9x9 (13. 585)

hospitalithings: a quiet, meticulous observation of common objects found in lodgings—via Nag on the Lake  

aka vlogging: Hank Green interviews Ze Frank (previously) about the YouTube format he pioneered, advising discomfort to put ideas out into the world—via Waxy  

yes, yes, very good—thank you for self-identifying as a short-sighted rube and saving us the trouble: the US constitution us for simple folk still burdened by the belief that words have meaning  

llog: Victor Henry Mair, sinologist and frequent Language Log contributor has passed away, aged 83  

new posting: an interactive map charting the careers of civil servants managing the bureaucracy of the British Empire—via Map Mania  

alignment chart: a cross-over of Chekhov’s Gun, Schrödinger’s Cat, Occam’s Razor and Murphy’s Law

in an instant: the last Polaroid factory in the world is in the Dutch town of Enschede 

bilberry buns: a Polish pastry gets its own holiday  

ozzy’s ozzy is a unique case: observations from a celebrity impersonator cruise—via Kottke 

welcome to the coolest summer of the rest of your lives (13. 584)

A heat wave in the British Isles, drought conditions and extreme temperatures extended through a period lasting from the end of June until the end of August, reached its climax on this day in 1976 with a then record peak of 35,9°C (97°F) registered in Cheltenham in the Cotswolds. Leading towards water rationing, impacts on wildlife and agriculture, mortality displacement (excess deaths) and a twelve-percent increase in food prices caused by crop failure, that summer was considered a reference point for stiflingly hot weather in the UK and Ireland, with temperatures just shy of the height over most of England for fifteen consecutive days, a plague of ladybirds and unprecedented forest fires, since rivalled by 2003, 2006, 2014, 2022 and the present season, amplified by anthropogenic greenhouse gas emissions resulting in self-reenforcing feedback loops.

synchronoptica 

one year ago: Jargeau and St Denis de l’Hôtel (with synchronoptica)

two years ago: the ancient quarter of Maccagno

three years ago: superlative drone photography, Ziggy Stardust retires, assorted links to revisit plus composer György Ligeti

four years ago: Dog Days of Summer, Double Indemnity (1944), more links to enjoy plus early AI image generation

five years ago: the Phaistos Disk (1908), US report on Unidentified Aerial Phenomena plus the offspring of Hermes and Aphrodite

six years ago: EXP TV, Mount Rushmore plus US support for the mujahideen in Afghanistan 

day one-hundred twenty-two (13. 583)

Without irony, US ambassador to the UN Mike Waltz proclaims that Iran is holding the world economy hostage by its violations of the Islamabad MOU, whilst US permanent representative to NATO Matthew Whitaker says that the alliance has moved past operational frictions in the Middle East and is ready to demonstrate and deliver on defence alignment and spending ahead of next week’s summit in Ankara. Iran holds funeral services, a multi-day mass for the country’s leaders killed in strikes on the Khamenei compound at the start of the war at the end of February. Revolutionary Guard troops clash with Kurdish rebels in the far north of the Islamic Republic.

from vanity to insanity (13. 582)

The preliminary findings of a Democrat-led House subcommittee have been published in a report that the Trump administration staged a hostile takeover of America’s semiquincentennary celebration to promote political ideology, self-enriching pet projects, the harvesting voter data and white Christian nationalism through a shadow corporation embedded within the Nation Parks Foundation, which hijacked the agenda from the independent, non-partisan and non-profit commission established by congress in 2016 to plan and execute the event. Charted as a wholly owned subsidiary under the parks foundation charity for public remove, Trump’s Freedom 250 sustained a relentless pressure campaign against America250 to hijack the anniversary for personal enrichment through transparent fraud and dissimilitude and selling access to the president, his Praetorian guard given a bonus in lieu of overtime with crypto-coins issued by the family crime syndicate and the same firm that organised the January Sixth rally being awarded contracts for July Fourth related events. Meanwhile, after the supreme court affirmed birthright citizenship, the acting attorney general directed prosecutors and law enforcement officers to monitor pregnant non-citizens and to try to prevent them from giving birth on US soil and whilst attending the opening of the Teddy Roosevelt presidential library (skipping Obama’s) quizzed the AI-generated hologram of Old Rough and Ready about the Panama Canal and lied to the press, whom had just witnessed the exchange, about how it went.

