A Relaxing 3-Hour Tour of Venice’s Canals

in Travel | April 27th, 2021

Experience Venice in this boat tour through 17 miles (27 km) of canals. “You will see the full Grand Canal going in both directions, navigate through the small canals and under bridges and see sites that you cannot see by walking.” It’s quiet, meditative, a mental escape from the tedium of quarantine life.

Right below, you can find a list of the stops along the way…

1:32 Constitution Bridge

2:02 The Grand Canal (Full Tour)

3:23 Santa Lucia Train Station

13:33 Rialto Bridge

23:28 Ponte dell’Accademia

30:38 Piazza San Marco

36:08 Small Inside Canals & Bridges

41:05 Libreria Acqua Alta

44:08 Campo Santi Giovanni e Paolo

47:16 Open Water – Skip ahead to the next section

57:25 Canal of Saint Peter

58:18 Building Bridges Sculpture

1:09:55 Bridge of Sighs

1:16:15 Rialto Bridge & Grand Canal

1:18:39 Small Inside Canals & Bridges

1:23:04 The Grand Canal

1:27:14 Pont dell’Accademia

1:34:44 Rialto Bridge

1:43:34 Ponte delle Guglie

1:46:04 Tre Archi Bridge

1:48:38 Liberty Bridge (Ponte della Libertà)

1:54:18 Constitution Bridge

1:58:38 Close Call!

2:04:43 Squero di San Trovaso (gondola boatyard)

2:07:23 Grand Canal (short section)

2:10:44 Small Canals and Bridges

2:17:14 Grand Canal (short section)

2:20:14 Magister Canova

2:22:04 Open Water

2:26:14 Small Inside Canals & Bridges

2:30:44 Piazza San Marco

2:33:04 The Grand Canal (Full Tour)

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The Venice Time Machine: 1,000 Years of Venice’s History Gets Digitally Preserved with Artificial Intelligence and Big Data

Pink Floyd Plays in Venice on a Massive Floating Stage in 1989; Forces the Mayor & City Council to Resign

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Behold the 1940s Typewriter That Could Type in English, Chinese & Japanese: Watch More Than a Thousand Different Characters in Action

in History, Technology | April 27th, 2021

There was a time, not long after the widespread adoption of telegraphy in the 19th century, when the written Chinese language looked doomed. Or at least it did to certain thinkers considering the implications of that instant global communication-enabling technology having been developed for the relatively simple Latin alphabet. And as unsuited as the Chinese writing system must have seemed to the world of the telegraph, it would have presented a seemingly even heavier burden in the world of the typewriter.

Only in 1916, thanks to the efforts of a U.S.-educated Shanghai engineer named Hou-Kun Chow, did the Chinese typewriter debut, built around a large, revolving cylinder that could print 4,000 ideographic (that is to say, each one representing a different word or sound) characters. From that point the evolution of the Chinese typewriter was rather quick, by the standards of the day. And it didn’t only happen in China: Japan, whose own written language incorporates many ideographic Chinese characters, had been subject to more intense technological influence from the West since opening to foreign trade in the 1860s.

The very year after its founding in 1939, electronics-giant-to-be Toshiba (the product of a merger involving Japan’s first maker of telegraph equipment) produced the first Japanese cylindrical typewriter. “Mostly used by the Japanese military during World War II,” says the Vintage Typewriter Museum, it incorporated 630 characters. After the war “Toshiba introduced a new model, the 1200 A, featuring 1172 Japanese and Chinese characters.” In the video above, from Youtuber by the name of Typewriter Collector, you can see a slightly later model in action.

Produced before the introduction of “Western-style” keyboards, the Toshiba BW-2112 has the same interface as its predecessors: “The character is selected by rotating the cylinder and shifting it horizontally, so that the necessary character is selected with the index pointer,” according to the Vintage Typewriter Museum. “When the print key is depressed, the type strip is pushed upwards from the cylinder, and the type hammer swings to the center to print the character onto the paper.”

