uncanny valley or listening-post

As if the bad economy, crowds and the potential for violence were not reason enough to keep one out of the stores, a business magazine reports on a development that may well become standard for traditional retail outlets—retrofitting mannequins, which are always creepy even when not cursed or endowed with a positronic brain, with bionic eyes and ears to spy and eavesdrop on customers and conduct market research in the field. Trade spokespeople were predictably ebullient about the cyborg mannequins’ ability to collect shopper demographics and find new prospects, brick-and-mortar establishments feeling at a disadvantage to on-line sales for not having customers’ hearts (buying habits) worn on their sleeves and hope the silent sentinels can gather new insights about effective displays and the influences that ultimately wins over one purchase over another at the rack or in the dressing room.

ninjutsu

A few days ago, the BBC featured a sad, disenchanting but informative little article covering yet another position made redundant by modern times: the ninja.

The grand masters of the two surviving clans have decided that while students may still learn ninja skills, neither will appoint a successor and will both be the last of a long legacy of agents for espionage, sabotage and field apothecaries retained in the service of samurais and shoguns. These feudal warlords have been outmoded, too, and I think no one morns that loss, though it is a little distressing to see such bailiwicks and traditions pass on. Though I suspect I am mistaken, I’d like to think maybe that the publicized disappearance of the ninja is not their coup de grâce but rather their cover story to allow the true ninjas to recede further into the shadows, indulging everything that one has seen in the movies.

ink trap

A very talented and prolific letter-smith crafted a typeface called DK-Viareggio, an Italianate Art Deco font that perfectly captures the lettering style on this classic poster for Carnival time. I was looking for something like this for quite some time, because although there is a good range of period fonts, it’s hard to match or contrast designs for their width, weight and slope with standard issue scripts to create something approaching authentic. Most signage and graphic arts was a unique, hand-rendered production with geometry peculiar to the artist, and it’s pretty neat that someone took the time to extrapolate a whole alphabet out of this one occasion.

What other vanity writing would you like to see turned into a font? I wonder how well a computer routine alone could handle scanning and fleshing out a whole character set from a few letters on a particular billboard or book cover and what that might mean in terms of classification and finding ones font when each is pulled from an individual source.  Of course, typesetting, casting a certain flow, is another challenge and achievement entirely.

bankster or the man who sold the world

I heard the song The Complete Banker for the first time just the other day as an interstitial piece during a radio interview with no less than a former World Bank employee, turned charitable advisor and gadfly to neo-colonialists. I had initially pegged it as a much older tune, somewhat reminiscent of a David Bowie song, for its bouncy rhythm and Thatcher references. Having not had the benefit of growing up exposed to quite few classic English ballads, the occasional, surprising work does pop up from time to time. The song, however, is part of a larger legacy of more recent songwriting by a band called The Divine Comedy and is from their 2010 album. It remains quite a good hymn for our times.

power-vacuum and powderkeg

Intrepid reporter for Mental Floss Magazine, Eric Sass, has undertaken the absorbing and challenging task of documenting the upcoming centennial of the Great War, day-by-day as events unfolded a hundred years past.

Most place World War I, on the European stage and brimming worldwide, from 1914 to 1918, and while those future anniversaries will be cause for reflection, this dreadful conflict began with a chain of events that precedes and maybe predicts the horrendous destruction. As the terror, heroism and lessons that can’t always permeate human denseness sadly cycle from living to historical memory, it is vital that we try to understand the background that created the environment and war-waging that does not only hinge on mechanisms that one can imagine going one way or another. There are easy answers and trigger-moments but I think tantalizingly accessible answers obscure more founding sentiment, like the waning influence of the Ottoman Empire and the imperial scramble to gainsay bridges and islands—colonies and wedges of control. I think this author and others will be able to faithfully pull together accounts and archives to cover the impulses and drives behind the outstanding course of human events and this looks to be a project to follow.

leftovers or turkey in the straw

Did you know that the turkey got its name in English, at least, because early explorers and settlers in its native New World range mistook it for an already known African complement?

Not realising that the birds were distinct species (albeit, they do look very much alike, like mistaking a pheasant for a quail or crocodile for an alligator), they named it with standing convention for the guinea fowl—a so-called turkey since the birds came to Europe through the ports of Ottoman Turkey. Similarly, in the Turkish language, the American turkey is called Hindi, based on the idea that the exotic poultry comes from the Hindu Kush mountains, sticking to Christopher Columbus’ original mission to reach India by sailing westward but not knowing there were unexpected lands in between.  Also, in French, the bird is called Dinde—that is, a contraction of poule d'Inde.

the abiding place or средизе́мье

Some months ago, I remembered, a contributing curator for the panoply of pasts real and imagined, the Retronaut, re-discovered and introduced a wonderful illustrated Russian edition of The Hobbit (Хоббит) from 1976. It is interesting how despite the difference in the way the characters are interpreted (I suppose all readers had their own formative images on how the figures ought to look), they are instantly recognizable and impart the same exciting scenes without having to puzzle anything out, like the lands depicted on this map of Middle Earth that don’t require a legend.

the dude abides

After spending a fun evening at a genuine American-style bowling-alley with friends in a neighbouring village, I was inspired to fulfill some of my self-imposed continuing-education class requirements with a training presentation called Introduction to Bowling! I thought I might acquire some trade secrets that might give me an advantage next time, like which ball colour is repelled from the gutter or magnetically attracted to the pins, which shoes are the lucky ones. The material, however, was mostly dry and concerned with safety and the dangers of not respecting the pin-setter and ball-return machines. There was one pretty interesting part that gave a quick survey of the game's history.
One slide, with little in the way of explanation, posed, “You may know that Martin Luther translated the Bible into German, but did you also know the Church Reformer basically invented the modern game of bowling? Luther thought nine pins were ideal.” Wirklich? That sounded to me like one of those nice but apocryphal tales that people attribute to George Washington or Abraham Lincoln, so I had to investigate further. It turns out since medieval times, cloistered monks ritually stoned totems, carving wooden clubs into pagan deities and tried to bowl them over. Eventually, this test of one's character made its way to the rest of the congregation, and peasants, who carried around a beam (which was the style at the time, I guess) called a Kegel (hence the German name for the game), started to repeat the monks' challenge with their own totems in the nave. A ball replaced rocks for safety purposes and the ritual evolved into a game. Martin Luther in fact was an avid bowler, having his own personal gaming pitch and later indoor lane, and turns out did write, among other things, the first rule book on bowling. Luther's influence probably did save the sport from obscurity, too, since it had been banned several places for promoting idleness among the working-classes.