My feed has perked up considerably since joining
/r/vexillology/ - this
is Malibu's municpal but the real fun is with all the new
flags people submit.
The millennial, "Koyaanisqatsi"-ish Chinese
New
Boy video which mentions Windows98 I quoted in a Metafilter
post yesterday (where I've been on a bit of
a
roll recently).
People will come to adore the technologies
that undo their capacity to think.
- Aldous Huxley
...as quoted by this
guy, who wants you to put down your phone and channel
your frustrated, creative energies into publishing 'zines. The
dirty little zine site
makes it easy.
June 3, 2026
If you were a fan of the early-web Yahoo! style
internet directories, check out
curlie.org.
Going
to the People in Russia during the mad
summer of 1874, when a mass exodus
from Moscow and Saint Petersburg of up to 4000 students, some of
whom were offspring of the nobility, traveled to rural parts of the
empire in order to live among the peasants and "prepare them for
their future political role." Compare with the rusticated
youth of the
Down
to the Countryside phase of the Cultural Revolution (which
reminds me of two things, unrelated:
that Led
Zeppelin song and
Young Lust #5.)
June 1, 2026
In Sri Lanka, pandala,
pandals or
pandols are erected for Vesak (Buddha's birthday, which was last
week). Large, illuminated temporary structures also called thoranas,
they remind me of the
Nebuta
floats of a northern Japanese summer festival. Click the vid
to see its Reddit source.
Sample pages from the Storied Colors blog, updated weekly: all
the Purples
(19 hue stories);
Emerald
Green AKA Paris Green, which contained arsenic; and
Engineer
Blue (another name for
Prussian).
Warning: this site was allegedly created with the Claude LLM.
Blue Conflict: Latin American bandera feature light
azul celeste blue, but the USA flag's blue is darker. Which,
for Puerto Rico? It's political.
Color
schemes of the Puerto Rico flag at Wikipedia tells the story. See
also, the inverse
Flag of Cuba,
they're into this too (during the 1902-1906 Republic their flag
employed the sky blue). Honduras also, they made their blue darker,
in January.
The Carousel of Progress,
a
Great Big Beautiful Tomorrow: closing soon, for a year; the updated
attraction will include an audio-animatronic Walt Disney. Some of the
earliest writings in these pages relate
a visit to the original, our
first pavilion at the World's Fair. Afterwards, it lived in Disneyland,
between 1967-1973, and was moved again to Florida, where it reopened
in 1975.
According to Wikipedia it's the longest-running stage show
in American history, a claim I've also heard about Coney Island's
Blowhole
Theater, neither of which seem legitimate, to me.
Learning about Locusts,
in a longread from Thomas Stafford. They're just grasshoppers,
which mutate into locusts under crowding conditions. Cicadas & Locusts:
What's
the Difference? Terrifying BBC Video short:
Locust
Plague in Madagascar.
And here's
Alien
Worlds in the Archive. My confusion with these two comic
books finally resolved,
Alien
Worlds (1982-85), which was published by Pacific, became
Alien
Encounters (1985-87) when published by Eclipse (then
replaced by a short-lived, irregular revival of Alien Worlds).
May 29, 2026
Beautiful Catalonian photo by Mick Stephenson in the Wikipedia
Twilight page,
click for the whole thing.
Science magazine: about
that
Methyl Methacrylate Tank in Orange County, which seems to be
stabilized now; and in Washington State, the Associated Press on
the deadly
'white liquor' tank implosion,
which I see refered to in some reports as an explosion. I
guess some fear their readers are unfamiliar with the former
term, which I first encountered in grade school, inspecting my
father's S-F magazine. This issue also contained the conclusion
of Frank Herbert's first 'Dune World' serial.
Kill
Sticky Headers is a bookmarklet you can add to your
browser to eliminate these, some call them "dickbars." To
see one, and verify your installation, check
Roger Ebert.com - it's
that floating banner with his signature and thumb-up.
More comics in the Internet Archive: the late-80s run of
Alien
Encounters, from Eclipse. #6 has the "Nada" story
John Carpenter turned into "They Live."