These vintage Japanese typewriters still today strike their viewers as marvels of engineering, though their then-vast store of characters (which included not just Chinese-derived kanji but phonetic kana and even the Latin alphabet) have long since been surpassed by digital technology. Now that every student’s smartphone puts all 50,000 or extant Chinese characters in their command — to say nothing of the world’s other written languages — it’s safe to say they’re not about to fall into disuse any time soon.

via Messy Nessy

Discover Friedrich Nietzsche’s Curious Typewriter, the “Malling-Hansen Writing Ball” (Circa 1881)

When IBM Created a Typewriter to Record Dance Movements (1973)

Discover the Ingenious Typewriter That Prints Musical Notation: The Keaton Music Typewriter Patented in 1936

Free Chinese Lessons

Learn Japanese Free

Based in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities, language, and culture. His projects include the Substack newsletter Books on Cities, the book The Stateless City: a Walk through 21st-Century Los Angeles and the video series The City in Cinema. Follow him on Twitter at @colinmarshall or on Facebook.

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The Rolling Stones Jam with Muddy Waters for the First and Only Time at Chicago’s Legendary Checkerboard Lounge (1981)

in Music | April 27th, 2021

Whatever marketing materials may claim, the Rolling Stones did not just happen upon Buddy Guy’s Checkerboard Lounge on Chicago’s South Side (before it closed, reopened in Hyde Park, then closed again for good) on a night when Muddy Waters happened to be there in 1981. And they did not spontaneously get invited to jam, as it seems, when they “climbed over tables” to get onstage with their hero and blues legends Buddy Guy and Junior Wells.

A chance meeting, of course, would have been magical, but the truth is the event was probably “planned and coordinated,” writes W. Scott Poole at Popmatters. These were the biggest names in the blues and rock and roll, after all. “Why,” before the Stones and their entourage arrive, “is there an empty table on the night Muddy Waters came back to Southside?”

And why did the Rolling Stones’ manager claim he “approached the Checkerboard higher-ups a week in advance,” Ted Scheinman writes at Slant, “proposing a surprise concert and proffering $500 as proof-of earnest”?

Was it a cynical ploy to re-establish the band’s blues cred during what would turn out to be the largest grossing tour of the year — one featuring what Jagger called “enormous images of a guitar, a car and a record — an Americana idea.” In some sense, Muddy Waters was also an “Americana idea,” but how could he be otherwise to the Stones, given that they’d grown up listening to him from across the Atlantic, associating him with experiences they had never known firsthand?

And so what if the historic meeting at the Checkerboard Lounge was stage-managed behind the scenes? That’s what managers do — they arrange things behind the scenes and let performers create the illusion of spontaneity, as though they hadn’t spent an entire tour, or decades of tours, making the same songs seem fresh on any given night. When it comes to the blues, playing the same songs over again is a key part of the game, seeing how much attitude and style one can wring out of a few chords, doggedly persistent themes of sex, love, death, betrayal, and maybe a bottleneck slide.

It’s a lesson the Stones learned well, and their adoration and respect for Muddy Waters is nothing less than genuine, even if it took some backstage negotiation to bring them together this one and only time. Muddy is spectacular. “Even as one of the aging elder statesmen of the Chicago blues in 1981,” writes Poole, “he exudes an aura of sex and power, showing off every attribute that so inspired Mick and Keith and that became an ineffable part of their own music and their persona.”

Meanwhile, the absolutely boyish glee on the faces of Jagger, Richards, Ronnie Wood, and Stones’ pianist Ian Stewart as they perform onstage with an artist who had given them so much more than just their name speaks for itself. The concert video and live album “began appearing as bootleg and unofficial releases almost immediately,” Allmusic notes, “from LP and CD to VHS and DVD.” Here, you can see them jam out three songs from the night: “Baby Please Don’t Go” (on which Waters brings Jagger onstage at 5:30 for an extended version and Keith joins at 6:50), “Mannish Boy,” and “Hoochie Coochie Man.”

A Visual History of The Rolling Stones Documented in a Beautiful, 450-Page Photo Book by Taschen

The Rolling Stones Release a Long Lost Track Featuring Led Zeppelin’s Jimmy Page

Josh Jones is a writer and musician based in Durham, NC. Follow him at @jdmagness

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Scientists at Purdue University Create the “Whitest White” Paint Ever Seen: It Reflects 98% of the Sun’s Light

in Science | April 27th, 2021

Xiulin Ruan, a Purdue University professor of mechanical engineering, holds up his lab’s sample of the whitest paint on record. Purdue University/Jared Pike

Surely, you’ve heard of Vantablack, the high-tech coating invented by UK company Surrey NanoSystems that absorbs over 99 percent of light and makes three-dimensional objects look like black holes? Aside from its controversially exclusive use by artist Anish Kapoor, the blackest of black paints has so far proven to be most effective in space. “You can imagine up in space people think of it as being really black and dark,” Surrey NanoSystems chief technical officer Ben Jensen explains. “But actually it’s incredibly bright up there because the Sun’s like a huge arc lamp and you’ve got light reflecting off the Earth and moon.”