a syntopicon (13. 581)

Coined especially for the two volume with the Neo-Latin term meaning a collection of topics, the two volume register of one hundred two great ideas of the Western canon, was compiled and catalogued by philosopher and professor Mortimer J Adler, published by Encyclopaedia Brittanica Press in 1954 as an index to accompany the fifty-four library of Great Books of the Western World, covering literature and though from Homer to Freud. I can recall seeing these books near the circulation desk at my alma mater as well as the shelves of the volumes in was made to guide at home, though I don’t think I was tempted to consult it to investigate how the individual works corresponded and overlapped, which is a bit of travesty considering the amount of effort and hours of reading it took to synthesise the writing of some seventy authors and something I will have to peruse. Like a Wikipedia gloss, it is a footnote and a hyperlink, and not just a cross-reference of themes or concordance but rather an instrument of liberal education itself for discovery and research and finding the unity in ideas that sometimes can be muddled and masked by language, examining each entry from multiple different angles, breaking each into several sub-topics. Afterwards, Adler edited the single volume Propædia or “Outline of Knowledge” as an appendix for the venerable encyclopaedia marshalling human knowledge into a logical frame work from 1974 to 2010, when the last print edition was issued.

synchronoptica

one year ago: unblogged Breton (with synchronoptica)

two years ago: Lago Delio 

three years ago: assorted links to revisit plus a registry of Americana

four years ago: more links to enjoy

five years ago: your daily demon, Mario theme inspiration, the year’s midpoint, a banger from Tracy Chapman plus a visit to Oberwaldbehrungen

six years ago: even more links, Airplane! (1980) plus the US Civil Rights Act (1964)

day one-hundred twenty-two (13. 580)

The Qatari foreign ministry reports positive progress related to the Islamabad MOU, despite the fact Tehran might not be participating and rejects US assertion regarding IAEA inspectors to all nuclear research facilities and rejecting Trump’s condition on unfrozen assets being used to exclusively buy American agricultural products. Through traffic continues to flow through the Hormuz, shippers say the Strait is still like a war-zone. Moscow conducts a deadly air raid over Kiev with multiple drone and missile strikes.  US declines to renew Trump’s version of the NAFTA trade deal struck with Canada and Mexico in January 2020.

bodega cat (13. 579)

Enjoying the correspondence between these two disparate posts, we couldn’t resist combining them as a celebration of our feline companions first with this project by Marcel Heijnen to document the gradual disappearance of “shop cats” in Shanghai as traditional stores are replaced through gentrification with modern, hermetically sealed retail spaces twinned with the early 1980s phenomenon of the Nameneko cats of photographer Saturo Tsuda. Hugely popular at the time, these cats were dressed and set in dioramas depicting high school gangsters—banchō (番長, male delinquents) and sukeban (スケ番, female delinquents) who rebelled against authority, smoking in the boys’ room and with subversive tailoring of their school uniforms. Hang in there baby. Much more at the links above.

o canada! (13. 578)

In what one can hope to be a prerequisite of joining the European Union, the European Broadcasting Union (EBU) announces, on the country’s national holiday, that its newest member, CBC / Radio-Canada will participate in the Eurovision Song Contest next year for its seventy-first iteration to be hosted by this year’s winner Bulgaria. This inclusion marks the first expansion outside of the continent since Australia joined in 2015. Céline Dion, representing Switzerland, won the 1988 Eurovision with the power ballad “Ne partez pas sans moi” (which was included in the Song-Along for the fiftieth anniversary held in Copenhagen covered Estonia soprano Elina Netšajeva and Conchita Wurst) in Dublin. We’ve given the spectacle a soft boycott the past several years, as have other countries—perhaps motivating the enlargement—but watching Canada might be an excuse to tune in.