winterval or five gold rings

Probably the most famous example of a cumulative song—The Barley Mow (Oh the company, the brewer, the drayer, the slavey, the daughter, the landlady, the landlord, the barrel, the half-barrel, the gallon, the half-gallon, the quart pot, pint pot, half a pint, gill pot, half a gill, quarter gill, nipperkin, and a round bowl
—Here's good luck, good luck, good luck to the barley mow) and Green Grow the Rushes O being other examples—the Twelve Days of Christmas enumerates a progression of increasingly grander, more ostentatious (generally of the avian variety) gifts exchanged during the interval between Christmas Day and the Feast of Magi.
The standard tune is sourced to a 1909 arrangement by baritone and composer Frederic Austin, prolonging the verse of the fifth iteration that is often rendered golden nowadays. While there has been much speculation without a definitive answer as to the symbolic meaning of the gifts, it is worth noting that there are a round three hundred and sixty-four gifts given all told—one for every day of the year minus Christmas—and the presents may represent a device for memorising the important things that go on in each month over the course of a year (the original French verse was something about ‘‘five rabbits a-running” and probably not a coded mnemonic for a Christian catechism—in which case the rings would represent the Pentateuch, the first five books of the Old Testament, the expository ones.

sign of the times

Japan’s kanji character of the year was revealed a couple weeks ago in a ceremony with 災 writ large in hand painted calligraphy strokes by Priest Seihan Mori of the Kiyomizu Temple in Kyoto, which strikes us as a pretty amazing way of announcing the results.
Pronounced like “sigh,” the word (which appropriately kind of also looks like a stinking pile of poo) means disaster is not only reserved for the natural spate of earthquakes, flooding, heatwaves and tsunamis that visit the land perennially that have grown more frequent and costlier but also for the general geopolitical shambles that define this year.

lamphouse

Recognising that a truly great cinematic experience is one that surpasses the need for a captive audience and the rapt attention of passive consumption, Bryan Boyer—inspired by the quantum strangeness of things designed at scale and at speed—invented a Very Slow Movie Player (VSMP) whose screen is a dithering canvas that cycled through film not at a rate of twenty-four frames per second, the threshold for the illusion of motion though apparently its now at the low end of filmmaking, but rather at a rate of twenty-four frames per hour.
At one thirty-six hundredth of the normal playing speed, each passing frame (one every two and a half minutes) is not watched but rather considered, studied—revealing and deconstructing the elements that went and how those techniques translate to elicit the desired effect in the viewer. Learn more at Kottke and the source—with a tutorial on the methodologies that went into making the VSMP prototypes since we would certainly like one of these digital movie houses to inspect throughout the day—at the links above.

there will be no love except for the love of big brother

There will be no curiosity, no enjoyment of the process of life. All competing pleasures will be destroyed. But always—do no forget this, Winston—always there will be the intoxication of power, constantly increasing and constantly growing subtler. Always, at every moment, there will be the thrill of victory, the sensation of trampling on an enemy who is helpless. If you want a picture of the future, imagine a boot stamping on a human face—forever.