countermand

Lest we forget, our friendly anti-terrorism office sent out a message recently that August is Anti-Terrorism Awareness month and we are admonished to be ever-vigilant and that it was also a perfect occasion to review and renew annual mandatory training requirements.

August, additionally, is Cataract, Psoriasis, and Spinal Muscular Atrophy Awareness and Audio, Goat Cheese and Panini Appreciation (according to one’s communion, I guess) Month. What inspired collusion results in such a horrendous and random patronage? The terror bit is especially disconcerting, I think, because I guess the message is not such a subtle reminder that had we always remained ever on guard, suspect and omnipresent, the events following in September may never have happened. Such a sentiment seems rather sorry and insulting, considering all the theatre and duplicity that’s imposed unchecked but very easily and beyond reproach justified and indoctrinated in all our everyday activities. Is it a resilient or circumspect thing to accept and cower to a thousand small tactics affecting freedoms of movement and one’s privacy that certainly are far-removed from peace and reconciliation—or even from triangulation and appreciation of the broader connections? Reminders of the patent and obvious are only cues, become ornamental as the rest of the theatre syndicate, even if the time of the year has been appropriated too to recall or foreshadow things to come.

nickled and dimed or be gone dull care

Summer recesses and vacation opportunities, depending on the culture of course, I think have always muted financial developments. It is, however, rather eerily quiet right now, and not maybe the driving forces, rather than those that have to deal with the consequences, are on holiday. Still, underlying conditions have not improved or set in the right direction and plans are going unattended without even follow-on debate or discussion. Perhaps less meddling is called for in order to separate the real from the virtual market, but still America is without a budget with an economy buoyed momentarily by turbulence and expecting yet another round of so called quantitative easing and the bargaining and coping of an election that may see drastic cuts to the social safety net, and Greece is primed to renegotiate its financial aide and stake its membership in the eurozone on the good graces of its neighbours.
Toil and trouble never take a holiday and I wonder if the hiatus from the attention and worry from the usual hyperbolic and gloomy headlines and analysis is to purpose: the prophecies of doom are inuring, lulling and desensitizing and can be by such cycles suspended or overcome before they cry Wolf. The driving forces probably need the support of a labour and spending pool prone to anticipate such drama, because I suspect that a dramatic crisis is not deferred otherwise, creeping and leisurely at a vacationer's pace and not with the expected and wanted clarity of disaster.

campus martius or thunderbirds are go

The successful landing of the Martian rover, Curiosity, is an outstandingly impressive accomplishment in itself, but the speculation and wonder to follow are to boast, I think, even bigger triumphs of the imagination and engineering. Despite all the creative practice that writers of fantasy and science-fiction have delivered over the decades, a wonderful range and vocabulary to describe what alien life might be like, the universe is still not granting to humans the license to be prepared or even to not overlook, not recognize it when it is there. It would be equally novel and significant, surely too, if there was no evidence of life, past or present.

 A full complement of sensors and gauges is there to divine for water and peer closely into the soil, after our own biases, and this array of equipment represents the best that technology can produce and ought to certainly find some trace and something unexpected. Not to discount the capacity for imagination and resourceful, but we’ve really nothing of precedent to compare this to—European explorers, perhaps, mistaking the Americas for the coasts of India or dinosaur fossils for dragons, other personifications and prejudices, and it’s hard to hold the human mind to any standard and disabuse anticipations. There may be no shadow or pale in evidence, a footprint or channel, visible, sequences and chemistries may not happen in human-sized time, and it could be a dreamy, escaping contagion, possessing or inspired, that do resemble the supremely unaccountable and unexplainable lunacies that are described in myth and lore and their modern incantations of magical-thinking or science-fiction, like the Colour Out of Space (DE) or the Andromeda Strain (DE). I also wonder about how scientific systems of classification might be re-enforced or upset: would a genus or family be a coherent and valid idea elsewhere? Would like kinds necessarily be present and identifiable, or only individuals or colonies? What would that do for our sense of order and predictability and want to catalogue and name things? Come what may, this mission promises discovery and may show that curiosity is insatiate.

citius, altius, fortius

Here is a collection of icons or pictograms designed for the different venues of the 1968 summer competition. This set of symbols made for the host Ciudad de México established an international standard that’s prevaded all sorts of gatherings, pointing the way and demarcating usage. I wonder if, given an expansive palette and canvas and absent the potential babel of diplomacy, language would have gone retrograde with such expressions and signs and would have invented or re-purposed them even if the need was not there. Most platforms, real and virtual, have liberal margins and encoding and masking is not necessary but logos are still invented and postal and area codes are as much identifiers as the localities that they stand for. The capacity for meaning to remain recognizable and immediately intelligible while curling in on itself, I think, is a hallmark of good and enduring design.