Here's that diagram showing the Hindi naming of the components of elephant caparison you didn't know you needed. (From the highly-recommended www.sahapedia.org/elephant-reg... )

Astonishingly gorgeous nef (lower left).

1963: A volcano births the new island of Surtsey, in an event occurring once in 3-5,000 years. Precious, such places unruined - at least at first hand, and at least for now - by people. www.theguardian.com/environment/...

Historians of science: any thoughts on this? I'm intrigued by a "recipe" in a 1505 manuscript, which describes what appears to be the Leidenfrost effect, named after Johann Gottlob Leidenfrost, who supposedly was the first to describe the effect in the 18th century 🗃️ #HistSTM #HistSci #EarlyModern 🧪

This concept art for @realgdt.bsky.social 's Frankenstein - and now, my home office - has been hiding in plain sight as part of a Hollywood Reporter preview of the 'Art of…' book. No artist credit unfortunately but Tamara Deverell production designer. www.hollywoodreporter.com/movies/movie...

Seasonally appropriate BTS from Berton Pierce on the models (and sets) of Coppola's Bram Stoker's Dracula. "… a skeleton ribcage skull head sitting on a throne. And yet it was to look like a castle. Like you've ever seen a castle like that." m.youtube.com/watch?v=LCqw...

Perhaps I mistook it for abandoned, perhaps I came to despise how effortlessly the author pushes at an idea and keeps pushing and pushing: in any case, somehow I forgot BLDGBLOG. In an overnighter tonight I remembered it and fell head & heels hook & line back in love. bldgblog.com/2022/01/molt...

Jason Ardizzone-West's work may tbh not be my cup of tea but his process documentation is truly outstanding and fascinating. www.jawstudiony.com/design-proce...

Jim Henson would've been 89 years old today. Commemorate his life and legacy by celebrating creativity, diversity, imagination, peace, and just plain silliness. Walk with me a bit while I talk about Jim and his work--and leave your comments about what he means to you. Right this way. /1

Exhausted by the continual effort to resist buying this well-provenanced (thoroughbred?) 1920s-vintage pantomime horse. Might be prudent to yield to it.

How can it be possible that this never-read three volume boxed set of The Memoirs of the Duc de Saint Simon in the Norton translation (abridged but this is recreational reading) can be sold and delivered to me for less than the price of a chip barm and small portion of mushy peas?

As much as that, Internet Archive?

ABSTRACT In this skeet I argue that the avant garde in contemporary food creativity is not to be found in the Guide Michelin but on MN State Fair's 'New Foods' page. Keywords: Cockaigne, Gargantua, Wonka DEMONSTRATION www.mnstatefair.org/new/food/

Goodnight. Concept drawings by Hermann Warm for The Cabinet of Dr Caligari (1920).

We have a winner. Chapeau, Dr Keegan, this is inspired. And brava, too to @annegoldgar.bsky.social who helped get us there! Bluesky, look how brilliant and how generous your people are.

#palaeography #skystorians can you help with this c18th Scottish headscratcher that's got me stumped? "…to come of ? ? that…" Eany = any? Needless to say, the meaning of the whole folio which is almost all bureaucratic boilerplate turns on these, the only two indecipherable words! 🗃️

Needed precisely zero seconds to decide to sign up for this banger. Also: extra marks for the banner image of Studley: altogether rightly the poster landscape of designed landscapes.

Extremely à la mode baroque tableside carving / fruit sculpture performance from Mattia Giegher's Tre Trattati (1639) gallica.bnf.fr/view3if/ga/a...

The argument from livelihoods is, overwhelmingly, an argument backwards from the conclusion to prospect for supporting evidence. The livelihoods which trade in fact safeguards are those of brokers, middlemen & profiteers, far downstream of the communities cynically enlisted as a moral flyweight.

Best. Parcel. Ever. Thanks to the gorgeous people at METh, a bulk shipping order of mint classic back issues of my all-time favourite journal, free, gratis and for nothing. Chances of accomplishing actual as-calendared work this week now laughably slight.

"That was my key to the whole set. We took big elements of Venetian architecture, and then we just painted them literally onto these big canvas arches.” If Wednesday S2.2 goes full Farinelli, you're going to need to use the maxi-dose bull elephant dart on me. variety.com/2025/artisan...

Harro Siegel's marionette of Grendel from his post-war production of Beowulf. museo-marionetas-barcelona.org/en/master-bu...

Lancelotti's 1612 souvenir guidebook to baroque feasting, Lo Scalco Prattico lists one garnish insistently. 140+ mentions in a 300pp volume. Greg, John, today I've cooked for you tocchi d'oro. Gilded (also, silvered) testicles. Served with a marzipan sculpture of Neptune holding his trident.

Pina Bausch's Die Nelkenreihe (aka Nelken-Line, aka Seasons March), but it's "Sonne" by Rammstein. Hohes Gras, Sonne. Sie ist der hellste Stern von allen.

Tussen alle politieke brieven van De Witt uit 1652 duikt ineens iets persoonlijks op: Johan de Witt accepteert een uitnodiging voor een bruiloft – waar hij onbewust zijn toekomstige bruid Wendela Bicker moet hebben ontmoet. Tamarah de Groot schreef er over: johandewitt.nl/de-bruiloft-...

