‘At Eternity’s Gate' (a lithograph which was
owned by Nelson Rockefeller, at one point). The subsequent painting
was discussed and displayed in these pages,
Christmas,
2024.
- More Persia: the
low-tech brilliance of Iranian design.
- I had never heard of
the
Irish goodbye, sometimes called a French exit or
'Going Houdini' -- leaving a gathering without saying farewell.
In France, they call it filer à l'anglaise
(to leave the English way) and in Germany, it’s a Polnischer Abgang,
or a Polish exit. I've been guilty of, but only rarely.
- More jargon: a new definition for PDA: Pathological Demand
Avoidance, another way to say "stubborn" -- how certain
kids lose their shit when asked or ordered to do something.
- Finally, the latest find in the Internet Archive:
George
of the Jungle: The Complete Series. I requested and watched
an episode
here
in 1991, when our media landscape was very different.
|
| March 14, 2026 |
- Amusing Planet looks into kinjiki,
Japan's
Forbidden Colors. Over the centuries, the strict
courtly regulations surrounding color gradually weakened [but] the symbolic
association between certain colors and authority, especially sumac, ochre
and gardenia, persists to this day.
- Animated Irish short, Oscar nominee:
Retirement Plan.
- BBC: France's
ghost car scandal, a million illegal vehicles on their roads
-- and how about the ghost cars of NYC?
CBS
update from six months back.
- Found this module at the thrift store for a few dollars, with no
external manufacturer logo or serial numbers. By its buttons I
could tell it's a clock of some kind; internet sleuthing
eventually led to the
Ten
Best Fake Hatch Alarm Clocks of 2025. Mine seems to be a Zelaclock, and
it's fun, like a combination light organ, Moonbeam alarm clock and white noise
generator. (Always takes me awhile to remember buttons on small digital clocks
have two modes: press and release, and press and hold.)
- Love the See
also of Wikipedia's 'chav' entry, for its British
subcultures like Hooliganism,
Bootboy,
and Football casuals, among others.
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| March 10, 2026 |
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| March 8, 2026 |
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