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| November 22, 2021 |
- At The Sword and the Sandwich, Talia Lavin on the
Antivaxx
Holocaust -- vaccine protests, yellow stars, and an inoculation of historical
reality.
- Checking in on Messy Nessy periodically, in order to review her weekly (?)
"13 Things Found on the Internet Today" but she also posts stuff like
In
the Grand Scheme of Things which is just a set of random, interesting photos.
- At This is Colossal, Jon Foreman's
Ephemeral
Compositions of sand and stones.
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| November 8, 2021 |
|
The only overt anti-vaxxer I know personally is the Swiss Miss. We
argue about Covid defenses on Facebook where she posts furious walls of
Deutsch which I feed into the Google Translator in order to
occasionally respond, in kind. Zum Beispiel, "Das
ist ein verdammtes Verbrechen was hier passiert. Es kommt jetzt
die 3. dann die 4. Impfung und die Menschen haben alle den Verstand
verloren." (Note the translator converts 'verdammtes' into
bloody.) My reaction to this was "Ich habe meine 3. Impfung
hatte, und ich habe nicht den Verstand verloren." (I've had my third
shot and I haven't lost my mind.) Or have I?
|
| August 25, 2021 |
If like me you're into Vexillology this flag might be familiar, except for that
lower, purple bar. It's the Spanish Republic, which lost their Civil War to the
Falangists (better known elsewhere as Fascists), a stuggle which continued into
WWII, and really, up to the present day. On the one side, the land-owners,
management, the bankers, the Church, the country-folk, and the military; on
the other, the factory or office workers and trade unionists, the artists (and
lovers of pretty things), the scientists and those cosmopolitan intellectuals.
Speaking of, Over-Explained Lists put together
State
Flags, Ranked, which annoyed some. One random comment: How
do you rank so many phoned-in 'State Seal on a Blue field' flags above some objectively great
flags ...like DC's, coming in at only #41. Although they don't address our states,
more valid flag criticism is found at WorldFlagsGraded.com, where you can
sort their list by their
score (based on attributes like Hurts My Eyes, Too Many Stars and Makes Me Nauseous)
as well as alphabetically. I
remember reading somewhere that brown is such an unpopular color, no country uses it
in their flag. Parsing the list, seems like about ten may have some brown, but maybe
that's just browser color-rendering issues -- looking elsewhere, I see the former
Soviet state of Georgia's described as crimson, and Qatar's as maroon (or sun-faded red).
Zambia seems to be the exception that proves the rule. State flags don't obey it, however;
the prime example being California's brown bear. One other, unrelated similarity:
doesn't Somalia's looks like a faded
Bonnie Blue?
Alec did a whole
Technology
Connections on the color Brown, but his focus is the visual; no mention of the
mythical Brown Note.
|
| August 1, 2021 |
A couple sticker-tags spotted around the neighborhood.
The photo doesn't do the first one justice -- it's printed on holographic rainbow foil.
|
| June 11, 2021 |
- A couple amazing animations: Shehr
e Tabassum depicts a future Pakistan; and the Gibsonian
Salad
Mug which allegedly took Ian Hubert three years, to make.
- Charles Schulz' rare
Hagemeyer
Peanuts. That's Lucy, as an adult?
- Yoon Hyup makes night-time
pointillist pictures. Nowadays,
I think we'd call those points pixels, and Yoon uses big ones.
- Chaojang Trap posts dense
explorations into 'Chinese niches'. The link is to their latest, #7, about elderly street fashion
of Shanghai; and how Wikipedia entries about small towns on the Mainland are weird.
- Electronic music, streaming -- Sovietwave Radio.
Working now,
but imparts a rank taste to the waffles, alas
|
| May 21, 2021 |
I'm restoring my mother's century-old stove-top Griswold waffle iron. The
focus of most guides to restoring cast iron is rust, but my problem's
with over-enthusiastic seasoning, which leads to baked-on crud, which must
then be meticulously scraped off. This process reminds me of the dentist, and
the long hours being worked over in the Chair of Agony as the dental hygienist
scrapes the tartar off the enamal under my gums. Her traditional tool for this
is the scaler, or plaque scraper, and I do have one of those (even as the switch
to ultrasonics is greatly appreciated) but I'm getting better results with the
tip of a new, flat-blade screwdriver.
- In Arizona, there's a
McDonald's
in Sedona with turquoise arches.
- From the BBC: Chinese
dreams on Native American land: A tale of cannabis boom and bust.
- Don't like Cory Doctorow, possibly because I confuse him with Corey Feldman,
the actor -- both born 1971. And now, Cory Booker (1969). Anyway, I stopped reading
'Boing Boing' many years ago -- WAS a daily visit, but I just turned against it
one day and never went back. Now,
he's bragging
about blogging for 20 years, although Justin and
Jorn, who
actually invented the web-log, go unmentioned.
- Ememem at This Is Colossal, who creates
Ceramic Mosaics
that Mend Cracked Sidewalks, Potholes, and Buildings in Vibrant Interventions.
- Public Radio Fan combines info from all
the local stations.
|
| January 3, 2021 |
|
Holiday housekeeping -- cleaned up my earliest web effort,
my online journal What I Do?
from 1998. I'd downloaded it all just before Yahoo killed
GeoCities, but there were gaps I managed to fill in with
assistance from archive.org's WayBack Machine.
|
| December 24, the Night Before Christmas |
- Earlier in the epidemic, back in July, we got window-swap.com (and here's
something similar, for random forest sound samples from around the world:
tree.fm) but we've just now received the
ultimate gift for the armchair traveler:
escapista.app. Choose your via:
Car, Rail, Bike,* Walking; or even Beach, Urban or Historic,
and away you go! Seems frustrating since you can't pause and there's
no backing up, but you can get the general location by dwelling lower-right
(and you can click on the title down there to jump to the source).
