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| July 17, 2025 |
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| July 10, 2025 |
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| July 9, 2025 |
Learned about the
Brazilian Expeditionary Force in Wikipedia, how they participated
in the Allied invasion of Italy but it was their shoulder patch
which really caught my attention, reminding me of
this artifact of my uncle's
futile, late 1970s legalization campaign. The train of these
thoughts provoked an update to my
ancestors page to include
my aunt and uncles, with this photo my father took of that whole
side of the family, on a mid-1950s visit to their farm in NW Kansas.
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| July 2, 2025 |
This is Railroad Shorty, as envisioned in 1953 by
Claes
Oldenburg (known for his very large,
and soft sculptures). A double amputee who'd
maneuver around Nelson Algren's Chicago on a mechanic's
creeper,
you might possibly have encountered an allusion to
him in that novel by Richard Brautigan (a briefly-famous
author nobody reads anymore, either) which has a chapter
"The Shipping of Trout Fishing in America Shorty to
Nelson Algren". Tom Carson, in
his
1986 introduction to The Neon Wilderness,
explains that he's an ex-fighter
who'd been cut in half by a train, and now wheels
himself around on a leather-strapped handmade platform.
He's a great creation — a cripple that you can't
feel sorry for. He appears both in A Walk
On The Wild Side, where I first met him, and the
short story "The Face On The Barroom Floor" (title
shared with a much-less-violent poem, from the 19th
century by John Henry Titus or maybe Hugh Antoine
d'Arcy). A more recent short story, from the
21st century, by James Lloyd Davis:
Trout
Fishing in America Shorty lives on after the death of his
dear friend Richard Brautigan, though sadly. Brautigan
checked out in 1984 in his house on the coast, while
gazing out at the Pacific Ocean; the body wasn't
discovered until a month later but the detail of a
suicide note at the scene stating only "Messy,
isn't it?" is apparently untrue.
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| June 27, 2025 |
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Seems there was a
public
referendum in New Zealand in 2015 to select a new flag,
but all the entries were rejected, including this striking design
by Lucy Gray. I recognize the silver-fern frond logo of their
All Blacks rugby team, since somebody at work had their flag
hanging in their office. Similar designs
were submitted for the 2023 contest to redesign the flag of
Minnesota, featuring a loon with laser eyes; as well
as the 2025 contest to redesign the flag of Illinois,
featuring a cardinal with laser eyes.
- Chris Ware's
250 Years of Delivering stamps
available July 23rd.
- The Seychelles Nut, or
Coco
De Mer: The Magical Derrière of the Sea. I first
saw one of these in the hilltop
Randall
Museum of San Francisco.
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| June 24, 2025 |
- Cosmos suggests that
Front-facing
brake lights could significantly prevent road
crashes. These front brake lights would
be green, and mounted on the bumper. Tested only
in Slovakia, so far... but in Japan, trucks may
have three green lamps mounted above the
windshield, which illuminate as the vehicle is
accelerating. According to my reading of
How
Does the Green Light Work on the Front of Cabin,
these lights, required from 1967, became optional
there, in 2001. However, very
few people know this even though they are Japanese
truck drivers, so if you like Japanese trucks, it
may makes you fun.
- The S.S.United States is
now
docked in Mobile; preparing for sinking, possible
lawsuit but it won't be sunk until next year
sometime as workers prepare the vessel. It
must be re-engineered [to]
sit upright on the Gulf floor. The president
has been asked to save the ship; I'm hoping instead
for a grand photo opportunity of him pressing the
button which sinks the United States.
- Mashed: the
Depression-Era Dessert We Still Eat Today has
photos which don't resemble any Wacky Cake I've
known. For some real pics, see
Sweet
Little Bluebird's Crazy Cake recipe.
- UPA Studio's
Madeline
(1952)
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| June 21, 2025 |
- The cast-steel axle from the first Ferris Wheel
was
located in 2019, underneath St.Louis. Erected
first for the 1893 Columbian Exposition in Chicago,
the Wheel was dismantled and rebuilt in St.Louis for their
1904
expo. And speaking of, Rest Of World
reports
on the China pavillion at this year's, in Osaka.
