soviet reunion

On this first day of the new year, after concerted efforts going back to at least 2009, Russia will attempt to rectify what some consider the biggest geopolitical catastrophe of the century with the dissolution of the USSR with a single market that spans from Belarus to Kyrgyzstan—with room for many more. The Eurasian Economic Union (EEU) is patterned to some degree off of the institutions of the EU.

This alliance has drawn little attention, since we’re conditioned to think that those economies are primitive and crude kleptocracies, whereas ours are not. Although characterisation in the Western media tend to play up the angle that such a partnership is reigniting the worse tensions of the Cold War, the realisation of the treaty is coincidental and one ought not be enamoured by propaganda from other side, since overtures from Western powers, also seeking to reassert and push regional, authoritative boundaries threatened Russia to a much greater degree than its machinations threaten the Free World. Perceived and actual weaknesses on America’s part did not embolden Russia to act—though mutual chest-thumping may have forced the crisis, nor does pandering to anyone’s dreams of recapturing lost glory, no matter which side. Reaction and judgment seemed much more deferred in the short term if not very forward-looking ultimately when the Soviet Union intervened (at the request of the secular government over fears of a fundamentalist over-throw) and invaded Afghanistan in the early 1980s. Though I am sure that much more was happening behind the curtain, the public face of the response was reciprocal Olympic boycotts and very partisan funding for the insurgents that would eventually metastasize into al Qaeda and associates, in a case of beggar thy enemy. The macroscope of politics and ideology is too big not to try to compartmentalise—and that’s probably also one of the biggest risks.

pop-quiz

BBC’s Monitor Magazine has put together an aggregation of list of one hundred surprising and fun facts, statistics and discoveries made during the last year. It is a variable monkey-house of not mere trivia but rather things that were collectively revealed to us that we did not know before and there are citations associated with each claim to learn more. What is something you found out last year that’s proved enriching?

open you the west door and turn the old year go

Open you the East Door and let the New Year in.

Happy 2015!

universal coordinated time

The tradition of dropping the ball in New York’s Times Square—and derivative celebrations, which began with the year 1908 after fireworks displays were banned in Gotham over safety concerns has much older roots that connect the count-down with navigation on the high-seas and reflect on the nature of time and time-keeping itself. The Naval Observatory in Washington, DC had installed a time-ball in 1845 for the benefit of fleets launching out from the Delmarva Peninsula for the antipodes that fell daily to mark high-noon. This temporal landmark goes back to the Royal Observatory east of London, which rests on the Greenwich meridian. While it was relatively easy for ships at sea to calculate changes in latitude (north, south) by gauging their position under the stars, reckoning degrees, minutes and seconds of longitude proved much more of a challenge.
A navigator could figure how far east or west one had traveled by knowing the difference in time at his present location relative to his point of departure, but clockworks did not yet have their sea-legs and it was not possible to keep good measure, until the development of the sturdy maritime chronometer, invented in 1737 in England, whose chief berth was at Greenwich, later declared to be the Prime Meridian in a convention chaired by US president Grover Cleveland. A bright red ball was installed on the observatory’s bell tower—visible from all around, that has fallen daily since 1833 as an aid cue for passing ships to synchronise their watches—although at 1300 since the crews were busy calibrating earlier with the noon-time angle of the sun. The newspaper magnate wanted to give the gathered crowds a similar cue, bereft of his former pyre and beacons, with a dazzling effect and commissioned the first illuminated ball to be lowered at the stroke of midnight to usher in the New Year.

banned to the bone or disc-jockey jump

Though Western music was officially restricted in Soviet Russia, some bootleg copies of jazz standards and the emerging rock-and-roll were already circulating in the 1950s and the privileged few who got to listen were starving for more and wanted to share—of course, the taboo experience with others. Vinyl as the media, however, came at a high premium and conventional propagation would have aroused the suspicion of censors, so the aficionados/bootleggers/pirates discovered an innovative and resourceful solution: raiding the dumpsters of medical facilities with radiology departments, they took discarded x-ray films and impressed the grooves of the music onto the radiographs. Colossal has a fine little gallery of these improvised albums plus several links that document more on the history of this phenomenon.

in der silvester-nacht

Though not to be characterised as weird or foreign and not exclusive to Austria, the country’s edition of the English daily, the Local, present a nifty summary of some of the ways Austrians ring in the New Year. Special credit, I believe, is due for not shying away from terms like agora- and ochlophobia (the latter being specifically the fear of crowds and not just being exposed and out in the open, fear of the Marktplatz) and molybdomancy (Bleigießen)—that is, divination by molten lead quickly cooled in water, complete with a description of the fun and an exhaustive Rorschach list of interpretations.

There are also some delicious recipes and more on merry-making. New Year’s Eve is goes by the name of Silvester for the sainted pope who baptised the Roman emperor Constantine and legitimised Christianity within the Empire, whose holy day is commemorated on the last day of the year and is combined with traditional celebrations and customs in Central Europe, like the countdown and fireworks. What are some peculiar traditions and rituals of your own? There’s still time to go out and augur your fortune with some ingots, a candle and spoon.  In der Silvester-Nacht wird das Blei zum schmelzen gebracht.

affix oder oh won’t somebody please think of the children

The Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers—under no official charter but not in the public-trust either—after a year of planning and negotiations, with deference to actual lexica and corporate nonce-words, is releasing an onslaught of new internet suffixes (DE/EN), some two-thousand new possibilities culled from different languages and markets. New German top level domains expand from .de to a whole uncharted wilderness of tags with the new naming conventions, like .gay, .islam, and .kinder as well as names of retailors and brands.
English speaking areas have the monopolisation potential as well with choices like .shoes, .pizza, .ninja—as if .biz and .free weren’t already chintzy and fly-by-night enough. All this cacophony strips dominance away from some appellation-squatters, I suppose—and maybe bursts a bubble for the online real-estate market, but it also makes for a lot of confusion too—where nothing’s not miscellaneous and not parsed and not delivered through search-engines.
I imagine most trafficking comes this way already anyway and most people are not willing to venture a guess at something new—for the very real fear of being led down a rabbit-hole and come to a look-alike site that’s maybe stealing one’s data. This move is rife, I think, for ideologues and for more spoofs, dodging and forgeries, but it is the off-chance that cartels go after one of the new domains that has people most concerned—seeing that confectioners are staking claim to the .kinder name to build brand loyalty to certain candies. What do you think? Are you prospecting for a new style, a manner of address?

dewey decimal or oracular vernacular

Before the advent and propagation of the internet and search machines, the inquiring public relied on certain institutions and librarians in particular for answers.

I do hope that there still are such venerable human experts—at least, the trained and the willing that are still there to field inquiries and riddled with such questions, like Mental-Floss shares a cache recently uncovered in the New York public library system. It seems that librarians jotted down the questions they found either humourous or very challenging, and I would wager that there are similar repositories to be found in libraries the world around. I remember well when librarians were mysterious oracles and when browsing the stacks lent a way of formulating a question that had been asked, in some form, before. Seeing these notes is certainly an interesting juxtaposition to allowing predictive software finish one’s sentence, where is, what is, how do I...