who goes nazi? (11. 705)

Prominent American journalist and broadcaster Dorothy Thompson was the first US reporter to be expelled from Germany in 1934, the order delivered by the Gestapo to her lodgings at the Hotel Adlon in Berlin with Thompson given twenty-four hours to leave the country, for her articles and observations critical of the party and its leader, as a Little Man and the embodiment of mediocrity. Continuing her work, Thompson rallied against the regime over the next two decades, trying to warn the world about its mindset and strongly advocated for first Jewish refugees, but recognising the right-wing infiltration of the Zionist movement, then displaced Palestinians, one of her more memorable and influential essays was published in 1941 by Harper’s Magazine, framed as a guessing-game with the objective of trying to spot the fascist at a social gathering, whom despite maintaining they have no truck with such dark ideologies would nonetheless support a mainstream, normalised movement under a different name—or under the same, unabashedly.

…The saturnine man over there talking with a lovely French emigree is already a Nazi.  Mr. C is a brilliant and embittered intellectual.  He was a poor white-trash Southern boy, a scholarship student at two universities where he took all the scholastic honours but was never invited to join a fraternity.  His brilliant gifts won for him successively government positions, partnership in a prominent law firm, and eventually a highly paid job as a Wall Street adviser.  He has always moved among important people and always been socially on the periphery.  His colleagues have admired his brains and exploited them, but they have seldom invited him—or his wife—to dinner. He is a snob, loathing his own snobbery.  He despises the men about him—he despises, for instance, Mr. B—because he knows that what he has had to achieve by relentless work men like B have won by knowing the right people. But his contempt is inextricably mingled with envy.  Even more than he hates the class into which he has insecurely risen, does he hate the people from whom he came. He hates his mother and his father for being his parents. He loathes everything that reminds him of his origins and his humiliations.  He is bitterly anti-Semitic because the social insecurity of the Jews reminds him of his own psychological insecurity. Pity he has utterly erased from his nature, and joy he has never known.  He has an ambition, bitter and burning. It is to rise to such an eminence that no one can ever again humiliate him.  Not to rule but to be the secret ruler, pulling the strings of puppets created by his brains.  Already some of them are talking his language—though they have never met him.

There he sits: he talks awkwardly rather than glibly; he is courteous.  He commands a distant and cold respect.  But he is a very dangerous man.  Were he primitive and brutal he would be a criminal—a murderer.  But he is subtle and cruel.  He would rise high in a Nazi regime. It would need men just like him—intellectual and ruthless.  But Mr. C is not a born Nazi. He is the product of a democracy hypocritically preaching social equality and practicing a carelessly brutal snobbery.  He is a sensitive, gifted man who has been humiliated into nihilism.  He would laugh to see heads roll…

…Mrs. E would go Nazi as sure as you are born.  That statement surprises you? Mrs. E seems so sweet, so clinging, so cowed.  She is.  She is a masochist.  She is married to a man who never ceases to humiliate her, to lord it over her, to treat her with less consideration than he does his dogs. He is a prominent scientist, and Mrs. E, who married him very young, has persuaded herself that he is a genius, and that there is something of superior womanliness in her utter lack of pride, in her doglike devotion. She speaks disapprovingly of other “masculine” or insufficiently devoted wives. Her husband, however, is bored to death with her.  He neglects her completely and she is looking for someone else before whom to pour her ecstatic self-abasement.  She will titillate with pleased excitement to the first popular hero who proclaims the basic subordination of women…

Married to Nobel award winning author Sinclair Lewis (It Can’t Happen Here), the 1942 film Woman of the Year, starring Katherine Hepburn (her first with Spencer Tracy and the later musical adaptation featuring Lauren Bacall), was loosely based on Thompson’s life and career.

fashion statement (11. 704)

