A master of self-promotion with its past campaigns to include sun-screen that smelt of fried chicken and Bluetooth enabled dining tray inserts to help patrons keep their phones grease-free, we learn via Miss Cellania’s Quick Links, that the latest marketing ploy from a fast food chain is a dating simulator (I am not quite sure what that even means) called ❤️I Love You❤️ Colonel Sanders!, pursuing a hotter, younger version of the franchise’s founder, Harland Sanders—an honourary title granted by the state’s governor for excellence in restaurateurship. Inexplicably, one of the playable characters is a dog, who is also a professor at the culinary institute that you all attend. The property will be released later in the month, for those of you who might be interested, on a platform where enthusiasts watch one another play video games.
Sunday 15 September 2019
Saturday 26 January 2019
crypt and call-box
From Public Domain Review comes a retrospective look at the life and times of influential early nineteenth century collector and architect Sir John Soane, who build structures sacred and profane and defined the layout of one particular sort of place of worship and wonder—museums and art galleries. Appointed Clerk of Works with responsibility for renovations of Whitehall, Westminster and Saint James’ Place, Soane also went on to design the Bank of England, the Bank of Ireland and the dining rooms of 10 and 11 Downing Street, respectively the official residences of the Prime Minister and the Chancellor of the Exchequer. Soane also designed the mausoleum where the earthly remains of his wife, himself and one son were entombed, which served as further inspiration decades after his departure.
Located in the churchyard of Old Saint Pancras, Giles Gilbert Scott, apprentice architect who would go on to build the iconic Battersea Power Station, whilst studying his father’s construction of St. Pancras Station, was much impressed with Soane’s grave and the younger Scott would return to that rounded, neoclassic capstone when it came to tendering his entry for what would become another ubiquitous and iconic design, the telephone kiosk.
catagories: ๐ด๓ ง๓ ข๓ ฅ๓ ฎ๓ ง๓ ฟ, ๐, ๐ฑ, architecture, libraries and museums, ⓦ
Saturday 10 December 2016
phubbing or the bowed head tribe
BBC Future magazine has a really fascinating article examining how language invents novel labels to delineate the rules of etiquette and protocol and how to characterise those who are seen as the transgressors. Public and private manners when it comes to engagement with one’s immediate surroundings and interlocutors or recourse to something or someone more interesting to be found at the other end of the telecommunications รฆther is a topic that perhaps is a little too close for comfort and the inspired terminologies—classifications like the phoney taxia of a cartoon coyote and road-runner, the former never giving up and the latter always evading capturing like some mythological beasts—which can indeed skewer their targets.
In Asia cultures, they recognise tribal and clan affiliation for the distant and distracted, though it’s Germany that’s putting cross-walk warnings on the pavement to reach inattentive pedestrians. Moreover, Germany’s Youth Word of the Year for 2015 was “Smombie,” a portmanteau of smart-phone and zombie. I had heard variations of these names beforehand that range from the self-effacing to the ironic to the cantankerous, something that an old man would shout—possibly not without warrant, but what most interested me was a new word for the very old concept of phubbing from Australia: phone snubbing. We’ve probably all been perpetrators or victims of the phenomena of sitting with some physically present friends or family and ignoring them in favour of one’s on-line ones. There’s probably a modern fairy tale with a nice morale to be found there as well. What’s your favourite label for those constantly networking and what would you choose for yourself?
Tuesday 29 November 2016
free-ride, freifahrt
Saturday 23 January 2016
ringxiety or push-notification
I don’t often keep my mobile device in such close proximity to my person so as to make it an extension of my senses (say, something akin to an artist’s paint brush or a seeing impaired person’s walking stick), but sometimes when I am marching along with my phone in my bag, I’ll get false alarms that cause me to pause and check, only to find it was in my imagination.
This happens especially I think when I’m anxiously expecting a call, and I always feel a bit silly. I knew I was not quite alone in suffering from this phenomenon but had no idea that it was common enough to earn a forum, clinical studies and even a name: Phantom Vibration Syndrome. Researchers are not quite sure what causes these ghostly cues but most believe they are harmless, tiny muscle spasms that would otherwise go unnoticed (perhaps like a nascent version of Restless Leg Syndrome, which apparently becomes insufferable for some people and dreaming, twitchy dogs) that are at an amplitude sympathetic to the subsonic silent mode of our phones. Such prompts also indulge our sense of separation anxiety as these same calls and responses are our social towropes that connect us to the wider world. What do you think? Have you been haunted by phantom vibrations?
Sunday 17 August 2014
know thy selfie
catagories: ๐ฑ, ๐ท, ๐ง , philosophy
Saturday 18 January 2014
hiobsbotschafter oder i spy
Though the German government and the people of the world had already lower their expectations regarding real reform to the practises of the fledgling police state that America has become—and from those partners duly or unwittingly deputized, the awkward spectacle of defending the indefeasible and saying essentially nothing by anyone in a position of authority was a more than a little revolting.
catagories: ๐ฉ๐ช, ๐ฑ, ๐ฅธ, foreign policy, language