i, in my great and unmatched wisdom

With no advance warning to Kurdish fighters or coalition partners, Trump announced the abrupt withdrawal of US troops from the Turkish-Syria border region.
This abandonment after five years of cooperation with Kurdish forces, whom have borne the brunt of defeating the Islamic State during Syria’s civil war though characterised as terrorists by Turkey, has prompted the Pentagon to deliver a stern warning to Turkey not to invade. Though Trump in principle agrees with the assessment that there should be no military incursion that would further destabilise Syria, pledging to economically destroy Turkey should it do so, removing soldiers from the cross-fire has essentially given Erdoğan a pass to carry on as he sees fit.

reference desk

Recently distinguished as Everlasting Blört’s curated pick of the day, we are finding this data visualisation from Hat Note both relaxing and engaging.
In real time, Listen to Wikipedia (best performance on mobile devices) signals changes to its articles, new entries and subtractions with plucks and peals and one can fine tune the criteria to track the new and novel as well as what’s possibly the target of vandals or subject to propaganda.

mechanical turk

Via friend of the blog par excellence Nag on the Lake, we find ourselves confronted with an interesting installation to help one better visualise one’s hourly salary.
This machine can be calibrated in a number of ways—illustrating, as in this configuration, how many turns of a crank it will take for the contraption to yield up a penny and by projection, the endurance and drudgery it takes over the course of an hour. The menial isn’t mindless of course and it’s not important whether it’s the floor or the ceiling so long as it’s a living wage. What do you think? Is tedium a luxury for those that struggle for fulfillment from a job? While perhaps unrewarding, there’s no pretense in doing this task, whereas other career-paths (with the support of professional sophists) do a good job of covering up that business of estrangement.  Someone will reinvent capitalism and undercut the competition with a machine like this. 

deustch-amerikanischer tag

Observed under the auspices of Public Law 100-104, 101 Statute §721 and proclaimed by Ronald Reagan on the two-hundredth anniversary of the landing back in 1983, German-American Day marks the 1683 arrival (see also) of thirteen families from Krefeld near Düsseldorf and Duisberg in Philadelphia, founding the settlement of what would eventually become Germantown, Pennsylvania.
The occasion was commemorated from the seventeenth century onwards and held in other parts of the colonies and country with German diaspora but was discontinued during World War I. This first group of Mennonite families had fled Prussia for religious freedom and established the Pennsylvania Dutch identity and were among the first, along with the Quakers, to petition for the abolition of slavery in 1688. Though coinciding with Oktoberfest, the largest celebration of German culture abroad, German-American Day predates the first Wiesn of 1810 by several decades.

detail & parody

Via Kottke, we find ourselves challenged to a bit of scansion and poetic graffiti in physician and writer William Carlos Williams’ (*1883 – †1963) 1932 modern, imagist kitchen table note “This Is Just to Say.”  Its perfectly self-consistent typographical structure, which reads more like the accidental symmetry of found poetry, makes the intensifier seem out of place anywhere. Williams’ wife, Florence (Flossie) née Herman (*1891 – †1976), herself penned a “reply” some years later—which I think far and away is the best “none-of-the-above” responses:

Dear Bill: I’ve made a
couple of sandwiches for you.
In the ice-box you’ll find
blue-berries—a cup of grapefruit
a glass of cold coffee.

On the stove is the tea-pot
with enough tea leaves
for you to make tea if you
prefer—Just light the gas—
boil the water and put it in the tea

Plenty of bread in the bread-box
and butter and eggs—
I didn’t know just what to make for you. Several people
called up about office hours—

See you later. Love. Floss.

Please switch off the telephone.

7x7

sonic smock: a garment that allows the hearing-impaired to experience music through tactile impulses

mixtape: the greatest hits of 1979 in three minutes

apophenia: the state of being exceptionally receptive to imagining synchronicity where little exists, accounting for the resonance of mashups—especially exemplified by The Dark Side of the Rainbow 

it’s got a sort of woody quality about it, gorn, gorn—much better than newspaper or litterbin: celebrating Monty Python’s fiftieth anniversary—via Slashdot 

peacock throne: the nicely framing wicker chair (previously) that’s the stuff of celebrity

bucatini: drinking straws made of pasta instead of plastic stand up in cold beverages—I had wondered about that sort of application but was sure that they wouldn’t last

we’re going to party, karamu, fiesta forever: musician Jacob Collier remixes Lionel Ritchie’s 1983 hit single

langer donnerstag

Though this thirtieth anniversary of the 1989 decision to allow retail operations greater flexibility in opening hours falls on a Saturday—the last day of the working week for which stores were obliged to close up at 14:00, something I can still remember from when I first moved to Germany, the Extended Thursdays rule allowed businesses to stay open for one day a week past the statutory closing time of 18:30, addressing weekend hours as well.
Impacted employees who had to reckoning with their schedules disrupted on a weekly basis referred to Thursdays as Schlado—a portmanteau, an acronym for sh*tty long Donnerstag. Since the 1960s, one langer Samstag was permitted a quarter, occasionally more depending on when Advent began as the lead up to Christmas. Since 2003, most stores remain open until 20:00 Monday through Saturday (laws now vary greatly by state), with Langer Donnerstag only relevant to banking branches, doctors and some government offices.