* realizing the dream of every stationary cyclist
|
| December 19, 2020 |
Happy Holidays!
- First off, lets get the virus link out of the way.
COVID
Cases/States by political leaning is a pair of animated bar graphs
which indicate the degree of infection, by color -- watch how they sort
out, over time.
- A while back, I wanted to read a collection of 'Doonesbury'
which featured every appearance by Misters Butts and Jay. Properly
crafted search terms into GoComics can produce these results;
Mr Butts
and Mr Jay. My
research reveals that Mr Butts
appeared on trash-cans on the beach of Santa Monica (that was after my time). And speaking of
Mr Jay, according to Vox,
Weed
won the 2020 election.
- Capture the Atlas has 25
most awe-inspiring Northern Lights pictures.
- At Unusual Traveler, a Travel
Guide to Ashgabat, the capital city of Turkmenistan, which
may be the strangest capital city anywhere in the world.
- At Moss and Fog, 2020's
Weather Photography of the Year doesn't disappoint. Related:
Monsoon 6, a time-lapse
video by Mike Oblinski.
- Condé Nast Traveler showcases
11
Beautiful Train Stations that Have Their Very Own Hotels, those
in the US inside the grand old structures now bypassed or replaced
by what railfans call the AmShack.
|
| October 31, 2020 Happy Halloween! |
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|
| October 2, 2020 |
"Here's something special - a new structural principle."
I've been crafting icosahedra since grade school, usually with plastic straws and
string. Recently, I've been making dodecahedra with toilet paper rolls,
those tubes which are usually discarded.
Toiletpaperfullerenes
and Charmin Nanotubes suggests cutting 30° loop-strips from the flattened tubes
and using interlocking triplets of these elements to form the vertices of pentagons and
hexagons. Points to
a
Tweet with detailed instructions for building your own dodecahedron. Challenge!
Four rolls should be enough. On the right, the low-watt lampshade I made by nesting
one inside another... its brown paper media looks like something from
Muji. Saved 'em up (paper towel
tubes work as well) and made a second-degree Buckyball (AKA a socccer ball)
but I really like the simplicity of the dodecahedron. Also, just learned of
Roman Dodecahedra -- according to Mental Floss,
Mysterious
Bronze Objects that've Baffled Archaeologists for Centuries, until
recently. The Roman form has knobs at the vertices, for knitting gloves?
I can understand the fingers, or toes for toe-socks, after watching
this, but not
a whole glove. Desiring one to play around with, looks like my only option
is a local 3D printer, using the necessary .STL file, which I found
at Thingiverse.
|
| August 8, 2020 (updated) |
- At Decopix, The
Story of Vitrolite.
- Nicholson Baker, author of The Mezzanine and many
others, in the Columbia Journalism
Review -- YouTube's
Psychic Wounds. I understand he's quite active on Wikipedia, where
I've 'upped my game' as well -- behold, my first article:
Muscle
Beach, the 1959 novel which, in its "Don't Make Waves" form, I first
read on the bus to Philmont, in 1968. So many things, almost everything
has a Wikipedia page now, and they'd made this book into a
movie starring Tony Curtis (trailer)
which has a page, but somehow one for the novel was missing. Since it
was a crucial part of my development, had to step up. And there's
requirements, mainly, you must have references, or your article is
unacceptable.
- Another great new video of a classic old song:
Eight
Days A Week (which they didn't actually play at Shea). Probably from
the
Ron Howard documentary from 2016.
- At Spoon & Tamago, wonderfully blue&white summer-y
Illustrations
by Rei Kato. (Update: that gallery shrank to just one pic
but you can follow a link there to a Twitter feed)
|
| July 26, 2020 |
This ball of insect fell out of the sky yesterday, landing at my feet as I sat on a park bench.
Eventually I realized they were June bugs, mating. Unlike humans, their passions weren't vigorous,
but eventually she crawled away, leaving him motionless, possibly dead (if they're like honeybees).
|
| June 17, 2020 |
There's nervous conjecture about voting this Fall, and rightly so. Columns like
Trump
Can't Just Refuse to Leave Office at Slate and
Here's
the Real Danger if he loses the 2020 Election at CNN provoke daydreams of his
forced ejection, and remind me of a famous news photo from 1944, of the ouster of
the
CEO of Montgomery Wards, who didn't agree with FDR's
wartime demands. Since nobody else seems to be accepting the challenge I was compelled to
fire up my old Win98 laptop with its ancient but still operational Photoshop and give
it a go -- click for my bigger, uncropped image, and feel free to pass it around.
|
| March 23, 2020 |
|
Reports of hoarding and empty shelves in the shops -- it's like Y2K;
grateful that TEOTWAWKI crisis was postponed for 20 years. Forced to
stay at home, awaiting the inevitable plague, required reading is Poe's
Masque
of the Red Death since we're all part Prince Prospero now.
|
| March 7, 2020 |
|
A global epidemic has been predicted for years; looks like it's
finally arrived. Don't think anything will prevent most of us from
getting sick, and not all of us will make it to the other side
but I hope to see you there.
|
| early February 2020 (reconstructed) |
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