Whilst strongly disagreeing with the conclusion that Trump’s party has mastered optics and branding, from the wholly unoriginal MAGA hat of Ronald Reagan to the latest donning on gauzy ear bandages—which caught my attention as truly laying bare the GOP identity as a cult, something reminiscent of the off-putting Ellen Jamesians from The World According to Garp who voluntarily cut out their tongues in solidarity—it is true that at least for now with the RNC over and Republicans confident and congratulatory that the Democrats did not deliver the sort of counter-programming that they wanted, with Joe Biden self-isolating with a mild case of COVID and more and more senior party figures publicly urging him to withdraw his candidacy from the ticket. Although I cannot say for certain that replacing Biden would help the Democrats’ chances, and down-ballot contests to retain the nearly evenly divided congress, I am glad that party leaders are forthcoming about their reservations, since public unanimity with private reservations was too much like Trump’s adults in the room. Moreover Democrats are pretty skilled when it comes to meme-making and wearing white during legislative sessions in protest for women's rights has been striking and classy, and aside from all that, the Democrats’ diversity and plurality speaks for itself.

synchronoptica

one year ago: the Siege of Chartes (with synchronoptica)

seven years ago: the World of Sid and Marty Krofft

nine years ago: The Golden Bough plus hysteria over overdue earthquakes

eleven years ago: augmented realities, the internet’s free trial period is over plus domestic spying in Germany

twelve years ago: departing for Norway 

i stand before you to proclaim tonight, america is a land where dreams can come true for all of us (11. 703)

Our faithful chronicler reminds us that on this day during the DNC in San Francisco, congress woman of New York, representing Queens the real-world setting of All in the Family, Geraldine Ferraro accepted the party’s nomination for vice president as the running mate of Walter Mondale for the 1984 Democratic ticket. Though many pundits saw this as politically risky, Ferraro reaffirmed her campaigning credentials and proved to be a quite formidable debater against Ronald Reagan’s policies, at times overshadowing Mondale and narrowing the incumbent’s considerable lead in the polls to a tie. The race however was beset scrutiny and criticism, which seemingly would have otherwise been more tempered for male candidates with pro-choice platforms, and criticised roundly in the media for announcing that her husband would not be releasing his income tax returns, as was customary but not a required disclosure, saying that doing so could disadvantage her spouse’s real estate business. Dismissing the issue by joking, “so you people married to Italian men—you know what it’s like,” turned out to be a miscalculation and was again attacked as promoting ethnic and gender stereotypes and some outlets suggested connections to the mob. Although eventually eventually both filings were given to the press and Ferraro endured a rather gruelling two-hour cross-examination line by line of the couples’ separate returns, the closed matter had consequences that lingered up until the election. Carrying the vice-presidential debate against George HW Bush—albeit who was judged the winner was split strongly among men and women polled, Second Lady Barbara Bush, referencing the financial disclosures and property portfolio that ran a bit counter to her narrative of as the child of immigrants and self-determination and angry about her husband being upstaged, publicly called Ferraro “that four-million-dollar—I can’t say it, but it rhymes with rich,” with the the vice-president’s press secretary reiterating, “She’s too bitchy—arrogant—humility isn’t one of her strong points, and I think that comes through. Though Mrs Bush issued a backhanded apology saying that she did not mean to imply Ferraro was a witch, none was given for the latter appraisal, saying the campaign was being hypersensitive for complaining about it. Mondale-Ferraro lost to Reagan-Bush in the popular vote by nineteen percent and only won the electoral endorsement of Minnesota and Washington, DC in November.

7x7 (11. 702)

drake’s equation: a reevaluation of the cosmic amenities we take for granted suggests that alien life might be exceedingly rare—via Damn Interesting’s Curated Links  

now the chips are down: the archive of the BBC’s Computer Literacy Project—see previously—via Web Curios

sunnyside up: a supercut of the best egg scenes in cinema 

duckmaster: a luxury hotel’s waterfowl tradition  

crickets: how the chirping of the insect came to be synonymous with “a conspicuous silence”—via Strange Company 

blue screen of death: transportation, media outlets and health care disrupted by largest IT outage yet, exposing the fragility of our digital infrastructure—essentially what the y2k patch worked against 

star-studded: the shortlist revealed for Royal Greenwich Museum’s astronomy photographer of the year

synchronoptica

one year ago: a banger from Genesis (with synchronoptica), the UK 1881 census plus assorted links worth revisiting

seven years ago: a zombie emoji, an engraved dinner knife, a gameified office, the woman’s signature on the US Declaration of Independence plus a stop-motion fairy-tale

nine years ago: Syncro-Vox animation

fourteen years ago: the landscape of Top Secret America plus an inspired preoccupation with rockets

evil malört (11. 701)

