Arrokoth is a small object, measuring 22 miles long by 12 miles wide and 6 miles thick, which orbits in the Kuiper belt beyond the orbit of Neptune. It was discovered while the New Horizons space craft was already in flight. New Horizons was redirected to pass within ~2200 miles of Arrokoth to photograph and measure it.
Arrokoth appears to be two small globular objects that collided at a slow speed and eventually fused together. It is the most distant celestial object yet visited by humans.
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In the U.S., at the end of WWII, there was fear that with the winding down of war production the economy might revert to the stagnation of the Great Depression. In fact, with all the returning soldiers and sailors looking for work, there was inflation and a recession in 1946-47. However, the post-war economy soon roared back to life. Part of it was the long pent up desires of the American public, part of it was the effects of the GI Bill (Servicemen's Readjustment Act of 1944) easing the soldiers' transition back into civilian life.
In the post war years, along with a baby boom, came a housing boom thanks to the low cost mortgages provided by the GI Bill. There was also a change in building methods during this period, with much more prefabrication and cookie-cutter design, as any visit to a WWII era suburb will attest.
These images, from Vintage Everyday's 30 Beautiful American Kitchens From the 1940s, show how kitchens for the new homes were imagined and advertised. There are more at the link.
These are videos of small, neighborhood udon/soba (noodle) restaurants in Japan. The captions have been translated into English, turn them on to read them.
If you ended up in one of these places, ordering would be an adventure. Once, in Taipei, my wife and I landed in a place with the menu in nothing but Chinese (it didn't have the usual pictures). We just randomly pointed at things on the menu. The waiter looked at us like we were nuts, but a wonderful meal was delivered. We figured he just ignored our pointing and served us something sane instead. Hopefully, that's what these places would do if you dined in one.
The videos are from the YouTube channel Japanese Udon Soba. There are many more there.
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| Vivian Maier self portrait |
I am silver and exact. I have no preconceptions.
Whatever I see I swallow
immediately
Just as it is, unmisted by love or dislike.
I am not
cruel, only truthful‚
The eye of a little god, four-cornered.
Most
of the time I meditate on the opposite wall.
It is pink, with speckles. I
have looked at it so long
I think it is part of my heart. But it
flickers.
Faces and darkness separate us over and over.
Now
I am a lake. A woman bends over me,
Searching my reaches for what she
really is.
Then she turns to those liars, the candles or the moon.
I
see her back, and reflect it faithfully.
She rewards me with tears and an
agitation of hands.
I am important to her. She comes and goes.
Each
morning it is her face that replaces the darkness.
In me she has drowned
a young girl, and in me an old woman
Rises toward her day after day, like
a terrible fish.
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These are a series of advertisements made for the Queen City Printing Ink Company at the beginning of the 20th Century. They were done to highlight the companies ink colors and type faces. Their simple and bold design is the work of Augustus L. Jansson who, along with creating ads, was a cartoonist and greeting card designer.
His striking and simple style isn't quite yet Art Deco, but it certainly anticipates it. Many of these images are from his Ink Beasts Parade series of ads.
These works, and those after the jump, are from the Public Domain Review's Augustus Jansson’s Queen City Ink Adverts (1903–1907). There are more at the link.
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| Augustus L. Jansson |
This video starts out in a small market. We then board a water taxi and travel down a river, through a small town where we refuel, and then eventually onto the open waters of a lake. It looks like it would be pleasant day trip.
In my title I called the country Burma, the film-maker called it Myanmar. So which is correct? It is actually been known by both names. The British, during their colonial rule, settled on Burma as its official name. After independence the country's name was changed several times. It was a military junta that changed it to Myanmar, with the US, UK and a few other countries not recognizing the junta's mandate for such a name change and still calling it Burma. Read What’s in a Name: Burma or Myanmar? if you're interested in further details on the back and forth of the country's name changes.
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These are movie posters of silent films from the 1920s. Between their goofily maudlin stories and the sensibilities of that time, I'm sure they have oodles of PC sins oozing from them. Much less being green lit to be made, I wonder if they could even be viewed in these days of neo-Victorianism?
The posters are from Go to Cinema! at the PICRYL archives. There are more examples after the jump, and even more at the link.
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These images are of playing cards from the 16th and 17th centuries. I believe they are all of the face of the cards, I would be curious to see if their backs are highly decorative. The suits and card values seem to be the same as modern cards.
