dallas, patrie du dollar du pétrol

I knew that the long-running 1978 US prime-time soap opera with its spinoffs that followed the feuding of the oil tycoons the Ewings with its cliffhangers and long story-arcs enjoyed more than a cult following in Germany but did not realise that the theme tune had been modified for francophone television markets to include expository lyrics. Continuing with the second verse and refrain:

Dallas, tu ne connais pas la pitié
Dallas, le revolver est ton idole
Dallas, tut e raccroches à ton passé

Find all the lyrics and translation plus various performances at Boing Boing at the link above.

matrix

We’re familiar with Plato’s Allegory of the Cave but our thanks to Fancy Notions for referring us to this 1973 animated short illustrated by Dick Oden and narrated by Orson Welles that we had not encountered beforehand. The dialogue of Socrates and his interlocutor, portrayed as Plato’s brother Glaucon, that puts forth this archetypal thought-experiment contrasts the power of education and enlightenment and wilful ignorance and how shadows can limn our reality.

k-briq

A Edinburgh firm called Kenoteq in collaboration with the city’s university is taking on the dirty business of construction by reclaiming materials that would otherwise end up in landfills and reconstituting the building blocks (see previously) without firing them in a kiln—making the process even more sustainable and environmentally friendly. Moreover the basic units can be created in situ from the salvaged material—saving on pollution caused by transportation.


 

bottle episode

Via friend of the blog, Everlasting Blört, we are introduced to a range of fantasy maps in the form of comics cartography in a series of cityscapes, headquarters and hideouts that includes one of the more intriguingly maniacal super villains in Brainiac, Superman’s arch nemesis. An extraterrestrial cyborg (a technopathic probe), Brainiac is responsible for the destruction of Krypton but also saved its capital city by miniaturising the buildings and inhabitants (blissfully unawares) as part of scheme to amass a collection of metropolises and repopulate his home world with subjects to rule over.

roll for perception

Founded a decade prior and six years after the establishment of role playing games as popular platform with Dungeons & Dragons, Austin-based Steve Jackson Games saw success with several genre-based games of strategy with dice, cards and table tops games as well as popularising the idea of creating and decorating miniature models of the enemies and playable characters became the subject of a sting operation culminating in a raid and seizure on this day in 1990 by the US Secret Service.
The impetus for monitoring and investigation was based on a rather spurious, tenuous concern that a proprietary document on how 911 emergency numbers (see previously) operated shared on a BBS (bulletin board system) in Chicago subsequently appeared on one in Texas for whom an SJG employee was webmaster (yell for the SysOp). The dragnet warrant consisted of nothing but over-reach and compounded three company computers along with over three hundred floppy disks, including the master programme for the firm’s computer version of its most popular game due to be released shortly but delayed in a fashion that crippled their business. Steve Jackson Games took the Secret Service to court and successfully sued them to recuperate some of their financial losses and encourage the agency to not be causal and sloppy about their justification. This suit and the Secret Services failure to amend their ways in a string of similar but unrelated operations (Operation Sundevil, a crackdown on perceived illegal hacking activities) during the same year that reflected the government’s learning curve when it came to technology were the catalyst for the establishment of the Electronic Frontier Foundation, an international digital rights group that champions internet civil liberties.

intaglio

In the a tradition parallel to trap streets (see previously here and here) but with more delightful consequences, we discover that Swiss map-markers faced with the potentially tedious task of reproducing the country’s varied topology are not above, like the marginalia of a medieval scribe, of seeking a bit of relief by the occasional hidden doodle in a mountain face—those isometric lines indicating relief, the angle and the orientation of the slope (and in no way snuck into a guide for climbers mind you), being called hachures (Schraffen oder Bergstriche). See more examples at the link above from Amusing Planet.

herd immunity

After reading this thoughtful essay and reflection by Guardian correspondent Gaby Hinsliff about the Derbyshire village of Eyam during the outbreak of the bubonic plague in the winter of 1664 and its singular self-sacrificing commitment to hold their ground and not spread the contagion until it had extinguished, exhausted itself and how this account begged the question whether any of us has the charity of isolation and deferment any more corresponded in a sense with the more contemporary act of contrition in the village of Tyneham in south Dorset, offered up to the Ministry of Defence as a testing-range as vital to the war effort.
The last victim of the plague of Eyam, a farm hand named Abraham Morten expired on 1 November 1666, the infection having run its course and the last resident of the some two hundred displaced—what they believed then to be a temporary measure, left Tyneham after receiving evacuation orders shortly before Christmas 1943, penned a poignant note to the church door for the troops in training—which has been respected:

Please treat the church and houses with care; we have given up our homes where many of us lived for generations to help win the war to keep men free. We shall return one day and thank you for treating the village kindly.

As Eyam endured the loss of many of its residents, the military requisition of Tyneham became a permanent one and the villagers never returned to their homes, given over to target practise, though the church was spared. Like the author, even for the tremolo heroism that doesn’t demand of us to rise to the occasion, whether we’ll see not kindnesses and succour of the immediate variety but rather the willingness to overcome the inertia of our own plans and priorities in this catastrophe or the next to accept inconvenience, cancellations and dashed arrangements to quietly keep to ourselves in the name protecting others and never know the value of what we’ve done. When the time comes will we be the vicar that convinces his parishioners (whom understood being contagious even if the vector was not known) to not flee the village in a panic or sheriffs and squires (free riders think the herd is other people’s problems) who bolted at the first sign of trouble?  Conversely, would we give up hearth and home for the greater good even if those goals were in a sense indirect and abstract?

tillökningsdagen

Rather than share the turmoil experienced by other parts of Europe in terms of lost weeks when converting from the Julian to the Gregorian calendar, in 1699, the government opted to gradually transition to it over a planned four decades, skipping leap days and eventually sychronising the dates.
Due to complications of the Great Northern War with Peter I of Russia, however, this business of calendar reform couldn’t be promulgated properly across Sweden and only the twenty-ninth of February of 1700 was omitted. By 1712, realizing that the provisional calendar was more trouble than it was worth and the country was not only no closer towards alignment with the Gregorian calendar and was moreover a day behind the rest of the world still using the Julian date, Charles XII decreed that Sweden would add that missing day back and at least be synchronous with Orthodox and Protestant Europe, hence the unique 30th of February of that year.