Already a somewhat notorious and reviled Swedish-style liqueur called bäsk, bitter and flavoured with wormwood and anise—Sweden being one of the few countries that never banned absinthe—a bartender is leaning into its noxious reputation with the Chicago distillery Jeppson (Bäska droppar is the most popular domestic label, drunk as a digestif), which imported the blend from the home country in the 1920s, first sold door-to-door as a medicine to bypass Prohibition restrictions. Pure described as tasting like “heartbreak and pencil-shavings” and previously offered as a boilermaker and during the emergence of the last brood, with an infusion of seventeen-year cicadas—no one asked for this—the latest concoction calls for a wash of truffle and sesame oil, chilli peppers, briny cuttlefish ink soaked in tobacco—specifically Newports. More about its reception—“grandma’s furniture from when she still smoked”—at the link above.

skynet (11. 700)

With the snowclone of a slogan “Make America First in AI” that appropriately spells out “mafia,” as I originally only suspected that Silicon Valley’s recent rally behind Trump was mostly an attempt to revitalise cryptocurrencies as a legitimate and safe store of wealth for tumultuous times, Trump’s draft executive order to eliminate burdensome regulations on development of artificial intelligence technology and military applications—described as a new “Manhattan Project” and scuttling ethical and safety-testing requirements for autonomous weapons—to ensure US dominance in the field is a worrying shift in policy. While the capabilities of AI as they currently stand are far from proven, the potential for a robot holocaust was not my first pick as existential threat that a second term would pose for the world, leaning towards either a cascading environmental collapse, a re-polarised geopolitical landscape or American irrelevance and dictatorship first and foremost. Furthermore, Trump’s vice-presidential pick as a former venture capitalist has the same mindset as the tech utopianists and accelerationists and is a vocal opponent of government interference, which if the technology realises its potential, would be wholly ungovernable.

synchronoptica

one year ago: Trump under to investigation (with synchronoptica)

nine years ago: typewriter...tip, tip, tip

eleven years ago: bad banks 

twelve years ago: baubles and market bubbles  

thirteen years ago: a mosquito-plagued campsite

amusing ourselves to death (11. 699)

Using the 1985 bestseller by educator Neil Postman, which draws on the dichotomy of the dystopian futures envisioned by George Orwell in 1984 and Aldous Huxley in Brave New World with the public stripped of rights by totalitarian governments in the narrative of the former and people voluntarily self-medicating and foregoing their liberties in an induced and voluntary state of blissful ignorance in the

latter, Boing Boing contributor Mark Frauenfelder presents an analysis of this dilution, delusion of news, culture and politics repackaged as commodities in our present forms of media, our soma. Presentation and format—“the medium is the metaphor,” see also—makes everything entertainment and a passive and non-critical one at that, written at a time when another celebrity held the office of US president, impressed on the general psyche not in words but in glancing television images and photo opportunities and carefully staged soundbites. Frauenfelder’s excerpts, like the below citation are addressing the fragmentation-effect of network news but accord perfectly with social media as well, TikTok substituted here:

“Now … this” is commonly used on radio and television newscasts to indicate that what one has just heard or seen has no relevance to what one is about to hear or see, or possibly to anything one is ever likely to hear or see. The phrase is a means of acknowledging the fact that the world as mapped by the speeded-up electronic media has no order or meaning and is not to be taken seriously. There is no murder so brutal, no earthquake so devastating, no political blunder so costly—for that matter, no ball score so tantalising or weather report so threatening—that it cannot be erased from our minds by a newscaster saying, “Now … this.” The newscaster means that you have thought long enough on the previous matter (approximately forty-five seconds), that you must not be morbidly preoccupied with it (let us say, for ninety seconds), and that you must now give your attention to another fragment of news or a commercial.

Much more at the links above.

the unchained goddess (11. 698)

Open Culture directs our attention towards the highlight of the Bell Systems Science Series, nine television specials originally broadcast between 1956 and 1964, with the first four written and produced by award-winning filmmaker Frank Capra (previously), recently having found himself “retired” from Hollywood due to being blacklisted as a communist sympathiser over his body of work (previously here and here)—despite being holding rather conservative political views himself, with the AT&T sponsored commissions being viewed in retrospect as a quiet means of rehabilitating his image and reputation, with the 1958 examination of weather. Though somewhat less well received by critics and audiences than Capra’s previous three instalments (perhaps the topic considered too pedestrian in comparison with the others on the circulatory system, the sun and cosmic rays), The Unchained Goddess is indelible and enduring with a prescient message about the effects of Anthropogenic climate change and the cascade of the warming atmosphere and sea-level rise. Much more at the links above.