All that sunlight can make certain parts of the world unbearably hot for humans, a rapidly worsening phenomenon thanks to climate change, which has itself been worsened by climate control systems used to cool homes, offices, stores, etc. Since the 1970s scientists have attempted to break the vicious cycle with white paints that can cool buildings by reflecting sunlight from their surfaces. “Painting buildings white to reflect sunlight and make them cooler is common in Greece and other countries,” notes The Washington Post. “Cities like New and Chicago have programs to paint roofs white to combat urban heat.”

The problem is “commercial white paint gets warmer rather than cooler,” writes Purdue University. “Paints on the market that are designed to reject heat reflect only 80%-90% of sunlight and can’t make surfaces cooler than their surroundings,” since they absorb ultraviolet light. That may well change soon, with the invention by a team of Purdue engineers of an as-yet unnamed, patent-pending ultra-white paint that has “pushed the limits on how white paint can be.” Those limits now fall just slightly short of Vantablack on the other side of the spectrum (or grayscale).

An infrared camera shows how a sample of the whitest white paint (the dark purple square in the middle) actually cools the board below ambient temperature, something that not even commercial “heat rejecting” paints do. Purdue University/Joseph Peoples

Purdue describes the properties of the revolutionary compound.

Two features give the paint its extreme whiteness. One is the paint’s very high concentration of a chemical compound called barium sulfate, which is also used to make photo paper and cosmetics white.

The second feature is that the barium sulfate particles are all different sizes in the paint. How much each particle scatters light depends on its size, so a wider range of particle sizes allows the paint to scatter more of the light spectrum from the sun.

This formula “reflects up to 98.1% of sunlight — compared with the 95.5%,” of light reflected by a previous compound that used calcium carbonate instead of barium sulfite. The less than 3% difference is more significant than it might seem.

Xiulin Ruan, professor of mechanical engineering, describes the potential of the new reflective coating: “If you were to use this paint to cover a roof area of about 1,000 square feet, we estimate that you could get a cooling power of 10 kilowatts. That’s more powerful than the central air conditioners used by most houses… If you look at the energy [savings] and cooling power this paint can provide, it’s really exciting.”

Will there be a proprietary war between major players in the art world to control it? “Ideally,” Kait Sanchez writes at The Verge, “anything that could be used to improve people’s lives while reducing the energy they use should be free and widely available.” Ideally.

Learn more about the whitest white paint here and, if you have access, at the researchers’ publication in the journal ACS Applied Materials & Interfaces.

via Smithsonian

Discover Harvard’s Collection of 2,500 Pigments: Preserving the World’s Rare, Wonderful Colors

A 3,000-Year-Old Painter’s Palette from Ancient Egypt, with Traces of the Original Colors Still In It

Josh Jones is a writer and musician based in Durham, NC. Follow him at @jdmagness

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The Meaning of Hieronymus Bosch’s The Garden of Earthly Delights Explained

in Art, History | April 26th, 2021

Over the half-millennium since Hieronymus Bosch painted it, The Garden of Earthly Delights has produced an ever-widening array of interpretations. Is it “a painting about sexual freedom”? A “medieval acid trip”? An “erotic fantasy”? A “heretical attack on the church”? The work of “a member of an obscure free-love cult”? James Payne, the London curator behind the Youtube channel Great Art Explained, rejects all these views. In the opening of the in-depth video analysis above, he describes Bosch’s well-known and much-scrutinized late-15th or early-16th century triptych as, “pure and simply, hardcore Christianity.”

Dating from “a time when European artists, writers, and theologians were shaping a new, terrifying vision of Hell and the punishment awaiting sinners,” Payne argues, The Garden of Earthly Delights is “an intensely moralistic work that should be approached as what it is: religious propaganda.”

Depicting the Biblical creation of the world on its outer panels, the work opens up to reveal elaborately detailed visions of Adam and Eve in the Garden of Eden, then humanity indulging in all known earthly delights, then the consequent torments of Hell. It is that last panel, with its abundance of perverse activities and grotesque human, animal, and human-animal figures (recently made into figurines and even piñatas) that keeps the strongest hold on our imagination today.

