flavourant or acquired taste

Sometimes what some might dismiss as being overly fretful or a moral-panic (which have always been with us but it seems that the 1980s were especially punctuated with them—particularly of the infernal variety with satanic recruitment drives and sacrifice lurking everywhere) have positive consequences, as was the case for the singular campaign that the intrepid crew of Atlas Obscura features in the story about the worse-tasting substance known to science. Although flavours on human magnitudes tend to be fairly subjective, denatonium (commercially known as Bitrex or BITTERANT-b) lies so far off the scale as to be absolutely intolerable even in the smallest doses.
The bitterness that it awakes in the taste buds is no jalapeño-challenge with a teaspoon being enough to “poison” an entire well with a lingering after-taste that makes the water (or any other victim of this chemical condiment) unpotable. Unwholesomely, this compound was created in the 1950s as sort of biological, non-lethal weapon that could be dusted on enemy food-supplies to render them inedible. As what’s on the table was plied with more palatable artificial-flavours, this bitter-pill was more or less forgotten about, until the mid-80s when our single campaigner and public-safety advocate recognised that Bitrex could be added to household cleaners to stop children and pets from ingesting a harmful amount of a toxic substance, too repulsed by the taste. The moral-panic aspect comes into the narrative here as well—while no preventable poisoning is acceptable, the number of cases were probably the stuff of urban-legend. Closer to describing a tragedy as it transpired and neglect in the industry were the number of cases of young children and dogs drinking sugary tasting anti-freeze, a product that didn’t fully adopt Bitrex until the mid-90s, despite consumer concerns. Now denatonium is a universal standard—the untasted and accidental flavour intensifier, that seasons anything we’re meant to keep away from our mouths.

shear madness

Poseidon’s Underworld presents a curated gallery of stylist to the stars, Jose Eber—vintage 1982, posing with some of the celebrities who’ve had their hair-dos done by the French hair-dresser. It’s really sort of a guilty-pleasure to pore over these glamour shots with accompanying, campy short interviews—confessions derived from an assessment that’s meant to identify one’s colour and thus one’s personality. Clients include Goldie Hawn, Penny Marshall, Farrah Fawcett, Jamie Lee, Cathy Lee, Barbara Walters and Pia Zadora.

tron/troff or pitch-perfect

Recently an archivist made a fascinating discovery in the form of the first programme, score of digital music from 1948. Cryptologist and polymath Alan Turing wrote the instructions to have his building-sized computer at a laboratory in Manchester perform God Save the King followed by a few other melodies.
While we do have some insight into the pragmatic drive for Turing to modify the mainframe to produce sound—wanting to untether himself from monitoring gauges and screens to check the status of a running programme, a B- of an F-note indicating whether the programme had concluded or ran into a logical glitch (the beep, bop, boop of vintage super-computers), so he could check for bugs elsewhere or attend to the engineering requirements of the hardware, we are sadly not privy to what Turing thought about electronic music or its potential, since for years Mister Turing was blacklisted and his contributions to computer science went unacknowledged.

crossbenchers

Though we are still hoping for a Parliamentarian Roadshow, this alternative proposal of putting the House of Lords on an air-mattress barge on the Thames temporarily whilst the Palace of Westminster undergoes some major renovations from the architectural firm Gensler does seem like a pretty sound and non-disruptive solution. What do you think? Us commoners have often been displaced and had to work out of intermodals during major construction. After the devastating fire of 1834, King William IV offered parliament the nearly completed Buckingham Palace—though this gesture was to rid himself of a detested residence that he didn’t care for, and the gift was roundly rejected.

troglodyte

Somewhat reminiscent of the accursed crew of the Flying Dutchman who are beginning to fuse with their ship in the Pirates of the Caribbean, the excellent Futility Closet introduces us to Altamura Man, discovered in a karst cave in Apulia (the heel part, near Bari) in 1993. The Palæolithic fossil is the best preserved and most complete example known, but owning to the calcite concretions of some one hundred and fifty thousand years of water funnelling over limestone, Altamura Man is merged with the cave and can only be studied in situ.

7x7

art deco revival: Paris’ 1920s Hotel Bachaumont is reopening with all its former grandeur after four decades

sequoia: the puzzling phenomena of the albino redwoods provide a glimpse into how trees communicate and support one another 

travelling far to see the sky: Yoko Ono’s Sky TV installation in remote Japan, via the always discerning Nag on the Lake

suburbia: New York City is getting an underground park complete with Victory Gardens

transhuman: the first Cyborg Olympic Games are being held in Zürich

nightliner: with competition from discount flights and long-haul busses killing romance, Austrian railways are trying to save the sleeper berth

luminophore: self-charging, glow-in-the-dark bicycle and pedestrian paths in Poland 

mechanical turk or singing for one’s supper

JF Ptak delves into a very modern topic of discussion through the lens that the long shadow that innovation has cast over jobs-security and the notion that robots will create mass-redundancy with musicians, once the mainstay of entertainment with live, orchestral accompaniment, finding themselves shoved aside with the advent of talkies and canned- or robotic-soundtracks punctuating the experience.
Colluding with the advent of telephony that made written correspondence a less attractive means of communication, various leagues and lobbies back in the 1930s rallied on behalf live bands—though there’s no incipient doubt yet of the humanity of the composition, just perhaps the emotional quotient of the performance. A Mechanical Turk is a human employed, at a pittance, to perform repetitive tasks that could be automated—thus stealing jobs from robots—but given the circumstances, it’s more efficient to have a person perform it, like squirrels running in wheels to operate a complex juggernaut.

soda derby

A new front has opened in the Cola Wars, as Boing Boing reports, in the form of rewarding dieticians to endorse the benefits of drinking sugary concoctions—or at least disparage the notion of taxing soda as sort of a gateway sin-tax for controlling all sorts of behaviour and choice. While this practise is undoubtedly revolting and ought to be brought to light (for shame, disreputable nutritionists), I think being subversive on social media pales in comparison to the way that soft-drinks are marketed almost as sacramental wine in Central and South America. What do you think? Most peddlers of patent-medicines were run out of town long ago, yet the biggest ones remain.