and they're all made out of ticky-tack and they all look just the same

Spiegel International reporters interview the former neighbour of the Fugitive at her home and from her perspective in suburban Maryland.

The former neighbour's point of view is limited it seems to staring off at two rectangles, her window facing the former Fugitive's home, where his mother still resides after her son went cosmopolitan, and the television screen, and the view that these two outlooks offer recently became blurred and recursive. I don't know if it's the fame or infamy or the disruption to routine that transformed this woman into quite a Gladys Kravits nosy neighbour type—whom I'm sure tried to warn her skeptical husband in the same fashion about the goings-on next door, or maybe she was always this way. Proximity always gives a face, voice and testimony to widely-held beliefs, but beyond any espionage or detective-work that the reclusive neighbour—to her mind, was engaged in, the article is a brilliant and absorbing look at the predominant and influential American psyche

zungenbrecher

The constructed compounds of the German language can form quite lengthy and specific epithets that sometimes come across as jargon—especially among the longest examples.

Such words can also tell a story, however, like in this animated lesson from Mental Floss and Languagehat that demonstrates how to build a grammatically valid, and for the nonce, word telling of Barbara, famous for her rhubarb pies, and her adventures with bearded barbarians at the local bar. It sort of reminds me of a tongue-twister (Zungenbrecher), like Sally-sells-sea-shells-by-the-sea-shore, which is a similar sort of creation.

three-d or camera obscura

The ever-inspired Mental Floss presents an engrossing lesson in art history, through the lens of the Portrait Project's timeline of depictions of the Western world, where there is a very noticeable shift towards realism and perspective around the year 1400 from simple two-dimensional portrayals of people and things to a jaggedly more accurate picture that acknowledges size and shadow.
While I was expecting some sort of explanation like the latter rediscovery of the forgotten lensing technique of camera obscura—a pinhole projection of an image onto a screen, tabula rasa fit for tracing that ushered in, speculatively, a revolution in painting, portrait-studio quality representation. The article goes on to account how in medieval Europe general misery with the human-condition led to a shunning of the classic artistic techniques of accuracy with their minds on the here-after, and surviving simplicity was a revolt and expressive way to remind viewers that worldly existence was something flat.
I wonder if it was the case, like in the relatively concurrent Muslim world there was a proscription against the rendering of natural things, which led to the elaboration of calligraphy and abstraction, that led to abandonment and subsequent reconditioning contemporary with the Western Renaissance.

travelling matte

More documents leaked to the press by the Fugitive reveal that US intelligence has the capability and apparently the prerogative to track the whereabouts of some five billion cellular telephones, the world's human population, per day. As the Washington Post reveals, with an array of special-programmes under names like CO-TRAVLER, the National Security Agency is able not only to intercept communications but also to plot the location of the devices and their users even when the phone is not actively sending or receiving—American reporting hinging on the fact that indiscriminate surveillance, almost apologetically those unfortunate and misguided Americans abroad, has culled some native mapping and associations—inadvertently.
Making self-reflection the biggest transgression always makes me angry about this sort of coverage, which comes at the expense of the rest of the population, as if their privacy was a trifling thing. With such a universe of star-crossed paths to reference, of course, analysts can retrace steps and build quite telling profiles (or misconstructions) through the gleaned habits and contacts of individuals. Of course, we've all too willingly outfitted ourselves and our lifestyles with these homing devices and pay a handsome ransom for the shackles of convenience, presence and awareness and such clever and useful tools were not doled out like identity papers or cattle-brands for these ends alone. It does seem odd, ironic that there is so much glee over the state-of-the-art when that's all the tidier to survey, with or without industry cooperation.