we’re social

PfRC is giving Tumblr a try to bookmark interesting findings and hopefully to better attribute the other makers and hunters out there. I know there are already too many walled-gardens to be found on the internet but we don’t want to hold you to these bounds. Check out some of our echo-chamber and hopefully find some inspiration or at least an evening’s entertainment.

babel fish

Via the always excellent Nag on the Lake, we are offered the chance to fund a veritable Universal Translator in the form of an ear-piece that will make speakers of a foreign language mutual intelligible. Admittedly, I am a bit skeptical of such wonders—though I’d surely have gravitated to the same cause—plus at least in theory (not in rigourous practice yet) I was very impressed with Google Translate (especially how it matched the type-face)–but I am willing to defer judgment and vacation with confidence.
The device obviously makes me think of that other plot convenience of Douglas Adams, the Babel Fish, an organism that delivered on the same promises. This specimen willingly inserted in the auditory organs of every civilised and contacted denizen of the Universe was a wholly organic construct (as far as we readers are privy) rather than a learned but artificial feed-back loop, but this product of natural selection raised an important paradox, which I think we tend to miss when congratulating ourselves on our own cleverness. Such a devastating useful creature proved the existence of a divine creator, and thus God who must exist by faith alone and was understood to no longer be in the habit of manifesting himself like that disappears in a puff of logic. A keen little aide that might help bridge the communication gap like this may not in itself present an existential crisis, but maybe the full faith and confidence that we put in technology’s omnipresence and omnipotence does. What do you think? I would definitely try this ear-piece, listening-aid out.

fiat or take and bake

Pizza is an acceptable form of tender for settling debt, both public and private, a court in Padua has ruled. A divorced chef may pay alimony to his ex-wife with the equivalent of three hundred euro worth of pizza per month, the judge decided after examining the husband’s income. This would have been a funnier story if the alimony did not include child-support and the pizza chef was just exacting revenge on an avarice ex-, but at least the man is making the effort to ensure that his family is provided for.

sacrebleu ou tabarnouche, tabarnouche will you do the fandango?

Isolated from other French speaking populations and surrounded on all sides by Anglophones, the Québécois have cultivated a quite charming arsenal of swears, as Atlas Obscura reports.
The essay is quite a good one and explores the broader nature of profanities and shifting intensities, and does well to remind us that our vocabulary of curses and what we find unspeakable usually reflects what we fear as a society and the fount of that power.  While the English borrowing fuckée means merely broken (as in “La doorbell est fuckée”), there’s a whole colourful litany of metaphors, interjections and expletives derived from the trappings of Catholic mass called sacres that aren’t to be used in polite company (with the vulgar context, at least). One might employ the diminutive of the French for tabernacle, tabarnouche, to express mild displeasure—like saying darn. The words for show-breads and the communion chalice convey far greater displeasure and are reserved for choicer occasions.

going dutch

Kottke’s assorted links point us back to reporting on a sociological phenomenon that we first found merely revolting but decided to take another look into the deeper implications of not being about to censor our feelings or affinities so well these days: there’s an application for one’s mobile accoutrements that allows one to transfer small sums of money between friends frictionlessly but the quick descent into audacity and miserliness is really straining those bonds and changing the nature of the casual encounter that’s funded by these exchanges.
Like that ungrateful bride who graciously gave a guest the opportunity to top-up a gift that the bride deemed unworthy or pan-handlers, people engaged with this application are abandoning IOUs, trust, quid pro quo, simple generosity in favour of instant and monitored reimbursement for their contribution. Etiquette notwithstanding, I think that the loss of reciprocation—demanding payment-in-kind, marks the dissolution of civil cohesion. I know many people are struggling to make ends meet, but to allow this spectre of expectation to dampen the mood of going out for a drink is really beyond the pale. What would you do if a friend (the scenario is in the article), with this convenient and absolving outlet, were to digitally inform you that your accounts weren’t settled until you reimbursed her the difference in price between the martini you asked for and the beer you bought her in return? Really? I would not want to meet any of these pinch-pennies.

gonna put it in the want-ads

It was not until spying this delightful assortment on offer in a community newsletter whilst doing laundry at the laundromat that I realised I never wondered why they might be called “classifieds.” I assumed it was for taxonomic reasons—rather than some antithetical security designation—like automobiles, rooms for rink, or kitchen utensils, like this lovely Serving Tong: great for serving fries, asparagus. It turns out that they are called classified advertisements (regardless of how miscellaneous) to distinguish them in the print business from display advertisements, larger format ones and usually with photos or graphics. If there had to be a picture, however, I’d much rather have seen Sheep Pendulum Clock below. I’ve done my best to obscure the contact information for these rivals to Craig’s List, but I will have you know that these items and more come from the same individual’s emporium.

drolleries or rabbit redux

The marginalia of medieval manuscripts often feature weird and wonderful and frankly impenetrable doodles of the faithful scribe, and via the fabulous Miss Cellania, we gain some insights in a common motif, that of bunnies doing violence to humans.
It does make one wonder why one would deface a text with idle graffiti that’s probably none too edifying in any context, but there was the viral convention of the drollery or the grotesque that represented an inversion of the expected order of things. A rabbit’s revenge was an obvious candidate as they were seen as characteristically weak, wilting but prolific—a compensatory measure that was an ill-advised tactic to adopt then and now. Perhaps there is something moralising and relevant after all in having bunnies marshaling the troops, jousting or roasting a hapless human.