Today also happens to be my father-in-law’s birthday. I wonder if his mother, way back in 1943, realised his 79th birthday would fall on such an unusual day. Any date in 2022 would be almost unimaginably futuristic. Have any of us given the year 2101 a thought?
I was going through my old bookmarks and randomly came across one from 2014, a link to a now-forgotten Etsy printable typewriter desk calendar thing. I’m not looking for a 2014 calendar at the moment, but I tried the link anyway. Not only did the link still work, but it redirected to an updated 2022 version.
2022 DIY printable paper desk calendar papercraft – Etsy UK Here’s a quaint little 3D Paper Desk Calendar for your mantelpiece, table-top or shelf… in the form of a typewriter, with 12 month cards with dates for 2022. The body of the calendar is like a miniature vintage typewriter, complete with realistic details.
Comes in yellow, too.
Just goes to show, you can’t keep a good typewriter down.
The start of another week. But what is a week, really? Here’s an essay on how we came to depend on the week despite its artificiality.
How we became weekly – Aeon Weeks serve as powerful mnemonic anchors because they are fundamentally artificial. Unlike days, months and years, all of which track, approximate, mimic or at least allude to some natural process (with hours, minutes and seconds representing neat fractions of those larger units), the week finds its foundation entirely in history. To say ‘today is Tuesday’ is to make a claim about the past rather than about the stars or the tides or the weather. We are asserting that a certain number of days, reckoned by uninterrupted counts of seven, separate today from some earlier moment. And because those counts have no prospect of astronomical confirmation or alignment, weeks depend in some sense on meticulous historical recordkeeping. But practically speaking, weekly counts are reinforced by the habits and rituals of other people. When those habits and rituals were radically obscured or altered in 2020, the week itself seemed to unravel.
History professor David Henkin explores the background of this man-made construction and highlights the impact the pandemic has had on our experience of it. Though it’s mainly from a US perspective, they’ve chosen to head up the article with a glorious photo from my own county in the north of England.
A sunny Sunday afternoon above the harbour at Whitby in Yorkshire, England, in 1976
Wherever the week has come from, it starts with coffee for most of us. But how many, that’s the question. Let Judit Bekker and David Lynch answer that for you.
Live-blogging a new project – Data muggle I might sound like a broken record, but this year I got super crazy about Twin Peaks, and I can only viz about the things that interest me. So here it is: I’m gonna count all the damn fine coffees that were drunk in all 3 series. It’s 50+ hours of content, so my mind might just go to the Black Lodge by the time I finish. But there are not that many Twin Peaks data sets lurking around to be downloaded from the internet.
And here’s the final data visualisation of the 258 damn fine coffees she saw being enjoyed in Twin Peaks, which you can also see and interact with on Tableau Public.
It’s good to see that strangely creative people are continuing to be strangely creative during the lockdown. And they don’t come much stranger than James O’Brien.
Meet the artist spending his quarantine making potato prints of celebrity dentures – It’s Nice That
Beginning the project a few weeks ago as countries around the world began to head into lockdown, “like most people at this time, I was feeling a bit lost and longed to hear or see something familiar,” says James. “My dad loved listening to Terry Wogan, so I made a set of Wogan’s dentures. I don’t quite know why dentures,” he says, “but I found it oddly comforting.”
Posting the results on his Instagram, James then decided he’d offer up his services to anyone in need of a free set of celebrity dentures on a postcard (everyone). “It went berserk: Freddie Mercury, Jurgen Klopp, Joanna Lumley, Elton John, Madonna, Bowie (original set), Ken Dodd, the list goes on.”
We all need a hobby, I guess. You must check out his Dictator potato printed calendar, Dictatoes, for a glimpse into the hobbies of Ugandan dictator, Idi Amin and friends.
Vintage Leap Day postcards – Postcrossing
2020 is a Leap Year, so how about a look at some old postcards illustrating one of the best-known Leap Day traditions? If you’ve never heard of this, the tradition is that on Leap Day (and only on Leap Day!) women can propose to men.
I almost forgot — today is 22/7, Pi Approximation Day, “a holiday for people who are GOOD ENOUGH, just not transcendental! They do their best! They get by alright in most situations – just don’t try to build a bridge with them, you know?”
Today (23rd June, 2019) is… Let It Go Day
Let It Go Day is another one of the bevy of holidays created by Thomas and Ruth Roy of Wellcat Holidays & Herbs. They knew the difficulty of living with a pocketful of regrets that haunts you during every quiet hour, and knew that letting them go was the only way to find peace and contentment in their lives. So it was that Let It Go Day was created, with the intent of encouraging others throughout the world to let go of their regrets and forgive themselves for actions taken in the past.
Perhaps file this under ‘Whatever will they think of next?’
It’s national Let It Go Day, so here are 8 things you should definitely… well, let go of
6. Regret. I believe in learning from mistakes but not getting mad at yourself for making them. We do what seems like the best decision in the present, and we can’t always know that our future perspective will look like. We also can’t know how the future would have turned out if we’d acted differently. The results of our “mistakes” are often blessings in disguise.
Your life in weeks “Each row of weeks makes up one year. That’s how many weeks it takes to turn a newborn into a 90-year-old. It kind of feels like our lives are made up of a countless number of weeks. But there they are—fully countable—staring you in the face.”
Very intrigued by this calendar template with its unusual radial design. It looks very appealing–complete with instructions on how to bind the PDF pages together to make a proper calendar in book form–but I can’t help wonder how practical this may prove to be, day to day. Might give it a whirl though.
With its white space around the circles to encourage ‘radial thinking’, a number of people have taken up this new calendar format and customised it to suit their setups better. Follow the links to Flickr and Facebook pages for more.
Miscellaneous Details 