tarnhelm, sorting hat

Entomologists working in south west India have found a new species of tiny spider whose camouflage—designed to disguise it as a dried leaf, to make it invisible like Siegfried’s helmet—and have dubbed it Eriovixia gryffindori after one of the academy’s founders Godric Griffindor.
In the Harry Potter series, Griffindor was renown for his preternatural knack for placing students in the fraternity or sorority house that would best help them thrive, and passed the gift along to his enchanted Sorting Hat to carry on with placement at Hogwart’s after he was gone. The discoverers have been so far silent on what magical properties this little spider might possess.

afturkalla

As the Reykjavík Grapevine informs, former Icelandic interior minister Ögmundur Jónasson granted a lengthy interview to EU think-tank Katoikos, with a warrant to speak for those sometimes feeling exiled in their own or adopted homes, in which he addresses his thought on the rise in nationalism, the financial crisis that ravaged the tiny island nation and—perhaps most sensationally, his standing up and eventual dismissal of the FBI.

There had been some discussion and rumours circulating around the 2011 incident, but Jónasson had not yet spoke about it candidly beforehand. After having been approached (and received in a cold manner, though the message did not seem to go through) in the early summer about touring the servers that were reputed to be hosting some of the data of the WikiLeaks platform. Despite the initial rebuffing reception, three months later, a whole planeload of agents came, with designs on framing the WikiLeaks founder. This act of defiance is certainly significant despite the fact that I wonder if Julian Assange has gone a little stir-crazy and am reminded nowadays of Harvey Dent’s line to Batman: “You either die a hero, or you live long enough to see yourself become the villain.” Jónasson made it understood in no uncertain terms that the FBI had no jurisdiction here and should leave immediately, the minister far more willing to side with the whistle-blowers over the domestic intelligence agency. At this point in our story, Assange had already surrendered to UK authorities, having leaked his major caches of communiques throughout 2010 but had not yet secured asylum in the Ecuadorian embassy in London

do the bat-tusi

Sometime ago, I recall noting how all the gadgets and booby-traps from the classic Batman television series were all really conveniently and explicitly labelled. As pleased as I was to discover that the collection is still growing, going back to look at the original post from Dangerous Minds (at the first link), I was now finding myself more perplexed with the nature of such ‘captions.’
Was this running gag something for the benefit of the audience and expedience in the narrative only or was it some sort of meta reference? I could just as well imagine the Boy Wonder telling the Caped Crusader something blindingly obvious—eagerness made all the more supercilious by the labelling. I still suppose it is preferred over something machine-readable only like a bar-code or something with no expository value. Good old Alfred was probably behind of it, but one could also imagine that many a diabolical plot was foiled thanks to basic literacy. What do you think? The items from ACME mail-order catalogue that was always Wile E Coyote’s go-to resource also left no doubt what they were to do as well.

6x6

bed-in: an epically funky cover of John Lennon’s Give Peace a Chance by Louis Armstrong with a chorus of back-up singers, via Marginal Revolution

for any occasion: the US Space Agency, NASA, has just created its own GIPHY board

on the shoulders of giants: the vice-president elect is also a good judge of anatomy

evaporating people: hundreds of thousands of Japanese looking to start all over disappear from respectable society to reinvent themselves on invisible black-market, via Super Punch

udderly serious: oregano and seaweed might significantly reduce environmentally damaging bovine flatulence

the purge: after installing a notorious climate change denier as a warden of the environment, the president-elect’s transition team is circulating an intrusive survey to identify those not marching in lock-step

