Saturday 4 February 2017

after all, you’re my wonder wall

Swedish lifestyle and furniture giant offers a flat-pack solution to defending the US southern border which comes in at a price that’s below the other cost estimates, though there’s some assembly required. Another popular item new to the store’s catalogue is the Lรคddr, capable of scaling heights of up to ten and a half metres.

mind-body problem

A new rather disruptive theory being investigated by multidisciplinary teams of scientists in France and Canada suggests that consciousness, the mind (or at least one of the cognitive manifestations thereof) arose out of the brain’s own systemic dissipation—that is, subject to the laws of thermodynamics like any other coherent structure in the Cosmos, the brain’s own lurching towards entropy produces self-awareness as a by-product. What do you think? The study was too small to be conclusive and will need to be peer-reviewed. Within the mind’s suite of faculties, there’s not only consciousness but judgement, perception, memory, intuition and thought as well, and it would seem that to carry the reasoning out to its natural conclusion, the self-preserving quality of being conscious paradoxically propels the brain quicker into dotage by making it a more complex system.

professor pangloss, i preseume

A theodicy is an argument proffered to try to reconcile why an all-powerful and benevolent God would allow evil and needless suffering into the world.
Most don’t immediately seek the sophistical refuge of moral-relativism, as ร†on magazine explores, instead going after the blandishments that from our limited and mortal perspective what can appear to us as cruel and undeserving is a sacrifice for the greater good in the grand scheme of things. The latter can be some solace but are generally not very comforting especially for the sufferers and it’s that old totem and taboo that can forge such arguments into dangerous weapons. Some account for evil as punishment for a wayward society and would lay the blame for disaster squarely on the shoulders of the fringe and those welcoming of them, and thus taking too many liberties with our free-will.

home again, home again, jiggety-jig

Thanks to a romp through the vast archives of the Futility Closet we learn not only of the clinical names of the manual digits—invoked when there’s no room for the vagaries of terms like pointer-finger: digitus pollicis, indicis, medius, annularis, that anatomists never bothered given the toes—except for the big one called hallux (like pollex for the thumb)—proper names. One clever medical student offered a naming-convention which followed in Latin the counting rhyme of “This Little Piggy” where one wiggles the corresponding toe. The little toe is called under this nomenclature porcellus plorans domun, piglet crying homeward. Be sure to check out more engaging curiosities at the website above.

Friday 3 February 2017

6x6

i’d rather have a bottle in front of me than a frontal-lobotomy: the cutting edge of neuro-surgery five decades hence, via the always marvellous Nag on the Lake

second hand rose: the life and times of a vintage wall-paper hunter

les diableries: nineteenth century stereoviews of Hell

hi-fi for the small fry: nursery rhymes and children’s folk songs set to the music of 1960s teen dance crazes

honourable mentions: as America declares itself first, more invitation videos vying for sloppy-seconds

tam-toss: a flash-mob tribute to Mary Tyler Moore from Minneapolis, via TYWKIWDBI

Thursday 2 February 2017

bates motel

One of the documentaries premiered at the Sundance Film Festival is managing—called “78/52” after the number of takes and how many ended up on the cutting-room floor as the director sought perfection for the iconic two-minute shower scene—to bridge that duplicity that the film Psycho has offered audiences since 1960 by deconstructing that very scene. The dual nature of the Hitchcock classic, which is explored by interviewing contemporary directors and actors who would gladly acknowledge the inspirational debts owed, comes as it was witness to such a departure in how we understood and consumed horror. Prior to Psycho, the monstrous was portrayed in the movies as something external—even if so allegorically, and one has to wonder what it was like for those first audiences to experience psychological terror and confront the realisation that it was all in a sense psychosomatic.  I doubt that the experience could ever be replicated for those who followed.  I want to check this out and the idea makes me think of the documentary Room 237 that also had a narrow focus and tales from behind the scenes with blocking that Stanley Kubrick limned for a particular suite at the Overlook.

Wednesday 1 February 2017

mad libs or ready for prime-time

Writing for Kottke, Tim Carmody invites us to think broadly about the rhetoric television politics and how the different venues intersect and how the strategies of enabling agents wield their sophistry to blur, confuse and manipulate the normally distinct forums and platforms. Would that we could examine the quiver of the rhetorician academically with Lincoln-Douglas debate club stakes as it’s really a fascinating exercise that’s been debased to the regrettable but very necessary act of bullshit detecting and knowing when the weaker argument is made the stronger. Unfortunately, the ability to articulate how this is done is valued far less that the talent for making the specious or the deceptive believable. I wonder if Dear Leader’s majordomo is a better advisor and mouthpiece.

the pre-fab four

At a time when popular culture and entertainment in flush with reprisals and reboots, many of which are not deserving of our nostalgia and really defy explanation other than derivative vehicles for some marketing tie-in, it was refreshingly discordant to come across this appreciation of fifty years since the debut of the Monkees.
Like the narrator, I realised that I probably had not really spared a thought for the band for years until that moment but being confronted with the intimately familiar repertoire again, I found myself thinking that these numbers were actually really well performed and not just the floss that I had always dismissed them as. Maybe it was that TV show theme that haunted the group—who were originally conceived as a sitcom about an aspiring group of musicians to be like the Beatles—and how both arms of the franchise unfolded concominently, making the music literally incidental. No faulting the band for what they label expected them to do, but it’s strange how I was compelled to hold one opinion—with some conviction and made me think of the Berenstein/Berenstain phenomenon, which is the manifestation of a false or alternate memory—sometimes known as the Mandela Effect as significant portions of the population swore and still possibly maintain that they have vivid, shared memories of Nelson Mandela’s funeral years prematurely.