window dressing

Collectors' Weekly has a pretty keen feature on the long and faceted history of the mannequin and how they reflect our sense of style. The figures advanced from a tailor or dress-maker's form, going back to ancient times, to basic racks to display garments to a growing, mechanized middle-class, to their present form—converging with dress-up dolls that came before and becoming the afternoon-idols of window-shopping they are today.
The story of their development is spiced with some interesting vignettes, like the dressing-dummies found in the tombs of pharaohs, that in an earlier career, L. Frank Baum (The Wonderful Wizard of Oz) worked in the advertizing business and was a key advocate of using life-like mannequins to sell the “romance of Merchandise and Merchandizing,” the genre of horror films that came out as they became more sophisticated and idealized, and lighter cases of agalmatophilia that teased and vexed returning war veterans. The history is augmented by a few individual collectors who are curators of these objects of fashion and make-believe.

native address system or context-clues

I had heard the term native advertising and its appeal by integrating itself—maybe a reinvention of the guerrilla-technique of piggy-backing, but I don't suppose I could articulated what it was. Mashables presented this handy infographic—framed in more traditional banner advertisements, of course—which presents the analytics fairly well.

Selective, relevant and cryptic market- eers—but nothing novel or innovative particularly, I think, mine for indications that audiences are less prone to ignore and behaviour that affirms tolerable intrusions, studying habits that lead to something beyond a selection of bundled products similar to the last on-line search or shopping-safari that one trekked but rather towards an understanding of baiting trust with something (at least glancingly) ingratiating. What do you think? I always feel scammed, and because of it twice shy, when I see something proclaiming that I might also like, only to find out its some sponsored promotion. I can understand ones spending habits being with the bailiwick of demographers but not the lag-time itself between curiosity, usually by a masquerade or appealing to vanities and phobias, and distrust and aversion, which seems pretty desperate and clawing and quite a lot of effort, no matter how infinitely small that labour can be divided and re-used, for something that remains pretty transparent and likely to be disregarded.

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.