Though American is demystified and disenchanted with largess and respect having been much reduced its footprint for destruction has only increased and gone into overdrive. The list consists of headlines as bullet points to the full stories as reported by The Atlantic’s correspondents but the headings alone are more than enough to make one shudder and remember the sheer incredulity.
We had seen this mock-up of a steel architectural truss abutting a Maltese cliff face circulating around the internet for a week but failed to realise that the idea was proffered to repair a famous natural landmark and tourist attraction along the coast outside of Gozo.
The Azure Window (also known as the Dwerjra Window) was a limestone pillar with a stone archway over the sea that collapsed in March 2017 following a violent storm but had been under threat for some time over erosion and increased visitor traffic. In addition to its appearance in Game of Thrones, the window was also featured in the original Clash of the Titans and the Kevin Reynold version of The Count of Monte Cristo, with its last cameo in the cliff-diving Hugo Boss apparel advertising campaign.
As the partial shutdown of the US government creeps into its third week, furloughed and exempted (working for delayed pay) staff at the National Weather Service’s Anchorage, Alaska bureau managed to embed a desperate plea in the forecast discussion.
One cannot expect to essentially close one quarter of the federal government without some nasty consequences down-stream and knock-on effects for departments that are open. Aside from rubbishing national parks, the workers and their families held kept in suspense, the air traffic controllers and screeners working without compensation (whoever thought we would be sharing a cup of kindness for the Transportation Security Administration), the research not being conducted and the tax statements not being processed (plus a litany of other thing not being done), there’s real dangers to public safety just being barely kept at bay by the dedication of a few.
As this year draws to a close, we again take time to reflect on a selection of things that took place in 2018. Thanks as always for visiting. We've made it through another wild year together.
january: Turkey enters the Syrian conflict in attempts to wrest control in the north from Kurdish rebels. The US government experiences a partial shutdown over a lapse in funding due to a stand-off regarding the status of immigrants that were brought to the US as children by their parents. We had to say goodbye to science-fiction and fantasy writer Ursula Le Guin.
february: There are further advances in private-sector rocketry that seem primed to usher in a new age of exploration. Another school shooting in America fails to get the country to open up to a dialogue on gun-control. The US Federal Communications Commission repeals net neutrality consumer protections.
march: A former Russian double-agent and his daughter are poisoned in Salisbury, England. In China, term limits for the office of president and general secretary of the Communist party are eliminated. In the US, a nation-wide school walk-out occurs to protest gun-violence and weak gun-control laws. Vladimir Putin is re-elected to a fourth consecutive term as president of Russia. We bid farewell to scientist Stephen Hawking.
april: France, the UK, and the US launch airstrikes on Syria bases following a government sanctioned chemical weapons attack that killed over seventy civilians.
may: The European Union’s General Data Protection Regulation goes into effect in an attempt to wrest back some modicum of control over individuals’ digital dossiers. Donald Trump precipitates a trade war by imposing punitive steel tariff on exporters with other countries responding in kind.
june: At the G-7 summit in Toronto Donald Trump pushes for the reinstatement of Russia before embarking to meet with the leader of North Korea in Singapore for talks on denuclearisation.
july: A series of climate-change driven heat-waves devastate North America and Europe, causing many deaths and torrents of forest fires. A boys’ football team and their coach are rescued from a cave in Thailand after a harrow, seventeen-day ordeal. Researchers confirm the existence of a subglacial lake of liquid water on Mars.
august: The market value of Apple surpasses one trillion dollars. The US reimposes sanctions on Iran over its nuclear programme (having announced its intention to withdraw from the deal in May) while maintaining support to Saudi Arabia in its retaliatory attack on the Yemen.
september: The National Museum of Brazil in Rio de Janeiro is engulfed in flames. The Supreme Court of India decriminalises homosexuality. Following a contentious hearing, a controversial justice is appointed to the US Supreme Court, altering its composition.
