extracurricular or rolling-stock

Via the ever interesting Presurfer comes a look at a yet extant relic of the planned economy in the Soviet Union and its satellite states in the form of heritage railways created as training platforms for apprentice students (die so genannt Pionieresienbahnen, but also present in Uzbekistan, Belarus, Hungary, China, Ukraine, Slovakia, Poland and Cuba) and aspiring engineers, complete with all the scaled down but functional equipment to learn all aspects of running a train-service to include switching-stations and actual routes that attend to recreational spots. Going to school during East German times, H told me that there was one period a week reserved for what was termed practical education but as his class was brought to a lamp factory, it really couldn’t be considered anything but child-labour and was a rather dreary, dangerous hour. It is all the more depressing to think that there was such a Pioneer Railway located right in Leipzig, where H grew up, for the luckier kids.  I think it would have been fun to be a conductor and get to wear a spiffy uniform, like those pictured at the link.

smål, smol

Swedish furniture and lifestyle emporium solicited plush toy drawings from children and have transformed ten winning visions into to stuffed animals for sale in their stores worldwide. Part of the their Toys for Education campaign, which has been active for over a decade but never before asked kids for their creative input, proceeds will also help benefit charitable organisations that help young people and their families.

persistence of vision

The splendiferous Nag on the Lake directs our attention to a lovingly curated gallery of mesmerizing phenakistoscope animations, whose looping effect (and themes, perhaps) are not much different than what’s produced by GIFs (which I have been kind of obsessed with lately).
Debuting in the early 1830s, the invention of Belgian Joseph Plateau but with several other independent animateurs promoting their own spectacles, the phenakistoscope spread quickly across Europe, the engaged audiences viewing a spinning disk through a series of tiny slits to achieve the illusion of motion. Until opticians devised techniques of projection—which saw an explosion in phantasmagoria with similarly prefixed motion picture devices—spectators had the Greek root ϕενακιζειν, which meant deceptive. I hadn’t thought about it beforehand but the German term for an animated feature is “Trickfilm.”

ulysses or hocus-porcus

By its nature, mythology does not admit to definitive versions, although the fables and folklore of the Greeks, once committed to paper by Homer and Hesiod and countless others took on an air authority that was not a uniting theme in the tradition of story-telling. Although different accounts circulated long afterwards and inheritor traditions continue to build on that unstaid corpus still, lore, variation and invention is sourced to the Heroic Age—those who fought in the Trojan War, and abruptly ended with that diasporic, lost generation afterwards.
Maybe it was because those stories were written down and the winningest narratives became the prevailing ones—competition continued among poets, championing their own character-analyses, morals and retribution and it’s now hard to imagine as the readership that there were opposing legends presented to audiences, amok-time scenarios where Electra and Œdipus had normal families and lost their place in the popular imagination to the racier, received versions. One of the very last myths constructed, a lost epic that seems groundless morose but somewhat reconstituted, by the Greeks is called the Telegony and dealt again with re-deploying veterans and the homecoming of Odysseus, but told from the perspective of the seductress and enchantress Circe. During Odysseus’ captivity on the exile-island of Aeaea—Lošinj, Croatia—(Circe was banished to this remote location to keep her out of trouble), Circe became pregnant and bore Odysseus a son after his departure, the eponymous Telegonus, whose name meant born far away due to his father’s distant home. Athena urges Circe to reveal to her young adult son—juxtaposed with the massacre and funeral service for opportunist suitors of his wife, Penelope, whose advances she solemnly rebuffed for the two decades’ absence of her husband that open the story—who his father is. Telegonus resolves journey to Ithaca to find Odyssey.
Why Athena, as Odysseus’ constant champion and protector, encouraged this reunion seems impenetrable and without the entire story—that’s just been teased out of a few lines and other myths referencing the Telegony—the goddess’ motivation will remain a mystery, I suppose. Before going on this long and dangerous voyage, Circe asks the blacksmith of the gods to craft her son a supernatural spear with the poison tip of a string-ray to defend himself. Just as Telegonus arrives in the Ionian Sea, he is visited by a terrible storm and disoriented, does not realise that he has already arrived at his destination. Though the trope seems rather predictable to us thanks to the tragedies of Sophocles, Telegonus poached one of his father’s cows and was ambushed by Odysseus and his men. As he deftly defends himself, Telegonus strikes down Odysseus, fulfilling a prophesy that the wily hero who satisfied his charge with burying an oar in a land where they never had heard of the ocean that stated he would meet his demise from the sea, and recognizes, too late, that he is his father. Beside himself with remorse, Telegonus takes Odysseus’ body, widow and half-brother, Telemachus (meaning “far from the battle-field” also unborn when Odysseus went off to war) back to Aeaea in the Adriatic. Circe’s magic was unable to restore Odysseus to life but is able to make the landing party immortal. Telegonus marries his step-mother, Penelope, and Circe, Odysseus’ lover, marries Telemachus. I wish we had the whole story in order to make this outcome seem plausible—the classic myths were hinged together in such a way where one could always suspend ones disbelief and accept that a character was fated to be transformed into a tree or flower or would be forced to experiment with the lesser-evils and impossible choices. I wonder if this outline could be expanded.

