cornucopia

What sort of daily sentiments, gems of wisdom, especially shop-talk or the poetic haikus of sociopathic rage that the boss of my boss has scribbled on all too ephemeral note pads, would you like to turn into keepsakes? Crochet it on a pillow? Steotch, the New England needle-artists, has produced a vast selection of such samplers, adding a touch of kitsch and permanency to tag-lines and memes, internet doctrines and covenants not necessarily captured in tee-shirt form, from Transportation Security Administration awkwardness to LOLCats (give us this day our daily cheezburger) to Peanut Butter Jelly Time to O RLY owl to Double Rainbow.  A happy and humourous Thanksgiving to everyone... Om Nom Nom.

allons-y, alonso

A bloggeur on Tumblr has a sizable and tasteful collection of animated GIFs from great films, the bulk from modern classics by Stanley Kubrick, David Lynch, Jean Luc Godard and Tarantino under the blog If we don't, Remember Me.  Unfortuneately, I can only share a static image from the compliation, but I really admire the scences, just a few frames each, that the author choose for their subtle expressions and nice quotes.  Animated GIFs remind me of those Cracker-Jack prizes, little postage stamp sized things with varigated surfaces, that when turned askewed revealed a new picture and the illusion of movement and change.  To get that right in the limited framework of available technology, like within the parameters of a graphic file, is much more impressive than embedding flashier presentations.

beyond thunderdome

Der Spiegel, via thelocal, reports on a tip from a would-be defector that warns of a Mumbai-style terror attack on the German Reichstag to be carried out in the Spring. Since when is kicking it Bombay style a way to talk about stratagems, as if it were comparable to à la russe or Stockholm Syndrome, because as dreadfully effective and tragic as it was for the city of Mumbai, storming Parliament and running amok is on a different level. It is just tacky shorthand.

Given the calm and collected reactions of the Ministry of the Interior, taking these developments in stride, I feel confident that with this warning and insight, the public will be kept safe—though Germany’s quitting Afghanistan altogether would probably be a cheaper and more expedient way to curb terror threats. One other item about this tip that seems suspect, however, is the speed with which authorities leaked this to the press and how quickly the news filters to the public forum. Transparency and disclosure are very important and ought to be expected, but maybe this threat, source and intelligence was too quickly put up for speculation and argument, even without all the details. That the luggage bomb couriered from Windhoek to Germany turned out to be a security test, a dummy, which no one is taking credit for planting, would also make me a little wary of tipsters and possible self-fulfilling prophets of gloom. When the news broke, before it was discovered that the suitcase was a tester model, I tried to fill in the blanks, remembering that Namibia is a former German colony, but now the country is a bit upset over the bad, and misdirected, publicity. Much of the war against Iraq and the regime of Saddam Hussein was prosecuted on the testimony of exiles, some of whom were later shown to have more complicated agendas and motives, but despite purity of evidence, it was taken as such because that was what the defenders wanted to hear. The exiles were very obliging.

flying dutchman or space ghost coast-to-coast

As the BBC reports, astronomers from the Max Planck Institute in Heidelberg have discovered the first exo-planet that seems to have originated outside of the Milky Way galaxy. Researchers believed that this planet, found in orbit around an ancient star in a stellar stream, formed before its host dwarf galaxy was absorbed by our own. These wispy bands of red giants are the remnants of once independent galactic bodies. Nothing yet, as with all distant planets, can be determined about is composition, nor is there reason to believe that it would betray any kind of departure from the imagined and the expected, as if anything could be safely assumed about alien worlds--rather, it is more evidence of the abundance of stars hosting planets. It also reminds me of the Martian meteor found in the 1980s in Antarctica. Without even addressing questions of extra-planetary biogenesis and whether the imprints on the rocks surface are fossils, just the fact that material could be ejected or otherwise shrugged off of Mars and travel through space and be captured by Earth's gravity to be found later by rock-hounds at the bottom of the world, just seems amazing and almost lyrical, purposeful and mysterious all at once.

red herring

Whenever we enjoy a bottle of Portuguese wine, which is not limited to Port incidentally, I recall from my MBA training one tract about the origins of trade and economic theory: the text posited that two not so very hypothetical countries, England and Portugal, who discovered a mutually beneficial arrangement in the exchange of English fabric for Portuguese wine. This barter sounds rather simplistic but was lucid and the example's transparency allowed one to discover all the nuances as trade blossomed into more complex markets--wine-making was less labour intensive to the people of Portugal than to the people of England, natural endowments were taken into account,worth, novelty, currency exchange and so on were considered.   But, like a toy poodle or a liger, this system could not evolve organically into a situation where hedging, speculation, and unabashed gambling are the chief financial expressions of the markets.  These, I believe, could only be successful through fear and manipulation, a reverse psychology, which comes after the pride of inventing a new outlet for wagers and getting the rating agencies and one's peers to vet it, when bookies can convince investors that missing this opportunity would be a grave mistake.  It is the antithesis of the fear driving most other news and developments, of which I have certainly not been immune, the fear of inclusion, assault by an airport-screener even though it only happens to a select few or some animal hybrid-based influenza-become-raging-hypochrondria or of terrorism itself or of jonsing to keep up with the Joneses.  While preoccupied with the sour idea of exclusion, meanwhile, the book-makers are concocting the next novel and impenetrable way to perpetuate this losing game.

#blurmany or good fences

Though it is difficult to determine how long this will last and how it should be judged, the hive--the swarm has digitally captured great metropolitan swaths, presumably of the willing exhibitionists only, of Germany, inviting a virtual tour, a stakeout of neighbourhoods and destinations. I cannot say if the whole operation should be expanded or quite puzzle out the exact nature of the resistance, however, I would probably opt out myself if given a choice. Vicarious visits are never as exciting or insightful as the real thing, especially for those for whom it is possible (which is why I do not see a rush for neighbours and stalkers spying on one another and being generally nosy) and images are a strange time-stamped slice of street life, but of course, it is nice and novel at first, and by turns a little frightening and repulsing, and a good resource to see the environs of one's real estate or hotel accommodations. The enterprise has gotten untenable in Europe, with too many legal challenges, redactions and pixilations to sustain, and it seems better to err on the side of restraint or allow individuals to fill in the blanks of this mosaics, rather than institutionally force unwanted and untried attention on the public.