bookofjoe's Favorite Thing: EqualSplit — World's Best Pill Splitter

Res ipsa loquitur.

$24.99.

The City That — From The Air — Looks Like a Person

Wrote Kottke:

...........................

Photographer and drone pilot Pio Andrea Peri captured this overhead photo of the Sicilian city Centuripe, a town of about 5,400 people on the island of Sicily in southern Italy. 

Set in the hills between the Dittaino and Salso rivers, some 2,400 feet (about a half mile) above sea level, Centuripe's humanesque form developed organically over centuries along the natural contours of the landscape.

Perched atop hilltops, the city looks like a person from above — even on Google Maps.

...........................

[via daily overview]

How a Tiny Enamel Portrait Miniature is Made: Painting With Glass and Fire

YouTube description:

..............................

How was an enamel portrait miniature made in the 18th century? In this video, watch enamel artist Ruth Ball painstakingly recreate a portrait miniature of Queen Charlotte, based on an original painted in 1781.

Enamelling is the delicate process of firing finely ground coloured glass powders onto a thin metal base. Layer by layer, the glass is fused in a kiln to create luminous, durable images. The copper sheet used for the base is less than 1mm thick — just strong enough to support the enamel while preventing warping during firing.

Despite the passage of more than two centuries, the meticulous techniques used to create enamel portrait miniatures have hardly changed since they were first developed. Watch the full process unfold, complete with unintentional ASMR sound — from grinding enamel powders to the final reveal of the completed portrait.

'Enthusiasm as a Form of Love' — E.M. Cioran

There are pure, limpid forms of life undisclosed to those living under the sign of despair. Those whose life flows without obstacles reach a stage of delightful contentments in which the world appears charming and full of light. Enthusiasm casts a bewitching light over the world; it is a specific form of love, a way of forgetting oneself. Love has so many faces, so many aspects, and so many deviations that it is hard to find a typical form for it. Any science of love will look first for love's original manifestation. As one speaks of love between the sexes, love of God, for nature or for art, one can also speak of enthusiasm as a form of love. Which form is the essential one from which all others derive? Theologians maintain that it is the love of God and that all other manifestations are but pale reflections of this fundamental love. Pantheists with esthetic tendencies believe that it is the love of nature, and pure esthetes, the love of art. Similarly, for biologists it is pure sexuality without affection and for metaphysicians it is the feeling of universal identity. Yet not one of them will be able to prove that the form he defends is the most typical, because in the course of history that form has varied so much that nobody today could define it with any certainty.

As for me, I believe that the quintessential form of love is that between a man and a woman, not only sexuality but a rich network of affective states. Has anyone ever committed suicide in the name of God, nature or art? Love grows in intensity when it fastens on the concrete; one loves a woman for what makes her different, unique in the world: nothing can replace her at the height of passion. All other forms of love, though tending toward autonomy, participate in this essential form. Thus one generally does not place enthusiasm in the realm of love, when in fact its roots penetrate deep into the very substance of love, its emancipating tendencies notwithstanding. There is in the enthusiastic man a universal receptivity, an ability to gather everything with a surplus of energy which spends itself just for the pleasure of acting. The enthusiast heeds no criteria, makes no calculations; he is all abandon, restlessness and devotion. The joy of achieving and the ecstasy of efficiency are the essential characteristics of the man for whom life is a leap toward heights where destructive forces lose their negative intensity. We all have moments of enthusiasm, but they are too rare to stamp us permanently. I am referring to people in whom enthusiasm is predominant and constitutes the essential mark of their personality. They do not know defeat, because it is not the goal but the initiative and pleasure of acting that attracts them; they throw themselves into action not because they have meditated upon its consequences but simply because they cannot help it. Although not altogether impervious to success, the enthusiast is neither stimulated by it nor defeated by its absence. He is the last one to fail in this world. Life is more mediocre and fragmentary than we think: isn't this the reason for our decline, the loss of our vivacity, the hardening of our inner rhythms, the gradual slowing down of our vital flow? This process of waste destroys our receptivity and our willingness to embrace life generously and enthusiastically. The enthusiast alone preserves his energy until old age; all others, if not already born dead like most people, die before their time. How rare the true enthusiast! Can we imagine a world in which everybody will love everything, a world of enthusiasts? Such an image is even more alluring than the image of paradise, because its excesses of generosity surpass any of those born in Eden. The enthusiast's ability to be constantly reborn raises him above life's demoniacal tempations, the fear of nothingness, and the torments of agony. His life has no tragic dimension, because enthusiasm is the only form of life totally opaque to death. Even grace — so similar to enthusiasm — has less of this irrational ignorance of death. Grace is full of melancholy charm; not so enthusiasm. My tremendous admiration for enthusiasts stems from my inability to comprehend how there can be such men in a world where death, nothingness, sadness, and despair keep sinister company. It makes one wonder, to see people who are never desperate. How can the enthusiast be so indifferent to success? How can he act by virtue of excess only? What kind of strange and paradoxical form does love take in enthusiasm? The more intense love is, the more individualized. Men who love truly and passionately cannot love several women at once: the more intense the love, the more important its object. Let us imagine a passionate love without an object, a man without the woman on whom to concentrate his love: what would it be but the plenitude of love? Are there men with a great potential for love but who have never loved in this primordial, original way? Enthusiasm is love with an unspecified object. Instead of orienting itself toward others, enthusiastic love expends itself lavishly in generous actions, with a sort of universal receptivity.

