pound-foolish

We were certainly not disappoint at the lengths that the internet went to admonish us that this recently cinematic release was not the first adaptation of Steven King’s It and the 1990 television mini-series featured none other than accomplished stage and screen actor Tim Curry as the creepy, shape-shifting clown Pennywise. I’ll leave it to viewers to decide who played the role better.

estelada

Although some seventy percent of the voting populace in Catalunya were in favour of holding a referendum on the matter of its secession from the Kingdom of Spain, prior to the police brutality and voter-suppression that occurred at the ballot-stations in Barcelona, Girona and a few other locations (prominent places surely but hardly not blocking all of them), the people were split on the issue with only some forty percent unconditionally voting for independence.
Spain’s central government maintains it is illegal and unconstitutional for a constituent region to declare its autonomy—and it is the government’s right and arguably its responsibility to try to kept its soverign borders intact and cohesive, like those currently strategizing over what a Kurdish homeland might mean for Iraq and Turkey (or for that matter, what the experience might be for the first US state to remove itself from the Union) or how the creatures of Brexit’s court rallied around Catalunya’s right to self-determination, but its violent response to stop voting altogether reportedly translated to an incredible outcome of over ninety percent—perhaps that show of might smacked too much like the totalitarian regime of Francisco Franco that came to an end a scant four decades ago. What do you think? In the aftermath of the plebiscite and the violence that marred it, Catalunya’s leadership have since softened the rhetoric of an immediate withdrawal and amid all this chaos it’s impossible to predict how things will progress moving forward.

deciduous

We were rather taken with this stunning ensemble of trees turning from green to gold with red-accented vines in a parking lot near home—there’s happily quite a spectacle to see with the changing of the seasons but sometimes there’s the most contrast when it’s removed from the forest a bit. The chloroplasts in plants would be optimised for absorbing light across all spectra should leaves be black and while there’s a wide range in colouration, botanists aren’t sure exactly why most vegetation is green and not a darker shade. I wondered if the changing colours was just the onset of shedding them, the parts dying—or whether the process weren’t something more poetic, like the death of a star with the different phases and outcome it goes through as its energy sources dwindle.
I don’t think one can quite bear out that metaphor but it turns out that it’s a gross over-simplification to say that trees shed their leaves because of the cost of maintaining a green mantle during the winter months outweighs the photosynthetic benefits. The chemical responsible for the yellow and orange hues is always present in the leaves but is masked by renewed chlorophyll during the growing season.
The chemicals responsible for purples and reds are produced at the end of summer and slowly become a part of the tree’s complexion. Brown is the absence of pigment altogether.
Trees undergo this transformation to prevent water loss primarily and in certain climes to stave off freezing of extremities but there’s a whole host of other reasons including foiling the camouflage of herbivores, avoiding infestation, advertising its seeds and berries and to even stunt the growth of close neighbours. The clusters of dead leaves that remain attached and aren’t dropped, called marcescent, are even kept around by design as in the Spring they are a store of nutrients and they mask growing buds and ensure that any animal foraging for these new shoots gets a nasty taste for the effort.

a poet and didn’t know it

Our sincere gratitude to Nag on the Lake for introducing us to the rather remarkable troubadour known as Poetweet that will cull one’s Twitter feed for lyrical snippets and combine them into one of three poetic forms. We were really impressed with the eye-rhyme that it found amongst our twiterpation, pairing fascist with Zeitgeist or “a send away service for souvenirs” with “and their houses in dire need of repairs,” but I think we write about too many non-sequitir things to get an authentic couplet—and that gave us an idea. Granted Dear Leader is a sub-literate sophist and a general menace to language in any capacity, Poetweet was nonetheless also willing to take the dotard’s handle and make him sound a bit like a bard. Give it a try yourself at the links above.

gravel and fire

Of course not without antecedents and followers in the same tradition and I guess that were are all standing on the shoulders of trolls, Public Domain Review introduces us to the land-developer turned politician (both of dodgy success) finally turned dystopian author and advocate for the Catastrophism trope of history began enjoying far greater reach and influence, master of disaster Ignatius Loyola Donnelly, who was more or less single-handedly responsible for the triad of the most irresponsible, intractable themes in pseudoscience and pseudohistory that were still made to entertain today. The Minnesota congressmen published his signature volume in 1882, Atlantis: The Antediluvian World, whose theories propelled the allegorical ideal Republic of Plato into a rather more literal interpretation of a lost continent and an advanced civilisation that ring the edges of our collective thoughts. Though the flooding of the Mediterranean took a mere instance in geological terms and perhaps the earliest ancestors of modern humans might have been witness to a time when the sea was a dry valley, the change certainly was not overnight nor generational. Most academics do not ascribe to the theory that change is driven by cataclysmic events over the gradual progression of nature, but by dint of the monomyth of a Great Flood—though I imagine that any flood can be privileged in the imagination of those who experienced it—and the fact that the City of Troy was being excavated and was not just a story after all, it all proved too tantalising and Donnelly was able to channel the populist movement in science and was also credited with giving rise to Mayan studies and mysticism through various citations of contemporary exhibitions.
No Ancient Aliens quite yet but we’re seeing what a fertile ground Donnelly is creating in the imagination of his readership. Encouraged by the reception of his first work, he followed on a year later with Ragnarok: The Age of Fire and Gravel that held that a near-collision with a comet was incident to history’s accidents, including the extinction of the woolly mammoth and the romancing of Norse mythology, and while somewhat resonant in other fields, if the Earth were subject to such formative, disruptive events, life would have never had the plateau of stability needed to develop into complex beings. Moreover, Donnelly’s writings were fraught with all sorts of fanciful racial ideas that some people will always latch on to as validating. Under a pseudonym, he also published a series of anti-globalist speculative fiction novels, Caesar’s Column, set in the post-apocalyptic ruins of America in 1980, informed by the Haymarket riots that had recently transpired in Chicago. Though we are all living with the legacy of Donnelly’s influence and appeal and many others championed these ideas, Donnelly was discredited in his own lifetime and never published again after a book tour in England where he tried to foist on the public his theory that Francis Bacon was the author of the canon of work attributed to William Shakespeare. The Britons were having none of that and shut him down.