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| March 18, 2026 |
-
Austin Bell
photographs Hong Kong basketball courts (of which there's quite a few)
with aerial drones, and assembles the results into
matrices -- detail, above.
- I saw
the
Antietam Arm in 1966, back then it was known as the Withered
Arm, it looked like a stick.
- Loved the yellow National Geographic, and I loved its
green, European competitor, which attempted an American edition in the
late 1970s: Geo. The Internet Archive has one,
the
December 1997 French issue.
- 5D, Hot vs Cold Data, and
Why
We Are Going Back to Optical Storage -- with glass.
- Another new psychological acronym:
HPP --
High Places Phenomenon -- what I call Edge Fear.
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| March 15, 2026 |
-
Iran's
only Van Gogh: ‘At Eternity’s Gate' (a lithograph which was
owned by Nelson Rockefeller, at one point). The subsequent painting
was discussed and displayed in these pages,
Christmas,
2024.
- More Persia: the
low-tech brilliance of Iranian design.
- I had never heard of
the
Irish goodbye, sometimes called a French exit or
'Going Houdini' -- leaving a gathering without saying farewell.
In France, they call it filer à l'anglaise
(to leave the English way) and in Germany, it’s a Polnischer Abgang,
or a Polish exit.
- More jargon: a new definition for PDA: Pathological Demand
Avoidance, another way to say "stubborn" -- how certain
kids lose their shit when asked or ordered to do something.
- Finally, the latest find in the Internet Archive:
George
of the Jungle: The Complete Series. I requested and watched
an episode
here
in 1991, when our media landscape was very different.
|
| March 14, 2026 |
- Amusing Planet looks into kinjiki,
Japan's
Forbidden Colors. Over the centuries, the strict
courtly regulations surrounding color gradually weakened [but] the symbolic
association between certain colors and authority, especially sumac, ochre
and gardenia, persists to this day.
- Animated Irish short, Oscar nominee:
Retirement Plan.
- BBC: France's
ghost car scandal, a million illegal vehicles on their roads
-- and how about the ghost cars of NYC?
CBS
update from six months back.
- Found this module at the thrift store for a few dollars, with no
external manufacturer logo or serial numbers. By its buttons I
could tell it's a clock of some kind; internet sleuthing
eventually led to the
Ten
Best Fake Hatch Alarm Clocks of 2025. Mine seems to be a Zelaclock, and
it's fun, like a combination light organ, Moonbeam alarm clock and white noise
generator. (Always takes me awhile to remember buttons on small digital clocks
have two modes: press and release, and press and hold.)
- Love the See
also of Wikipedia's 'chav' entry, for its British
subcultures like Hooliganism,
Bootboy,
and Football casuals, among others.
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| March 10, 2026 |
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| March 8, 2026 |
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.jpg "Piu Sik")