A small selection of general links. Right now, haddock is the place to go to catch up on all the holiday media splurges, like the BBC Today programme guest editors (who included Zaha Hadid) / 'An animation showing edits to the OpenStreetMap.org project during 2008' / six-month pinhole camera exposure / R Cubed is an astonishingly bitter newsletter, now defunct, that excoriates the critical community.

The Rat and Mouse has a go at predicting the next shift in the UK property market / Strange Maps on cartocacoethes, 'the compulsion to see maps everywhere' / on the possibility that hauntings exist but ghosts do not / on 60 years of the 7" single. See the flickr 45rpm Group for several thousands fine examples of the art / is the latest Libeskind design little more than 'a crude and unavoidable reminder of the horrors of 9/11'? More images at Curbed; are those 'gashes' or simply openings?

Ben Fry's All Streets project creates a skeletal map of the USA from its tarmac infrastructure (via SuperSpatial). See also James Medcraft's Anatomy of the UK series / Swapatorium moved to flickr / would Curbed's Floorplan porn section work in the UK? The real estate market here isn't as spatially aware as the Americans (or even the French).

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Pelican of the Week: Digging up the Past. While the back covers of these books rarely match up to the fronts, there are plenty of nuggets to be gleaned from the jackets. Sir Leonard Woolley's classic introduction to the archaeologist's work was an attempt at confirming the profession as a science, not the preserve of treasure hunting gallivants, the fedora-toting hard-men battling through lost civilisations on the covers of countless pulp novels (and later burnished into mass culture through the composite character of Indiana Jones.

Woolley was best known for his 1922 excavations at Ur, the ancient Sumerian city that sits slap bang in the middle of modern Iraq. He was also a close acquaintance of Agatha Christie, who was fascinated with the Middle East and its potential for myth and mystery. Twenties Iraq was quite the hotbed of activity for the bright young, and not so young, things, including Gertrude Bell, founder not just of the lately much beleaguered Baghdad Archaeological Museum but also the very make-up of modern Iraq, soon to become a very strategic location indeed.

Hackney-born, Woolley led an often unconventional life, immersed in his work and ruled by his women. From the Christie link at the fascinating (though highly partisan) Winscan site: 'A man who goes to bed in one room with a length of string leading from his big toe to his hypochondriac wife's wrist in another room, so that she can tug on it at the onset of a headache, might be said to deserve his fate, or perhaps a sainthood'. Such were the preoccupations of the people who created modern archaeology, the modern mystery thriller and the modern mixed-up nation state, each entirely unrelated save for the close proximity of their creators.

Labels: linkage, maps, pelican

posted by things at 00:15 / 1 comments