purge or dead reckoning

Though the aspiring Caliphate is committing far worse atrocities than the unabashed destruction of antiquities in the museum of Mosul, this has been the only unfiltered footage (at least that not involving the execution of Western hostages up close—there’s been quite a few sweeping vistas of massacres I guess counted as less discriminate since they’re countrymen and innocents in the way) shown of their ruthless violence.
There has of course been far worse examples too of wholesale looting, pillage and revision of mankind’s common history and heritage with the Cultural Revolutions of China and France and the censorship and looting of the Third Reich, along with countless other examples. Surely, any and all of the gruesome propaganda is available out there to anyone who wants to confront this vileness directly, and it is a delicate arras that the media uses to protect the public from such images, but maybe nothing further need be witnessed. Out of respect for victims and their families, such sensationalism ought not be shown, but in general, should the public be shielded from facing the terrors—and be allowed for our imaginations to limn, complete the scene or not?

munchausen syndrome

Though dishonesty in journalism is most indefensible, especially given the climate and standard that politicians, lobbyists in the agricultural and pharmaceutical businesses and even in the art world are expected to stoop to (vis-à-vis the last accusation in this list levied), I think some are made examples of and all the muck-rakers have to muck-rake on one another. That being said, one certainly owes oneself a little reprieve by checking out this hilariously mounting litany of charges against the disgraced anchorman pressed by Bob Canada.

stioch or yarn-bombing

Collectors’ Weekly curates another fine show-and-tell segment with the editor whose fascination with hobbyists of the 1970s, gleefully without the need to fill their off moments with one of an infinite number of distractions that all fall somewhere short on that spectrum called productivity, cultivated their creative juices through determined clacking, has helped in part spark a revival. These knitted fashions are are truly spectacular and in many ways—not just nostalgic feeling for the vintage, are inescapable, representing a sense of experimentation and a mentality of craftiness that we’re happily not ready to give up. Even though a lot of the sway of style is up to the fashionista-set, unconventionality is well tolerated, and maybe in part because that flair is just kept at a simmer by that same catalog of diversions that don’t hone skills and by a manic admiration for things consciously imitative of the the past, one’s childhood memories, whose template becomes something rather deflated and demystified, that originality, durability, security twice- or thrice-removed. When there’s too much sentimentality, I think, it’s easier for the authorities to step in and reintroduce some balance until the next iteration of discovery.

table-manners or gravyboat, showboat

I too, like Nag-on-the-Lake, would have though this table-top photo studio, designed to capture one’s meal in the most flattering light and one’s dish’s best side, was a very real offer that the wait-staff of restaurants or the social-media sommeliers would be bring around, like the desert wagon.  I think that probably the Selfie-Sombrero probably escaped into our dimension, first as a lampoon—as a joke poking fun at people’s vanity but I suppose we can’t put that genie back in the bottle now.  And though this demonstration #DinnerCam is meant to advance a discussion about how the internet and constant, omnipresent access is changing public deportment, I’m a little afraid that such spots, blinds and backdrops might become a thing.

rest in peace, Mr. Nimoy

five-by-five

canine confessions: Ze Frank presents Sad Dog Diary

hootenanny: big in Japan, owl bars are coming to London

a pox upon thee: gerbils should get the blame for spreading the plague

phonemic handshape: a video on how some of the latest slang and jargon is signed

monogrammed: dozens of vintage corporate emblems, mostly logographic to peruse

cross-promotion or courier-new

After learning about some clever entrepreneurs’ plan to partner an open all hours chain of diners with parcel delivery services for the sake of more convenient pick-up and drop-off—and just after hearing of a single US hotline number to order anything from pizza to a horse-drawn carriage ride around Fantasy Island, I must say, while clever and enterprising—and possibly well-connected, I don’t know about this middle-man economic model. Sim salabim!

People should not be discouraged from being resourceful and even innovate, and if for instance, car-sharing schemes, facilitated logistically, result in reduced pollution and profit all involved, then that seems like a very good thing. Hoteliers and taxi drivers ought not to have an industry monopoly, and there’s certainly the old way of connecting and sharing that I think will resist being compartmentalized by any middle-man, however ambitious and deemed indispensable, but there is too a certain level of expertise and the safe-guards of bureaucracy and that’s not acquired overnight nor by mere association. Besides, being a concierge, not even a courier, is I think not a career that one aspires to.

pious fiction or brother's keeper

This thoughtful essay from Æon magazine, which hangs the chief friction between faith and science on the transition of God from being a dissembler and a Noble-Liar for our own good to one incapable of deception, reminded me very much of a thin but engrossing book by Portuguese writer José Saramago called Cain that I read recently. Unflinching to the last, the author tries to answer that same paradoxical quandary that’s plagued philosophers and theologians (a subset of theodicy) since the beginning: why did a perfect and all-powerful God need to mislead or test his creations?  Cain, an ostensible victim of one of those trials (others including the expulsion of his parents from Eden, Sodom and Gomorrah, Job’s suffering, Noah’s deluge, etc., etc.) condemned to wander the Earth for the act of killing his brother—which arguably was not unprovoked, confronts God directly over this and other injustices perpetrated seemingly by a petty deity who was far from omnipotent, and doesn’t relent.
Neither side can afford to give in, nor really—kind of tenderly, is either willing to accept the argument that that business was all Old Testament or that God’s ways are mysterious and inscrutable, and the standoff echoes through the ages. In seeking to reconcile these founding inconsistencies, God, who was and is ever present, was made a bit mute and aloof and it was argued that was ever the case. In hardly something to pin one’s faith to but illustrative, Descartes posits that the feeling of being forsaken or deceived is akin to one suffering from dropsy (funky cold œdema), where one is retaining too much water but is nonetheless constantly thirsty. Our faculties are generally configured to drink when parched and one person’s unfortunate condition isn’t universal, invoking Ockham. A little strangely, Descartes also supposes that in the heavenly-sphere that God were to erase a star but still perpetuate the sign of it, it’s similarly a self-delusion that we ought not to project—though looking to the skies, we are looking to the past, which is a quandary that the philosopher could not have known, scientifically at least. What do you think? Has God stepped back after setting things in motion (as the re-discovered writings of the Greek classics that led to the Renaissance and Enlightenment revealed), have we gone deaf or is it something else that the troubled old folks have failed to question? I’d like an answer—and would even wrestle an angel for one.