turkey in the straw, turkey in the hay

Reeling collectively still with the news of the untimely but recent natural death of Courage—the first turkey that was graciously pardoned by President Barack Obama in a strange ceremony that annually reasserts the dominance of humans over overfed domesticated fowl, we learn, via a historical newspaper clipping spotted by Weird Universe that the tradition of clemency (and I’d like to see a turkey that could commit capital crimes) is a fairly recent one.
Until the administration Ronald Reagan, turkeys presented to the White House were in general not allowed to retire to greener pastures and were dealt their death knell at the hand of the president. I had believed it was at least as storied and established as some of the other strange folk-practises that the US has cultivated—seemingly for lack of the mythos of other, older nations, like having a groundhog forecast the weather or Columbus Day. On the occasion of Eisenhower’s gala feast, as the article states, an animal psychologist urged him to subject the sacrificial birds to hypnotism in order that they be killed more humanely and so they’d taste better, having not been seized with a rush of adrenaline before going in the oven. With the long life of Tater and Tot secured just yesterday, Obama has set free his last turkey and I wonder if going forward, whoever goes afoul of the court won’t be able to count on its mercy.

hoppípolla

The legendary Icelandic band Sigur Rós will be remixing one of their most popular songs (which in its original version accompanied the 2006 launch of the first Planet Earth series hosted by Sir David Attenborough) for the next iteration.
Very particular about commercial ventures, the band was however all too pleased to rework one of its signature tunes for the sake of environmental awareness and showcasing some of the spectacular creatures that our presence is imperilling. See teasers for the latest instalment and listen to the song at the Grapevine above and if you’ve not yet seen it, check out this amazing, nail-biting iguana vs snakes chase-scene from the pilot episode of Planet Earth II here.

old glory or oconus

Via Hyperallergic, we’re treated to a gallery of submissions for the radical redesign of the US flag in 1958 in order to accommodate and highlight the incorporation of Hawaii and Alaska as the forty-ninth and fiftieth states as by President Dwight Eisenhower, perhaps as a symbolic end to America’s imperial aspirations—having gone from sea to shining sea and then some.

More than three-thousand entries, some variations on the same theme and others highly abstract, hopeful, patriotic and provocative, came in at the time and though the bulk has gone unseen since examined, considered and dismissed by the jurors, all the designs have been conserved in the archives of the Eisenhower Presidential Library in Abilene, Kansas. A new coffee-table book has collected some of the best of them for your consideration.  Check out the link up top for more information and alternate flags.

source code

In deference to aspiring human writers and accomplished robotic ones and since if you’ve procrastinated until now, there isn’t enough time left in National Novel Writing Month to crank out your œuvre, take a look at this parallel call for submissions that calls for awareness on the subject and nature of sentience and autonomy with National Novel Generation Month.
While apparently not self-aware and just following the protocols of their programmers, the output of this observance is at once both sublime and surreal works of literature—the generative code that participants write as throughput is really something apart, a hybrid that we maybe don’t have it yet in our philosophical quivers to address. Check out the link above to learn more about the project and a curation of a few select entries that demonstrate the profundity and creativity that we’ve managed to tease from ourselves and instantly, inexhaustibly commission a story into existence.

dongle or airdrop

I knew that the close-proximity wireless data transfer was the namesake of Viking ruler Harald Bluetooth and even bore his runic initials in the medium’s symbol, but I ought not have just been pleased and satisfied with that bit of trivia and not wondered why.
The person of Bluetooth, to whom that moniker was given for his fondness of blueberries, was interestingly the second king of a uniting Denmark and Norway and father of the first canonical Danish king of England, Sven Forkbeard. An engineer at the Swedish telecommunications company Ericsson who was working in 1997 on a way to synchronise devices, mobile phones with computers at the time, at close range was reading a history of Scandinavia at the time and choose “Bluetooth” as the working title for their project—in collaboration with Finnish Nokia. Once the technology had been worked out and they were ready to unveil this new feature, on the advice of marketers they nearly named the ad-hoc networking feature Flirt—close but not touching, but harking back to the original implication behind the name—for the king who brought together diverse tribes into a single united kingdom (and made them all into Christians as well), they wisely and artfully decided to stick with Bluetooth in the end.