JabrWoky - Following the white rabbit since...

The Irony Called History

Recently got to watch Jean-Pierre Melville’s debut movie ‘La Silence de la Mer’ (The Silence of the Sea). Arguably one of the finely crafted movies I have seen in recent times.

The above scene from the movie does make me wonder if at all our global leaders do learn anything from history. The irony of it all.

Year of Helvetica

It seems like it's the year of the Swiss typeface Helvetica. The documentary film on the famous font appeared a few months back. Now Blanka has this spectacular poster collection celebrating 50 years of Helvetica. And these are my favorites:

 

humble beginnings

The Internet Archive is a brilliant resource to dig into and unearth how some of the most prominent websites of today used to look in their infancy. It almost gives you a feeling like flipping an old photo album and commenting on the bad hairdo of your favorite cousin in 1984.

This is what Yahoo looked like on it's birthday on Oct 17, 1996:

Google had only two lines on its homepage, the day it debuted on Nov 11, 1998:

And when you clicked on the first line it took you to this page (which is a lot more cluttered than the simple Google front page of today):

On Oct 22, 1996, the original search engine AltaVista was born like this:

How the times they are a changin'...

Robotic Obsession

[Source: Monocle magazine, Issue 1, Feb 2007]

A Short History of Coffee & Starbucks in UK

· 1554 Constantinople's citizens become the first to patronise houses selling coffee.

· 1652 Refined arabica coffee arrives in Britain. It was drunk black and without sugar, and the first shop was reputedly opened in Oxford.

· 1660s Coffee houses in Britain become a social phenomenon and are dubbed 'penny universities'. A single penny bought you a coffee and time to scan the latest newsletters posted on the walls.

· 1665 Samuel Pepys recorded nearly 100 visits he made to coffee houses.

· 1688-98 Some houses became a hub for commerce where information was exchanged. Jonathan's Coffee House in Change Alley brimmed with stockbrokers - and eventually became the London Stock Exchange.

· 1700s Coffee houses begin to fall out of favour.

· 1930s-40s Two world wars and a social revolution revive cafe society in the UK. A migrant influx still nostalgic for coffee houses sets up cafes such as The Cosmo in Hampstead, London.

· 1971 Starbucks opens its first outlet in Seattle. The name derives from a character in Moby Dick

· 1998 King's Road in Chelsea becomes the first location for Starbucks in the UK, selling cappuccino or mocha latte at £2.

· 2000 The UK coffee shop market rockets with daily sales of 4.4m cups. Coffee-selling becomes a billion-pound industry, with UK-owned chains such as Caffe Nero and Costa Coffee offering stiff competition.

· 2006 The Starbucks empire grows to 12,500 outlets and £4bn in revenue.

[From The Observer article]

Lego

The Lego brand name is a truncation of the Danish words "leg godt" which translates as "play well". Lego also means "I study" or "I put together" in Latin.

The company was founded 1932 in the Danish town of Billund by Ole Kirk Christiansen.

Rudolph Topffer

[From Scott McCloud's book "Understanding Comics: The Invisible Art"]

30 Years of Indianess

India-Today magazine has done it yet again. Given us a culturally comprehensive 30th anniversary edition (Oct 2, 2006 edition) of all the significant events and what-not that has happened in the past three decades since the declaration of emrgency rule under Indira Gandhi to the technological and economical leap under Dr Manmohan Singh. If you are genuinely interested in getting to know the significant events and people that shaped the cultural mish-mash of modern day India this is indeed a collector's piece.