* * * * *

synchronoptica

one year ago: photos of the Anthropocene (with synchronoptica) plus a continued blockade on Ukrainian grain shipments

seven years ago: swimsuit models, Voltaire’s science-fiction, the premiere of SpongeBob plus the Golden Submarine

nine years ago: assorted links to revisit plus Merkel’s immigration policies under scrutiny

twelve years ago: climate change and too much water plus a branded look for US Commanders in Chief

fourteen years ago: a trip to the Baltic coast

only the lonely (11. 697)

A part-talkie (with mixed audio-dialogue, sound-effects and score plus intertitles), Public Domain Review presents Paul Fejős’ 1928 Lonesome, exploring the subject through following the lives of two working-class New York City urbanites apart and together over the course of a single July day, the telephone operator and factory worker get a break from their drudgery, met and have a splendid time at a funfair but are separated by a sudden downpour and regret loosing each other only to later discover that they’ve been neighbours in the same apartment block all along. The featurette, considered a masterpiece, has the narrative of an O Henry story and many innovations in terms of cinematography including fast-motion, superimposition, split screens and a roller-coaster mounted camera.

⚶ (11. 696)

Observed between 1802 and 1807 before being identified as a minor planet by astronomer Heinrich Olbers, whom having already discovered and named what is now understood to be the asteroid Pallas gave the honours to mathematician Carl Friedrich Gauss, whose orbital calculations had enabled researchers to confirm the existence of the first such object in that region of the solar system, Ceres, presumed—incorrectly—to be fragments of a larger, destroyed planet, and called the discovery after the Roman goddess of hearth and home, Vesta. The Dawn mission, dispatched to explore the asteroid belt, entered into a year-long orbit around the brightest and second-largest asteroid on this day in 2011. Presently represented by the modern astrological variant of the original symbol conceived by Gauss, it was suggestive of the altar of the goddess and home-fire by extension, the first form is scheduled to return as a Unicode character, the pictorial representations repopularised following their retirement in the mid-1800s as impractical as the cosmic backyard became more crowded with eight major planets and over a dozen minor ones. During the interim until the 1950s, asteroids were given the naming convention of ordinal numbers, according to the sequence of their discovery, this one called ④ Vesta.

synchronoptica

one year ago: professional uniforms (with synchronoptica), an experimental overland train plus the Trinity nuclear test (1945)

seven years ago: a linguistic curiosity

eight years ago: a beach on the Île d’Orélon

nine years ago: classes of quarks plus a Mad, Mad, Mad Max mashup

eleven years ago: informant gadgets 

trump-vance (11. 695)

Author and jurist turned politician and once among the ex-president’s staunchest and vocal critics, a Never-Trumper, within the party since transformed into an apologist for some of Trump’s most authoritarian aspirations and cheerleader for his style of populism, Ohio senator JD Vance was picked as Trump’s running mate, announced during the first night of the Republican National Conference held in Milwaukee, less than forty-eight hours after the assassination attempt on the GOP presumptive candidate. Vance blamed the political violence on the rhetoric of Biden and “legacy” media who characterise Trump as a dangerous autocrat that threatens democracy. Vance’s platform is aligned lock-step with Trump’s, and arguably the world-vision of this political heir and protege might be a darker one.

9x9 (11. 694)

fungal magic: an update on the mushroom documentary narrated by Björk  

always lands on its feet: the myriad ways animals negotiate the laws of physics—see also  

meisje met de parel: decoding Vermeer’s true colours—see previously—via Miss Cellania 

i’m your heat pump: a seductive slow jam seems to educate the public on the thermal energy transmission system 

eno: the generative documentary on the self-described non-musician that changes with each viewing  

legal daisy spacing: a purported 1985 manual for terraforming a planet that presents a warped bureaucracy and sterile landscaping  

nolle prosequi: federal judge overseeing illegal retention of classified documents trial against Trump dismissed the indictment over the improper appointment of the prosecution’s special counsel—see previously here and here  

