sears, roebuck & co (12. 201)

On this day in 1925, the retailer which had previously focused exclusively on mail-order sales, opened its first brick-and-mortar department store on the massive campus it had acquired and maintained as a city-within-a-city on the westside of Chicago—the complex hosting the company’s warehouses, catalogue printing, prototyping and product-testing laboratories, fashion studios and employee amenities—with its own fire and police departments and on-site private bank.

Despite its remote location on the outskirts of the city, it proved popular with customers, owing the increased car-use and leading to the development of shopping malls and its later reputation as an anchor store—pivoting from traditional urban flagship stores (see previously) and catering to motorists. During the height of its success in the 1960s and 1970, Sears was the largest retailer in the world and moved its headquarters to the Sears Tower in 1973, the world’s tallest building briefly, surpassing New York’s World Trade Centre. Over the next decade, the company began its slow-decline, diversifying its portfolio away from retail into brokerage and real estate, a credit card—Discover—and an online subscription venture with IBM called Prodigy. Divesting itself from ancillary operations and eventually declaring bankruptcy in October of 2018, it was acquired by a private equity firm called Transform Holdco, with the remaining stores leveraged for their property value before being shuttered in 2022.

synchronoptica

one year ago: top-charting seventeenth century ballads (with synchronoptica), The Point (1971) plus a craving for compass liquor

seven years ago: French brutalist apartment blocs, postcards from Mars plus attacking the Deep State

eight years ago: a documentary on the making of Psycho

nine years ago: CS Lewis’ The Abolition of Man, assorted links worth revisiting plus US presidential candidate Ted Cruz

ten years ago: the Lost Generation plus eight or nine wise words about letter-writing

opsophagos (12. 200)

Mapped onto all sorts of anti-social behaviour and privations of gluttony, the real and reputed ὀψοφάγοɩ, gourmandise of ancient Greek culture with a penchant for relish or horsd’œuvre as anything that might compliment a staple dish were leveed with a fish addiction, the most desirable morsel of a repast—we learn via Strange Company. There are many accounts of overindulgence by the wealthy and philosophers alike, wishing almost self-destructively for the gullet of cranes and pelicans for devouring the food—the poet Philoxenus of Leucas, for example, an enthusiastic banqueter and seafood lover who caused his own death by gorging on a giant octopus—and the conspicuous consumption was linked in the public’s mind to all sorts of vices, immediate gratification and moral failings, and indeed the spectacle or the rumour of the fish market became a moral panic of the day. More from JSTOR at the link above.

disposition of a government (12. 199)

Flooding the zone was intentional, and there are too many uncontrolled blazes to keep track of and there’s but as a reminder of the ongoing events of the coup d’état, Trump announced the creation of the Department of Government Efficiency, to be co-chaired by Elon Musk and Vivek Ramaswamy (who left before the project began to further his political career) as an outside consulting firm to make recommendations on spending-cuts and restructuring. Contradicting the original scope of the commission, Trump instead took an obscure technology unit within the executive established in 2014 by Barack Obama to improve digital services and federal websites (also to sign up for health insurance exchanges under the Affordable Care Act) and renamed it US DOGE Service (DOGE itself is a temporary organisation and not an executive department as that requires the approval of congress and cannot be accomplished by diktat) and embedded and with a veneer of authority (however challenged and lawless), Musk and his team infiltrated the Treasury Department, the Office of Personnel Management and the General Services Administration, which manages government office space, laptops and connectivity—VPN included. Senior officials are being dismissed, relieved of duty or otherwise sidelined over access to sensitive and comprehensive information on civil servants (previously) and remittance systems which is being migrated to outside servers—ostensibly to process the data with artificial intelligence for guidance on which funding and employees to cull, as earlier attempts at a blanket bans for duly appropriated monies for programmes were halted by judges and workers weren’t taking a phoney, leveraged “buy-out” with the promise of an eight-month farewell that runs counter to the Anti-Deficiency Act.

canting arms (12. 198)

Having previously learned a bit about kamon (家紋, Japanese family crests), we enjoyed these reimagined emblems by graphics designer So Terada with incorporate cuisine into these ancient symbols, some inherited over generations and others adopted for aesthetic reasons as the practise became more popular and not limited to the gentry—originating as a bespoke standard or license plate on ox carts to identify rank and status, with a certain protocol for right-of-way. There’s a tribute to Italian food as well as motifs with traditional Japanese dishes. What personal crest would you choose reflecting your favourite foods? Much more from Spoon & Tamago and the artist’s website at the links above.

synchronoptica

one year ago: Comic Sans (with synchronoptica),  Elmo loves you plus more bardcore

seven years ago: an arresting photograph that turned public opinion, structural dandelions, more on gravitational waves, monumental artist Krzystof Wodiczko plus a colour classification system

eight years ago: the premier of the Monkees plus the rhetoric of tv politics

nine years ago: US presidential campaigning begins, eradicating all mosquitoes plus late-stage capitalism

ten years ago: Karl Marx’ love letters, debt forgiveness plus assorted links worth revisiting

outward facing media (12. 197)