5x5

memory-hole: the estate of George Orwell, ironically, attempts to suppress unsanctioned mention of “1984”

peabody’s improbable history: the archived internet, the Wayback Machine, is getting a search engine

isambard kingdom brunel slept here: a look at the makers of London’s historical markers, the Blue Plaques

monstrous memorabilia: gallery of vintage horror film lobby cards

stellar hosts: an overview of how astronomers went from zero to five thousand plus potential exoplanets in two decades via Kottke’s Quick Links

rutherfords and risk-assessments

Immediately for me invoking recollections of that endless film franchise Final Destination, wherein some hapless teenagers have premonitions of freak accidents that are perpetuated by some Rube Goldberg chain of events and shoddy craftsmanship, the notion of the micromort, conceived by ethicist and information-scientist Ronald Howard of Stanford University, modestly and eloquently has further reaching meaning in terms of public literacy in probability and statistics, risky undertakings, and deflecting media bias.

As a unit or scale, the micromort roughly measures a one-in-a-million chance of dismem- berment or death from exposure to various activities—both bidden and unsolicited, like base-jumping, shark-attacks, skiing, drug use, quick-sand, terrorism, diet—allowing one to weigh the peril though in the end the odds seem to say on our side. I don’t think that this a model that insurance companies use, per se. Facts and figures can be easily turned into anecdotal evidence in support of any argument or newly-fashioned threat. Not to disparage the better intentions of keeping healthy, wealthy and wise, but the burden bore by saying that sitting is deadly and is ratcheting up one’s individual risk by—say a fifth, does not factor in prevalence and can be misrepresented as something huge and something that we’re morally obligated to counter. History is punctuated by moral panics and distortion, but even more so now, as we’re already couched in safety and leisure, and the idea of security and hygiene has supplanted superstition. Like the dread millisievert, the rutherford is also a doseage of radiation exposure and can also be easily taken out of context. What do you think? Does being informed carry with it a healthy degree of skepticism?

stretch of sands or jack sprat

The dicey encounter between the US and Chinese navies in the rarefied archipelagos of the South China Sea represents of course modern points of contention but the history, the anchorage of the Spratly Islands (known by several other, disputed monikers) reaches into the distant past and under tenser auspices. Though just outside of major shipping-lanes, the disperse islands, some eight hundred shoals and reefs that constitute a mere four square kilometers of land combined, did not garner much attention, regarded as treacherous waters to be avoided—outside of a few micronation claimants—until the end of the nineteenth century, seeing the chance to expand their sphere of influence and control of the channels of commerce, Britain made the first petition.
This territorial extension did not yield a secure title as the newly independent Philippines first needed gentle reminders by their former minder, the USA, that their lands did not extend that far out (though the lesson did not really penetrate with these squabbles extending through the people’s revolution in China, the Republic in exile in Formosa, another try for a micronation utopia, and finally the intentional wrecking of a Filipino submarine on one of the islands and a permanent military detachment around that wreckage) and then was overcome by the outcome of the Sino-French War that erupted over Qing China’s incursions into Tonkin (the northern part of French-Indochina, now Vietnam). Japan occupied most of the archipelago during World War II, with the Republic of China (now confined to Taiwan) re-establishing garrisons after the Japanese surrender. Lending more support to Chiang Kai-shek than to the communist, mainland government, America preferences rather inflamed the dispute and helped foment the notion of a one-China policy—insofar as the stance translates to Western ears. Post-war, the stakes grew with natural resources to exploit and Malaysia and the Sultanate of Brunei joining in.