City Guesser is a geography based browser game that strives to provide an exceptional travel and guessing experience by allowing participants to guess where in the world they are from short video clips. I spent way to much time at this, but not to brag, I had an amazing success rate. Try your hand at City Guesser, it’s free and mildly addicting.
When Death Comes
When death comes
like the hungry bear in autumn;
when death comes and takes all the bright coins from his purse
to buy me, and snaps the purse shut;
when death comes
like the measle-pox;
when death comes
like an iceberg between the shoulder blades,
I want to step through the door full of curiosity, wondering:
what is it going to be like, that cottage of darkness?
And therefore I look upon everything
as a brotherhood and a sisterhood,
and I look upon time as no more than an idea,
and I consider eternity as another possibility,
and I think of each life as a flower, as common
as a field daisy, and as singular,
and each name a comfortable music in the mouth,
tending, as all music does, toward silence,
and each body a lion of courage, and something
precious to the earth.
When it’s over, I want to say: all my life
I was a bride married to amazement.
I was the bridegroom, taking the world into my arms.
When it’s over, I don’t want to wonder
if I have made of my life something particular, and real.
I don’t want to find myself sighing and frightened,
or full of argument.
I don’t want to end up simply having visited this world.
— Mary Oliver
Kitagawa Utamaro and The Red lantern Shop, Kyoto, Woodblock printing technique From Process of Printing Wood Engraving (Mokuhan Suritate Junjo), 1956.
Graphic artist Anthony Burrill recently created an enormous typographic mural in Leeds, England. The short documentary below explores the ideas behind the artwork and its meaning to the designer. You&Me and Me&You shows Burrill’s signature letterpress typography blown up to eye-catching proportions, covering one side of the 88-ft-high, seven-story canal-side building, The Calls, in Leeds city center. Powerful in white on black, the piece embodies Burrill’s mission to “say the most with the least, and connect with people through words” on a monumental scale, and speaks to the importance of human connection during the pandemic.
The film was produced by Charlotte Rosson with production company Maniac, and DoP Matt Gentleman. The mural was curated by Laura Wellington at In Good Company, supported by King & Co and installed by Bread Collective.
Philadelphia can be a difficult place to live even in the best of times. Although it can be a wonderful destination for visitors, America’s “cradle of liberty” also suffers from one of the nation’s worst poverty rates and has been laid-low by an opioid crisis for years. The Covid-19 pandemic has devastated an already struggling city. with marginalized communities severely battered by the virus. But the literary community has been a constant source of hope for Philadelphians.
The most recent example is the Healing Verse Philly Poetry Line. Created by Philadelphia poet laureate Trapeta B. Mayson, the project offers a glimpse of hope through its poetic messages. Callers to the toll-free number (1-855-763-6792) are greeted by Mayson’s voice with a recorded message and introduction to the project, which offers an affirming poem by a Philadelphia-connected poet as well as information about events and mental health resources. The Philly Poetry Line offers a new poem every Monday. The short poems provide a welcome respite from pandemic life.
Trapeta B. Mayson is a poet, teacher and social worker based in Germantown. (Kimberly Paynter/WHYY)
In the aftermath of World War I, many politicians, political scientists, philosophers, and even cartographers offered innovative proposals to restructure Europe. P.A. Maas, an Austrian publisher, suggested a wildly creative way to re-imagine Europe as a political entity. “Does anyone really seriously believe that the consequences of the peace negotiations so far have secured eternal peace?” he wrote. “Does anyone really seriously believe that the revenge of the individual peoples has been satisfied by the consequences of the present peace negotiations?”
Instead Maas proposed to subdivide the continent into 24 wedge-shaped “Kantons,” each named for a major city. These would converge at St. Stephen’s Cathedral in Vienna, the epicenter of the new European union’s capital, which Maas envisioned as “a large, wide garden city, hygienically designed and expanded.” The Kantons would cut across cultural and ethnic lines and across the old national borders, and each one would include at least two of Europe’s “Nations” — Romans, Germans, Slavs, and Magyars — so that “racial hatred does not prevail as before, but the love of the people prevails.” A three-year presidency would rotate among the Kantons. He also proposed that everyone would speak Esperanto, and everyone over 20 (except married women) could vote.
“To many a reader this work may appear as the result of over-excited imagination; someday, though late, the knowledge of truth will gain the upper hand, and perhaps many things which have been stimulated by me here will be realized.”
Who knows, if Maas had succeeded with his plan, maybe World War II would have been avoided. If you are intrigued by his proposal, you can download a copy of his 24 page pamphlet here .
This Sunday, millions of people in the U.S. and around the world tuned in to watch the annual Super Bowl. Each year, a large percentage of the viewers watch just to see the often clever and funny commercials. On his special post-Super Bowl edition of The Late Show, Stephen Colbert featured a commercial for an unlikely business: indie bookseller Foggy Pine Books in Boone, N.C. Colbert explained, “Big companies aren’t the ones that need our support the most right now. It’s small businesses that have been hurt the most in this pandemic. Of course a small business could never afford the millions of dollars it would cost to produce and run an ad on CBS tonight, which is why we here The Late Show have decided to just pick one and just give it to them.”
The commercial, which opens with a skydiver plummeting from a plane, features Sam Elliott, who narrates (“every book is an adventure waiting to happen”), and “satisfied customer” Tom Hanks (“Foggy Pine Books has the best selection in all of Boone. They have books on all of my interests, such as World War II, and also books about the events from 1939-45”)
Travel Between The Pages 