october: A dissident journalist is kidnapped, murdered and spirited away in pieces at the Saudi consulate in Istanbul. Canada legalises cannabis possession and use nation-wide. Trump deploys soldiers to the Mexican border to fend off an approaching caravan of asylum-seekers. While visiting his native China, the chief of INTERPOL goes missing and presumed assassinated. The US signals its intent to leave the International Postal Union and shutters its diplomatic outreach offices for Palestine.
november: Democrats take control of the US House of Representative with Republicans retaining control of the Senate. The InSight probe lands on Mars, beginning a mission to pierce the surface of the Red Planet. We had to bid farewell to SpongeBob SquarePants creator Stephen Hillenburg and social justice warrior Harry Leslie Smith. US ex-president George Herbert Walker Bush passed away, rejoining Barbara Bush, his life partner of seventy-three years, who died in April.
december: The shambles of Brexit and the investigation into the Trump campaign and administration to Russia are ongoing. US forces withdraw from Syria with plans to also do so for Afghanistan and the country’s defence secretary resigns in protest. We had to bid farewell to actor and director Penny Marshall. The US government enters another partial shutdown over Border Wall funding.
Japan’s kanji character of the year was revealed a couple weeks ago in a ceremony with ็ฝ writ large in hand painted calligraphy strokes by Priest Seihan Mori of the Kiyomizu Temple in Kyoto, which strikes us as a pretty amazing way of announcing the results.
Pronounced like “sigh,” the word (which appropriately kind of also looks like a stinking pile of poo) means disaster is not only reserved for the natural spate of earthquakes, flooding, heatwaves and tsunamis that visit the land perennially that have grown more frequent and costlier but also for the general geopolitical shambles that define this year.
Sadly, as Paleofuture reports, the Paramount Ranch, the location of a number of large scale-sets that was a major actor in a number of film and television productions since its 1927 acquisition as a film ranch—falling within the traditional bounds of the studio zone, a thirty-mile zone (TMZ) that radiates out from West Beverly in Los Angeles and an easy drive from Hollywood—has been engulfed by the Woolsey wildfire, sustaining significant damage. The allure of this spot, backdrop for 1981’s Reds and 1968’s Herbie the Love Bug plus many others and numerous television shows like Westworld, The Bachelor and Doctor Quinn: Medicine Woman was that it was also open for public inspection, provided that nothing was filming at the time. Wildfires devastating the region are burning California from both ends, with at least twenty-five fatalities and thousands of homes and businesses burned.
At the same time as Hurricane Florence was bearing down on the North American eastern seaboard, the deadly Typhoon Mangkhut was roiling in the Pacific with both areas still dealing with the consequences. The latter refers to the Thai form of the purple citrus-like exotic fruit the mangosteen—as we learn from Oxford Words blog, native to the Malaysia and anticyclones do not share the naming conventions that the World Meteorological Organisation has established for storms in the Atlantic, alternating alphabetically between boys’ and girls’ names, like Irma, Katrina, Maria and Harvey.
This tradition started in the US in September 1950 when three hurricanes made landfall simultaneously and there was confusion within the public and weather centres, using exclusively female names at first (male names were added in 1979) derived from the Air Force’s phonetic alphabet. And while member nations are not required in the context of local reporting and coverage to keep to the assigned designation (the WMO is the final arbiter one whether particular names should be retired after a particularly disastrous event, ninety so far so I guess by necessity we’ll have to start including more non-traditional ones soon), in the West where personal names are employed, we are generally at a consensus and use the one standard. In Asia, however, different jurisdictions modify the storms’ designation to fit local language and customs. Quite sensibly, in the Philippines, they taunted it with the name Omlong (the toothless, the feckless one) in hopes it would crumple from the insult—rather than giving a common name that might potentially stigmatise later on.