Payne’s explanation goes into detail on all aspects of the work, highlighting and contextualizing details that even avowed appreciators may not have considered before. While identifying both the possible inspirations and the possible symbolic intentions of the figures and symbols with which Bosch filled the triptych, Payne emphasizes that, as far as the artist was concerned, “his images were a realistic portrayal of sin and its consequences, so in that sense, it wasn’t surrealism, it was realism.” This bears repeating, given how difficult we moderns find it “to look at this painting and not see it as surrealism or a product of the subconscious, not see it as a sexual utopia, a critique of religion, or even a psychedelic romp.” Just as The Garden of Earthly Delights tells us a great deal about the world Bosch lived in, so our views of it tell us a great deal about the world we live in.

Hieronymus Bosch’s Medieval Painting The Garden of Earthly Delights Comes to Life in a Gigantic, Modern Animation

Take a Multimedia Tour of the Buttock Song in Hieronymus Bosch’s Painting The Garden of Earthly Delights

The Musical Instruments in Hieronymus Bosch’s The Garden of Earthly Delights Get Brought to Life, and It Turns Out That They Sound “Painful” and “Horrible”

New App Lets You Explore Hieronymus Bosch’s “The Garden of Earthly Delights” in Virtual Reality

Figures from Hieronymus Bosch’s The Garden of Earthly Delights Come to Life as Fine Art Piñatas

Based in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities, language, and culture. His projects include the Substack newsletter Books on Cities, the book The Stateless City: a Walk through 21st-Century Los Angeles and the video series The City in Cinema. Follow him on Twitter at @colinmarshall or on Facebook.

by Colin Marshall | Permalink | Make a Comment ( 4 ) |

Quarantined Dancer Creates Shot-for-Shot Remake of the Final Dirty Dancing Scene with a Lamp as a Dance Partner

in Comedy, Dance, Film | April 26th, 2021

1987’s low budget sleeper hit, Dirty Dancing, propelled its leads, Jennifer Grey and the late Patrick Swayze, to instant stardom.

Swayze later mused to the American Film Institute about the film’s remarkable staying power:

It’s got so much heart, to me. It’s not about the sensuality; it’s really about people trying to find themselves, this young dance instructor feeling like he’s nothing but a product, and this young girl trying to find out who she is in a society of restrictions when she has such an amazing take on things. On a certain level, it’s really about the fabulous, funky little Jewish girl getting the guy because [of] what she’s got in her heart.

Nearly 35 years after the original release, another gifted male dancer, Brooklyn-based photographer Quinn Wharton, is tapping into that heart… and Grey has been replaced by a lamp.

Wharton once told Ballet Hub that his favorite part of dancing professionally with the San Francisco Ballet and Hubbard Street Dance Chicago was the access it gave him to the great names in dance — William Forsythe, Mats Ek, Christopher Wheeldon, Wayne McGregor, and others whose proximity made for “a remarkable education.”

The first few months of the pandemic forced him to dance solo, recreating memorable film moments in response to a friend’s challenge:

I was hesitant at first but thought I would give it a try to see what I might be able to learn from it. Turns out it was way more fun than I thought and the result was funnier than I could have imagined.

We agree that his Quinn-tessential Dance Scenes series is very funny, as well as beautifully executed in the twin arenas of camera work and dance. His self-imposed parameters — no outside help, no green screen, no filming outside of the apartment, and no special purchases of props or costumes, contribute to the humor.

His hardworking, disembodied, comparatively well-covered haunches elicit laughs when seen next to the much skimpier original costume of Flashdance’s “Maniac” scene, above. 18-year-old star Jennifer Beals had three dance doubles — Marine Jahan, gymnast Sharon Shapiro, and legendary B-Boy Richard Colón, aka Crazy Legs of Rock Steady crew. None of them appeared in the original credits because, as Jahan told Entertainment Tonight, the producers “didn’t want to break the magic.”

In other words, a lot of steamy 80s-era fantasies centered on Beals are now known to be a case — possibly three cases — of mistaken identity.