Chic dining from Vittorio Lancelotti's 1627 Lo Scalco Prattico: - a marzipan tableau of two duelling Germans armed with halberds - a rustic diorama of dancing peasants with a band, all sculpted in butter

Fresh off the press! Our perspective in @natrevbiodiv.nature.com discusses the wealth of information on biodiversity contained in historical sources, and its integration for long-term ecological knowledge and biodiversity conservation. A thread on the paper and what led to it: rdcu.be/eEcIt

My error was watching Grand Budapest Hotel. A smug, preening, arch, bloodless, flounce of a movie. Seldom have I seen (the first reel of) a film easier to loathe or more abjectly in default of the cleverness & visual élan with it so poignantly & so very mistakenly believes itself lavishly endowed.

This is a really neat bit of work on Bankside as an entertainment space, based on years of painstaking professional excavation. A hard read for a dog-lover, but fascinating nonetheless www.cambridge.org/core/journal...

And here's the link to the paper - just published www.cambridge.org/core/journal...

Are you curious about the potential for archival practices to shape the study of emotion; why there are letters in the English State Papers labelled 'mad'; or how the culture & politics of Elizabethan England shaped people's experience of distress? Find out here! doi.org/10.1017/S008... #earlymodern

"To make a skie colour sauce in summer." Rosselli, Giovanne de. Epulario, Or the Italian Banquet Wherein is Shewed the Maner how to Dresse and Prepare all Kind of Flesh, Foules Or Fishes […]. Translated Out of Italian into English 1598. www.proquest.com/books/epular....

My soul fell out and I don't know what to do.

TIL: One of the designers of Disneyland's Tomorrowland in 1955 - working on the TWA Moonliner and Rocket To The Moon - was V2 rocket designer, SS Untersturmführer and slave-labour entrepreneur, lovable all-American Wernher "Tinkerbell" von Braun.

This week in Things Which Are Difficult to Archive: rollercoasters. Quoted passage: Lukas, Scott A, Theme park (Reaktion, 2008) p109

A #17thCentury #broadsideballad, describing the sights & sounds of #BartholomewFair, which was held #otd at #Smithfield from the 12th to the 19th Centuries. www.youtube.com/watch?v=pC_2... #earlymusic #earlymodern #historyoflondon #onthisday #onthidayinhistory #ballad

I am a huge fan of Mark Scruton's work on Wednesday, and Tamara Deverell might well be the best designer working in Hollywood today but both these figural pieces look weak compared to the hellmouths of the C16th Villa della Torre near Verona.

Wolfgang Heimbach, Banquet at Night in the Knights’ Hall of Vienna’s Hofburg Palace, 1640, oil on copper, 64.2 cm × 117.6 cm (Kunsthistorisches Museum Wien)

Grail kicks for Brugeois sneakerheads in the last quarter of the 14th - early 15th century. Banquet of a paper with something to enthral anyone: art, science, material culture, trade, textiles, food, fashion.

Awful news Tosh was the most Manchester it's possible to be, and emphatically not in the corporate way that would mean nowadays: ornery, elegant, gobby, brilliant, subversive, charming, a dreamer, an insurrectionist & too clever by at least three quarters. Inspirational. Meeting him changed my life

Italians' anathematisation of ketchup on pasta confirms decades of poststructuralist theory that authors= poorly qualified to interpret their texts. If you arent putting mushy peas & ketchup on your pasta youre in the grip of some tragically naive essentialist-intentionalist readings of carbohydrate

The idea of universal architecture: Vincenzo Scamozzi, influential Renaissance architect, died #OTD 1616; completed Palladio’s Teatro Olimpico in Vicenza in 1585, with celebrated trompe-l’oeil scenery, the oldest surviving stage set. UNESCO World Heritage Site

Mark Scruton & team won the 2023 Emmy for the production design of #Wednesday S1, and if there's any justice S2 just sewed up 2026 too. youtu.be/lZf8vSIHVDg

In 1997 I saw a one-off for Laurie Anderson's Meltdown at SBC, a duet by Bill T. Jones & Robert Wilson in which each walked down a flight of stairs, as themselves, improvising in counterpoint. Just that. The most breathtaking thing I ever saw on a stage. RIP, Robert Wilson. robertwilson.com/news

This show, Systolic, a solo for aerialist Lizy Whiting with lasers and self-illuminating costume controlled by her pulse - felt futuristic when we (Venya Krutikov electronics, Maria Olmos costume) made it knocking on 15 years ago. Meanwhile, in 1881...

Humbled again both by how enviably learned some scholars are in wildly-niche but gorgeous fields, and also how generous.

As a child, these machines were always my first stop at the arcade. I only recently discovered their Leeds connection. Penny arcade machines like the one below were a seaside sensation in the late 1800s. Leeds craftsman John Dennison created many of them, supplying places like Blackpool Tower

#skystorians #bookhistory colleagues, #Victorian #ephemera brains: Online sources report that printed, lined blank paper was invented 1770. Can anybody point me to surviving c19th exempla? For something so obviously & immediately useful, odd there isn't more of it about (to my knowledge)? 🙏🗃️