wattway

Over Christmas week a Norman village of about thirty-five hundred residents unveiled a one kilometre-long stretch of road that is cobbled with solar-voltaic panels.
Though the region is not famously sunny, the power generated is projected to kept the village’s street lamps burning with a surplus for other utilities. And despite the first of its kind experimental thoroughfare (Wattway it is called and is the innovation of a veteran firm specialising in asphalt) costing five million euro to pave, a trial of the next two years that will look at durability and energy returns may mean this small village in the Orne will be truly trail-blazing in the near future. Perhaps electric vehicles can be made self-charging.

pause for station identification

Please enjoy our tireless troupe with their interpretative Yule Log dance as you while away the holiday hours, or if care for more sedate spectacle, please check out this extensive bulletin-board of various artists’ take on the tradition—whose proceeds help young people like us off the streets by teaching them how to code. Thanks for visiting, as always, and happy holidays and may all your wishes for this season come true!

summary judgment or a betrayal of crust

If you haven’t already discovered the sheer hilarity of being an privileged witness or court observer to the Honourable Judge John Hodgman’s docket, I strongly encourage you to experience justice being dispensed first hand. In the tradition of television jurisdictions, plaintiffs—generally couples or neighbours, bring their cases, played out in extended podcast form, and pledge to abide by the court’s ruling.
All the episodes I’ve so far been catching up on are very entertaining with the right balance of lunacy and obscure cultural grounding, but I thought one case in particular would be a good introduction for those just getting acquainted with internet justice: a complex web of deceit is woven when a married couple want to give a gift subscription to a pie-of-the-month club but decide to do the baking themselves. After continuing this ruse for over half a year, one wants to come clean and confess but the other promises to take the secret to his grave.

découpé or humument

We are being treated to the five decade long planned demolition and brilliant reimagining of a rather unremarkable Victorian-era book by a historian and novelist called William Hurrell Mallock entitled A Human Document by London artist Tom Phillips. It is amazing to think about all the books that were in circulation during that time and how though we acknowledge that period (and others) as prolific, really there are very few titles out of the whole Phillips’ first iteration of the 1892 story came out in 1970—abbreviated as Humument, subjected to a sort of cut-up technique then being synthesised as an operatic performance of surrealism and then a critically acclaimed digital app in 2010. The work’s final form is ready for publication in early 2017 and each page is a poetic collage of few words that tell a profound story in fragments.