Link Salad for 26 February

Today marks two cultural anchors that make 26 February unusually fertile ground for a link salad.

Taxi Driver (set in New York) was released on 26 February 1976.
Victor Hugo, author of Les Misérables, (set in Paris) was born on 26 February 1802.

Yesterday’s link salad spread outward into a dense, multi-line network.
Today’s is deliberately more circular — a closed loop of films, music, and cities, with time as the running theme.

A circular map of culture and time

At the centre are New York, London, and Paris — arguably the world’s three most influential cultural cities — joined today by a fourth: Marseille.

New York
Taxi Driver, Robert De Niro, Gangs of New York, The Wolf of Wall Street, Leonardo DiCaprio, Martin Scorsese.
A city of performance, excess, and consequence.
Paris
Victor Hugo, Les Misérables, revolution, ideas.
The source city — where concepts begin.
London
Les Misérables the musical (reworked and perfected in the West End),
Inception, ABBA (Amanda Seyfried), Mamma Mia!, Eurovision (Brighton).
The transmission hub — where culture is amplified and exported.
Marseille
Taxi, Ronin (via Nice), La Marseillaise.
The hinge city — movement, speed, ignition.

The time theme: meters, marathons, and mind-shifts

26 naturally invites the metaphor of endurance — the marathon distance.
That feeds directly into the image of the taxi meter: time running, cost accumulating, no pause button (Airplane).

From there, the links tighten:

Taxi (Luc Besson, Fifth Element, also New York) → Marion Cotillard
Cotillard → Inception (London, Paris and many others)
Inception → distorted time, layered perception, mental endurance

Time doesn’t just pass — it bends (Persistence of Memory, Salvador Dali, New York again – MoMa)

Music, war, and cultural compression

Les Misérables began as a Parisian novel, became a London-stage phenomenon, and finally a global hit in New York — including the 2012 film featuring Hugh Jackman and Amanda Seyfried.

Seyfried leads to Mamma Mia! → ABBA → Waterloo → Eurovision → Brighton → London again.

History collapses into pop.
War becomes song.
Time compresses.

Meryl Streep

To bring it all together, Meryl Streep becomes a perfect human hinge for today’s map. In Mamma Mia!, she anchors joy, memory, and music; in The Devil Wears Prada, she embodies relentless time pressure and authority; and in The Iron Lady, she channels history, power, and consequence. Music, fashion, and politics collapse into performance, and the loop closes neatly across London, New York, and Europe — time measured, bent, and finally performed.

Off the map: Australia

Beyond the circle sits Australia:

Hugh Jackman (Les Mis)→
Baz Luhrmann (Director) →
The Great Gatsby →
DiCaprio → back to New York.

The loop closes.

Final thought

26 February becomes a clock face:

Paris generates ideas
London transmits them
New York performs them
Marseille sets them in motion

The meter is running.