Wharton’s quarantine project afforded him a chance to come at John Travolta from two angles, thanks to the disco classic Saturday Night Fever and Pulp Fiction’s twist sequence, a surprisingly popular fan request. Though Travolta’s dance training was limited to childhood tap lessons with Gene Kelly’s brother, Fred, Wharton praises his “serious range.”

Wharton cites the inspiration for one of his lesser known recreations, director Baz Lurhman’s first feature, Strictly Ballroom, as a reason he began dancing:

My dad loves this movie and as a kid I can’t count the number of times that I watched it. It’s so much, loud, brash, exuberant …It also allowed me to bring back my favorite partner.

Quinn-tessential Dance Scenes is on hiatus so Wharton can concentrate on his work as a dance photographer. Watch a playlist of all eight episodes here.

See more of his dance photography on his Instagram page.

The Power of Pulp Fiction’s Dance Scene, Explained by Choreographers and Even John Travolta Himself

The Iconic Dance Scene from Hellzapoppin’ Presented in Living Color with Artificial Intelligence (1941)

Ayun Halliday is an author, illustrator, theater maker and Chief Primatologist of the East Village Inky zine, who can occasionally be spotted wandering around New York City in a bear suit, in character as L’Ourse. Follow her @AyunHalliday.

by Ayun Halliday | Permalink | Make a Comment ( None ) |

Ray Dali & Adam Grant Launch Free Online Personality Assessment to Help You Understand Yourself (and Others Understand You)

in Psychology | April 26th, 2021

Back in 2017, Ray Dalio published Principles: Life and Work, a bestselling book where the creator of the world’s largest hedge fund shared “the unconventional principles that he’s developed, refined, and used over the past forty years to create unique results in both life and business.” You can find a distilled version of those unconventional principles in a 30-minute animation video previously featured on our site.

To accompany his book, Dalio has now released, along with University of Pennsylvania organizational psychologist Adam Grant, a free personality assessment tool called PrinciplesYou. The assessment takes about 30 to 40 minutes to complete, and we would strongly encourage you to sign up for an account before you get started, so that you can save the results of the assessment afterwards. Otherwise you will lose the results.

According to psychologist Brian Little, “PrinciplesYou was developed over a two-year intensive and creative R&D process with two goals in mind. First, it measures traits that Ray Dalio and his team have observed and studied for many years as critical for personal and organizational success. Second, it is based on the latest research in personality science. The assessment provides a person’s score on a comprehensive set of traits, their underlying facets and interactive patterns, and it has high reliability, internal structure, re-test reliability and validity of these traits and facets. A distinctive strength is its ability to predict an extraordinary array of actual behaviors observed by the Bridgewater staff over many years.”

Adam Grant adds: “To achieve success, you need to know yourself and the people around you. Although your car comes with an owner’s manual, your mind doesn’t—and neither do your colleagues. We designed PrinciplesYou to help you gain the self-awareness and other-awareness that are critical to making good decisions, getting things done, and turning a group of coworkers into a great team.”

You can watch Grant and Dalio discuss PrinciplesYou above. You can listen to Grant feature Dalio’s insights on his Work Life podcast here. And finally you can start the free personality assessment here.

The Principles for Success by Entrepreneur & Investor Ray Dalio: A 30-Minute Animated Primer

Economics 101: Hedge Fund Investor Ray Dalio Explains How the Economy Works in a 30-Minute Animated Video

How to Raise Creative Children Who Can Change the World: 3 Lessons from Wharton Professor Adam Grant

by OC | Permalink | Make a Comment ( 1 ) |

Parrot Sings AC/DCs “Whole Lotta Rosie”

in Random | April 25th, 2021

Here’s the original from AC/DC. And here you can find more sing-alongs from Frank Maglio Tico & the Man. Enjoy.

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Hear the Sound Of Endangered Birds Get Turned Into Electronic Music

Cornell Launches Archive of 150,000 Bird Calls and Animal Sounds, with Recordings Going Back to 1929

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Freddie Mercury & Rami Malek’s Live Aid Performance: A Side-By-Side Comparison

in Music | April 23rd, 2021

All Hollywood musicals need a big final set piece, one final rousing number to bring all the narrative threads back together, and provide redemption to our fallen hero. Bohemian Rhapsody, the 2018 biopic about Freddie Mercury and the band Queen, uses Live Aid as its final number. We’ve written elsewhere about how this was not really the final hurrah for the band, nor was this some kind of triumphant return after years in the Wilderness. (“Radio Gaga” and “I Want to Break Free” had been in the charts just over a year previous.) Neither was it their biggest concert of the 1980s. That would be the Wembley concert of 1986, where they would fill the exact same stadium used for Live Aid, but this time it was just for them.

