dovecote or invasive-species

I wonder if we could enlist pigeons or some other urbanized wildlife to act as a take-down, shock troop to dispatch with swarms of drones, without harming the pigeons or turning them into roving access points, of course—or rather than dog-fighting it out, perhaps equipped with signal jamming devices. I bet house-mice—and the whole domiciled food-chain, would not appreciate others scrounging around in their crawl-space one bit, and I wonder if some evil genius would even need to train them—or would the pigeons and other vermin, seeing their air-space and territory invaded, do this spontaneously on their own accord.

intellectual heirs or non-aggression axiom

At the risk of courting controversy and inviting trollish commentary (I think that those risks are acceptable), I’d like very much like to recommend Dangerous Minds’ toppling treatment of Ayn Rand. The essay, including three “trash-compactor” digests of the film adaptation (conveniently plucked out of forty plus years of “development Hell”) of Atlas Shrugged meant to placate the new generation of Tea-Partiers really resonated with me because I too, as a teenager, was an avid fan of this sort of pseudo-intellectual fervor and it took quite some doing to disabuse me of this allure and get out of that phase.

I am really mortified to own up to that much, but even today I still carry around an onerous reminder of that period in the form of a passkey that’s an obscure reference to Anthem (a plagiarized novella, oh nos, about the assault against science—ostensibly, but really a critique of collectivism and supporting the luddites in the end anyway) that I am made to plug into my (work) computer every time I turn around—lest I forget. I guess that this was a fairly common rite of passage, growing pain, though not defensible like a bad sense of style that takes some time to mature. Screenwriter and comedian John Rogers observed once, “There are two novels that can change a bookish fourteen-year old's life: The Lord of the Rings and Atlas Shrugged. One is a childish fantasy that often engenders a lifelong obsession with its unbelievable heroes, leading to an emotionally stunted, socially crippled adulthood, unable to deal with the real world. The other, of course, involves orcs.” On balance, we all tend to gravitate towards creative, selfless fantasies, I think, but when the impressionable aren’t given to being particularly well-read or well-informed and have a limited library, this sort of sophistry becomes a masterpiece. The idea that prompted Rand to writing Atlas Shrugged, a great lump of a tome, was toying with the idea of declaring herself on strike from her publishers for their difficult demands—I wish she had, rather than creating a dystopian world where all the supposedly talented and ingenious and indispensable people picketed in order to make her ideas and agenda seem legitimate.

five-by-five

paper-doll: McCalls Pattern Behavior adds dialogue to the models posing for sewing block patterns

i’ve been everywhere: map pins songs mentioned in popular music

siesta: researchers found that coffee-naps are more effective than either respite, stimulus alone

you see with your hands: being endangered and against the law to touch, selfies with the very gregarious quokkas of western Australia take off

on the wagon: a look at England’s last remaining temperance bar, herbal tonic emporium

chindōgu or as seen on tv

Via the ever brilliant Nag on the Lake comes this Mental Floss treatment on the Japanese concept of chindōgu (珍道具) that probably best translates to having the quality of being unuseless—since these gadgets cannot be totally dismissed as having no merit but it’s even harder to come to their defence as anything useful or that people might actually buy, other than as a gag.

In fact, chindōgu aspires to a rarefied art form with specific criteria that should be adhered to—including not being taboo, conventional or patentable. A solar-powered flashlight, Whisper 2000, a muff to keep one’s hands warm while texting, moustache cups or duster-onesies for babies to allow them to sweep up the floor while playing might be good candidates. Other Japanese terminology for the misfits is an impressive list as well.  Finding art in the chaotic and impracticable makes me think of Rube Goldberg’s fantastically ornate machines to perform simple tasks.

cowboys and indians: siege perilous or high turn-over rate

The siege of Damascus, ill-chosen to begin with, by the Crusaders was not a plummeting defeat but rather a weary retreat that marked the end of the second adventure. It had simply fizzled out and for a second time, disappointment visited Byzantium and the now dissolved County of Edessa and all parties concluded that it was not pragmatic to rely on a saving cavalry-charge from Europe to extricate the Crusaders in the Holy Land from their diminishing lot.

Rather than focusing on strengthening the position of the remaining lands or forging a mutual alliance, the Crusaders provoked more strife, internal and external. The nearly four decade long lull in active campaigning was not a time of peace and civility but rather beset by transitions and political intrigues—which certainly could have had different outcomes, studied or no, among all the regional powers. The Byzantine Empire, already having found the armies of Latin Christendom to be ineffectual if not a liability, regularly breaking truce negotiate between the Empire and powers that antagonized the Seljuk Turks, raiding Greek villages and appropriating for their own Crusader States the few lands that had been taken back from the Islamic forces, plus threatening the balance of trade between the Middle East and Europe, which the Byzantines had controlled for centuries.

The Empire’s subjects were already fatigued with John II Comnenos westward-lending sympathies, they found much of the same tendencies in his son, Manuel—which they endured for decades more. Emperor Manuel’s rather sudden death saw his infant son, Alexios II, elevated to the purple, with his widow, Impress Mary, a European princess, ruling in his stead. When the Roman Catholic Mary suggested that Constantinople be rejoined with the metropolitan West, a shadow of its former glory and authority in the Holy and Roman Empire of the Germans (an idea that Manuel had already tried to champion and failed to bring about), they had had enough and sought to depose these pretenders. The people entreated a veteran hero and cousin of the deceased emperor Andronicus Comnenos out of retirement, who took the capital and began a purge not seen since the last days of the Roman Empire.
 Comnenos began well but that old spectre of great power’s price of great paranoia emerged, and sensing vulnerability the Italo-Normans of Sicily marched towards Byzantium. The Byzantine Empire certainly had the resources to raise a formidable, even invincible army at a moment’s notice, but fearing vesting too much power in one general who might incite a military coup against the popular emperor, Comnenos split his fighting-force into five armies, powerless divided against the Sicilians, and the empire’s second city, the great port of Thessaloníki was captured and picked clean. Though the Italo-Norman march on Constantinople was eventually rebuffed, Byzantium never recovered from the loss of Thessaloníki and began its long decline and capitulation to the Turks. Political purges were standard operating procedure for Fatimid Egypt, a bastion for the Shia confession independent of the Sunni caliphate based in Baghdad, once a vizier fell out of favour with the hereditary caliph, and often Egypt found itself wanting for a government with administrative experience to hold it all together. With the unexpected but welcome military exploits against the Crusaders, however, of a brilliant strategist of Sunni Kurdish extraction, known to history as Saladin (introduced to battle rather relunctantly by his uncle Shirkuh, who had nearly taken Antioch) that saw this foreigner elevated to vizier and the death of a frail, teenaged caliph, against all odds Saladin was able to remain in office and eventually stitch together a kingdom as sultan that stretched from Syria to Palestine.

A determined campaign to retake Crusader lands followed and saw many of the occupiers graciously allowed to return with their lives and whatever treasure they could carry with safe passage either back to Europe or as refugees to the few remaining strongholds in the County of Trans-Jordan, Tripoli or in the Kingdom of Jerusalem. The vestiges of the Crusader conquests were also suffering from that plague of child rulers with the untimely death of King Amalric of Jerusalem, who departed without an adequate succession-plan. Amalric had an heir, but his mother and sister were to act as regent until he came of age—burdened with ambitions and intrigues of their own that made cooperation and coordination impossible and there were also plenty of examples of sabotage among factions. The nobility did not have very Christian tolerance for the young king, who was struck down with leprosy, and were blunderous in their choices, which saw the inevitable but orderly and humane fall of Jerusalem. This loss prompted the European powers to in earnest launch the Third Crusade.