- How
to turn off "Search the Web" when using the Task Bar's Search
in Windows 11. Worked for me; but still seeking an effective way to
suppress Google's annoying requests to log in, at so many
websites.
- Also in Japan, a Van Gogh show has just opened
at
the Pola Museum, near Tokyo.
- Today's image by John Singer Sargent. A certain girl gave me a copy of
this
painting, which I immediately put on the wall
of my first apartment, in old Greenbelt; a parting gift
before I went off to Europe the first time.
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| June 16, 2025 |
- It's the
International
Atomic Energy Agency's flag. Flags of the World has
a long
list of these rarely-seen UN flags.
- Two new artists:
Daniel Rich
translate photographs into
paintings, of buildings and cityscapes;
and Thibault Drutel makes photos of
symmetric
subway platforms.
- I linked to this sequence of vintage cars demonstrating their
retractable headlights previously, when it was on Twitter. Watching
it again on Reddit I don't see the early 60s Corvette so
here's
a '66 Sting Ray doing its thing.
- A lot of programmers are now using LLM "AI"s to
generate sub-routines and code they'd previously
write themselves. In fact
people
are talking with these ChatGPT AIs, falling in love
with, even believing they've found a channel for conversations
with God. Scary, perhaps; and now I understand those
programmers' frustration with the software, spending
hours tweaking their prompts to get just the right
output. Like I do: here's my current 'achievement', courtesy
Perchance.org.
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| June 12, 2025 |
- CNN:
A
brief history of airline food’s rapid descent.
- Radioactive Quack Cures at the
Museum of Radiation and Radioactivity.
- The
Truth about White South African Refugees. A loaded,
complicated issue; but SA is Winston's country so I
find him more credible than mainstream media on this
issue. This recent group may have jumped a queue, but
white people in SA are
targeted for ethnic cleansing now. As is so typical
these days, there was no follow-through, their entry
into the US was just for the optics, support for and
interest in the group evaporating afterwards —
No food, job or
phones: Afrikaner ‘refugee’ family ‘stranded’
or rather dumped in Montana.
- Today's image is a color-shifted detail from a postcard
advertising one of 12
Variety
Acts by the Wiener Werkstätte in 1907. This one
depicts A.Lucci, the famous Hunger
Artist, [who] had gone 132 days without food, and though
reduced to a skeleton was still smoking, reading and
in pretty good spirits. Also at Flashbak,
Photographs
of The Romanovs' Final Ball, in Color in
St.Petersburg in 1903 (such opulence!) and
Surface
Designs for Die Quelle, also from Vienna, 1902.
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| June 11, 2025 |
This is from Displaced by
Lucy Knisley, just
read it again, where she accompanies her grandparents on a
Caribbean cruise. She's also posted a 17-years-later
Part 2
sequel to her wishful song about time travel,
The
Last Time.
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| June 10, 2025 |
sticker-graffito spotted in Fremont, California
- More about this
Barbara
Kruger at Art Net. (It's called
Questions.)
A member of Pussy Riot involved also, she's in a cell
inside the museum, right now; doing a performance called
"Police State."
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| June 9, 2025 |
What's going on in LA? Who knows, really; but there's
a
connection between a 1990 tale I wrote about my life
there called 'A Trip Downtown' which explains the setting
of this recent confrontation there, between
law enforcement and the media.
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* Reminding me of
the Gary Snyder:
Stay Together
Learn the Flowers
Go Light.
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June 5, 2025
- Navigation within, a learned skill, but
Weimar Berlin.com
(by the mysterious "Al") is worthwhile, many fascinating
things therein (including this painting from 1930 by
Hanns Kralik, "Out My Window"). Inspired by
Babylon
Berlin, which I'm now catching up on, courtesy
the
Internet Archive. Challenge! As it's a German production,
natürlich, keine englischen, spanish sub-titles only!
Summaries available online enable some level of comprehension,
and library DVDs are coming.
- More Weimar at
Secret
City Travel.
-
Two words for truth, istina and pravda; and also, two
words for lies: lozh and vranyo. The Conversation delves into
vranyo, Russian
for when you lie and everyone knows it, but you don’t care.
Meanwhile, according to the BBC, one should
beware
pokazukhas and zakazukhas in Russian media — empty spectacles, and paid propaganda.
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