unquote or falsehood flies and the truth comes limping after

Recalling that fake news is not just any objective fact that challenges one’s world view and how the retraction is never as wide-spread as the misreporting, we are reminded of probably the most popular bits of folksy wisdom that war-time Prime Minister Winston Churchill never said:
“A lie gets halfway around the world before the truth has a chance to get its pants on.” While the sentiment might be in the right place, there’s no evidence of Churchill having ever uttered the like and he was definitely not the first to whom this phrase or variation was attributed—heroes and luminaries of days past credited with authorship of this quip from Mark Twain, to Thomas Jefferson, to a fortune cookie proverb, to Jonathan Swift. I think indulging in this sort of generational modishness is akin to using props and publicity stunts to forward one’s agenda, and besides there are plenty of very fine things that public figures did without a doubt say.  Its origins, so far as anyone can tell, are rooted in a 1787 homily by Rector Thomas Francklin: “Falsehood will fly, as it were, on the wings of the wind, and carry its tales to every corner of the Earth; whilst truth lags behind; her steps, though sure, are slow and solemn, and she has neither vigour nor activity enough to pursue and overtake her enemy.”

vexing vexillogy or false-flag

Amid reports that Texas law-makers have introduced legislation that would enable them to impose fines on fellow office-holders for misrepresenting the Texas flag with the emoji for the Ecuadorian one (presently, states and other subnational regions* do not have their own emojis) and that Dear Leader’s supporters were pricelessly duped into waving flags with the Russian tri-colours at a conservative political summit before he addressed the audience (they were confiscated by ushers), the vice-president unfurled the banner of Nicaragua to show America’s commitment to Israel.
Granted the two flags do look somewhat alike on a tiny screen and we all make mistakes, but perhaps people should avoid shorthand and symbolism and particular forums if it’s only going to cause more and more political gaffs.

*Contentiously, Danish Greenland, Norwegian Svalbard and Jan Mayen, Caribbean Netherlands, Hong Kong, Macao, Spanish Ceuta and Melilla, French Mayotte, the US Virgin Islands, the Falklands, Gibraltar, Tristan da Cunha and the Channel Islands have their own flags, with perhaps more on the way.

port authority

Atlas Obscura has an intriguing feature on passport collector and expert Tom Topol, whose research and curation run through the entire history of border controls from the seventeenth century up until modern times with US re-entry permits issued in response to one of Dear Leader’s executive orders. The bureaucratic cul-de-sac that the article uses to introduce Topol’s collection is a set of six passport (not pictured) from defunct countries that present an interesting narrative of these former regimes and the travel documents’ bearers.

mazel tov cocktail or then they came for the trade unionists, and i did not speak out…

Law-makers in the US state of Arizona, with precedent and believing rabble-rousers are paying others to incite a riot, affirm civil forfeiture for organisers and participants in protests with the potential for violence and destruction.
The consequence of this chilling bit of legislation being that the state or opposition can requisition provocateurs to make the ruling enforceable, even when proceedings are peaceful. What do you think? The new laws conflate organising a protest with the crime of racketeering—that is offering a service, unbidden, to solve a problem that doesn’t exist or is created by the racketeers, like extortion for a protection scheme. It sounds to me like these senators are in violation of their own statute. A broken window or someone temporarily denied the egress that they signed up for could be cause for seizing the assets from all partakers for dissuading and significantly curtailing anyone’s willingness to act up or stick their necks out for any cause.

stokoe notation

With a vocabulary of over two thousand immediately memorable signs, a visit to actor and American sign language consultant Robert DeMayo (via Bored Panda) is sure to teach and boost retention, imparting a bit of knowledge that’s practical in itself but can also give one a fresh perspective and a new way of communicating.

milliarium aureum

Though far from pardoning all the hardships that the global fast-food franchise has brought on the neighbours that it’s saturated, we did enjoying hearing of how one restaurant incorporated some ancient ruins into its dining experience, conserving a bit of an archaeological excavation in the process.
The parent company invested an additional three hundred thousand euro to ensure that a stretch of Roman road was properly preserved and protected that was discovered during ground-breaking back in 2014, and now is on view thanks to a transparent floor in the restaurant. This compromise reminds me of the shopping mall in Mainz that’s host to a subterranean first century sanctuary of the goddess Isis and the Cybele discovered in 1999 when the mall’s proprietors were looking to expand underground parking.

victory garden

Via Nag on the Lake, we discover a collaboration between a Swedish furniture and lifestyle magnate and SPACE10 has resulted in an open-source, free to replicate pavilion called the Grow Room for planting and raising one’s own sustainable produce, even in an urban setting. Given the motivation and basic carpentry skills, anyone could set-up their own personal farm with some seed, soil, plywood and a jigsaw.

privileged witness or over the hill

Nuancing the anthropic problem—that the Cosmos seems custom-tuned for nurturing the development of sentient life as we know it and if any universal constant were off by the slightest amount, there would be no stars in the sky nor carbon from the furnaces of the suns—Geoff Manaugh posits the truly profound scenario that beings living at this stage of the Universe’s development might be among the last that could understand the nature and the history of it.
Fast-forward to a race coming into existence billions of years in the future, and their skies will still be peppered with stars but only those of their parent galaxy, the accelerating force behind the expanding Cosmos having pushed galaxies so far distant that they lie below the fold and even the most powerful telescopes could not detect their estranged neighbours. And while coming of age in a much smaller, ahistoric and constant Cosmos—horizons only as far as one’s own galaxy and not inconceivable huge and ancient—seems bleak and desolate and the invitation for myth-making, it’s also somehow comforting and reassuring. As much as I think we should take pride in what we’ve learned about cosmology and are capable of producing models that reveal much of how physics works on all scales, our assumptions may be wrong, ill-informed because we too came of age at a time of historical disadvantage—too far separated or too closely embedded to take in a comprehensive view.