I read about the FCC considering 10-digit dialing and immediately thought of my college roommate’s rather rural hometown where, in the 1990 timeframe, amid much griping, everyone had to start dialing seven numbers instead of four for local calls.

I was poking around (virtually) at my favorite Cambridge bookstore, Wordsworth, and noticed they were featuring Boundaries, a book by Maya Lin, designer of the Vietnam Veterans Memorial and other notable structures (see my 5/29/00 posting). She has always impressed me with the purity of her vision and her dedication to the truthful rendering of it. Her work always contains more thought behind the inspiration than just the visual experience of it can relate, so it will be wonderful to read about her experiences and motivations. They provide an excerpt about the Vietnam Memorial.

In the mid 1990s it seemed that everyone at my company was running the Johnny
Castaway screensaver. Johnny was a little cartoon guy stranded on a little cartoon island. He’d
fish, have run-ins with an octopus, put on a jogging outfit to go for a run,
cavort with a mermaid, and — if you were lucky, actually get rescued.
He’d work on building a raft that got bigger over time. There were special happenings for certain
holidays (usually appropriate decorations would appear), and a few rare events that would have
people calling over the cube walls for witnesses. Apparently the “real”
ending has him returning to civilization, only to realize he misses the
island life. He parachutes back and “The End” appears. Then, it starts all over again.

In 1987 I stumbled upon a Wiener Werkstatte exhibit at the MOMA. It was a defining moment in the formation of my appreciation for style. I had no expectations for what I was about to see; we were just going to the museum for the day. It seems that a lot of life’s best experiences happen when you have no expectations. This exhibit of the objects and artwork from the Vienna workshops of the Art Nouveau, and then Art Deco periods clanged into my head as a revelation. There were beautiful organic forms (think Lalique) and crisply balanced strict lines (think Frank Lloyd Wright). There was
even form with function. I drank it all in. It revealed to me the labels, time
periods, and pioneering artists for the designs I had been subconsciously
craving. Now I knew what to look for. And I do look for it. Unfortunately
it isn’t usually nearby. When I was in Vienna, I headed to the MAK (Museum of Applied Arts) which has acquired the complete archive of the Wiener Werkstatte. I caught a Charles Rennie Mackintosh exhibit at the Met a couple years ago. The National Gallery of Art is currently hosting a major Art Nouveau
exhibit that has been in the Victoria and Albert museum in London. It
has a wide selection of items, including that famous Paris subway
entrance. They created a web site describing the creation of the exhibit (via Yahoo Weekly Picks).

According to Reuters (here on NY Times), Digiscents will announce today that fragrance suppliers Givaudan and Quest are backing their company. If my memory is correct, Quest developers are behind many of the luxury fragrances that peppy people try to spritz at you when you enter department stores. Givaudan appears to be in the same line of work. You remember Digiscents; they have a device that can make your computer exude smells. And you thought you only had to worry about that with perfume inserts in magazines.

Many professional “to the trade” journals protect their web archives from the innocent eyes of consumers. Not so the Professional Jeweler Magazine. There you can find info on the gem and precious metal trade, designed to keep jewelers informed about the many supplies and variables their livelihood depends on. The site has various organized lists of the magazine’s archives, for example, the gemstones archive page where I learned that NBC’s Dateline had done an expose on the use of fillers in emeralds (which are notoriously flawed; in fact, if anyone ever tries to sell you a flawless “genuine” emerald, run the other way). For lots of fun with DeBeers (and their now-postponed plan to bypass diamond sellers and brand their own cut diamonds), check out the diamond archive. There is also an archive just for the conflict diamonds crisis (the U.N. is now considering a certification process to ensure that diamonds aren’t coming from shady circumstances in Africa).

I was on a foreign website and spotted an ad for Bohemian Bagels in Prague. If not for the URL, Czech language link, and prices, you’d swear this shop was in any big city USA. It also made me wonder where these little round breads come from. Are they an American immigrant invention? An evolution of a Jewish bread? I found two Ivy League links with historical explanations of the genesis of the bagel. Here are “The Round Role with a Hole” and an excerpt from “We Are What We Eat”. There apparently is no consensus, as various “old country” baked goods resemble early bagels, and could claim ancestry. It is easier to trace the bagel’s history after it hit America, as it became firmly associated with the New York deli and also had a following in Chicago. And once Lender’s started mass production, bagels rolled out to the rest of the U.S. And now many areas on the West Coast have Noah’s Bagels, and I assume other bagel chains are dotting the rest of the country, or at least the urban areas. Plus many supermarket bakeries sell bagels. I’m not content with Lender’s inferior bagels, and I was surprised to find out that after the Lender brothers sold out to Kraft, they went back to the restaurant business and produced “real” hand rolled bagels once again. Kellogg bought Lender’s from Kraft and then sold it to Aurora Foods.

Today is World AIDS Day. The U.N. reports that 36.1 million people have HIV/AIDS worldwide. We’ve gotten used to the idea of AIDS, kind of like how we got used to space shuttles going up into orbit. Then Challenger exploded. Complacency can kill. Educate. Don’t hate. Reach out. Fight ignorance. There is still denial and fear surrounding AIDS. It’s OK to be scared of AIDS, as it is OK to be scared of death. But you should not be afraid of discussing AIDS, learning more about it, helping people who live with it. The fear is actually helping the virus to spread, because many people refuse to face the facts. The virus picked its primary transmission methods well: sex and drugs, not very high moral ground for starting an educational campaign with. AEGIS is the largest HIV knowledgebase in the world. It began with Jamie Jemison and Sister Mary Elizabeth, who each recognized the usefulness of a BBS for connecting those affected by HIV. Let’s hope that one day soon it becomes an important historical archive instead of remaining an active community.

A site (from Iceland) about violin making. And here is a step-by-step “PhotoStory” (from Italy) about the creation of a violin. I figure it’s about time (25 years since I first picked up a bow) that I learn what purfling is.

The SciFi Network’s new Dune miniseries begins Sunday night. According to their schedule, you have three consecutive chances to tape and/or watch each episode each night. In other scifi news, TNN (yes, formerly The Nashville Network) won the bidding for “the reruns of Star Trek: The Next Generation, Star Trek: Deep Space Nine and Star Trek: Voyager, as well as five Star Trek feature films.” They are shifting away from country music… boldly going where no niche network has gone before. (Did anyone else see that episode of The Critic with “Hee Haw: The Next Generation”? The TNG characters dance in a hoedown. It’s…adorable.)