expanded universe

Via Boing Boing, we rediscover the lost intervening episodes of the Star Wars saga as captured in the imagination of luminary Alan Moore, acclaimed as the best in his genre and creator of other classic, brilliant franchises such as V for Vendetta, the Watchmen and contributing writing to other more mainstream storylines as well. This treasury of short vignettes features five abstracts of the stories with weirdly psychedelic panels.

trump card

Thanks to a superb essay from Dangerous Minds, suffragans now have keen insight in the platform and the policies of America’s favourite rogue presidential contender, who can apparently combat terrorism solely by dint of his uncanny instincts of just feeling there’s bound to be an attack.
Just as the Führer’s stellar rise as the soi-disant “messenger from nothingness” was guided by a higher power—confirmed, I think, as one of the candidate’s personal heroes by his response of “you tell me” to interlocutors whether his plan to force Muslims to register themselves into a national database wasn’t something akin to the Nazis’ treatment of the Jewish population, attributed his coif and political successes to mysterious, Americans may be courting another equally occult and charismatic disaster. Apropos, Karl Marx once declared: “History repeats itself, first as tragedy—second as farce.”

5x5

antique singer sewing machines: cosplay caliphate labs are desperate to obtain red mercury

genre: enterprise in Grenoble to furnish free short works of fiction so people waiting don’t feel compelled to stare at their phones

membership has its privileges: no longer a melting-pot for the ordinary and fabulous to endure together, Los Angeles is constructing an exclusive celebrity terminal

space oddity: theatrical preview of David Bowie’s upcoming Blackstar album

b.f. skinner: pigeons can be trained to spot anomalies on diagnostic screenings as good as human radiologists

barefoot in the sand or casimir effect

For this centenary year of the publication of the General Theory of Relativity, Dangerous Minds has nice remembrance of the visit, decades later, by the preeminent scientist, Albert Einstein, and how he came to acquire those sandals in the iconic, candid photographs.
Be sure to visit the link for the full account, but his hosts believed Einstein was inquiring after a pair of “sundials”—which has suggests some impenetrable, secret insight into time-dilation to me. It’s interesting that Einstein, after cementing his ideas, rejected (initially at least for some of the projected outcomes but was never a convert for others) the chief cosmological consequences of his model: Einstein rejected the notion of the Big Bang (der Urknall) and the expanding Universe, the figment of Black Holes (Schwarze Löcher) and Wormholes (Wurmlöcher—also known as an Einstein-Rosen Bridge) whose dynamics suggest the possibility of time-travel. We are reasonably sure that the former two phenomena exist—and have good reason to suspect, given the sceptic’s track-record, that the latter might be possible as well. Photographs themselves are like little fossilised increments of spacetime, allowing one to reach into the past. Given that cinema was emerging around the same time, I wonder if Einstein and other theatre audiences knew intuitively to apply their sense of flashback and foreshadowing to cutting to different scenes on the movie screen.