ha ha ha! boom! boom!

In order to salvage TV Land’s threatened heritage, the British Film Institute has concocted an ambitious five year strategy, as the Verge informs, to conserve and digitise over a hundred thousand “at risk” programmes. Episodes from arcane but memorable children’s shows, documentaries, breakfast-time spots from the 1950s to the early 1980s are in danger of being lost to future generations as the antiquated storage media continues to degrade—shelf-life being a consideration no matter how good the environment is—and the loss of institutional knowledge and wherewithal as those familiar with the archives and format are retiring.
Among the titles set to be saved are, in the category of children’s programming, shows include Basil Brush (pictured) and Shang-a-Lang featuring the musical stylings of Bay City Rollers. There’s also At Last the 1948 Show from 1967 is a comedy starring John Cleese before joining the troupe that became Monty Python’s Flying Circus and a marriage quiz show from the same year called Mister and Missus, which might illicit some cringes and not everything retro is worthy of our nostalgia but from an ethnographic and historical standpoint it’s really an invaluable glimpse into our collective, formative pasts. Do you remember any of these shows mentioned here and at the links? I personally cannot claim myself as heir to this television legacy but my interest is a genuine one—and not an affection, like a semester abroad accent—and hope that the Telly will allow me to play along.

articulating the popular rage

The 1976 black comedy that billed itself as “perfectly outrageous” now seems presciently quaint by today standards, BBC reports in its appreciation of the motion picture Network.
Not only does the protracted mental breakdown of veteran news anchor Howard Beale provide unexpected ratings gold with his uncensored rants that channel the collected offenses and fears of the audience and the counterpoint of globalists in recognising that true power was taken from the tribes of man by corporate entities, producer Diana Christiansen who cultivated Beale’s new character also ventured into what we would regard as reality television.

haber process

Informed by Super Punch, The Atlantic presents a primer in a geopolitical snarl that’s potentially more significant for humanity’s surviving and thriving than the cartel of petroleum producing countries and all the economic booms, bubbles and bursting of the past: the virtual phosphate monopoly held by Morocco and its contested territory of Western Sahara.
Back in 1918, chemist Fritz Haber was awarded the Nobel Prize for inventing the process that fixed atmospheric nitrogen to phosphate to synthesize ammonia for fertilizers and other applications that allowed the world population to climb to the billions through improved agriculture—and while nitrogen is essentially unlimited, phosphate is finite and there’s no substitute. Currently, Morocco—which is very sensitive on the subject of Western Sahara, akin to a One China Policy or Kurdish independence but the controversy has been successfully muted and the plight of the aboriginal Sahwari people is largely unknown—cannot leverage the rest of the world with its reserves but that could change any moment, with wealth-redistribution and climate change, and suddenly food-security might mean that the Earth can no longer sustain us in the lifestyle we’ve grown accustomed to.

context clues or remembrance of things past

Writing for Æon magazine, scholar and translator Arthur Goldhammer explores the nuance of translating versus interpreting and how context can be an elusive matter for even the cleverest algorithm—occasioned by one translation engine’s shift from a phrase-based system to a neural network that can infer at least some of the subtleties of natural language. 
Schooled on a variety of sources, the algorithm can essay something as rich and complex (in small bites at least) as Marcel Proust’s indulgent masterwork À la recherche du temps perdu, which we humans know is translated as Remembrance of Things Past—as the article demonstrates. A quick check of the new translation engine does reveal it to be pretty polished and refined—ever perhaps surpassing, and the foibles of a non-native speaker using an inappropriate synonym whilst addressing nuns—reminding me of my German step-father saying “shit-storm”—do illustrate how the goal of communication is not always to be intelligible.

luck dragon

Kottke invites us to marvel at the recently completed Lucky Knot Bridge (whose long form inexplicably name is the Lucky Knot / Dragon King Kong Bridge) which despite appearances is a real, physical work of engineering and not some concept artist’s rendering. Spanning the Xiang river, you can find the bridge designed by NEXT Architects of Amsterdam and Beijing in Changsha, the capital of the Hunan province and find out more about the projects at the links.

one planet, slightly used

Although this photograph from the NASA archives from a 1984 space-walk might look as if the Earth were for sale, astronauts Joseph P Allen IV and Dale A Gardener are actually making a comment on the quality of two recovered satellites that failed to deploy properly and fell into lower orbits. This space shuttle Discovery mission was the only time “space junk” was salvaged and brought back to Earth for repairs.

blessed are the cheesemakers

Although we’re a little late for this season with first Advent last Sunday already (I suppose that necessitates that we’ll just have to eat extra morsels to catch up) and as the finished kit won’t be ready until next Christmas—via Bored Panda, there are instructions on how to make a cheese Advents calendar of one’s own. That sounds perfectly delectable and preferable—at least to my wizened old palette—to chocolates. I know quite a few fancy delicatessens and fromageries that could pull together some truly gourmet ways to count down to the holidays. What would be your daily treat?