survey sez or keeping up appearances

The discouraging results of a 2012 survey of American's acumen and performance on a battery of basic science questions were revealed just recently and show that a dumbfounding 26% believe that the Sun transits the Earth, rather than the other way around.  These sort of things that the pollsters asked where not just matters of trivia but rather established facts and necessary for the most elementary of further inquiries.
I do, however, wonder why the National Science Foundation delayed releasing the news of the abysmal state of education, having lost a couple years to help correct the matter, and why draw parallels to an even more outdated, yet equally symptomatic and depressing round of questions from European and Asian demographics that fares worse. Having such non-compartmenalised knowledge or disengaged guardians is not what a vengeful Church was to Galileo.  Maybe it was due to all the negative and anti-academic that has mounted against environmentalists over climate change—or perhaps, hopefully (statistics being what they are), these respondents, schooled aright, realised the nature of these trick-questions, though the Earth is not the pivot point of the Sun, that neither does our planet orbits a point negotiated between our star and the rest of the universe. Far fewer still could correctly locate Atlantis on a map. Such optimistic thinking is probably out of line, however, and the outcome is never that skewed.

at the star wars, star wars cantina or non-canonical

Looking through some old photographs, I found a picture I had taken of the curio-cabinet that housed primarily Star Wars action figures, circa 1991 (I imagine it was a few years later but would be embarrassing to admit, seeing as I had made trousers for the brooding Luke Skywalker from Revenge of the Jedi and set up an infirmary for G.I.*Joe characters in need of repair—the rubber-bands for their twistable torsos having snapped with a waiting area). Besides the meticulously curated cast of the original saga, it is interesting to see who else shared this prime real estate: the villains of Cobra, an out-of-proportion Insectoid and Thundercat, Happy Meal toys, Animaniacs, PEZ dispensers and a few other sundries and ephemera are represented, including a student council campaign sticker advising to “free your mind.” I believe I still have everyone of these people, somewhere, and I think I ought to recreate this Wunderkammer.

preterite or palabra jot

The German language is adaptive one, which irks many purists to no end—and most languages adopt certain prevailing styles from commerce and other engendering and endangering factors, as well, and one of the more irresonate constructions one commonly hears (though there are many others) is the German congegation of the English infinitive to google—googeln.

It is especially bizarre in the past tense, zum Beispiel: ,,Ich habe schon es gegoolgelt aber kein exakter Treffer gab” (I have already googled it but there were no exact matches) where one is just as likely to encounter gegoogled—which preserves the grammatical participles, artefacts of both languages, the ge- prefix and the -ed suffix. I wondered if there are parallels to be found elsewhere and I found some very well defined ways to communicate the act of an internet search, literally and figuratively:
 

Language	Infinitive: to google	Gerund: googling	Past-Perfect: have googled
Dutch	googelen	googelde	gegoogeld
Norwegian	å google	googly	har googla
Spanish	googlear	googleando	haber googleado
French	googler	googliser	googolisai

Most other European languages (and these certainly are not the sole representatives) that I could identify either had similar conjugations or did not bother to incorporate in greater detail, but I would like to learn more and see the list expanded. I am no polyglot and think that the pervasiveness of English does harm to lingual diversity in many cases but was very pleased to learn that come-lately words and concepts still have to stick to established rules.