As another potentially deadly and destructive hurricane is poised to ravage the eastern seaboard, Trump is expressing doubts about the death toll in Puerto Rico from last year’s Hurricane Maria, saying that Democrats have inflated numbers in order to make him look bad. We don’t want to draw more attention to this unslaking narcissist and his unabashed departures from reality but this particular lie especially insulting and emblematic of his revolting behaviour in that Trump is only willing to recognise and honour only one victim: himself.
Via Slashdot we are reminded that we’ve put the planet on an apocalyptic trajectory that we absolutely cannot afford to be complacent about changing if we want to ensure that the Earth remains a hospitable place. An array of tipping elements—loosing one or multiple of those regulating bulwarks like oceanic currents and expanses of healthy forests—will result in run-away climate change, resulting in accelerated disasters and a sustained temperature rise double that of current forecasts.
The World Climate Conference held in Geneva in February of 1979 accrued the collective will of some fifty nations and the public and scientific consensus that climate change was a real and imminent threat to the survival of human kind and for the next decade, it seemed that we were on the cusp of effecting real and permanent change and the that the course towards global catastrophe was not inevitable.
During this decisive time, however, a group of determined scientists failed to convince and influence the requisite governmental participation and policy—which yielded to business interests and unchecked capitalism. The New York Times presents a truly compelling, long-format, multi-media essay comprised of interviews and anecdotes that helps one to appreciate how close science came to saving the environment and ourselves from what we can now only to defer as long-term disaster and negotiating what we’re willing to sacrifice since we’ve pivoted past any better outcomes. This narrative on the wilful abrogation of leadership is not to exhaust nor to resign the rest of us to our impending doom but rather demonstrate that the future will not look like the past and that we are all stingy with our imagination and rallies us all to be aware of the consequences of our choices. The warnings are not new. Though we may be on course for disaster and have remained at the same bearing, we are not beyond redemption.
Oceanographers in Queensland for the first time have produced a comprehensive, global map charting out the pristine, untouched areas of oceanic wilderness, which sadly reveals that there is only a small percentage not already befouled by mankind.
Researchers admit that they were expecting to find much broader expanses of unspoilt waters and ecosystems but these contrary results, testament to the endless assault that people are waging with careless pollution, climate change heating up waters and disrupting currents, over-fishing, sand-mining (the chief component of all the concrete and glass that goes into new construction) and intensive shipping, demonstrate the degree of negative, disruptive impact that humans have had above and below the waves.
Eight months after Hurricane Maria made landfall on Puerto Rico, devastating the island and many residents in remote areas are still without basic utilities, the official government tally of fatalities has stood at sixty-four.
An impromptu memorial two weeks ago (and we’re all ashamed for having overlooked such a powerful and important gesture, which illustrates how beastly and uncaring and so easily called away we can be) on the marble courtyard of the San Juan capitol grew into thousands of pairs of empty shoes being neatly lined up to represent a truer number of the number lost in the storm.
Hat-tip once again to Kottke’s Quick Links for directing our attention to Crazy Walls, a blog obsessed with the appearance of forensics walls in film and television that attempt to connect and solve mysteries by linking maps and newspaper clippings through red yarn.
Following the principle of conservation of detail, the method called concept mapping can be used to filter out red herrings when the investigator does not know what easily overlooked detail might lead to a break-through and looking for relevance in every detail can drive one to distraction or worse. Though sometimes in earnest or sometimes meta-critical like this cameo of X-Files’ David Duchovny (previously) on Full-Frontal with Samantha Bee—bringing us back around to the matter of Puerto Rico whose underreported casualties might have been shoved out of the news cycle in part by amplifying and hijacking the host’s own monologue, most often the trope is used to lampoon conspiracy theorists.
