carriage-and-four

Gentle readers, I could not even begin to reconstruct the daisy-chain of thoughts that made me think of the tale of Johnny Fedora and Alice Blue-Bonnet, a short animated musical from 1946 produced by Disney animators, but suddenly the lilting and wistful tune was in my head.

The vignette tells of two fancy hats that fall in love in a department store display case, who are sold separately to two different human owners who do not do much to foster their courtship and rather dash it. The fedora's owner eventually tosses Johnny out as old and tattered, but when all seems lost, a coach driver saves Johnny from the dust-bin and paring out two holes along the brim for ears and outfits his horse. The snazzy happy ending happens when a despondent Johnny realises that the nag trotting beside him is proudly wearing Alice. I don't know where exactly the memory came from but it brought a smile to my face the other day and was happy to find that others recall this too.

jai alai

The European Union and Brazil will sink a submarine fibre-optic cable beneath the waters of the Atlantic to link Portugal and Latin America directly and provide a relief artery for more of the world's population to avoid using American infrastructure for communications.

There are manifold benefits behind this project, which is an upgrade on an existing connection now only able to rely calls from land-lines (though one ought to wonder about the growing strain on band-width and the dozens of tenant advertisers and background services that pounce on with every move, putting exponential demands for speed with malingers plus an array of possibilities of what to do next and how an image is gainsays far more than a thousand words) with cost-savings and added security. Fibre-optics, though far from impervious, are much harder to tap at the source, some hundreds of metres under the sea and to focus in on due to the lack of an electromagnet signature, and I suppose it creates a secondary industry of intermediaries and mercenaries to protect and attack the newly expected integrity of the internet. That's a strange thing to ponder too: when the internet was just simply considered a lawless and enter-at-ones-own-risk place, I think people were more willing to accept trespasses as sublimating things, evaporating and only with mostly fleeting and contained repercussions, though party to any petty-thief and highway-man, rather than a sly and voracious monitoring in telescoping hopes of tilling something incriminating. I hope these efforts at creating an alternative are not immediately contaminated, either by espionage or the peddling of some false sense of security that can never exist in an open and free internet.

three is a magic number

The fantastically thoughtful aggregate of boot-strapping and interesting things, Brain-Pickings, shares a new collection of self-improvement reflections and exercises from Martin Seligman, the founder of positive psychology in the States—though popular in Europe for years, that seem to certainly fulfill their promises of more joy and less angst.

Though the notion of amending ones gratitude is certainly important and could be nothing but therapeutic—mutually, I am not sure how I personally feel about thanking someone long after the fact, since one ought to be, if anything, gracious, and I know—according to the prescription, at least, some people might not take too well to a confrontation with gratitude. Nonetheless, it is something to think on, even if one does not carry out the rehearsal fully. Seligelman suggests writing a truly heart-felt speech to deliver in person, but I suppose the greatest impetus comes too late, like only socializing with a co-worker for his retirement or farewell celebration. Another ritual, however, appealed very much to me: I have morning routines but not so much a nightly one but I will certainly try to incorporate Seligman's thrice-blessed days along with the news and a pair of posts. One ought to try to recall at the end of the day (and document) three things that went right during the course of the day and acknowledge why, despite or because. No one ought to have to grasp for citations, but it could be as simple as “I heard a snatch of Me and Julio down by the School Yard,” and it was because the Universe knew I needed that tune to carry in my head.

the commons

Revolutions have shifted from seasons and colours it seems towards something more in situ and the world is receiving a lesson, no less, in foreign terms for square or plaza where the protests are taking place and public politics are fomenting.
In recent memory, before the press was allowed to name and tidily adjudge such things, there was Tiananmen Square (天安門廣場, named for the Gate of Heavenly Peace which separates the area from the Forbidden City) in Beijing in 1989. Not as if everything was quiet, peaceable or simmering in the meantime, there was Tarhir Square in Cairo (Mīdān at-Taḥrīr, Liberation Place) in 2011. In 2013 and on-going is Taksim (meaning division or distribution from an Ottoman era reservoir originally on this site where the plumbing of the city was managed) Meydanı in Istanbul whose Gezi Park has become a symbol for government oppression and autocracy. Presently, the Maidan Nezalezhnosti (Майдан Незалежності, Independence) in Kiev has seen its square component of its name become shorthand for public uprising itself—the Euromaidan (Євромайдан) demonstrations seeking to realign Ukraine with Western Europe. Of course, there were countless rallies, marches, movements and occupations before they could be widely reported to the outside and degrees in coordination and spontaneity, and myriad in between. Overthrows and positive reform do not end with these pivotal moments, and possibly a public more educated and connected can appreciate the difficulty in managing the aftermath and transition.