Enthusiasm is a superior child of Eros. Of all the forms of love, enthusiasm is the most free of sexuality, much more so than mystic love, which cannot shed its sexual symbolism. Thus enthusiasm is spared the anxiety which makes sexuality play an important part in the human tragedy. The enthusiast is preeminently an unproblematic person. He understands many things without ever knowing the agonizing doubts and the chaotic sensitivity of the problematic man. The latter cannot solve anything, because nothing satisfies him. You will find in him neither the enthusiast's gift of abandon, his naive irrationality, nor the charming paradox of love in its purest state. The biblical myth of knowledge as sin is the most profound myth ever invented. The enthusiast's euphoria is due to the fact the he is unaware of the tragedy of knowledge. Why not say it? True knowledge is the most tenebrous darkness. I would gladly exchange all the harrowing problems of this world for sweet, un–self–conscious naiveté. The spirit does not elevate; it tears you apart. In enthusiasm, as in grace and magic, the spirit does not oppose life. The secret of happiness lies in this original nondivision of an impenetrable unity. If you are an enthusiast, you do not know that poison, duality. Life usually preserves its fecundity and productiveness through the tensions and oppositions of an agnostic struggle. Enthusiasm overcomes it, and accedes to a life without tragedy and a love without sexuality.

ohjoeyjoey@yahoo.com

Two days ago just for lulz I had my Crack Research Team©®™ see if they could excavate my late 20th century Yahoo email and get it working again.

Success!

It costs $5/month (after a 14-day free trial) to enable mail forwarding, which is the only way to get email without visiting Yahoo's still crazy-cluttered site.

Those under 15 (about half my readership) will have no idea what Yahoo is unless they've seen "Back To The Future."

BeyondTheMedspeak: My Rule of Thumb for Expired Meds

My rule of thumb for expired meds: every year after the expiration date = 10% loss of efficacy.

So, a 5-year-old Rx = half as effective (5 x 10% = 50%) as when you picked it up from the pharmacy: take twice the prescribed dose.

This is a rough estimate: that's why it's called a Rule of thumb.

For example, when I broke a bone in my foot last year, it really hurt, so much so that I couldn't sleep.

The urgent care doc where I got an x-ray wouldn't prescribe narcotics; she said to use Motrin/Advil etc.

Ha — what a joke.

At home in the back of a cabinet I found some expired hydrocodone from a 2019 tooth extraction.

Just to be on the safe side, I took one as prescribed back in 2019: it decreased the pain but didn't eliminate it.

A second one did the trick.

Chinese Cigarette Museum

The site's grand panjandrum explains why it exists:

................................

I've been fascinated by Chinese cigarettes for years — the sheer variety of pack artwork, the regional brands, the history embedded in each design. Walking through a Chinese convenience store is like visiting a gallery.

