now there’s only love in the dark

Via Curious Brain, we are treated to Billy Butcher’s little collection of 1980s love ballads presented in style of Steven King horror paperback covers—or rather VHS cassette  boxes. Aside from Bonnie Tyler’s torch song, titles with lyrics and cover-notes include Nazareth’s Love Hurts, Chris de Burgh’s The Lady in Red and Bizarre Love Triangle by New Order.

sock-puppet, sine cure

Although it is not unusual for hold-over appointees from the previous administration to serve in caretaker capacity until an incoming regime can fill positions, the fact that Dear Leader abruptly called for the dismissal of the incumbent Surgeon General of the United States on a Friday afternoon so the news might get buried and with no replacement waiting in the wings (and few lined up in general) seems a bit suspect.
Dear Leader, on the eve of the March against Alternative Facts, might have decided to fire America’s Top Doctor for a number of reasons, including labelling gun-violence and opioid-use a matter of public health or for saying that vaping was not such a stupendous alternative and may prove a gateway to other more damaging habits, but it was most likely his recent appearance with puppet and stooge (and degenerate) of the immunizations racket to argue that vaccinations keep us all safe and healthy. Many of Dear Leader’s core supporters, we’ve heard tell, are of the conviction that immunizations cause autism and a whole host of ills and would rather tempt the ravages of medieval diseases that had been all but eliminated in the West, and so the physician had to be replaced with one of his lieutenants—making her the first individual to hold the office without a medical background, which seems a bit important.

kittyhawk oder wo ist mein fligendes auto?

At an airstrip outside of München, Lilium Aviation, Dezeen informs, undertook its first maiden voyage earlier this week with its electric powered prototype, a two-seater vertical take-off and landing personal jet.
The Bavarian start-up certainly has some robust competition, but they are pulling out ahead of the pack with this feat. With future plans for allowing a fleet to be summoned via cell-phone, like hailing a taxi, the aerial vehicle has a range of three hundred kilometres and can travel as fast per hour, and can either be piloted by its passengers or can fly autonomously with human remote supervision, as was done for this test-flight. Learn more and see video footage of the at the links above.

leerverkauft oder going-long

History’s non-events, those disasters thwarted by accident or fortune, always figure strangely in a milieu that’s supposedly both nimble and lame with near-misses and we are still trying to wrap our heads around on what transpired in Dortmund on 11 April when the number two German football club’s tour caravan and the rival Monacan national team were targeted with roadside bombs.
Reinforced glass on Borussia Dortmund’s bus and a hedgerow ultimately prevented loss of life and limb which would have surely precipitated an unimaginable tragedy for both countries. Though the attack was diffused the same script was trotted out, with the Cosplay Caliphate immediately taking credit—with most of the public willing to grant it them—and a radical left-wing anti-fascist was accused of trying to pull off this mass-murder because hooligan fans of team represented intolerance. Some formulated that the extreme right AfD would have Borussia Dortmund martyred in order to strengthen their anti-immigration platform. The true-crime truth is indeed stranger and is an outlier for what we expect in this environment: as common as the refrain is that greed is cause of all sorrows, we are surprised to find that that motive lie behind this calculated murder attempt. An individual identified as Sergej W had bought up fifteen thousand team stock market shares with the option of selling them short (Leerverkauft), since the portfolio of the team would plummet in value in the aftermath and was staying in the same hotel as the teams at the time of the attack with a room with a view of where the bombs were planted. Had Sergej W’s plan succeeded, his speculation would have yielded him four million euro off of an initial investment of eighty thousand.

the big guava

Although multi-coloured motifs certainly have their place as with the rainbow pride flag or the banner of the Sámi peoples, the city flag of Tampa (the Big Guava as it was called in 1970 for introducing that fruit to America)—as Weird Universe informs, from a vexillographer’s view violates a lot of the guiding principles of design, particularly its odd pennant shape that makes it prohibitively expensive to reproduce in number.
There are a multitude of other state and local flags that could benefit from a re-vamping, but despite being the official symbol of the city for seven decades, residents seem taken aback and a little embarrassed to learn of this jumble that’s unfurled daily at city hall. There’s reasoning behind F Grant Whitney’s vision—which is an homage to the flags of the six powers that have controlled Florida but those elements could have perhaps been better represented. What do you think? Would you recognise your town’s regalia especially in a different context?

ux or peer-review

Albeit the ubiquitous and public institution has weathered criticisms by academia in the past citing the platform for unreliable references and is constantly under siege by vandals and revisionists, Wikipedia’s record for dealing and dispatching with fake-news (following Cunningham’s Law) is far better than that of other social media networks.  Without question consumers of such streams of likes and like-mindedness ought to be encouraged to be more savvy, critical and literate when it comes journalism.
Like the argument espoused by Big Thinker Katherine Maher, social media users would be as quick to extinguish a self-serving falsehood as an encyclopædist in many cases but the difference in virality and endurance is not in giving users a means to conduct fact-checking but diverges much earlier—in the sequestered and opaque (probably even as unclear to the merchants of doom that profit from them) decisions of algorithms and market-models to promote one particular news item to one particular individual over another. Each user experience (UX) is of course unique and personal and no two people would be able to share that same tailored barrage of content, unlike being spectators at a sports event or rally or even being exposed to a suite of commercials on television. Until social engineers and mediators can be more forthcoming about the profit-motives and why, to the best of their knowledge, one headline, advertisement was served to you instead of another.

agente provocatrice

Though I am sure that such an endorsement rings as hollow as the phoney pretence of populism as something by and for the people (it has always been so) and will have the same stamina as mutual support from and for Russian, Turkish or Egyptian leadership, Dear Leader’s declaration for Marine Le Pen as being the strongest candidate is rather a breach of custom—not that foreign influence-peddling in the national elections of others isn’t a done thing these days, as world leaders traditionally refrained from siding with one contender over another. While governmental systems outside of the United States may have more mechanisms to avoid gridlock and can dissolve the legislature, the fact remains that Dear Leader’s aspiration platform is failing and the only successes it can celebrate are in its violent death-throes—which may still be the death of all of us. Systemic mistrust untethers identity and unity as much as any disruptive force—real or abstracted, and all are due careful scrutiny, lest we fawn over the solution that the easiest to obtain but comes at the cost of empathy and cooperation.