verso-recto

The unique and enigmatic Voynich Manuscript, a six century old pharmacopoeia, which supposedly only returned into the world's stacks after its purchase by a Polish antiquarian in 1912 when the papal college in Rome was forced to auction off some of its collection, may have at least been demonstrated as something other than a hoax, according to one British researcher.

The text still defies deciphering and the abugidas are beyond our compre- hension—even with the aid of bizarre illustrations, but the linguist may have puzzled out ten proper names for plants—apparently as recipes for herbal-cures. Theories abound about what the book could be about, from an encrypted treatise of medicine with secret cures transmitted from antiquity, an undiscovered language to a phonetic rendering of by a European scholar of some Asian text—like the transliteration of Mandarin into pinyin and the Latin alphabet or the addition of invented lower-case letters and punctuation for Ancient Greek texts, which originally had neither, by scholars and copyists—with shorthand and ligatures, that certainly would have appeared inscrutable to readers on either extreme of these aids for reading.  One can browse or download the scanned manuscript from the holdings at Yale, where the book resides.

cosine or god bless you, mister vonnegut

Never discounting the classic novels Kurt Vonnegut Jr. gave the world with Galapagos, Slaughterhouse Five, Mother Night and a dozen more, one of the story-teller's simple gifts, long overlooked, may have been in the form of an anthropology thesis—rejected at the time for appearing too unsophisticated, which theorized every arch-of-story, all archetypes, can be represented in eight shapes. Luckily, Mr. Vonnegut later revisited his “man-in-the-hole” and other hypotheses and his lectures and conjectures have caught the interest of others, like the brilliant graphic artist Maya Eilam, who presents these ideas as a beautiful infographic.

devolution or shelbyville-adjacent

The suggestion of one of Silicon Valley's resident tycoons that California governance has become untenable and the state ought to be splintered into six separate republics has picked up some momentum for the populace too impatient for the great quake and letting Mother Earth sort it all out.

Maybe there is some truth to the claim that management is growing impossible and that a unified California is too unwieldy to be run under the former model. The proposed breakup, given enough petitioners to force a referendum on the matter, however, includes a state of Silicon Valley carved out of the adjacent state of Central California which would create the wealthiest enclave in America next to one of the poorest regions. Segregation does not seem to be solution for creating a functional government—jettisoning territories that are of different political persuasions or in different tax brackets, especially when the middle-class is burdened with actually paying into state and federal coffers while the corporations are typically the scoff-laws. Though for very different reasons, this plan reminds me of the upcoming decision of Scotland to leave the United Kingdom and join to European Union as an independent member. What do you think? Is small-time session the answer?

synchronicity

Via the peripatetic Kottke, purveyor of fine hypertext products, cites some stunning pairings of historic events that took place on roughly the same date but to grapple with this coincidence presents some real cognitive dissonance. The growing indices solicited on Reddit point out, for instance:

1888: Nintendo was founded as a playing-card company, Jack the Ripper was active in London, the cornerstone was laid for the Washington Monument and van Gogh painted Starry Night

1971: Astronauts drove a rover on the Moon and Switzerland attained universal suffrage

1977: The last execution in France via guillotine and the premiere of the Star Wars franchise

There are plenty of other jarring, curious moments of history overlapping—like the Monguls fought on two fronts simultaneous: the Crusaders in the Middle East and the Samurai clans in the Far East, woolly mammoths still existed during the time that the Ancient Egyptians were building the earliest pyramids, or the sandwich and the sushi-roll were invented approximately the same time separately by two noble men, one English and the other Japanese, both with a love for gaming and could not be bothered to devote two hands to their food. What other historical worm-holes can you think of? You'll earn a Time Tunnel badge if you can come up with a good one.