In order to comply with an executive order purportedly with the goal of “defending women from gender ideology extremism” not only are public websites and resources off-line to scrub and shunt down an Orwellian memory-hole language pertaining to sexual orientation and gender identity (CTRL-F), overhaul prompts that ask for preferred pronouns, cancel training or policies promoting such topics, and “ensure that intimate spaces designated for women, girls or females (or for men, boys or males) are designated by biological sex and not gender identity,” this erasure (under the harmful trope—perverted by conservatives just like their version of “critical race theory” that elides over America’s apartheid—that identity is a belief and choice, rather than a right, and propagandised) is also extending to archival material and large data sets maintained by the US census bureau on household composition and the Centres for Disease Control longitudinal studies to remove reference to that demographic, compromising their use in research and understanding public health. The same assault is occurring for programmes that address accessibility for handicapped workers and promote equity, diversity and inclusion. These are not white flags.

12x12 (12. 196)

happy to be hard core: a sampling of the genre produced on Amiga computers—via Web Curios 

biodiesel: grassroots efforts opposing plans to transform Hungary into an EV battery manufacturing hub—see previously 

pc gamer: vintage scans of computer and arcade hobbyists’ magazines  

eureka moment: the account of the rediscovery of one of Archimedes’ lost manuscripts—see previously  

signature block: as part of Trump’s attempt to redefine gender as a sexual binary and “defend women,” US federal workers are directed to remove preferred pronouns from their emails  

the cruel kids’ table: a look at the resurgent fratocracy of Americans under thirty, as witnessed at Trump’s inaugural parties 

hexaflexagons: fun with paper models—via MetFilter 

m23: Rwandan-backed rebel forces take provincial capital of Goma in the Democratic Republic of the Congo, possibly with designs on annexing the eastern region  

hold the line: the new legal council of the US Office of Personnel Management (previously and under new management) is a soi-disant “raging mysogynist” 

clu clu land: the Video Game History Foundation opens its archives to the public—via Ars Technica  

doggerland: archeological exploration of the submerged North Sea region 

mixolydian mode: compose chords and compare output in a range of dozens of scales—see previously—via ibīdem

synchronoptica

one year ago:  a film by Rosa von Praunheim (with synchronoptica), assorted links to revisit plus another banger from ABBA

seven years ago: telepresence, more links to enjoy, credit for the discovery of x-rays plus an executive order from the desk of Richard Nixon

eight years ago: film-strip leader ladies

nine years ago: even more links plus perspectives in price-lists 

ten years ago: chance decision-making, the mad monk plus electromagnetic moats

the gourd question (12. 195)

First documented around two thousand years ago in divination manuals, the tradition of playing the race game called huluwen (translated as above but has many regional variations and diverse and contemporary themes, also called “to drive away eight snakes,” “bureaucratic promotion table or “chaos at dragon palace” for example) during family gatherings for the Spring Festival has endured and evolved over the centuries with the gods and political or career ambitions. Players advance according to a roll of the dice (or a spin of a dreidel-like top) a certain number of spaces landing on an image and then must jump forward or back to an identical square, the first reaching the centre winning. Though the seemingly humble gourd was not always the goal, in Taoism the calabash (互录, also a homophone for “interactive recording,” hence the streaming service) symbolises longevity through medical or miraculous intervention and can also represent a portal to another realm or be interpreted as a scapegoat or pharmakós, a object that could absorb bad luck and be cast out—from the same Greek root as drugs, potions and spells.

natronlokomotive (12. 194)

From the archives of Amusing Planet, we learn about a variant of “fireless” trains, running off a reservoir compressed air cycling through a reciprocating engine as opposed to steam-power derived from burning coal—cheaper, more energy efficient and safer without the risk of boiler explosion but with a limited range, called soda locomotives. Invented in the early 1880s by engineer and chemist Mortiz Honigmann, the engine was loaded with five tons of caustic soda (sodium hydroxide), generating heat when the substance came in contact with water, enough to propel the car forward with exhaust from the pistons in the closed-system passing again through the soda to perpetuate the cycle. After about four to five hours of use, the chemical reaction ceased being self-sustaining, at which point the boiler jacket would be swapped out for a refresh one at a station, the spent soda “recharged,” re-concentrated by dehydrating it, evaporating the excess water with an injection of ultra hot steam, that sourced from municipal heating surplus. Trialled as street cars for the public transit systems of Berlin and Aachen, they proved reliable and were well-received by passengers due to their silence and lack of smoke and soot. The demonstration project, however, was abandoned due to logistical problems, owning to the weight of the tank and liability for explosion (which fortunately never occurred) and whilst a forgotten juncture in rail and metro development, such an thermo-chemical exchange system has found new applications in recent years as a storage cell for renewable energy.

synchronoptica

one year ago:  a sixty year old chatbot (with synchronoptica), Sierra On-line games plus assorted links worth revisiting

seven years ago: an exceptional flaneur, LEGO Day plus an online museum of ephemera

eight years ago: Trump’s national security council, feeding livestock subpar candy plus American Carnage 1.0

nine years ago: underwhelming fossils, Barbie origins, seasonal trappings and stereotypes, UFO cults plus road sign typefaces

ten years ago: the history of US-Mexico relations, the Duma to rule on German reunification plus more links to enjoy