dustbin, doxbin

Though generally only perceived as a vaguely threatening presence by pets, it turns out that for the past few years robotic vacuums, in their quest to optimise navigating the terrain of one’s home, have also been collecting that telemetry and reporting back to the mother-ship in order for those maps to be sold on to marketers to formulate better-focused furniture advertisements (or scare families into investing in security services) and model virtual smart-houses. Or simply to judge our taste in décor. These domestic double-agents that we welcome into our lives highlights one way that technologies are no longer ours to exploit and benefit from as tools, but rather the merchants of attention undermine our relationship with computers and machines by supplanting it with some Pavlovian bond of button-mashing and push-notifications. What do you think? Albeit arguably robot vacuums are a time-saving convenience but coordination and connectedness come with a cost and perhaps the autonomous appliance market is reaching its true economical zenith—again, not as an instrument or amusement but as pusher, staking out its beat, like that craze with augmented reality games which helped plot out previously uncharted demographics.

la guerre des étoiles

While much of the epic space opera’s influences and homages have been studied and extolled in great detail, including Joseph Campbell’s monomyth and the comic Flash Gordon, there’s been little  acknowledgement for a French series of comics from the early 1970s, as Messy Nessy Chic helps us to uncover, that informed the arch of the story almost scene for scene at points. Artist Jean-Claude Mézières’ creation Valerian and Laureline is now starting to be accredited for its plot and stylistic contributions—including ice, desert and marsh planets, a Millennium Falcon-type ship, a hero encased in a resin and another held hostage by an overweight mobster who is forced to wear a metal bikini—after the characters are getting their own cinematic adaptation with Valerian and the City of a Thousand Planets.  Though perhaps four decades overdue, Mézières’ role in establishing the saga is beginning to garner recognition.

hatch act or marching orders

It’s striking how the adjective elite only remains palatable to the general public when speaking of soldiers, and Dear Leader trounced on yet another established norm by encouraging his military to lobby for their own self-interest.
Not only is advocating that service members call their representatives and urge them to support the commander-in-chief’s agenda probably a violation of the Hatch Act (An Act to Prevent Pernicious Political Activities from 1939) that restricts federal employees from engaging in partisan activities, it also sets a very dangerous precedent that causes America to lurch further towards becoming a tin-pot dictatorship—a weaponised tool of incumbency and imparting a privilege to a class above those they have sworn to protect and defend. What do you think?  Dear Leader is a nihilistic moron and an opportunist who has no stake, personal interest or knowledge in his policy decisions and is only pandering to those who might satisfy his unquenchable ego.  Surely honourable men and women are deserving of respect and hopefully the profession of arms attracts individuals of like ilk and ought to held to high standards, but they are not asking to be accorded some superhuman praise reserved for the blindly loyal.  People, however, tend to rise to one’s estimations and expectations and eventually the armed forces might come to demand such esteem.

cuteness overload

From the language desk over at BBC Culture, we are introduced to a perfectly needful term that’s very transparent in the relation of sound and meaning that while in common-parlance to the Tagalog speaking Filipino population—it’s rarely heard outside of that community.
The untranslatable word for the joy elicited from being in the presence of overpowering cuteness is named gigil and is a great way to describe that compulsion experienced—sometimes in spite of one’s self—to share an adorable encounter. Gigil is the debut word of a new series that will highlight some of the lexical gaps of the English language with foreign borrowings that might help bridge them, so check back regularly at the link up top to expand ones vocabulary.