Great old war comics, like EC's Two-Fisted
Tales -- but not gung-ho, quite the opposite:
Blazing Combat
from 1965. Only a few issues before it was suppressed, in
'66. Read all four
in
the Internet Archive.
And What is a .cbr file, anyway? Ah,
Comic Book Reader. They contain a sequence of zipped-up JPEGs,
compressed into what programmers call a 'tarball' since they're
created with the Tape
ARchive command (jargon I thought was
dumb, I think calling it a Tar is adequate, there's nothing 'ball'
about one, and 'tar ball' is too close to Tar Baby.)
Wonderful, extensive archive of ephemera from the hippie days: Sean
Flannagan's Far Out Company.Dedicated to unearthing the work of under-appreciated
artists of the 1960s and ‘70s counterculture.
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.
Another candidate for my links page:
Watching
America - news
and views about the US, published in other countries.
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.
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.
May 9, 2026
2013 Swatch advertising - Scuba Libre
May 3, 2026
random Harvey Pekar encountered while searching for "Sid's Detroit Job Interview"
Wikipedia:
Fascinating
map of western North and Central America in the extreme late
18th century, when it was all still Spanish. Texas was New Filipinas;
I'd heard there was a New Mexico before there was a Mexico, which this shows.
One fan's answer to "What's your favorite comic book story?"
isn't the Galactus Trilogy; rather
Whatever
Happened to the Man of Tomorrow? I'd never read
this;
DC Crisis stuff gives me a headache, but interesting given my initial "comic books"
exposures, which for the most part were late-Silver Age early-60s Superman.
Popular Mechanics reports on
blue
dogs in the Zone but don't get excited, recent videos of
blue-hued Chernobyl dogs caused a bit of a stir online, until it was confirmed the
dogs had just been rolling around in porta-potty chemicals.
Shane Bauer at Mother Jones:
My four months as a private prison guard."Don't
ever say thank you," a[nother] Corrections Officer tells her. "That takes the power
away from it."
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.
Float the moment. Fly Zeppelin.Sightseeing over the
Bodensee, from Friedrichshafen, just like Count
Zeppelin, a hundred years ago.
More
info at airships.net.
Banner of the Atesh ("fire"
in Russian), partisans operating in the occupied territories of Ukraine, formed
by Ukrainians and Crimeans in September 2022. I can see the SS'
winged
odal rune in that logo; potential fuel for Putin calling 'em Nazis.
('Tesh' reminding me of
Dr.Who.)
Jeremy Hansen's special CSA patch for the Artemis mission.
Inside the silver border is a thin blue line. The blue
represents the light or spirit that is in all of us – in all humankind,
plants and animals. This spirit will travel with the crew aboard the
capsule.
AD listicle:
The
27 Most Beautiful Places in the World. Note that their
Grand Canyon pic is the Horseshoe Bend of the Colorado River,
which is actually part of Glen Canyon. My score here is only 4...
I've almost been to another four, and my fifth is scheduled
for this July.
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.
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.
March 25, 2026
Wikipedia pages for three not-so-well-known landmarks
I'd like to visit in Germany:
the Bastei
Bridge, near Dresden; the
Alte
Nahebrücke of Bad Kreuznach, one
of the few remaining bridges [with] buildings on it; and the
Eltz
Castle on a tributary of the Moselle.
A couple creative music videos from the turn of the
century, one new to me, which reminded me of the other:
Playgirl
by Ladytron and Let
Forever Be by the Chemical Brothers.
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.
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.
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
SUMAC
OCHRE
GARDENIA
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.
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.
My wife keeps me appraised of the exotic on the mainland,
including weChat video of these parades. The one in Hong Kong
gets all the coverage but she says they hoist kids up in the air
elsewhere in South China, like in Mao Ming. They'd never fly in the US!
According
to the Honeycombers,in an impressive feat
of balance and engineering, young children dressed in elaborate
period costumes are cleverly positioned on a hidden supportive
frame so they appear to be 'floating' above the parade crowd as
they traverse the streets. Not really balancing; they're
strapped in; and not up there very long. More at China Daily HK,
Piu Sik or Floating
Colors for the 2024 and
Piu
Sik in Cheung Chau for the 2025 Festivals.
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