brussels calling

Chief diplomat to the European Union’s delegation to Turkey, Hansjörg Haber, has abruptly resigned, reportedly (angeblich), over Ankara’s conduct regarding a deal to create an immigration buffer-zone in exchange for visa-free access to the EU bloc of nations for Turkey and refusal to live up to its end of the bargain.
This rather cantankerous behaviour is to be expected from a nation that realises it has the EU over a barrel with the refugee situation, even if Europe does not itself fully appreciate the situation. This further fracture comes at a time when tensions are already running high over a lack of candor about the present and the past that has seen German journalists being denied entry and German officials of Turkish ancestry being given police protection, worried that there could be retaliation for their votes to label the massacre perpetrated by the Ottomans as genocide—and campaigners in the UK are vocal with a political hot-potato that EU ascension for Turkey is either imminent or otherwise will not happen within our natural lifetimes but that Turkey should nonetheless strung along with a glimmer of hope to maintain good terms. I’ve wanted to say to the Leave camp, “You know, Brussels can hear you?  They hear all those awful things you are saying about them.” Perhaps the Remains need to have the same thing pointed out to them about Turkey.

birthday suit or trooping the colours

Though I’d say that the Queen’s choice of posh-frock for her birthday procession was a slight wardrobe malfunction, but the Photoshop battle royale that it inspired was in good spirits. Her highly visible dress (not quite day-glow) did really look like a chroma-key green-screen—and the fun ensues.

Via Madam Jujujive’s Everlasting Blört, comes a moving gallery of grief and solidarity of vigils and memorials voicing support for the victims and families of Orlando.

and now for something completely different

For many years, Atlas Obscura has been our expert tour guide for many weird and wonderful places and always a good resource to consult when vacation planning to discover what oddities might be hidden near one’s desitnation. We continue to find the web-site’s edifying, educational trips to be quite serendipitous as well—like the recent sourcing of the iconic mashing foot, animated by Terry Gilliam, that segued from the opening-credits of Monty Python’s Flying Circus, to a detail in the mannerist masterpiece of Agnolo “Il Bronzino” di Cosimo called Venus, Cupid, Folly and Time—wherein Cupid seems about to carelessly crush a hapless dove with his hammer-toed foot. One can view the entire allegory that inspired the surrealist troupe in the National Gallery in London.

rotoscope or dance, dance revolution

Here’s a delightful and spirited celebration of the amazing, evolving possibilities of motion-capture technology from Method Studios. Follow the link to watch the show-reel and experience the full performance at Colossal. Such special-effects are already at our disposal and we can have a dance-off as well and try our hands at composing this sort of choreography. 

mugshot or surplus to needs

Formally it seems that one could easily hang some signature accessory on a villain, a passably sinister profile, trim of moustache or a particular brand of smokes that might be forever reviled by the horrified public and associated with notoriety. Currently, however, we are all essentially naked with no distinguishing uniform or props (other than the occasional posing) and are just left with rather non-descript—though susceptible to certain judgments, reflective, innocent, ill-informed, poorly counselled, discordant, overly-tuned or just plain skanky in the same fashion as we might rate the cascade of loose-associates—parade-ground of our social-mediators, I wonder where those strains of repulsion dwell, unsafe in the knowledge that we all have a virtually immediate connection. We ought to all delete our accounts—if that meant more than acquiescing to an archive. There’s incubating speculation as well about how the perpetrator of the massacre in Orlando worked for a security contractor that supplements services to the US government’s Department of Homeland Security, including the goon squads at airports and the farming out of newly arrived immigrants by bussing them to points beyond. And while the parent company may enjoy such a position of public-trust and does perhaps deserve to have its employment-screening practises looked into, that particular fiend only had the warrant of a mall-cop. It’s chilling nonetheless, to imagine that he might have been deputised as something more, although this identification and aversion (like the avatars above) is like the high incidence of engineers attracted to radical groups. It is not that they are recruited for their potential bomb-making skills, as one might think, or for their ability to design some diabolic juggernaut, but mostly because they’ve pursued a certain career path and found that there’s not the jobs in the industry to support their numbers. The preponderance of (failed) engineering students is not a commentary on the field, but rather a criticism of the schooling systems of many places in Africa, the Middle East and Asia that puts all its resources in post-primary education for the few, mainly males who survive a childhood of neglect and discouragement.

mordantly queued litheness

Though perhaps better known for their compendia of infernal characters, the Lesser Key of Solomon (definitively edited by Aleister Crowley) and the Pseudo- momarchia Dæmonum (the False Hierarchy of Demons) that inspired the former, the grimoires also contain a range of mandalas—magic circles for summoning and casting-out above referenced malevolent forces, but naturally (although unlike the cleromancy of I-Ching divination or Tarot whose permutations are mathematically defined and all possible oracles are set forth) not all variants, whose compliment of iconography includes fimbriation suggestive of the works of Piet Mondrian and bar-codes and all sorts of symbols, could be contained in a single tome, no matter how big. The Lesser Bot, however, could—in theory—generate every possible spell. This achievement sounds quite dangerous but without an incanter, I wonder if it counts.