media matters or upright citizens' brigade

In 1971 an activist group, after thorough planning and casing the facility burgled the Federal Bureau of Investigation's office in a small Pennsylvania town and obtained more than one thousand documents of a sensitive nature.
The Citizens' Commission to Investigate the FBI submitted the pilfered material, which revealed the extent of the Bureau's focus on the profiling and surveillance of pacifist organisation's and willingness to target petty crimes and inconsequential conduct and overlook larger, systemic damage done by groups with power and influence, to many press outlets but most of it went unpublished until (for fear of reprisal or doing damage to on-going operations) until a journal advocating non-violent resistance disclosed the entire cache. Ultimately, the revelations led to congressional investigations, which caused the Bureau to abandon its most controversial and politically motivated programmes, although the efforts were just splintered and buried with more secrecy and overtaken by more inscrutable agencies. The FBI let the case go after the expiration of the statue of limitations and the perpetrators went unknown until just now, with the release of a memoir and documentary on the break-in and players. Just after the get-away, one member recalls, they called a journalist from a phone-booth and delivered a powerful statement, challenging the members of the media who have demonstrated integrity and concern for the truth to help bring about reform and justice by broadcasting their modus operandi that prosecuted the war in Vietnam against the will of the America's to appease a few masters in politics and industry.

nakkaşhane

Via the ever serendipitous Neat-o-Rama comes a gallery from artist Murat Palta brilliantly depicting classic film scenes in the style of Ottoman miniature, the distinctive illuminated texts of the Sufi tradition. Nakkaşhane refers to the studios where the miniaturists worked and bound their painting. There are quite a few clever renderings, like the ones for Inception, The Shining, A Clockwork Orange and Alien, but my favourite (so far) was this reinterpretation of Return of the Jedi.

bertillonage or unfortunate incarceration

Forensic science and data-collection began in response to reforms in French law in 1832, which prevented the branding of criminals (like cattle). First-time offenders were given an indelible mark heretofore and the practise was followed in much of the world (a scarlet letter or compare the punishment of dismembering of some parts of the world).

Absent these visible signs, there was no way to identify a criminal—and likely recidivist, so copyist for the Paris police Alphonse Bertillon, out of frustration and a calling to contain especially anarchists, political hot-heads, conceived of the idea of profiling and a registry (French, fiche) of transgressors and invented the field of biometrics. Adopted world-wide, Bertillon's methods involved the newly invented photographic-documentation with a rigourous regime of weights and measures of different body parts, like the elaboration of the ears and length of the forearm, which projected points of chakras (useful for the police) to remember. Although contributing significantly to the burgeoning industry of photography with the establishment of mug-shots and unending galleries of those to look out for, the method for identity verification was overtaken by the technique of dactyloscopy, finger-printing, for practical reasons as the demands of Bertillon's way were too high, and it was not until the advent of closed-circuit television and facial-recognition software that could automate the cataloging of distinguishing markers that this kind of attention to detail is becoming en vogue again.

billy-goat's gruff oder when there's trouble, you call d-w

Though better known right now for the its bishop being a bad custodian of tithes and negligent of his vows, Limburg an der Lahn (on the river—like Stratford-upon-Avon) is a pretty dynamic city, situated halfway between the megalopolises of Frankfurt and Köln. Recently civic planners and architects secured the permission to redistrict the arches and concrete pylons of the old valley Autobahn bridge, scheduled for decommissioning in 2016 due to age while a new span is being constructed for apartments, office-space and hotel. Historically, bridges were so zoned.  It looks like a pretty cool concept, if the realty firm involved can pull it off without squashing the vision, and think it would make the perfect lair for a brooding, reclusive super-hero—or a villain, like T-Bartz.

seismograph or triple-witching

A certain breed of a meme has been circulating the internet since around last November, superimposing the contemporary US stock-market erratic-pulse with those of 1928 and 1929 in the period that led up to the crash and following world-wide Great Depression.

A market-watcher originally drew these parallels for entertainment, reportedly, but the analogy has held since. Projections often find their point-of-departure and yield something more surprising but it is nevertheless frightening what such a trend pre-supposes. This correlation and foreshadowing is especially interesting, as the announcement that the US House of Representatives support a capitulation that will raise, without conditions or visible trade-offs, the borrowing ability of the US government—the debt-ceiling. While it is money that America owes itself, the investors did not flinch, neither bombasting nor blanching at this development, and there are fictions about what this policy means at both extremes of the spectrum, it does seem like a delay of the inevitable, which is due in May of this year, according to the charts.