oversight or sense and sensibilia

Advocate of plain speaking, believing that heuristically people ought to be able to explore perception and reality and arrive at insights and truths through logic and simple language alone, Oxford professor John Langshaw Austin (no relation to author Jane, though much of his linguistic speculations were posthumously packaged under the above title) in the 1930s greatly expanded the nuanced understanding of the way meaning is imparted, demonstrating that sentences can be more than just interrogative, declarative or directive and in fact usually are none of these things and instead fall somewhere on the spectrum of doing things, a social task or a phememe.
After his wartime service in his majesty’s secret service (a tenure that a whole cadre of Oxbridge instructors took up) for which Austin was credited for as being instrumental in the success of the D-Day Invasion, Operation Overlord—however, perhaps influenced by his intelligence work, his research became even more engrossing in its accessibility. Packing his philosophical quiver, Austin dissected the language of excuse and pardon that people toss about with apparent abandon to find the pregnant meaning in all the ways to say that one is sorry and distance one’s self from moral decrepitude and omission. Not only is there an endless buffet of expressions to choose from to exculpate oneself—oversight, accident, mistake, mishap, misunderstanding, misstep, confusion, etc.—they all have subtle ethical connotations, on second look, that warrant further investigation. Though not naturally duplicitous, people are probably most honest about their feelings when they’re begging-off.

5x5

we’re walking in the air: a fine retrospective on David Bowie’s magical Christmas classic

random-access memory: a lesson in boosting one’s rote and recall from a eidetic, Major System grand champion

resolutions: adorable and mesmerizing animated work-out GIF

monkeyshines: an update on that dapper primate that ran amok in an IKEA three years back

darth trump: seamless mash-up of megalomania

automatonophobia

The brilliant Kottke, maker of fine hypertext products, introduces us to a new type of uncanny valley in the form of composite three-dimensional masking.
While trying to capture the essence, the thing in itself, of personalities or politicians, one found that a sort of ventriloquist’s dummy is created and despite transferring personæ to different individuals, the original speaker still reverberates through gestures and facial expressions that come across as familiar and recognisable but look awkward and alien on the face of another. The eeriness and conflicted vocal cues is probably best illustrated in the video demonstration of the technique with talking-heads and statesmen found at the link above. The fear of anything that impersonates a living being is called automatonophobia (as in an automaton), which can include wax-figures and mannequins too.

leader board or it’s the plumber, i’ve come to fix your sink

Although pandering and sycophancy takes place during every political campaign (remember Joe the Plumber) and democracy and civics is not so broken and beaten down that such demagoguery will carry the day, I do really fear for what choices America might commit itself to. Albeit one is generous to call the political views of this serial-candidate—having threatened to contend in every presidential election since 1988—a platform, there are some serious concession to people’s basest insecurities that’s sure to resonate, despite how fraught with disastrous and back-handed consequence those plans are.