I like songs with what the Music Genome Project calls "ambiguous lyrics", but then I grew up listening to many songs which have some lyrics I still can't make out at all. I guess closure isn't something I'm looking for in music

Today, made ½ (or just under 300 ml) of this custard-style vanilla ice cream recipe and froze it in the Solo Scoops machine. It completely filled the machine and was about right to serve three people. www.theguardian.com/food/2020/au...

In 2014 the synthpop duo Ejecta had to change their name due to a clash with a guy called DJ Ejeca(?). They canvassed for additions to the name and settled on "Young Ejecta". This is similar to (New Young) Pony Club's strategy except better because young ejecta (fresh ejecta) are a thing in geology.

Amen kotaku.com/a-train-sim-...

Delightful en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bay_mud

Meadow in progress

Syllabub and spoom: both off by one final letter from a word now in common use, both sweet beverages

Just saw someone complain, with a straight face, that they had to feed an extract from Spengler's "Decline of Western Civilization" to Claude in order to understand it. (It had to be Claude, not ChatGPT, obviously, because of Claude's intangible advantage in the well-spoken snootiness department.)

"Gordon Matta-Clark’s Conical Intersect (1975) was a torqued, spiralling ‘cut’ into two derelict seventeenth-century Paris buildings adjacent to the construction site of the Centre Pompidou." www.afterall.org/publications... Conic sections are not spirals and there's no twist here. Open the schools

"Weather that is nice is often weather that is wrong." (Roni Horn)

I've just heard about it, but this knot seems to have solved the draw-string problem. en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lapp_knot

Don't be a tidal bore – take Pep-tide

Last month two library workers reached out to Public Collectors to ask about making a booklet version of Fobazi Ettarh's essay "Vocational Awe and Librarianship: The Lies We Tell Ourselves" for a Celebration of Life event. We did, and it is now available for all: halfletterpress.com/vocational-a...

Nothing says quirky like a $150 Louis Wain-inspired blanket www.strikegently.co/collections/...

Jana Jocif photo of a Plečnik's riverbank works in Ljubljana www.architectural-review.com/essays/revis...

I am right this very minute sitting in the cool breeze under the grapevine (that Juliet also planted) eating one of these figs and it is just an all-round incredible experience, like maybe the whole point of life was to eat this fig, mmmmmm

Musso make premium home ice cream machines that cost 8 or 9 hundred euro and have features such as "all components made of stainless steel" and "no electronics". Self-aggrandizingly self-effacing no-nonsense industrial-looking design. I'm suspicious. musso-icecream-machines.com/en/collectio...

Can’t sleep? Simple methods that work: • study hurricane forecast • who hates me • what did i forget • relive supreme humiliation • win 12-yr-old argument • buried alive? could happen • what i did vs should have done • dead people i miss • what if i’m bad • why do i say stuff • what’s my fuckin deal

There's an obscure early Bjork track called Karvel. The word is what it looks like: a cognate of carvel. It's an Icelandic male given name.

The top example of a fencepost error in art is Hans-Peter Feldmann's 100 Years. It contains photos of people at every age between 0 and 100 inclusive, hence there are 101 images. www.moma.org/collection/w...

I saw @edwinheathcote.bsky.social retweet this 1964 Evelyn Hofer image on X, but I'm trying to avoid being there. The sootiest New York image is more glamorous to me than her bleak Dublin photos. I'd say most honest Dubliners, hard up or not, would agree. via www.theguardian.com/artanddesign...

Technical post over on Mastodon about just how analog modulation of radio signals works graphics.social/@theohonohan... It's not as complicated as I thought it might be, but the geometry of AM is simpler than FM, when viewed using phasors. AM has two sidebands, FM has an infinite number.

New high-res ocean floor maps, free to use. shadedrelief.com/blue-earth-2/

Calling your book Piranesi creates a weird and impossible to meet expectation. It's as if The da Vinci Code was called "da Vinci". Piranesi is so revered by architects that by thinking you can borrow his name for a text, you're just showing that you're not actually aware of his status in that field.

Convex and concave Carinated vase Iran ca. 3000–2250 BCE www.metmuseum.org/art/collecti...

If you became famous in the 60s, it seems you're automatically elite now. In 2000 Artforum described Julio Le Parc as mediocre. Now the late Le Parc has a Tate Modern show. NB it also works to be an unknown woman artist from the same generation who kept working. www.tate.org.uk/whats-on/tat...

Asako Narahashi, Kawaguchiko, from the series "half awake and half asleep in the water", 2003

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Heinric... | en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:He...

I do find Lumo’s whole ‘look at us, we run electric trains’ green flag waving a little grating when over on the West Coast they’ve just launched a 670km-long Euston-Stirling diesel service, every meter of which is under electric wires, the longest totally-avoidable diesel service anywhere in the UK.

The Victorian Agnes B Marshall invented a faster ice cream machine. The previous roughly "spherical" buckets were the worst shape for ratio of surface area to volume. Hers was wide and flat, the base freezing a thin layer of mix, like the modern Thai ไอติมผัด method. fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sorbeti...

"The idea isn't to dye the ice cream an artificial green, but to use a hint of blue (!) gel paste to neutralize the yellow tones that pistachios develop with toasting" blue and yellow? sure sounds like you're mixing a green to me

photo by Mathias Klotz "Detalle escalera edificio 20 / Fritz Jaenecke y Sten Samuelson, Hansaviertel / 1961 / Berlin" www.instagram.com/p/DQK6a-zER7N/

Came across this very idiosyncratic display font combo for a unisex magazine (Germany's first?)

Accidentally discovered that people who play slot machines often wonder whether they should move around or just use the same machine until they run out of money. At least, there's some discussion of this online. One commenter advises that anything that slows you down makes your money go further

A friend and neighbour, David Wynne, has died. Here he is on television in the 80s discussing a model railway layout that he worked on, showing the DART at Dun Laoghaire. www.rte.ie/archives/col...

When Imogen Heap sings about wanting "to Play-Doh® waveforms in The Hideway", I just don't know whether to roll my eyes at the affectation or be enthralled by her on-brand lifestyle, absolutely true to form

"God is tasteful", apparently? How is that a real sentiment coming from anyone. Get back to me when this guy produces something like Nadja's 'Stays Demons' www.theguardian.com/music/2026/j...

Maybe surprising that there's nothing explicitly about heat here, except something about sweating and something about muscular refrigerator doors www.walkerart.org/reader/claes...

Cyprien Gaillard Chute, 2026 www.kunsthaus-bregenz.at/ausstellunge... As far as I know nothing is actually being dropped through this chute. There have been MUCH more subversive museum interventions (Chris Burden's for example) but this is... eloquent or fluent or something.

Harry Gruyaert Children playing with fire hydrant, Manhattan, 1985

I'm never sure what to think about possibly bombastic (definitely ostentatious) 18th century decorative arts. But this monument has ease going for it www.flickr.com/photos/12696... Via Rubens1577's faves on Flickr

There's scale to this confluence in Waterford Harbour where the River Barrow (+River Nore) meets the RIver Suir which is on its way to the sea from the port of Waterford (out of the Google Maps image, to the west). The combined catchment area is the second largest on the island. Photos from January.

"Some signs advertise Buc-ee's locations over 1,000 miles (1,600 km) away." www.cspdailynews.com/company-news... That's at the very least two days of driving. Why do they need to be top of mind for days in advance? How many cars are actually going to stay on the hypothetical route all the way?