reimann hypothesis: new insights about the distribution of prime numbers—via Damn Interesting’s Curated Links  

kräuterbuch: Johannes Hartlieb’s fifteenth century treasury of herbs

 

synchronoptica

one year ago: assorted links worth revisiting (with synchronoptica), Netscape plus the Rosetta Stone

seven years ago: dark matter, more on the election integrity commission plus the bicentennial of Frankenstein

nine years ago: thalassocracies, plutographies plus more links to enjoy 

eleven years ago: a slightly NSFW Soviet adult literacy reader

twelve years ago: the German banking system plus the Oberammergau Passion Plays

8x8 (11. 693)

priscila, queen of the rideshare mafia: the tale of a gig-economy pyramid scheme  

fête nationale: a comprehensive list of what Americans and the French know about each other 

80s lifestyle icons: health and fitness guru Richard Simmons and sex therapist Dr Ruth Westheimer pass away  

stillsuits: researchers develop Fremen inspired garments for astronauts that improve comfort, hydration and hygiene  

my israel home: US real estate companies profiting off expanded, illegal settlements in the West Bank—see also 

paranormal phenomenon: Japanese terms for déjà vu, telepathy and incredulous serendipity 

🛒: the trend of grocery store tourism really resonates with us and a cultural experience we always are sure to have—via Nag on the Lake 

kein brot und keine ehre: Georg Christoph Lichtenberg’s correspondent’s categories of human endeavour

no responsive documents (11. 692)

Our friends at Muckrock (previously) have successfully through a FOIA petition to the US National Security Agency to locate a historic lecture delivered by computing pioneer Admiral Grace Hopper, authoring COBOL as a demonstration of a machine independent high-level programming language, at the intelligence agency’s Fort Meade headquarters. The NSA, however, is refusing to release the 1982 recording from its archives, preserved on an AMPEX video tape reel, because it has no equipment capable of making a copy. Although not an unsolvable problem, particularly for one of the most powerful and well-connected spy agencies in the world, and the Freedom of Information Action cannot require the records-holding entity to obtain hardware to access outdated file formats, it does speak to the problems of obsolete technology and our coming digital dark ages.

the great white way (11. 691)

Via the New Shelton wet/dry, we are directed towards an interesting biography of the individual, coining the above nickname for Broadway in 1901 due to its dazzling electric lights, responsible for the spectacle of Times Square, OJ Gude. Taking advantage of the accident of civil planning that had created a bowtie-shape with the intersections of 45th Street and Seventh Avenue that was an ideal amphitheatre for showcasing the energy and dynamism of commerce and advertising, Gude designed many of the flashing, animated billboards that fill the skyline. This theatre-in-the-round upstaging the playhouse-district put the show on the periphery for a captive audience of consumers, who couldn’t ignore the advertisers’ messages, was a bit of promotional genius, the tradition upheld for over a century, with Gude’s salesmanship directly behind many of the iconic and colossal displays. More at the links above.

shelly’s leg (11. 690)

For Bastille Day 1970, Seattle’s gastronomical scene arranged a dinner party and parade to showcase their establishments, and a freak accident involving an antique cannon loaded with confetti, which during the route had dipped from its skyward trajectory and fired into the crowd resulted in the establishment of the city’s first disco—we learn via the New Shelton wet/dry an all inclusive space—yielding a triumph, fabulous but short-lived and returning to tragedy, from this mishap.

Among the spectators was one Shelly Bauman, whom at close range sustained life-threatening injuries from the festive munitions and the eponymous (in the tradition of taverns of olde) leg had to be amputated. Confined to a wheelchair for the rest of her life, Bauman sued the municipality and event-planners for a settlement of several hundred thousand dollars and eventually used this as seed money to purchase a former hotel and turn it into a rather fabulous club scene and outreach centre, no expense spared and unapologetically gay, running from 1973 to 1977. Read more at the links above. 

synchronoptica

one year ago: the Talking Heads’ second album (with synchronoptica), molecule of the month, social summaries plus misquoting Marie Antoinette

seven years ago: Trump in Paris, personality quizzes plus the composite photographs of Fong Qi Wei

eight years ago: but let us return to our sheep at hand

nine years ago: wiping out the buffalo, assorted links to revisit plus the Greek economic crisis

eleven years ago: making banking scary again plus a visit to Bad Homburg

connoquenessing township (11. 689)

During a campaign rally held at a parade ground near Butler, Pennsylvania, a would-be assassin perched on a rooftop outside the heavily secured (the fifty thousand attendees were subject to a screening process for weapons and other prohibited items in a queue that lasted up to five hours prior to the event) venue shot at the dais and grazed candidate Trump’s right ear, killing one by-stander and critically injuring two others. Secret service agents killed the shooter. Trump, discharged from a nearby hospital, proceeded to his next rally in New Jersey and reiterated that the Republican National Convention will begin as scheduled next week, to formally nominate him for the GOP ballot.  Despite Trump’s openness and advocacy for extraordinary measures, the international community is condemning political violence.

doppeldecker-treffen (11. 688)

 Going to the next village from home, Hermannsfeld, we saw a little airshow in the fields that was a reunion of sorts for a certain model of biplanes from all over Germany, the sports-craft built from kits (every one unique) and named Kiebitze after the lapwing (peewit, Vanellus vanellus) as the wings are designed to fold up, like the birds, for easy transportation and can be towed by a car. We got to see quite a few take-offs and landings and some aerial acrobatics.

 

women on the waves (11.687)

The Dutch NGO founded in 1999 by Dr Rebecca Gomperts has the mission of bringing reproductive health services, education and outreach to women in countries with restrictive abortion laws, with services rendered on board a specially-made ship, which boards women at a pre-arranged port-of-call and sails out to international waters, where Dutch law is in effect. Unsafe abortions administered in countries whose laws provide no other alternative are a leading cause of maternal death and the organisation seeks to champion universal reproductive autonomy. Earlier ship’s doctor on the Rainbow Warrior II, Gommperts and crew of medical professionals have visited Ireland, Poland, Portugal, Spain, Guatemala and México—all countries that have since significantly expanded abortion access, and a spin-off programme, Women on the Web, helps women with self-managed medical abortions with the drug combination mifepristone and misoprostol.

beaumont slope (11. 686)

In anticipation of eventual ratification of the 1994 UN treaty, the Convention of the Law of the Sea (UNCLOS, see more), the United States quietly staked claim last month to its extended continental shelf in the Arctic so were it to become a signatory, it would be joining on its own terms with boundaries already delineated. The move did not go unnoticed as other member nations have also tried to assert, under the treaty, their own territorial reaches in the far north and the American declaration of what’s theirs by dint of geological affiliation, an area of the seabed the size of California which overlaps with the exclusive economic zones of Canada, Norway, Denmark and Russia, rather than political flag-planting and is seen as contentious and a sign of continued American exceptionalism, manifest destiny flouting customary and international law. More from Radio Free Europe at the link above.

synchronoptica

one year ago: the search for past life on Mars (with synchronoptica) plus the Hollywood sign (1923)

seven years ago: assorted links worth revisiting plus a million dollar heist

eight years ago: camping in Metz 

nine years ago: missing the Dalai Lama plus the Bechdel Test

eleven years ago: a furlough for US federal workers, psychiatry and sainthood plus a choreographed panopticon

blowed ‘em up reeeeeal goooood (11. 685)

As our faith chronicler reminds, one this night in 1979, the US baseball team the Chicago White Sox playing in their home stadium of Comiskey Park against the Detroit Tigers, held as a promotional event to attract flagging fans during a poor season Disco Demolition Night—previously. In exchange for bringing a record that they wanted to see destroyed, the audience was extended a discounted admission of ninety-eight cents—a reference to the frequency of some popular local radio stations seen as betraying their rock credentials and base by playing the now mainstreamed genre, the host team engaging local shock-jock and fervent anti-disco advocate Steve Dahl to capitalise on the polarising matter of taste in music, with disco’s normalisation to the point of saturation seen by some as degenerate and rooted in gay culture—for frigid women and effeminate men and minorities, whose activism had already stoked riots. With more individuals coming to see the spectacle rather than the game during a pause in play, DJ Dahl collected the albums in a crate and detonated it on the field. Due to damage to the outfield by the explosion and an ensuing onslaught of rowdy fans, the White Sox were made to forfeit the game for the damage to the Tigers. Though already on the decline, disco’s growing unpopularity coincided with this biblioclasm, with artists and labels rebranding it as dance music and many stations returning to a rock format.

7x7 (11. 684)

fernwood 2 night: Martin Mull (RIP) interviews Tom Waits on first talk show satire  

dead heat: polls indicate that the US presidential race is virtually tied, unchanged after the debate performance 

alberta bound: the Great Canadian Song Map—via Web Curios  

tropic of cancer: some of the US falls outside of NATO’s geographic scope—see also  

moved permanently: North American telephone area codes that are also HTTP response headers—see previously—via Kottke  

shelley’s heart: Charles McCarry’s eerily prescient 1995 political thriller  

now benson, i’m going to have to turn you into a dog for a while: Taika Waititi is serialising Terry Gilliams’s 1981 Time Bandits for television

postpositive (11. 683)

Via TYWKIWDBI (indeed), we are brought back to the subject of forming the plural of compound expressions through what are also referred to as post-nominal adjectives, which in English syntax can be employed for subtly and nuance—asking to be directed to the responsible people versus the people responsible or adjacent to something versus something adjacent—and occur in a number of set and archaic phrases, usually derived from Latin and French, like midnight dreary, body politic, proof positive, and the legal term malice aforethought (premeditated, from malice prépensée).

 synchronoptica

one year ago: a marker to symbolise the start of the Anthropocene Epoch (with synchronoptica), a crowd-pirated movie plus assorted links to revisit

seven years ago: LeVar Burton Reads, open-pollination, THC regulations in the EU, a typeface combining Hebrew and Arabic plus Trump as Putin’s useful idiot

nine years ago: exploring Pluto and beyond

i’m in this to complete the job i started (11. 682)

At the conclusion of the NATO summit, held on the trans-Atlantic organisation’s seventy-fifth anniversary—overshadowed to an extent publicly and privately by speculation about the host’s health and ability to
retain high office and counter-measures to Trump-proof the alliance which detracted from business at hand including including containment of Russia and China and Ukraine’s membership question, a defiant Joe Biden participated in a rare solo press-conference, re-affirming his commitment to remaining in the presidential race, not for his own legacy, but for America and to beat his opponent. This crucial and closely scrutinised event was a strong showing, despite some gaffes including referring to Harris as vice-president Trump and Zelenskyy as Putin (Macron and Scholtz were quick to defend Biden’s address saying one could always detect such slips of the tongue with such close monitoring, and probably would not have elicited gasps from the audience were it not for the poor debate performance that intensified calls for him to bow out from his party’s nomination) but may not convince his supporters or quiet the chaos within the party.

splogoverse (11. 681)

Having previously tracked how that the zombification of dormant domains followed the cannibalisation of the oldweb and general enshittification as squats for AI-generated slop, we gave a close reading to this account involving the purchase of a long-abandoned URL of a mainly print newsletter that once hosted their contributions in order to spare their by-line from the indignity visited upon many legacy websites, coopted by prolific impostors for name-recognition (like Red Lobster being private-equitied). Like the above cannibalisation—which seems rather tame in comparison—archived content (which may be also hosted in parallel by a successor publisher) is lightly edited and updated to make it appear fresh and relevant, at least to search engines and advertisers. More from Tedium at the link above.

double-click (11. 680)

Language Log presents an interesting discussion on the latest polarising and overused corporate buzz-word in double-click—as in to focus or drill-down on some matter, which admittedly didn’t at first blush register as a term I’ve heard employed inside or outside the office but then realise that I might just have a blindspot for such phrases—moreover leading to see how quickly technological neologisms are adopted and have staying power, like way English has a whole is peppered with rather fossilised sports metaphors that can have an othering effect for non-native-speakers. Offline (as in a sidebar discussion) and bandwidth (mental capacity) have become pervasive and we use this jargon without noticing it. The article also includes an interview with the inventor of the rapid tap mousing, engineer Bill Atkinson who conceived it for Apple’s Lisa Project back in 1979, who would eschew such talk—buzzwords quickly lose their buzz—and has some regrets about the gesture he designed, thinking that a shift key for computer mice might be more ergonomic and user-friendly.

 

synchronoptica

one year ago: military weather modification programmes (with synchronoptica), The Specials plus assorted links to revisit

seven years ago: May’s Little England, more model villages and company towns plus a capital ß

nine years ago: the collective amnesia of nationhood plus imagining parallel ecosystems

ten years ago: off to Croatia

eleven years ago: graffiti terminology, images of borders plus a spyware roundup

surréalisme (11. 679)

In anticipation of the centenary of the publication of the rival manifestos of opposing factions of the art movement in October of 1924 by Yvan Goll and André Breton, we learn via PRINT magazine that there’s been a call for submissions to reinterpret modern corporate logos in the style of the multidisciplinary group following arising from the liminal space between full awareness and the subconscious (see also),
all emergent after the horrors of the Great War, the 1918 Pandemic and the popular psychiatry of Sigmund Freud. We especially liked the Magritte-inspired reimaging of the Youtube brand with reference to Salvador Dalí and the Belgian artist’s own 1929 “False Mirror,” Le faux miroir, which was also the inspiration for the American television network CBS eye logo.  Much more at the links above.

gallery of the louvre (11. 678)

On the occasion of the record-setting auction in which the pictured painting fetched an incredible three-and-a-quarter million dollars on this day back in 1982 (going to a private collector but on public display), we take a look at the artist, better remembered for his contributions to telecommunications, Samuel Finley Breese Morse. 

First establishing his credentials at a portrait artist and having a success career, several US presidents sat for him, Morse turned to invention in his late forties after encountering a fellow-passenger on a steam ship back from Europe who taught him about electromagnetism and demonstrated some experiments for him. Setting aside the subject painting in 1832 (finished the following year and contains thirty-eight miniature versions of the museum’s treasures—see also), Morse developed a single-wire telegraph, improving on European systems, and overcame the problem of signal-strength and range, a limiting factor, by the addition of relays to boost the distance transmissions could be carried from a few yards to dozens of miles. Patents were awarded but Morse’s invention was not unique or as foundational (see previously here and here) as he liked to present it. Adopted as the international standard for telegraphy, Morse would go on to contribute to his eponymous Code a few years later.  The first public demonstration was held at a steelworks in Morristown, New Jersey with an electronic missive—rather cryptically the message was “A patient waiter is no loser,” sent to a factory two miles away. 

stripware (11. 677)

Via Waxy, we enjoyed this look back at the briefly popular method of scanning code from paper from Cauzin Softstrip. A precursor to the modern QR-Code, programmes were printed in bands, highly compressed so encoding wouldn’t take up too much real estate in the periodicals that carried them (see also), most distributing computer games, like this early version of Minesweeper, Othello, Checks, Free Ski, etc. The scanning wand itself was about the size of a baguette and didn’t always produce the right output—and the games themselves in retrospect didn’t quite deliver in terms of play, though the cover art, illustrations and gaming manuals (plus a little imagination) completed the experience. More from Ironic Sans (previously) at the link above.

synchronoptica

one year ago:Django Reinhardt’s jazz band (with synchronoptica) plus assorted links worth revisiting

seven years ago: more links to enjoy

nine years ago: even more links to revisit

ten years ago: the linocuts of Edward Bawden

eleven years ago: more public outrage over mass-surveillance 

in the year twenty-twenty-five (11. 676)

By inference, example and declaration, the American people and the world has been warned repeatedly, relentlessly of what a second Trump term would entail, a conservative agenda of policy proposals that failed to coalesce on the first attempt radically transforming the republic into a regressive evangelical hypocracybased on the rule of tribal grievance and restoring the patriarchy. With the express aim of purging what’s characterised as “woke propaganda” in regulation and curriculum under a Trump regime, emboldened and enabled, the administration not only is plotting to gut the administrative state under a unitary executive with autocratic powers, eliminate environmental regulation (framing global warming as a hoax), consumer safety, civil liberties and protections (framing affirmative action and equality as “reverse racism”), mass deportations, stripping of citizenship, abortion access, pornography as well as no-fault divorce—essentially rolling back the hard-fought progress of the past seventy years and this all, with the extensive blueprint pre-positioned, might happen on day one.

städtebilder (11. 675)

Via the always wunderbar Nag on the Lake, we are referred to this lovely montage of West Berlin on a nice summer’s day in 1977 (see more, see also), composed of rediscovered vintage, full-colour footage (including aerial sweeps and shots) with a catchy, jaunty soundtrack presented by Chronos Media, the country’s largest, independent private archives—with more documentaries about Germany and several other historical, nostalgic city portraits at their Youtube page.