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)
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.
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—banchล (็ช้ท, male delinquents) and sukeban (ในใฑ็ช, 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.
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. Cรฉline 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 Netลกajeva 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.
Among the first attempts by the British to give an ethnographic account of the customs and observations of the denizens of Colonial India, particularly the the Muslim population of the southern portion of the subcontinent and reminiscent of the I-Ching and other auspicious augury, the supposed translation (the original lost to time) published by East India Company surgeon Gerhard Herklots, 
a hefty and encyclopaedic volume covering all aspects of life in Madras, food, language, clothing, superstition and folklore, contains only a small appendix on setting the optimal itinerary for a journey, direction, date of departure. This guide to propitious days for embarking on trade and travel, however superficially appropriated or re-approrriated (see above), gains a purchase on the thought and tradition underlying it, informed by astronomy, astrology and currying divine protection and intercession. Much more from Public Domain Review at the link above.
synchonoptica
one year ago: the commune of Belz (with synchronoptica) plus the city of Vannes
two years ago: the castles of Bellinzona plus the US supreme court grants presidents blanket immunity for official acts
three years ago: more venerable publications going out of print
four years ago: and then they came for me (1937) plus Scottish devolution (1999)
five years ago: Julie Moon (1970), children’s author Dodie Smith, assorted links to revisit, a banger from Grandmaster Flash (1982) plus being well-read in Antiquity
six years ago: slavery abolished in the Netherlands and its colonies (1863), police crackdown in Hong Kong, America’s entitled class, US Homeland Security tasked with protecting statues plus the licence plates of Palau
The Qatari foreign ministry confirms that no high-level meeting between US and Iranian officials is scheduled to take place in Doha over the coming days despite the arrival of envoys Kushner and Witkoff, Tehran saying it is currently not negotiating with Washington in any capacity and will not resume talks until violence ends in Lebanon. Concerned over increased executions has prompted French lawmakers to sponsor individual death-row political prisoners, whilst German intelligence services find that Iran is spying on opposition activists domestically.
…for their relentless message discipline. Despite the fact it registers lower on the national and global insult level of what Trump heinous things has done than the Melania movie, the ongoing fiasco surrounding the Capitol Reflecting Pool has managed to capture public attention through successive news cycles whilst we might forget even the latest demolition job on civil rights, the environment, rule-of-law, world-order, democracy and even on the architectural landscape and heritage of Washington, DC—for as precious that Americans can be about such things, the response over the extensive remodelling of the White House was muted and resigned. 
The resonance of this renovation lies in its scale for the rapine and corruption and incompetence and grift that are too big to contemplate soberly (hence, flooding the zone) but also in the fact that something humbling yet manageable exploded with scapegoating, outsourcing and more deflection rather than finding a remedy, behaviour that violates the code of all dads everywhere (and the like) when it comes to cleaning a grungy pool, firing up a backyard grill or planning a party.
Via Quantum of Sollazzo and deliciously reminiscent of the harried and hued colour profiles appearing in the Paris Review and the Awl right before folding, we are directed to this delightful project chasing down the paper trail of pigments, one colour per day with its chemistry, provenance and poison. 
There are over two-hundred fifty already indexed, like the pale jade glaze originally from ancient Chinese ceramic-making techniques, this greenwear copied by Korean and Japanese artisans (the greyish shade comes from oxidising iron during the firing of kilns, Fe₂O₃→FeO, and the Western namesake is from a character in a popular seventeenth century French pastoral novel, L’Astrรฉe by Honorรฉ d’Urfรฉ, who dressed in light green garb—no relation to the Celadons Ovid’s Metamorphoses or International Klein Blue, a synthetic ultramarine with connections to the Nouveau rรฉalisme movement and among the first pigments to be successfully patented. Each entry has adjacent palettes and new specimens are posted Sundays. I feel like this is site I will return to often.