basic birch: Gemma Correll presents an assortment of millennial plants
fairway: George Barris (previously) made Bob Hope a one-of-a-kind golf-cart that was a caricature of himself
hexagonal tessellation: high resolution gallery of the mathematically inspired woodcuts and mezzotints of M.C. Escher
kinopanorama: after decades of neglect, Moscow’s theatre in-the-round experience has reopened after a major refurbishment
net cetera: the “Be Best” initiative to combat cyber-bullying might be a touch derivative
isla del encanto: charming ensemble of colourful houseboats of southern Puerto Rico, which weathered Hurricane Maria
everything zen: images from this weekend’s European Stone Stacking and Balancing Competition in Scotland are tranquil (rather than precarious) and oddly fulfilling, via Super Punch
soiree: ahead of the fete for Macron’s state visit, the Atlantic reviews White House state dinners of the past decades
boilerplate: discontent over handling of user data may signal the end of perpetuating meaningless fine-print and illusory choice in contracts
bird’s eye view: cameras carried aloft by trained pigeons deliver turn of the century aerial photography (previously)
convolutional neural network: using deep learning and augmented reality, programmes can aid physicians in detecting cancer and other diseases in real-time, via Slashdot
crassus became the richest man in rome by owning the fire department: privatising emergency services will insulate the wealthy from the worst consequences of climate change while making the poor pay
2008 tc3: meteorite found in Nubian desert is one of the last remains of an ancient, doomed proto-planet
rest in grease: a fast-food chain’s release of a mixtape prompts us to question the boundary between music and marketing and what constitutes a brand versus a band
Though the re-discovery of the ancient Roman city of Pompeii buried in the pyroclastic ash of the catastrophic eruption of Mount Vesuvius in 79 AD is sourced to the excavations by Spanish engineer Roque Joaquรญn de Alcubierre in the service of the Duke of Parma that began on 6 April 1748, history records at least one previous rediscovery of the long-forgotten settlement. A century and a half earlier, a workman discovered some frescos and inscribed walls whilst digging a ditch and summoned a respected architect from Naples, Domenico Fontana (the same who oversaw the transportation and erection of those Egyptian obelisks in Rome) who assessed the site.
Either out of farsightedness or simple prudishness, Fontana ordered the artefacts reburied and not to be discussed again. Italy during the Reformation and the Counter-Reformation perhaps did not have the artistic sensibilities to appreciate what was uncovered. Sort of equivalent to having neglected to delete one’s browsing history (to couch it in modern terms as death came swift and unexpectedly), archaeologists found and continue to find quite a lot of erotic art and imagery and the public was not quite prepared for it. In fact when King Francis of the Two Sicilies visited an exhibition of artefacts collected from Pompeii with the queen and princess, he was so mortified that he decreed that the explicit material be sequestered in a secret Neapolitan museum (Gabinetto Segreto—obviously NSFW) that only admitted mature adults whose morals were above question. One is given to wonder on how many occasions the finds of the past were subject to censorship when it did not fit our collective or personal narrative. Closed and reopened numerous times over the ensuing centuries according to society’s norms and mores, it was last reopened in 2000 with people under the age of eighteen still not admitted unless accompanied by a guardian.
clan of the ice bear: the outsized but possibly overlooked contributions that polar bears made to the development of evolution
hal 90210: Boston Dynamics is teaching its robotic dog to fight back, via Slashdot
one of these things is not like the others: Trump reportedly wears dress shirts with customised cuffs—as a reminder to himself and others, he is the forty-fifth president
tierrechte: Switzerland outlaws boiling living lobsters
we’ll leave the light on for you: a nice, retrospective profile of US National Public Radio essayist and humourist Tom Bodett
service feline: Puffy the cat with hypnotic powers
cultural icon: David Attenborough dance sensation, via Marginal Revolution
Centralia, Pennsylvania has been a subject of fascination for us for a while, depopulated to all but six of its residence due to a coal seam fire that has been smouldering underground since 1962 and there’s little indication that the conflagration will burn itself out soon.
