Six Things, Volume 161

Advertising | Jerry’s Map | Crows | Windows | Baguettes | Words

Thing 1 – Advertising

Advertisements are annoying, aren’t they? Despite our best efforts, they stay in our head, exactly as intended. “For mash get Smash”, “we don’t pronounce the ‘ck’” , “Nicole? Papa!”

They’re also a way of measuring your age. If you don’t recognise any of the above, consider yourself young (or perhaps not from the UK – your experience will be different depending on where you live/grew up, so merely substitute the above with memorable slogans from your own youth).

It’s not just words. The evocative nature of classical music has been used and abused in the name of advertising for as long as any of us can remember, either introducing the music to a wider public or ruining it for ever, depending on your point of view. Dance of the Reeds? Cadbury’s Fruit and Nut. Dvorak’s 9th Symphony? Hovis. Mahler’s 7th Symphony? Castrol. Orff’s Carmina Burana? Old Spice. Those lasses singing, you know the one, the opera thing? British Airways. And, inevitably, Bach.

These nostalgic thoughts were prompted by this article in The Guardian about the History of Advertising Trust, home to fifty years of British advertising history. It is, for those so inclined, endlessly browsable. And it’s not just TV adverts – the ghost signs archive proves equally fascinating.

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Thing 2 – Jerry’s Map

Jerry Gretzinger has lived an interesting life. He studied architecture and liberal arts, had a spell in the Peace Corps, then pursued careers as architect and handbag designer. But most of all he’s made a map. It’s a big map, as you can tell from the illustration above. It is in fact his life’s work, a sprawling representation of an imaginary world constructed with unimaginable patience – and adhering to rigorous principles and guidelines – over seven decades (although he does admit he took a “coffee break” of twenty years or so).

The project is extraordinary, and Jerry himself is quietly endearing. Here he talks about his process (impenetrable to me, but clearly well thought out and rigorously followed):

Here he discusses whether the map is art or not (yes):

And here’s a recent documentary about him and the map made by People Make Games:

Brilliant. Bonkers.

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Thing 3 – Crows

A jackdaw, the smallest British crow, thinking about how much it likes chips.

Are corvids our friends? Or are they merely exploiting us for their own nefarious needs?

A good read from Audubon.

If you want to know my thoughts on the matter, you might find this cautionary tale interesting.

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Thing 4 – Windows

A couple of things here for fans of portals.

Dave Krugman is a New York photographer who’s been documenting windows for a few years and has now assembled them in this project, unsurprisingly entitled ‘Windows’. You can view it, as he describes it, as an attempt to “recreate the sense of belonging and sonder that one feels while wandering the storied streets of this beautiful metropolis” – or you can just click around and have a look at some interesting photographs, perhaps wondering what lies behind them. You can also play a memory game with them. (I still call it ‘pelmanism’ because that’s what my mum called it.)

Related (and if anything even more interesting) is this photo essay on doorways of Chicago, based on Ronnie Frey’s Instagram account of the same name.

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Thing 5 – Baguettes

How much does a baguette cost in France?

Now there’s a question.

(Between €0.80 and €1.95, depending on where you go, if you can’t be bothered to click through.)

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Thing 6 – Words

Two very similar word-forming games for you to choose between. In both you make words from available letters – but you can only form them from letters joined by a line. When a letter can no longer be used to form a word, it disappears – so it gets easier as you go along.

Zanagrams gives you little boosts and encouragements (“you’re on fire!” “Word nerd!”) which is fair enough. It also gives definitions of the words and detailed stats, and the archive is free to play.

Ribbit, meanwhile, has dancing frogs, but if you want to play the archive you have to subscribe to Puzzmo (there’s a whole suite of games to play, as if you didn’t already have TOO MANY DAILY GAMES).