in which Kurt Vonnegut, JR appears as a benignly unreliable narrator, the namesake of reformer and labour rights champion Eugene Debs, to blithely contemplate the End Times in the early twenty-first century—having written the book in the final decade of the twentieth, knowing that God is not big into numerology. The phrase hocus pocus, according to some sources, is a parody of the priest’s seeming magic trick of transubstantiation during mass. Hoc est corpus meum. The first English language work to address sleight of hand and prestidigitation, incidentally, was an anonymous publication in the early seventeenth century titled Hocus Pocus Junior—which might have been the stage-name of the author.
Thursday, 18 June 2015
currently reading: hocus pocus, or what’s the hurry, son?
5x5
rook to queen’s gherkin: the skyline of London in chess pieces
consider yourself part of the furniture: aspirational lamp aims to earns its keep, like a character in Pee-Wee’s Playhouse
border-control: colourful gallery of world’s passports
nictotine
During the Golden Age of Exploration, French ambassador to the kingdom of Portugal, Jean Nicot de Villemain, undertook a voyage to the Portuguese new world colony of Brazil in 1560, bringing back with him a specimen of a tobacco plant, which he presented to the French king. The plant was studied and classified in Paris and incorporated the ambassador’s name into the scientific nomenclature—hence the chemical compound called nicotine. Tobacco-use was promoted a defence against the plague and grew popular very quickly. This tobacco substance was moreover as widely used as a pesticide as it was smoked, up until the 1980s when alternatives deemed less harmful to humans could be produced cheaply.
Wednesday, 17 June 2015
feuilleton
Quartz presents a really fascinating and under-appreciated glimpse on the strange, strained affair that the Chinese government has with Western social-networking heralds and mavens.
catagories: ๐จ๐บ, ๐, ๐ฅธ, ๐ง , networking and blogging