But there was nowhere online to actually explore this world. No beautiful directory. No way to discover what exists, compare brands, or track what you'd tried. Everything was scattered across obscure Chinese forums or buried in e-commerce listings.

So I built it. A proper archive — thousands of SKUs, full imagery, translated descriptions, ratings data. Something that does justice to how visually rich this world actually is.

If you're a collector, a traveler, or just curious — this is for you.

Self-Leveling Furniture Glides

Very clever!

Something seemingly simple — the little doohickies you put on the bottom of chair and table legs — gets an upgrade.

The inventor created a two-component furniture slider that lets each leg independently find its level position and smoothly glide on indoor or outdoor surfaces.

These sliders automatically adjust for angled or uneven legs and adapt their gliding surfaces to match floor and patio irregularities.

Safe for hardwood floors, wood decks, brick, concrete, linoleum, parquet, and tile.

Eliminates chair and table wobbles.

Set of 4: $9.99.

Picture of the Day

Taken at Chicago's O'Hare International Airport.

LIbrary of Juggling

My heart leaps with joy when I stumble on an old-timey-style site like this.

No cookies opt out/in, no banner ads, no flashing lights, no sounds, no dark patterns.

WYSIWYG.

N.B. The most recent additions were on June 13, 2015.

"The Library of Juggling is on an indefinite hiatus, which means no new tricks will be added. Existing content will continue to be hosted for the foreseeable future."

1999

Wrote Prince:

From "Prince: The Beautiful Ones," published in 2019.

He was 24 when he wrote "1999" in 1982.

You know what song I'm hearing....

Prince was my favorite musician of all time.

I thought he'd be around for a long time: he's the only musician I'd travel to see perform live.

I missed numerous chances.

When he was found dead in an elevator at Paisley Park, his HQ, on Thursday, April 21, 2016, at age 58, I was well and truly shocked.

Antique Hold-To-Light Postcards

I never knew such things existed until I happened on them in Clive Thompson's Linkfest.

From reddit:

.......................................

I started collecting these cards several years ago when I was really interested in collecting antique Coney Island postcards.

Each of the cards has been intricately "carved" out and painted with bright colors allowing those areas to glow when held up to the light, the thicker parts of the paper don't let any light through.

All of the cards pictured are from the early 1900s, most likely between 1903 and 1910, because two of the cards I have depict the 1904 St. Louis World's Fair, and 2 of the 4 Coney Island cards pictured depict an area of Coney Island called Dreamland which burned down in 1911.

Making A Giant Zipper To Explain How It Works

'Thumbs Up' Decanter

I first saw this beautiful Riedel decanter back in 2005 and featured it in bookofjoe (above).

The other day I got to wondering if it was still being made and sure enough, it's been popular enough to continue being produced for the past twenty-one years.

Lead-free crystal hand-blown in Austria.

$280.

FunFact: $159.95 in 2005 is worth $266 in today's dollars.

'Powers of 10'

Every ten years or so (see what I did there?) I like to watch this mind-expanding classic film made in 1977.

Back story here.

FunFact: last century, when I lived in LA, I visited Charles & Ray Eames house and studio (below), 

which is open to the public for tours. 

Wonderful.

Highly recommended.

Apply within.

Intertapes — Archive of Found Cassette Tapes

From the website: "Intertapes is an updating collection of found cassettes from around the world. The audio fragments include: voice memos, field recordings, mixtapes, bootlegs, and more."

Fair warning: there goes the day.

Wait a sec — what's that song I'm hearing?

[via Clive Thompson]

First Fig — Edna St. Vincent Millay

My candle burns at both ends;

   It will not last the night;

But ah, my foes, and oh, my friends—

   It gives a lovely light!

Motion-Induced Blindness

 

From the website:

• You see a rotating array of blue crosses and three yellow dots

• Now fixate on the center by watching the flashing green spot

• Note that the yellow spots disappear once in a while:

• Singly, in pairs, or all three simultaneously

• In reality (!), the three yellow spots are continuously present

More?

Your wish is my demand.

154 others should drive you insane.

Don't say I didn't warn you.

Wait a sec — what's that music I'm hearing?