blimey or yet another hierarchically organised oracle

Happy Mutant Rob Beschizza relays the news that the venerable but faded internet pioneer Yahoo! (the backronym above) is being courted by the UK’s broadsheet, the Daily Mail.
At first, I felt the perennial (or ephemeral) disparagement that I always put off having held the same email address the past two decades.  I admit I’m a little protective of my virtual address, although I am recognising that the two tabloids probably are very deserving of one another, running the same sensational, catch-penny content and attendant sponsored content. In the end, the change in management, if it comes through, probably won’t signal a change in mentality that has not already been slipping for some time. What do you think? One ought not expect rewards for loyalty—and lethargy in not wanting the inconvenience is surely its own, but the steadfast have been receiving less and less in return.

rebound or like water for octane

There was a 2001 episode of The Lone Gunmen, a spin-off series from the X-Files, titled as above (after its parent’s flair for headings, though probably even the most dedicated fans could only conjure up “Post-Modern Prometheus”) above the government’s suppression, at the behest of the petroleum industry, an automobile that could run on water. The inventor and the Gunmen, however, ended up destroying the prototype over the realisation that having cars with unlimited mileage on a free and limitless resource would see the entire planet paved over.
This reasoning is a perfect illustration of what’s called the Jevons effect (or Jevons’ paradox)—named after the English economist William Stanley Jevons—positing that while technology might increase the efficiency of using a resource (the steam-engine and coal in the original case), progress in the long run does not lower consumption as growth, facilitated, increases demand. Scholars are still not sure whether these conditions hold or are unsustainable—a sort of moral panic for ecologists, whether the Gunmen were short-sighted in their assessment or whether, prescient, the move towards tele-presence would have been stifled without scarcity—but the warning is certainly a fair one, to be ignored at one’s own peril. No condemnation of progress or pursuit of greater production, similar unintended consequence might be said to arise out of diet (guilt-free) foods or bracketing a motorway with more lanes that only leads to more congestion.  What do you think?  Did Jevons take the right tack or was taken the underprivileged view that progress would always be steam-powered?

proscenium or meta-reference

The cinematic adaptation of Deadpool, wherein our anti-hero addresses the audience directly, is of course not a new convention— although it did stir some interest on the part of theatre-goers on what’s known breaking the fourth wall, the three walls of a box stage suspended and closed off by another, imaginary boundary.

A metaphorical fifth wall might appear if another actor, perhaps suffering from genre blindness, is prompted to question the sanity of another’s aside to those out there in TV Land. Another film whose narrator extensively engaged the viewers (and not just in a post-credits denouement) was the 1986 John Hughes comedy Ferris Bueller’s Day Off, but I didn’t appreciate the blocking homage of Ryan Reynolds to Matthew Broderick until seeing it side-by-side. Of course, both characters ought to be footnoted as tributes to Tex Avery’s Bugs Bunny, I think.

 

whiter than white

This artefact circa 1976 from the doomed town of Scarfolk—which has still not managed to advance beyond 1979, in the form of an advertisement for the popular if not pricey laundry detergent, Panama Automatic, is a brilliantly savaging critique and allegory of the entire erupting scandal, which has become sadly all too common-place. Be sure to visit the council notes for the account of the rather devious wash-day practises that surrounded this brand.

providenciales

Since 1917, Canada has sought to incorporate the Crown suzerainty of the Turks and the Caicos Islands in the Caribbean as its southerly province in order that the expansive nation be able to offer its residents the full-spectrum of tourism-opportunities without leaving the country, as TYWKIWDBI informs. When devolution has occurred in the past, it is not without precedent, like Australia or New Zealand administering even farther removed UK possessions in the Pacific, that such associations can be arranged. Previous polling as shown enthusiasm on both sides, and although the long, unusual quest has been going on for almost a century, the matter is on the docket for discussion for this weekend’s plenary party talks of Canada’s new government. I wonder if we will have anything new to report on this front soon.

how do you get so big eating food of this kind?

Thanks to Weird Universe, one can know re-create the healthful Jedi stew that Master Yoda prepared for Luke Skywalker. I’d have expected such detail nowadays for your space knights but was surprised to find this level of dedication sourced a long time ago and far away to the newspaper the Milwaukee Journal in 1983. The recipe does sound rather good, if not labour-intensive.

inky, blinky or yes we have no bananas

Purveyor of wonderfully hideous men’s fashions (although style is very much in the eye of the beholder) OppoSuits presents this Pac-Man bit of tailoring that seems the natural and dignified answer to pin-stripes (or at the very least, the natural consequence of novelty ties), via Neatorama. The gang’s all there but no ambulatory fruits to be found in the maze. We are in agreement with their suggestion that one ought to wear this for his court-arraignment and would also be appropriate attire for a job interview—or a televised debate. At only around eighty euro, it seems within anyone’s clothing allowance.