“Where browser tabs from December go to retire”
Heya, are you ready for a ride through the latest batch of random interesting stuff?
Yeah?
Lets go!!!
I was reading a book from 1969 about the department store, Eaton’s. There was a reference to an “encased coin” – and it turns out that these were promotional items where a penny was inserted into a holder. Read more about encased Canadian coins here.
These remind me of “encased postage stamps” that were used as money during coin shortages in the USA:
John Provencher is a digital artist with a strooooong aesthetic. I dig it!
John has a friendly “download media” page where you can save his works to your MS-DOS Personal Computer (PC).
This realtor and his dog are fierce:
Pringles “Street Taco” flavour. I don’t know aboutchu, but momma said never to put that street taco in my mouth. Same for back-alley hotdogs.
Harry Clarke – gorgeous Irish stained windows and illustrations. His greatest work was the “Geneva Window”. You can see an HD image of the window and watch a free documentary about it here. Apparently his racy images have nothing to do with the stories they’re ostensibly illustrating…
I am really curious to learn about Harry Clarke’s wife, Margaret Clarke. When Harry died, she was left with 3 children and the running of their stained glass business – a large workshop with many employees. She ran it successfully for 30 years until her death. I think she did fantastic.
I don’t know much about Irish history. The famine sounds brutal, especially the fact that food exports continued from Ireland while the locals died of starvation (but, y’know, it’s a complicated picture if you’d like to make it complicated).
There were so independence movements. Apparently, the Fenians (Irish North American revolutionaries) tried to take over Canada. They are even responsible for producing the first practical submarine, Fenian Ram.
I was walking at my local cemetery at the beginning of December. My eyes resed on a pair of fancy gravestones, and I recognized an old friend: Harold Franklin Ritchie.
“Carload” Ritchie was a Canadian who founded a sales empire. By the time of his death in 1933 (obituary), he was one of the wealthiest men in the world. It also sounds like he had ADHD or something – constantly on the move, and forgetting to eat.
I know of Ritchie from this book by Don Gillmor. Ritchie’s innovation was to take itinerant salesmen, who would travel Canada selling one product, and to have them sell multiple products for multiple manufacturers. That meant that he and his staff could make x10 the sales at each town during their far-flung travels.
Ritchie’s mansion became the nucleus for Toronto’s “Forest Hill” neighbourhood – one of our many ultra-wealthy enclaves 🤑
Here is an interesting article about Ritchie’s headquarters in Toronto, and ads for some of the products he sold.
After November’s look at a certain sculpture, I decided to read up about a pair of sculptors who used to live in my neighbourhood. I read a lovely book about “The Girls” by their friend, Rebecca Sisler. These were 2 Canadian sculptors who lived and worked in Toronto’s midtown neighbourhood during the first half of the 20th century.
I wanted to share a funny quote from Florence Wyle about men:
I like men. But women do most things very much better!
I went to their old home, called “The Church” and took this photo:
In a nearby parkette, you can see Wyle and Loring’s bronze busts of each other. They are much more alive and loving than any photos of these works can convey.
I am also now 100% convinced that Loring is not the sculptor behind November’s relief sculpture.
You gotta read
It’s a look into the inner thoughts of your Artificial Intelligence Girlfriend. I often say “when me grow up, me write gud like Sam Kriss or Adam Mastroianni” and now we can add Sarah Chekfa, the author, to that list. Go read it, why are you still here!?
Happy New Year
May you have this feeling in your new year!:
Panoramas
After resurrecting panoramas of the HR Giger Museum from 2001, I decided to explore this Quicktime VR Showcase CD that Apple produced in 1996. Unfortunately, whatever panoramas I could extract were yawn-tastic. There were 2 delightful panoramas by Erik Bryan Slavin, though. Click on the pictures below to view them:
One of my project ideas was to use my QTVR panorma skills to extract views of the Enterprise from the 2002 “The Captain’s Chair” CD, and make them accessible online.
Fortunately, someone already took on this painful task and did an absolutely incredible job of it.
A song I constantly listened to in December:
Funny that some of this music sounds inspired by Sleaford Mods (…and Soundcloud claims the two bands share many fans in common).
A masterpiece of package design
I finally wanted to say publicly that I’ve been floored by the design of the Similac SimplePac.
This product had obviously been designed after extensive ethnographic research with parents. Some of the killer features I remember from using it:
- Can be opened with one hand
- Has a scoop holder in the lid so you don’t have to search for it inside the powder
- The scoop has a little hole at the bottom, so there’s airflow that lets the powder slide out easily when tipped.
- The inner lip of the container has a rubbery overhang, so you can wipe excess powder from the top of the scoop in an upward motion. This gets you a perfectly level scoop of powder every time.
- The exterior indentations make it easy to lift and move with one hand (the other hand is carrying a baby)
SEO Update
Dear “Jacob Nation”: we are now the #6 organic result on Google for Coque D’Asses. I’m on the verge of making a fortune as a phallic food influencer (phood inphluencer?) through my Jacob Eats series. Several Splenda Daddies have already gotten in touch with me. They’ve offered to pay me for custom videos where I eat bananas, kielbasa, freezie pops, pixie stix, individual spaghetti strands, twizzlers, English cucumbers and mini-baguettes. Wish me luck! 🖤
Fabric brand stamps:
These ones have beautiful fonts, and were made with metal pieces driving into a wooden backing:
Highlights of the Adrian Wilson Collection of Shipper’s Tickets
Seamlessly blending 2 near-identical images together to get 1 “perfect” image:
An interesting story about a billionaire and the tax-evading, “student owned” London gift shops that operate on his premises. I am certain we entered at least one of these when we visited London in 2025!
https://www.londoncentric.media/p/asf-aziz-london-candy-shops-gift-shop-unpaid-
Zuru mini brands:
Footnote: woman brushing her hair
Ok, so this is going to be the mother of all footnotes.
The self-portrait of the woman brushing her hair is by Russian artist Zinaida Serebriakova. I’m wishing that you have that feeling that’s depicted in the painting, but none of her life story…
Serebriakova had quite an unusual life trajectory. She was born to a family of Russian land owners under the Tsar. She married her first cousin and had 4 children with him. The Communist revolutionaries jailed her husband and he died of disease in prison, leaving her as a single mother. She went to France for an exhibition and was forbidden to return. She was able to bring 2 of her children to France, but 2 had to stay in the Soviet Union. She was able to see her oldest daughter only after 36 years apart.
If you review her work, Zenaida painted a lot of nudes of her daughter Katya. I think this is odd even in the context of that culture and that time. Looking at Zinaida’s travels in Morocco, I wanted to comment on how she went out of her way to paint the locals in the nude – but it turns out that this was entirely her patron’s demand, and she found it very challenging to find sitters. Hmmm, perhaps that’s why some of these women suspiciously resemble Katya…
Katya herself became an artist and lived to be 102 years old. Here is an interview with Katya from when she turned 100 (in Russian).
What I learned from the interview is that to survive in Paris, Katya ended up making and selling these elaborate miniatures of wealthy people’s homes. Complete with clay figures and painted backgrounds:
