übermorgen or it’s jam every other day

A few of the world’s languages, including one Bantu, Mwoltlap of the Vanuatuans and the passé composé of classic French of the 1600s (J’ai vu quelque chose—I did see something but I talk like that anyway) have a specific tense called hodiernal—hodie or hodierno being Latin for today, with distinct ways of addressing events taking place in the past or future in respect to the day of record.
Events referenced that take place before or after the unit of the present day are categorised as pre- or post-hodiernal. Other Bantu languages have crastinal aspect for events that take place on the subsequent day (Latin crāstinō die is tomorrow) or post-crastinal for the day after tomorrow (Übermorgen). More rarely, only reported among speakers of the Plateau family of languages in Nigeria, there is also the hesternal (hesterno die, yesterday) for actions that transpired then.  These forms would I imagine make for some interesting and exacting conjugations in popular ballads: “Today is the greatest day that I’ve known,” “Yesterday came suddenly” or “Just thinking about Tomorrow clears away the cobwebs and the sorrow.”

photo booth

Nearly spanning the whole history of photography with the first coin-op unit being installed in Hamburg in 1890, photo booths carry ethnographic and sociological currency as much as technical achievement with the popular Japanese activity known as purikura (プリクラ) being no exception.
Even before there was a chance for the ceremony to evoke a sense of nostalgia, the allure was there. The social photos (not group pictures but rather always as a avatar to be shared on social networks) offer insight on the way forms of self-expression are manifested and perpetuated—with the creation of sub-genre and sub-culture, purikura not staying within the polite and sacarrine bounds of kawaii, the cute aesthetic, with filters and post-production effects that are opposite of flattering and some assumptions and architecture of choice to be aware of.  The term comes from the English words print club.

patco

Having first organised in 1968 as a trade association before representing the interests of members as a fully-fledged labour union and lobby, the Professional Air Traffic Controllers‘ Association was effectively disbanded on this day in 1981 when then president Ronald Reagan declared their strike, called two days prior, illegal as a “peril to national safety” and ordered the federal workforce back on the job, breaking the strike by firing over twelve-thousand employees.  Faced with a lifetime ban (later eased by degrees, relaxed first to allow them civil service jobs, just not their old positions back) on government employment and disempowered to pursue the working conditions that the industry needed, Reagan‘s firings—catching many off guard, the unions have backed his candidacy over Jimmy Carter‘s re-election over sore dealings with the Federal Aviation Administration thinking relations would improve—marking the beginning of the decline of organised labour in the US, lockouts, sickouts and strike actions having dropped precipitously over the decades.

bouba kiki

For some time, I’ve been convinced that my blog archives are gaslighting me and usually that belief gets vilified in the end after encountering several instances with no productive records, some creative searching will finally yield the topic I could vaguely recall posting about four years and revive it with a contemporary reference—other times, though, there is a strange unresolving defeat where I still think that that had been something we blogged about before.

It seems, when a recent entry reminded me of the phenomenon and global study, that the Bouba/Kiki Effect had decamped with the latter, rather than eventually revealing itself, not that there is not also bit of self-censoring, self-promotion and obfuscation going on as well—a search void being a notoriously hard thing to find.
First observed in 1929 and then more rigourousy studied in the early 2000s, there’s a strong preference—though with notable exceptions, for people to associate the more jagged, spiky shape with the identity Kiki and the amorphous, rounder one with Bouba—also in terms of assigning roles, compliance versus determination.
Researchers suspect that the results may indicate a neural basis for sound symbolism and a correlation with early stages of perceiving, conceiving and forming a word with meaning attached, the mouth making shapes that agree in a way, suggesting consistency of cognition, with the characters. A deliberate mismatch, a spiky Bouba, generated a fairly great deal of dissonance for something with such seemingly low stakes.

compression codecs

The ever brilliant Things Magazine refers us to a ghostly composition called moDernisT created by Ryan Maguire from the sounds lost to the lossy compression of converting the Susan Vega track Tom’s Diner into mp3 format, the rhythmic tone poem famously (previously here and here) used as the in studio control for the engineers behind the digitisation to catch themselves and recalibrate if they’d gone too far sacrificing fidelity for the sake of disc-space. Likewise, the accompanying video created by Takahiro Suzuki contains only remnants salvaged from the cutting room floor after creating the mp4. I am waiting at the counter for the man to pour the coffee…

schwarzes moor

With some relief from the rather dry summer and a cloudy, rainy day to provide some atmosphere, H and I visited the nearby nature reserve that has the upland bog called the Black Moor, the perimeter in bloom with what’s called fireweed or willowherb (Chamænerion angustifolium, Schmalblättriges Weidenröschen).

We passed the stone gate that was once the entrance to Nazi era work camp (Reichsarbeitsdienst) to combat unemployment while at the same time indoctrinating the disenfranchised since removed and reforested before entering the park and marking a circuit of the unique biotope on an elevated plank pathway that kept humans from traipsing all over the place.

The trail winds through several different environments and presents lessons on the ecological system that supports the flora and fauna, an observation tower rising in the centre of the small portion of the heather-covered heath that is publicly accessible.