try the grey stuff - it's delicious, don't believe me, ask the dishes

Best thing I’ve seen in a few days.

“Wear A Mask” to “Be Our Guest”

Brilliant... pic.twitter.com/qGoYlLmKjA

— Rex Chapman🏇🏼 (@RexChapman) October 18, 2020

the pharmacological merits of apotropaic magic

Just as drills for a zombie apocalypse is a useful heuristic for disaster-preparedness in general, so too are models of the inevitable vampiric saturation of run-away predation verses a more managed approach a tool for understanding contagion and immunity. Deferring to science, Dracula will always best our superstitions and folk-interventions.

pilzfund

H and I wandered a bit in the woods foraging for mushrooms, and while we didn’t really encounter anything that we were reasonably certain was edible and warranted collecting and later research, we found that the forest was ripening with all sorts of fungi, including Wood’s Ear (Auricularia auricula-judae—see previously and which we forgot again was safe for consumption and is widely used in China—I just don’t know about the texture and the prospect of picking one up) that was pretty widespread along the path and some more nice examples of fly agaric (Amanita muscaria, Fliegenpilz, see above). 

A new variety that we had not encountered beforehand, however, were these colourful ones in the same family—sometimes referred to “verdigris agaric” called blue roundhead (Stropharia caerulea, der Grünblaue Träuschling)—the specific epithet caerulea being Latin for blue while for contemporary speakers it generally indicates a shade between azure and teal. Host trees are usually beeches (Buchen) and thrive in alkaline soils.

this is what happens when streams are crossed

We previously enjoyed the musical mashups The Grey Album and the Beastles (full compilations at the link below) and so appreciated making the acquaintance with the broader repertoire of cross-over classics with Kraftwerk and here with Ray Parker Jr’s Ghostbusters vs Intergalactic (see also).

international necktie day

Honoured worldwide on this day, the fashion tracing its origins back to the traditional uniforms worn by Croatian mercenaries stationed in France during the Thirty Years War (1618 – 1648) with knotted neckerchiefs (see previously), which garnered the interest of the courtiers in Paris—especially when the boy king Louis XIV donned this accessory. Worn by both men and women, this article of clothing came to be called the cravat, a compromise between the endonym Hrvati and the exonym Croates, with the lacier variety distinguished as a jabot. Traditionally the observance includes historical and art installations as well as presentations on etiquette and knotting a tie.

6x6

floating worlds: the artistic vision of Joanna Pousette-Dart 

river under earth: profiles of Russia’s indigenous Finno-Ugrian peoples 

a mountain out of a molehill: the burrowing “mole” unit (see previously) of the Martian lander Insight is completely buried 

iso 7000: international standards for symbols on equipment and peripherals—via Things Magazine  

non-rhoticity: Open Culture takes us on a retrospective tour of American accent and dialectal divides  

pearl de wisdom: allow these squirrel and opossum spiritual readings and mediations to lift one out of doom-scrolling

diglossia

(\_/) 
( •_•)  
/ >🎩 

 

Copy, cut and paste but change what the bunny is holding—via.

embargo

On this day in 1973, OPEC (then OAPEC, the Organisation of Arab Petroleum Exporting Countries despite Venezuela being a charter member) ministers came to a consensus to use their cartel powers to influence the West’s materiel and monetary support for Israel during the Yom Kippur War when the country made incursions into Syria and Egypt, advancing towards the economic and strategically important Suez Canal (see previously) and retaliated against Canada, Japan, the Netherlands, the UK and the US by a crippling quadrupling of prices, a shock to markets that precipitated the 1973 Oil Crisis.

Geopolitical antecedents factoring into this stand-off included the decrease in American petroleum production post-war and the rise of OPEC, the decision to float world currencies—unpegging them from the price of gold—with the US unilateral withdrawal from the Bretton Woods Accord in 1971 and subsequent recession, plus the never neglected opportunity for proxy warfare between the US and its allies and the Soviet Union on a new frontier. Because the embargo, which lasted until March 1974, failed to change the West’s stance on the Arab-Israeli conflict, history judges it as ineffective despite the long-term effect it had on international economics and gradually over the ensuing decades pushed the US towards more domestic exploration of fossil fuels and towards energy independence and globally pressured reforms for financial institutions to control for inflation.  Intermediate effects included fuel rationing, a slow-down in factory-orders, a shift in preference for smaller automobiles and a pivot towards China for manufacturing.