But Hollywood cares not for that, so instead lets look at how faithfully Rami Malek and his fellow actors (along with what might have been Bryan Singer as director or possibly Dexter Fletcher, the man who replaced him after events we’d rather not go into, look it up) faithfully recreate those 20 glorious minutes. After all, it was one of the most watched events in the summer of 1985. There is video evidence!

I’ll leave it up to you out there to debate over Malek’s performance, which is going to suffer no matter what he does in a side-by-side with the real thing. Instead, notice how the filmmakers use certain parts of the performance to complete the narratives of the film. We get a cutaway to Brian May (Gwilym Lee) with a “by George he’s actually got it” look on his face—relief that Mercury finally got it together for the performance. There’s no equivalent shot in real life. The kiss that Mercury blows to somebody off camera is received by his mother and sister back at his childhood home.

After Mercury’s call-and-response with the teeming audience, the band dives into “Hammer to Fall” and the film cuts to a montage to show Live Aid’s phones ringing off the hook, anxious viewers wanting to donate even more because of Queen’s performance. This is again Hollywood hokum, as donations only really stepped up after Bob Geldof got in front of the cameras a little after Queen brought the house down and harangued viewers.

Still, you have to hand it to the movie for having the stones to indulge in the full 20 minute set, despite silly moves like cutting away to the movie’s “you’ll never go anywhere” record executive for the line “no time for losers” during the final song. (D’oh!)

YouTube user Juan Dela Cruz, who assembled this side-by-side, has made two other comparison videos using existing footage and the film: Part One is here, and here’s Part Two.

Watch 16 Hours of Historic Live Aid Performances: Queen, Led Zeppelin, Neil Young & Much More

Bob Geldof Talks About the Greatest Day of His Life, Stepping on the Stage of Live Aid, in a Short Doc by Errol Morris

Ted Mills is a freelance writer on the arts who currently hosts the Notes from the Shed podcast and is the producer of KCRW’s Curious Coast. You can also follow him on Twitter at @tedmills, and/or watch his films here.

by Ted Mills | Permalink | Make a Comment ( 1 ) |

3D Print 18,000 Famous Sculptures, Statues & Artworks: Rodin’s Thinker, Michelangelo’s David & More

in Art, Google, History, Photography, Technology | April 23rd, 2021

To recent news stories about 3D printed guns, prosthetics, and homes, you can add Scan the World’s push to create “an ecosystem of 3D printable objects of cultural significance.”

Items that took the ancients untold hours to sculpt from marble and stone can be reproduced in considerably less time, provided you’ve got the technology and the know-how to use it.

Since we last wrote about this free, open source initiative in 2017, Scan the World has added Google Arts and Culture to the many cultural institutions with whom it partners, expanding both its audience and the audience of the museums who allow items in their collections to be scanned prior to 3D printing.

Community contributors have uploaded scan data for over 18,000 sculptures and artifacts onto the platform.

China and India are actively courting participants to make some of their treasures available.

Although Scan the World is searchable by collection, artist, and location, with so many options, the community blog is a great place to start.

Here you will find helpful tips for beginners hoping to produce realistic looking skulls and sculptures — control your temperature, shake your resin, and learn from your mistakes.

Got an unreachable object you’re itching to print? Take a look at the drone photogrammetry tutorial to prep yourself for taking a good scan — rotate slowly, remember the importance of light, and get up to speed on your drone by test-driving it in an open location.

Keep an eye peeled for competitions, like this one, which was won by a photo editor and retoucher with no formal 3-D training.

Art lovers with little inclination to crack out the 3D printer will find interesting essays on such topics as the Gates of Hell, scanning in the pandemic, and the history of hairstyles in sculpture

You can also embark on a virtual tour of some of the global locations whose splendors are being scanned, programmed, and rendered in resin.

A virtual trip to Paris takes in some of the Louvre’s greatest 3-dimensional hits: the Venus de Milo, Winged Victory, and Psyche Revived by Cupid’s Kiss.