Until receiving this update on one local institution that’s still thriving and creating community despite the want of one, however via Things Magazine, we would have assumed that there was nothing holding the town’s diaspora together. Even after the relocation of members of the congregation to other parts of the state, people kept returning to the Assumption of the Blessed Virgin Mary Ukrainian Greek Catholic Church for mass and other celebrations, despite the governor claiming imminent domain and the prerogative to evict remaining people. A visit by the major archbishop of the eparchy in 2015 even got the church and ghost town designated as a place of pilgrimage, with officially sanctioned tours scheduled.
february: North Korea invites international censure for testing a ballistic missile over the Sea of Japan and for the very public assassination of the country’s leader’s half-brother. Astronomers discover a solar system comprised of seven Earth-sized exoplanets in our Goldilocks zone.
march: Millions face the prospect of starvation in northern Africa. Elon Musk successfully recovers and reuses the booster stage of an orbital class rocket. The United Kingdom invokes Article Fifty of the European Union Treaty, triggering its exit from the bloc.april: US retaliatory action in Syria significantly damages the country’s relationship with Russia, then America drops the largest conventional bomb in Afghanistan. Coral bleaching threatens the world’s reefs. A passenger was violently removed from a commercial airliner prior to take-off, setting off a trend of customer abuse. We had to bid farewell to comedian Don Rickles and actor Jonathan Demme.
may: A terrorist bombing at a concert in Manchester tragically killed twenty-two people and injured hundreds. A ransomware virus holds computer systems around the world hostage. French presidential elections put a stay on the spread of conservatism. Sadly, actor Roger Moore, musician Greg Allman and statesman Zbigniew Brzezinski passed away.
july: North Korea continues to test more and more sophisticated, longer-range missiles. The Syrian city of Mosul is taken back from ISIL. Huge ice bergs break away from the Antarctic ice shelf. Researchers believe early human migrated out of Africa seventy thousand years sooner than previously thought. We bid farewell to actors Sam Shepard and Jeanne Moreau.
august: The detection of gravitational waves is becoming a common occurrence. North America experienced a total solar eclipse. Hurricane Harvey struck the Gulf Coast. The Burmese military carry out ethnic cleansing against the Rohingya people. The Eagles’ Glen Campbell passed away as did Dick Gregory and Jerry Lewis.
september: Russia expels hundreds of American diplomats over new sanctions. Hurricane Irma devastates the Caribbean and Puerto Rico, followed closely by Hurricane Maria. An earthquake strikes Mexico City. Actor Harry Dean Stanton, Monty Hall and playboy Hugh Hefner pass away.
october: A gunman opens fire on an audience gathered for a concert in Las Vegas, Nevada from high atop a casino resort hotel and killed fifty-eight and injured hundreds, surpassing last year’s deadliest shooting at an Orlando, Florida nightclub, failing again to make Americans more willing to discuss gun-control. The US withdraws in protest from UNESCO, with Israel following immediately after. Austria elects a far-right coalition. Our Solar System gets an interstellar visitor. German researchers discover that there has been a seventy-five percent drop in insect biomass over the past twenty-five years. Catalonia declares independence from Spain. Tom Petty dies.
november: A German newspaper publishes a tranche of documents leaked by an offshore law firm as an encore to the Panama Papers. A work attributed to Da Vinci fetches the highest price ever paid at an auction for a piece of fine art. Many brave women come forward and confront their sexual harassers. Parliament will be given a final vote on the divorce deal before the UK leaves the EU. Actors David Cassidy and Jim Nabors pass away.
december: More wildfires ravage California. The Trump regime provocatively recognises Jerusalem as the capital of Israel and moves to eviscerate net neutrality and other consumer protections. Russia is barred from the Olympics due to its sanctioned, systemic doping practises. Narrowly, Alabama elects a senator from Democratic party rather than a sexual predator, though there is still one in the White House. Entertainer Rose Marie and French rockstar Johnny Halliday pass away.
