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‘July 9, 1862. Deck and turret of U.S.S. Monitor on the James River, Virginia. From photographs of the Federal Navy, and seaborne expeditions against the Atlantic Coast of the Confederacy. Wet collodion glass negative, left half of stereo pair.’
The Native English Elephant
The native English elephant
is very rarely seen;
its hide is finely camouflaged
with dappled brown and green.
The elephants of England
are terribly discreet.
They stroll around in hazel woods
on softly-falling feet.
To find if English elephants
are living near you:
in April check for little piles
of bluebell-scented poo.
Napowrimo #2: Aeolian Squid
There really is a distinct shortage of good rhymes in English.
Aeolian Squid
Observant sailors sometimes say
that over Arctic seas
they see small blobs of silver-grey
floating on the breeze.With bodies full of helium,
they rise above the spray,
and trail ten dangling tentacles
in search of tiny prey.
Links
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via Coudal: ‘Segway inventor Dean Kamen is looking to re-invent the prosthetic arm. IEEE Spectrum caught up with Kamen and one of his “test pilots,” to see the robotic arm (named after Luke Skywalker’s articficial limb) in action.’
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‘”I Could Tell You but Then You Would Have to Be Destroyed by Me: Emblems from the Pentagon’s Black World” … focuses on a rather odd subject: the completely freaky patches worn by secret U.S. military units.’ Check out the NYT article as well.
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‘September 13, 1923. Washington, D.C. “Testing bulletproof vest.” National Photo Company Collection glass negative.’
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‘late night conversations … commonly degenerated into a discussion of Dumb Ideas for Typefaces. One was that the OCR-A font — used on bank statements and designed for optical character recognition — really needed to be outfitted with a set of swashe
Napowrimo #1: spider
As a dog returneth to his vomit:
You sometimes find, on Merseyside,
a tiny spider sitting
upon a web of red and white.
It makes it out of knitting.So if you hear, around the house,
faint and highly pitched,
a burst of irritated Scouse:
a spider’s dropped a stitch.
Links
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‘In the 1920s and early 1930s, Jewish architects created some of the greatest modern buildings in Germany… Pentagram Papers 37: Forgotten Architects is a survey of 43 of these architects and their groundbreaking work.’ Some fabulous buildings here.
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‘Curtis was a portrait photographer, living in Seattle, who decided around 1900 to begin documenting the Native American tribes living in the Pacific Northwest. This project … evolved into a 20 volume ethnographic opus called The North American Indian.’