Thursday 12 February 2015

dumpster-diving or dead-letter office

Abusing the language of a 1986 provision that is meant to ostensibly give the government eminent-domain over letters that have gone unclaimed for six months—the right to search maybe overflowing and neglected mailboxes with no other suspicion than that they appear to have been abandoned, by American reckoning, this same provision can also extend to electronic correspondence exchanged past that same one-hundred eighty day period and stored in the ether. Are your archived items disowned and fit for the public record? I suppose it would not do to delete one’s old correspondence, either, since they’re then arguably even more forsaken then. While there is thankfully a contingency of legislators seeking to reform this statute and update the precise wording and intent, it does strike me as rather chilling that legal holdovers could be plied in such a way as to create loopholes.

so fetch

Via the indefatigable Neat-o-Rama, comes this erudite gallery of fine art turned hilarity with obviously timeless lines from a 2004 American teen comedy film called Mean Girls. I had never even heard of this movie before—sounds like an updated version of Heathers with a different rat-pack cast, but I don’t think that matters in the least, though now I’d like to watch it and there also a sequel, apparently.
At least I know where some of these catch-phrases come from now, being the late-adopter that I am. These captions match perfectly with some of the iconic and those under-appreciated master works and one can tell that the creators are also art aficionados themselves, providing a blurb of historical context—for the painting and the characters. You can find many more images at the link to their Tumblr blog.

five-by-five

my precious: a brilliant equation of the One Ring to the allures of technology

love token #9: a look at Victorian forget-me-nots for Valentine’s Day

i-spy: nickle-tour of some of the grandiloquent bastions of espionage

reboot: how the TV show Friends might look today

reaction faces: dramatic gesticulations from a nineteenth century guide

Wednesday 11 February 2015

unionists and publicans

Writing for the Spectator, columnist Mary Dejevsky has found a more apt, although much more uncomfortable, analogy for the tension and territorial integrity that’s no rarified metaphor or theoretical matter triangulated among Russia, Ukraine and the Crimean peninsula.
Rather than resorting to popular but inhibiting comparisons to Nazi aggression or Czarist Russia, Dejevsky suggests a more contemporary parallel to another triad composed of Ireland and Britain and the creation of Northern Ireland. The correlation is of course not a perfect fit either, history being untidy, but I believe that by avoiding abstractions that strip away civility and humanity and making matters more personal (the UK certainly would not have tolerated any meddling in these internal affairs), one is better outfitted with the vocabulary to talk about matters, even if the received-language is already chilling enough in one direction.

pins and needles

In the early 1960s, the US military, fearful of Soviet sabotage against traditional modes of communication that were restricted to undersea cables or radio signals propagated with varying degrees of reliability—depending on the weather and other factors—when bounced off the ionosphere, commissioned the laboratories of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology to create an artificial ring in low orbit of some half a million tiny copper needles to augment the quality of transmissions. Once the news of the secret programme called Project West-Ford was uncovered, there was understandable outrage that America could deport itself in such a manner, possibly polluting the atmosphere and grounding space travel forever by undertaking an experiment on a global scale. Pressure from the scientific community was passionate and brought about the international Treaty on Outer Space. The system worked well and did facilitate broadcasting and if the technique had not been made obsolete by the communications satellite, another orbiting ring, we might still be chattering via pins in the sky. Though the majority of needles have fallen back to Earth, a few are still circling the globe half a century on.