These images, and those after the jump, are from the Paris Musées digital collection. There are more at the link, you can also download zips of each card which contain the card's image as well as a PDF with further information. The PDF is in French.
Sailor Boy Bill goes on shore leave with a cocky attitude and seven months pay on him. He meets a friendly young lady in a bar and gets drunk. What could possible go wrong?
The walk starts in a regular market in Bangkok, Thailand and the moves to the part of the market that sells flowers. I half expected to see Chompoo, Peun, Prim, Foon and Art, but it looked like it was early in the morning so maybe they were sleeping off one of their benders at Go's bar.
OK, enough of my stupid jokes. It was filmed in December of 2020. The mask usage seems to be fairly random.
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| Images from Messy Nessy (click any image to enlarge) |
The newest computer can merely compound, at speed, the oldest problem in the relations between human beings, and in the end the communicator will be confronted with the old problem, of what to say and how to say it. - Edward R. Murrow
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'It's a beautiful thing, the destruction of words. Of course the great wastage is in the verbs and adjectives, but there are hundreds of nouns that can be got rid of as well. It isn't only the synonyms; there are also the antonyms. After all, what justification is there for a word which is simply the opposite of some other word? A word contains its opposite in itself. Take "good", for instance. If you have a word like "good", what need is there for a word like "bad"? "Ungood" will do just as well -- better, because it's an exact opposite, which the other is not. Or again, if you want a stronger version of "good", what sense is there in having a whole string of vague useless words like "excellent" and "splendid" and all the rest of them? "Plusgood" covers the meaning, or "doubleplusgood" if you want something stronger still. Of course we use those forms already. but in the final version of Newspeak there'll be nothing else. In the end the whole notion of goodness and badness will be covered by only six words -- in reality, only one word. Don't you see the beauty of that, Winston? It was B.B.'s idea originally, of course,' he added as an afterthought.
A sort of vapid eagerness flitted across Winston's face at the mention of Big Brother. Nevertheless Syme immediately detected a certain lack of enthusiasm.
'You haven't a real appreciation of Newspeak, Winston,' he said almost sadly. 'Even when you write it you're still thinking in Oldspeak. I've read some of those pieces that you write in the Times occasionally. They're good enough, but they're translations. In your heart you'd prefer to stick to Oldspeak, with all its vagueness and its useless shades of meaning. You don't grasp the beauty of the destruction of words. Do you know that Newspeak is the only language in the world whose vocabulary gets smaller every year?'
Winston did know that, of course. He smiled, sympathetically he hoped, not trusting himself to speak. Syme bit off another fragment of the dark-coloured bread, chewed it briefly, and went on:
'Don't you see that the whole aim of Newspeak is to narrow the range of thought? In the end we shall make thoughtcrime literally impossible, because there will be no words in which to express it. Every concept that can ever be needed, will be expressed by exactly one word, with its meaning rigidly defined and all its subsidiary meanings rubbed out and forgotten. Already, in the Eleventh Edition, we're not far from that point. But the process will still be continuing long after you and I are dead. Every year fewer and fewer words, and the range of consciousness always a little smaller. Even now, of course, there's no reason or excuse for committing thoughtcrime. It's merely a question of self-discipline, reality-control. But in the end there won't be any need even for that. The Revolution will be complete when the language is perfect. Newspeak is Ingsoc and Ingsoc is Newspeak,' he added with a sort of mystical satisfaction. 'Has it ever occurred to you, Winston, that by the year 2050, at the very latest, not a single human being will be alive who could understand such a conversation as we are having now?'
- George Orwell
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These images are from the Book of Miracles, a German early Renaissance work that shows various miracles, natural disasters and visions of the apocalypse drawn from Biblical sources and legends. There are more examples after the jump.
A while back I did a post on Cossack sword dancing. Today we follow that post up with some Korean sword dancing. Above is a video of young ladies from Chungnam Arts High School doing a sword dance. Their swords are no where near as long and dangerous looking as the Cossack swords, but the costuming and choreography is very nice.
Korean sword dances are called Geom-mu(검무). All the examples of Korean sword dancing I saw featured women; I'm not sure what the story behind that is. The dances appear to be more formalized and theatrical than the Cossack dances. Below are a couple of other examples of Korean sword dances.