great leap forward

The Atlantic presents a rather sweeping, comprehensive list of political, foreign policy milestones and anniversaries that will occur in the upcoming year, illustrating how fraught diplomacy with compounded legacies not easily shaken and those foundations probably ought not to be tempted.
February marks a quarter of a century since the European Economic Community embarked into a new system of greater legal and political integration—beyond trade deals, with the Maastricht Treaty, which led to the creation of the contemporary EU, though it now stands at a crossroads. It is the centenary of the Russian revolutions of 1917 that created the Soviet Union as well as the fiftieth anniversary of the Chinese Cultural Revolution. Of course cultural movements and revolution don’t exclusively cause contemporaries to confront (and tackling “on this day” is only contending with a shadow of the original event and certainly not its precedents—and perhaps in the moment of memorial, not its antecedents either) the past only on round birthdays (there are many more events covered in the article) and the nostalgia for chronicle and a surfeit of past to the fill the present has become a sort of a touchstone lately—and hopefully the trivia can tease out some curiosity into the deeper history and influences as well—and perhaps shows that the whole jabberwocky of bookends needs respect and continual servicing. What do you think? Perhaps there’s also a strong desire to step away from a present in hopes that we can bound it—and whatever slurry of 2016 won’t wash into the new year.

choreographed geometries

Our thanks to the brilliant Messy Nessy for her extended and studied appreciation of the sublimely strange Triadic Ballet of the Bauhaus Theatre movement of the 1920s.
We had marvelled at the production and revivals beforehand but we were not clued into the backstory, inspiration and legacy enough to be able to enjoy it to the full extent, one always being induced to learning more, like realising the aspirations of Bauhaus itself was in a way realised in the lifestyle engine that is IKEA. The passage through the acts to something darker and more mechanised, formal and constrained in its expression, symbolised synthesizing the Dionysian impulse (which we’d assign to dance) in purely artificial and abstract Apollonian terms—which is ultimately the fate or anything staged and the burden of performance art. In fact, one of the character designs of Oskar Schlemmer that appeared in the third triad became the inspiration for Kansai Yamamoto’s 1973 Ziggy Stardust exaggerated jodhpur jumpsuit. There is currently an exhibit on set layout, choreography and costumes in Metz, and while no troupe is performing the piece right now, you can watch a video of a seminal production at the source link above.

self-dealing

Whilst the US president is only bound by tradition and the Emoluments Clause, being unable to receive gifts from foreign powers nor himself being able to grant grace and favour appointments that would otherwise amount to bestowing title of nobility, the presidential cabinet of advisors and other appointees are subject to quite specific laws to stave off conflicts of interest and ulterior motives.
Aside from the other potential baggage that the presumptive Secretary of State, Top Diplomat, the head of a petroleum concern and decorated with Russia’s Order of Friendship—a high civilian honour, the appointee will also come into the office with stocks in his own company worth a quarter of a billion dollars.  Because of regulations in place (some might argue that the incumbent Secretary of State was given a pass since he receives ketchup royalties through his wife of a nickel every time so one uses it) the appointee will have to resign from the company and he will have to divest himself of all those pesky, burdensome ties to his former career tax free. We here at PfRC are not here to question anyone’s civic-mindedness and view public service as a noble calling which could well benefit from an infusion of experience from the private sector (no matter how corporate welfare might have supported his rise in the industry) but it seems to me that having several hundred million or billions even exempt from taxation would be motivation enough to take a turn in serving the public and one would not even bother invoking anything else.

retail therapy

Though I’ve always had an appreciation for the story behind the naming convention of IKEA furnishings—giving sobriquets rather than model numbers because that’s how the founder’s brain associated things, I am finding this new advertising campaign to be pretty funny and a nice complimentary look at the struggles we have sometimes with the accessories that we feel obligated to buy and assemble—despite the fact that we’re in sort of an admitted post-consumer, peak-curtains state. In addition to the cabinet or couch’s proper name, each item in their special-edition catalogue is given a description gleaned from the most common familial or relationship advice sought in Sweden. This tongue and cheek treatment comes to us via Bored Panda, which features some of the furniture giant’s other recent creative projects, including instruction manuals that turn the potentially frustrating and argument-inducing experience of putting together a HEMNES daybed into an act of foreplay.