oconus or american empire

When on that date which “will live in infamy” that is framed as the bombing of Pearl Harbour by Japan, it was not just Hawaii that was attacked but also the US territories of Midway, Guam, Wake and the Philippines as well as the British colonial holdings of Hong Kong, Singapore and Malaya.
It was not, however, that Pearl Harbour was an inclusive way of summarising all this assault under one aegis of place, as shown in preliminary drafts of the speech that Franklin Delano Roosevelt would make to the American people and commit the country to take part in the war effort fully, but rather a calculated appeal that hedged against Americans’ aversion to involvement in foreign wars. Because the Philippines seemed too exotic and a distant outpost like Guam didn’t seem worth military entanglement, they were downgraded and went unmentioned while Hawaii was promoted in the speech to the “American island of Hawaii,” much to the slight and consternation of the people of Manila and elsewhere who had also experienced great suffering.

wpm

A research group has trained a neural network that when given a prompt for prose or a news item can extrapolate a whole, plausible sounding passage, which for all its naturalness is wholly a product of machine learning and the computational musings, however, convincing are divorced from reality.
Recognising the potential for propagandise the automation of literature and the press (here’s a less scary example), the group is for now withholding releasing their findings to the public, until such time as we are better equipped to use such abilities in positive ways and not suffer under the abuse of them but I wonder if we’ll ever truly be prepared and sufficiently girded against our own copyediting and desire for a quick turn-over reflected back at us far faster than we could churn it out. Read more at the link up top.

10 us code § 2808

Despite some probably ill-advised concessions to Trump’s monument to white supremacy that secured continuation of government operations—sparing hundreds of thousands the indignities of being played as political pawns, Trump has decided to make up for the funding short-fall by declaring the lack of a border wall (see also here and here) a national emergency, siphoning funds away from other military construction projects. The onus of proof, enumerating how this crusade constitutes an emergency and what other priorities and obligations are to be cut, lies with the administration and legal challenges could yet throw the whole enterprise into limbo and spell further delays and brinkmanship.

music for airports

Our thanks to the always engrossing and enlightening Open Culture for turning our ears to this special, time-dilated edition of Brian Eno’s electronic music improvisational session from 1978, a collaborative tone poem of meditative incidental music called Ambient 1. Establishing the genre, the artist hoped to produce something as “ignorable as it is interesting” and conducive of reflection amid all the chaos and cacophony of an international terminal. The sound installation was set up in the Marine Air concourse of the LaGuardia airport during the mid-1980s but is not currently soothing anxious passengers—at least not over the public-address system.

sua sponte

Never to be accused of being an old romantic at heart, Pope Paul VI issued on this day in 1969 the Mysterii Pascchalis, reforming the liturgical year and revising the calendar of the saints.
This motu proprio (from the Latin, at one’s own accord) represents an official decree not prompted by another or in response to current developments or findings yet still has the force of law regardless of motivation, among other things struck many figures from the Calendarium Romanum, the cycle of celebrations called the Proper of Saints—to include Saint Valentine, whose feast day coincided with the decree. Only wanting to preserve the rites that were truly of universal importance to the faith, the Pope deleted or transposed nearly fifty solemnities for all our favourites, mostly due to redundancy or their problematic histories, including the saintly family of Maris, Martha, Abachum and Audifax, Canute of Denmark, Dorothy of Caesarea, Faustinus and Jovita, Ursula and her companions, Simeon, the Seven Sleepers and Saint Barbara.

6x6

art brut: the incredible portfolio of outsider artist (previously here, here and here) Adolf Wölfi

gamalost: Norway’s campaign to re-popularise a crumbly and aromatic cheese with reputed libidinous qualities—via Nag on the Lake

call sign: radio station logos of the Soviet Union—via Coudal Partner’s Fresh Signals

hey! wait! I’ve got a new complaint: a brief history of the heart-shaped box and how it became a Valentine’s staple

mirror, mirror: the label on this sun-screen bottle are printed backwards to be more photogenic

word vectors: advanced translators are an endorsement Ludwig Wittgenstein’s theories on language

course and wythe

One of the more viable indigenous, constructed scripts (see also here and here), the Atlas of Endangered Alphabets profiles the Mandombe system of writing, revealed to its author by a venerated Congolese religious leader in a dream, recognising the sacred serpentine turns along the familiar backdrop of a brick wall.
Inspired, glyphs were developed whose pronunciation and inflection was determined on direction and orientation and is suited for the national languages of the country, with more efforts underway to transcribe neighbouring languages into Mandombe, and is taught in parochial schools affiliated with the church that conceived it in the Republic of the Congo, the Democratic Republic of the Congo, Angola as well as in France and Belgium.

shortlisted

We enjoyed pouring over this gallery of photographs curated by Plain Magazine that have been nominated to contend for high honours in the annual Sony World Photography Awards (previously) and we were especially intrigued by the symmetry of the scene captured by Eng Chung Tong of an extraction operation in Malaysia entitled Synergy of Humanity. We were also very pleased to see the ethereal submerged choreography of Christy Lee Rogers had made the cut as well for this twelfth iteration of the competition. More to explore at the links above.