trim up the tree with christmas stuff or persistence of memory

This evening H and I had the chance to unbox a lot of the seasonal artefacts and populate the house with some Christmas cheer, and it was interesting to note, I thought, how, despite the passage of an entire, busy year we both remembered how each figure had been assigned a home, though this recall was not always immediate and was welcoming of new additions. The iron stocking holder belongs on the on top of the cabinet where the beer bottle collection has to be pushed back—carefully. Hanging ornaments on the tree is a similar affair stirring up memories with a long shelf-life. Carols playing as we arranged, assembled and hung the trappings, it is pretty remarkable how one can keep track of dozens of different creatures and their native habitats inactively. It reminds me of experiments regarding memory and being pelted with an overwhelming array of images. The objective, however, was not to be able to articulate every single impression in order and when replayed with a certain sliding admixture of pictures that were not included in the original showing, subjects young and old and with widely varying degrees of confidence in their power of recollection, could identify without fail the hundreds of images of the first exhibition from the additions.
If such could be demonstrated about successive displays, I wonder if the vintage and the spirit of the season contribute to tracking the whereabouts of a festive moose out of place. It's more of oh—I remember this guy rather than there's too much or where did we put all this before, probably the effects of the above experiment magnified. Trim up the tree with Christmas stuff, like bingle balls and whofu fluff. Season's greetings with more to follow!

window dressing

Collectors' Weekly has a pretty keen feature on the long and faceted history of the mannequin and how they reflect our sense of style. The figures advanced from a tailor or dress-maker's form, going back to ancient times, to basic racks to display garments to a growing, mechanized middle-class, to their present form—converging with dress-up dolls that came before and becoming the afternoon-idols of window-shopping they are today.
The story of their development is spiced with some interesting vignettes, like the dressing-dummies found in the tombs of pharaohs, that in an earlier career, L. Frank Baum (The Wonderful Wizard of Oz) worked in the advertizing business and was a key advocate of using life-like mannequins to sell the “romance of Merchandise and Merchandizing,” the genre of horror films that came out as they became more sophisticated and idealized, and lighter cases of agalmatophilia that teased and vexed returning war veterans. The history is augmented by a few individual collectors who are curators of these objects of fashion and make-believe.

native address system or context-clues

I had heard the term native advertising and its appeal by integrating itself—maybe a reinvention of the guerrilla-technique of piggy-backing, but I don't suppose I could articulated what it was. Mashables presented this handy infographic—framed in more traditional banner advertisements, of course—which presents the analytics fairly well.

Selective, relevant and cryptic market- eers—but nothing novel or innovative particularly, I think, mine for indications that audiences are less prone to ignore and behaviour that affirms tolerable intrusions, studying habits that lead to something beyond a selection of bundled products similar to the last on-line search or shopping-safari that one trekked but rather towards an understanding of baiting trust with something (at least glancingly) ingratiating. What do you think? I always feel scammed, and because of it twice shy, when I see something proclaiming that I might also like, only to find out its some sponsored promotion. I can understand ones spending habits being with the bailiwick of demographers but not the lag-time itself between curiosity, usually by a masquerade or appealing to vanities and phobias, and distrust and aversion, which seems pretty desperate and clawing and quite a lot of effort, no matter how infinitely small that labour can be divided and re-used, for something that remains pretty transparent and likely to be disregarded.

and they're all made out of ticky-tack and they all look just the same

Spiegel International reporters interview the former neighbour of the Fugitive at her home and from her perspective in suburban Maryland.

The former neighbour's point of view is limited it seems to staring off at two rectangles, her window facing the former Fugitive's home, where his mother still resides after her son went cosmopolitan, and the television screen, and the view that these two outlooks offer recently became blurred and recursive. I don't know if it's the fame or infamy or the disruption to routine that transformed this woman into quite a Gladys Kravits nosy neighbour type—whom I'm sure tried to warn her skeptical husband in the same fashion about the goings-on next door, or maybe she was always this way. Proximity always gives a face, voice and testimony to widely-held beliefs, but beyond any espionage or detective-work that the reclusive neighbour—to her mind, was engaged in, the article is a brilliant and absorbing look at the predominant and influential American psyche

zungenbrecher

The constructed compounds of the German language can form quite lengthy and specific epithets that sometimes come across as jargon—especially among the longest examples.

Such words can also tell a story, however, like in this animated lesson from Mental Floss and Languagehat that demonstrates how to build a grammatically valid, and for the nonce, word telling of Barbara, famous for her rhubarb pies, and her adventures with bearded barbarians at the local bar. It sort of reminds me of a tongue-twister (Zungenbrecher), like Sally-sells-sea-shells-by-the-sea-shore, which is a similar sort of creation.

three-d or camera obscura

The ever-inspired Mental Floss presents an engrossing lesson in art history, through the lens of the Portrait Project's timeline of depictions of the Western world, where there is a very noticeable shift towards realism and perspective around the year 1400 from simple two-dimensional portrayals of people and things to a jaggedly more accurate picture that acknowledges size and shadow.
While I was expecting some sort of explanation like the latter rediscovery of the forgotten lensing technique of camera obscura—a pinhole projection of an image onto a screen, tabula rasa fit for tracing that ushered in, speculatively, a revolution in painting, portrait-studio quality representation. The article goes on to account how in medieval Europe general misery with the human-condition led to a shunning of the classic artistic techniques of accuracy with their minds on the here-after, and surviving simplicity was a revolt and expressive way to remind viewers that worldly existence was something flat.
I wonder if it was the case, like in the relatively concurrent Muslim world there was a proscription against the rendering of natural things, which led to the elaboration of calligraphy and abstraction, that led to abandonment and subsequent reconditioning contemporary with the Western Renaissance.

travelling matte

More documents leaked to the press by the Fugitive reveal that US intelligence has the capability and apparently the prerogative to track the whereabouts of some five billion cellular telephones, the world's human population, per day. As the Washington Post reveals, with an array of special-programmes under names like CO-TRAVLER, the National Security Agency is able not only to intercept communications but also to plot the location of the devices and their users even when the phone is not actively sending or receiving—American reporting hinging on the fact that indiscriminate surveillance, almost apologetically those unfortunate and misguided Americans abroad, has culled some native mapping and associations—inadvertently.
Making self-reflection the biggest transgression always makes me angry about this sort of coverage, which comes at the expense of the rest of the population, as if their privacy was a trifling thing. With such a universe of star-crossed paths to reference, of course, analysts can retrace steps and build quite telling profiles (or misconstructions) through the gleaned habits and contacts of individuals. Of course, we've all too willingly outfitted ourselves and our lifestyles with these homing devices and pay a handsome ransom for the shackles of convenience, presence and awareness and such clever and useful tools were not doled out like identity papers or cattle-brands for these ends alone. It does seem odd, ironic that there is so much glee over the state-of-the-art when that's all the tidier to survey, with or without industry cooperation.