(Any one of those oughta class up the ol’ bedsit…)

The virtual trip to Austria includes Kierling’s monument to Franz Kafka, the Beethoven memorial in Vienna’s Heiligenstädter Park, and Klaus Weber’s tribute to Hugo Rheinhold’s Darwinian sculpture, Monkey with Skull. (1,868 downloads and counting!)

A Google map awaits those who would tour the original flavor inspirations in person.

Begin your explorations of Scan the World here, and do let us know in the comments if you have plans for printing.

The Earth Archive Will 3D-Scan the Entire World & Create an “Open-Source” Record of Our Planet

The British Museum Creates 3D Models of the Rosetta Stone & 200+ Other Historic Artifacts: Download or View in Virtual Reality

Ayun Halliday is an author, illustrator, theater maker, Chief Primatologist of the East Village Inky zine, and sometimes, a French Canadian bear known as L’Ourse. Follow her @AyunHalliday.

by Ayun Halliday | Permalink | Make a Comment ( 1 ) |

30,000 People Line Up for the First McDonald’s in Moscow, While Grocery Store Shelves Run Empty (1990)

in Food & Drink, History | April 23rd, 2021

Everyone has waited in a long line — for burgers, Broadway tickets, Black Friday sales… But few us have the notorious queuing resilience of the Soviets. “When the first McDonald’s arrived in Moscow in 1990, the city went mad,” Boris Egorov writes at Russia Beyond. “Thousands of Muscovites flocked to the new burger joint, forming lines several kilometers long in the center of Moscow on Pushkinskaya Square.” On its first day, the restaurant obliterated the previous record for most McDonald’s customers (9,100 in Budapest), serving over 30,000 people, a testament to the fortitude of the employees. The CBC news segment on the opening above quotes a line from Pushkin to set the scene: “a feast in a time of plague.”

Stereotypes of fast food workers as lacking in skill and ambition did not find purchase here. “The first workers,” Egorov notes, “were the crème de la crème of Soviet youth: students from prestigious universities who could speak foreign languages with brilliant customer service skills.” Their cheerfulness so unnerved some customers that they were asked to tone it down for Russians “accustomed to rude, boorish service.”

Customers seemed less awed by the iconography than the “simple sight of polite shop workers,” wrote an American journalist. The restaurant, once a tourist attraction, notes travel site Bridge to Moscow, had “more than 700 seats inside and 200 outside,” and was once the largest McDonald’s in the world.

The Moscow McDonald’s represented more for Russians than an American novelty. Original customer Ksenia Oskina had never heard of McDonald’s before she visited. She later saved her Big Mac box. “I used that Big Mac box for a long time and put my sandwich in there instead of a lunchbox,” she tells The Washington Post. “I’d clean it, dry it on the heater and then use it again.” It wasn’t about brand recognition for many who dutifully lined up to pay half a day’s wages for a couple “thin slabs of meat and sliced vegetables between buns of bread.” (Sorry… “two all-beef patties, special sauce, lettuce, cheese, and a sesame seed bun…..”)

What did Soviet Russians, who had not been raised to sing fast food advertising jingles, see in the new restaurant? Capitalism’s promises of abundance. One Soviet journalist wrote of McDonald’s as “the expression of America’s rationalism and pragmatism toward food.” Just months afterward, the first Pizza Hut arrived. As the Soviet Union dissolved less than two years later, the country saw the creation of more desire for high-calorie, ultra-processed foods with Western-style TV ads: most famously a Pizza Hut spot from 1997 featuring the U.S.S.R.’s last premier, Mikhail Gorbachev. (“Because of him, we have Pizza Hut!”)

The politics may have mattered little to the average Muscovite McDonald’s customer in 1990. “Visiting the restaurant was less a political statement than an opportunity to enjoy a small pleasure in a country still reeling from disastrous economic problems and internal political turmoil,” notes History.com. Large, seemingly abstract problems had tangible effects: the empty grocery stores for which the failing empire became famous.

The Moscow McDonald’s was a colorful oasis for its first customers, who had no sentimental associations with burgers and fries. Now, those tastes are nostalgic. “I love it,” said Oskina thirty years later. “For some reason in America, it’s not as tasty as it is here.” Insert your own dated Yakov Smirnoff reference.

Watch Andy Warhol Eat an Entire Burger King Whopper–While Wishing the Burger Came from McDonald’s (1981)

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Josh Jones is a writer and musician based in Durham, NC. Follow him at @jdmagness

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