christmas is just around the corner

Spotted by Miss Cellania, one town’s art centre (which shall remain anonymous) has been decorated with Christmas festoonery that references Banksy’s famously self-destructing masterstroke (previously here and here) whose performance art and meta-commentary is becoming a meme of its own.  I suppose it follows that a tree would shred into garland after all, sort of like the palm fronds from Palm Sunday burnt for the ashes of Ash Wednesday.

selbuvotter

Often interpreted as a snowflake instead of a flower and universally as shorthand for all things wholesomely wintry and Scandinavian, the knit pattern selburose is an ancient symbol and predates its 1857 appearance on a pair of mittens (vott) that had the whole congregation of the town of Selbu quite smitten with the design.

The popularity of the pattern (selbumønster, which also sparked a whole cottage industry and helped women become more economically independent) coincided with the Norwegian independence movement from Sweden and became somewhat of a bold fashion statement as something distinctly Norsk despite the mixed pedigree. Read more on the origins and spread of this icon at The Atlantic and find similar stories about the familiar and everyday syndicated at Object Lessons.

manderley

Thanks to a tip from the Map Room, we can now explore Postman Pat’s delivery route and visualise where Dibley and Holby City is in relation to Hollyoaks and Little Whinging—though I suspect none of the listed venues take place in the same fictional universe—with this map of locations of the British isles from books, film and television. How many places do you recognise? A surprising number of places have fairly exacting space-time coordinates but there are a few nebulous and untethered ones as well. Click through for larger versions to pour over. We’re wondering which sagas and series do share reality and wonder what sort of cross-overs there are. I bet some aficionado has created that Venn diagram as well.

the new colossus

In a rather disturbing policy pivot that codifies and brings to the fore the uglier sentiments harboured along with calls for “merit-based” immigration and which does indeed have the undertones of the “social credit” scheme under development but not yet implemented in China, the US Department of Homeland Security—which oversees migration and border controls—is proposing to make eligibility for citizenship contingent on credit-worthiness.
Never mind the perpetuation of the myth that immigrants overburden state welfare systems or what the potential rules change signals to aspiring asylum-seekers about American hospitality and magnanimity, the metrics that credit rating agencies provide are notoriously fraught with problems and heavily skewed and biased—for both individuals and on national levels and would set up serious impositions to people already struggling to establish a new life (much less a history of good credit) for themselves. It seems rather inhumane to assess and pass judgment based on flawed data but it is also emblematic of broader trends that reduce our sphere of determination to a set of demographics.

we call it maize

Festively we learn thanks to Dave Log v 3.0 that the Trump administration is observing Thanksgiving not only through a brisk round of golf and definitely not in the spirit of gratitude or charity but is in fact actively tearing down one inconvenient pillar of the holiday in unrecognising the aboriginal tribe, the Wampanoag of Massachusetts without whom the pilgrims would have hardly survived the harsh winter in the new land. No tribe has been denied their sovereignty or territory side aside since the Truman presidency but Trump is not acting just out of malice in this case—characterising the group as not Indian enough, but rather, and unabashedly so, out of business interests. At least as far back as 1993, the real estate mogul whose business acumen isn’t sufficient to keep solvent a gambling operation has been using legal means and name-calling to try to get the Department of the Interior, which oversees the office of India Affairs to deascension the tribal lands in that particular area of the state in order to not undercut and compete with his own designs at casino and resort development.