santa’s little helpers

Writing for The Daily Beast, columnist Sally Kahn reminds us how big warehouse distributors exploit workers, especially those brought on to take up the holiday slack, with a telling decision upheld in the courts.
Though happily in Germany, these elves can go on strike—and over lesser injunctions—for America’s sweat-shops there seems to be little hope, and no great change of heart for these grinches seems forthcoming. This stint is not an insignificant one, not paying workers for the time at the end of each shift they spend being subjected to mandatory screenings and searches to make sure that they are pilfering any merchandise, especially considering that this same company will be awarded (for its tracking and logistics expertise) government security contracts and help maintain that list of who’s been naughty and who’s been nice.

load of guac

The avocado is not only, like the tomato, a fruit and not a vegetable also known—apparently—as the crocodile pear, it is also the cultivar of an evolutionary anachronism. The avocado, like cherries or berries to lesser creatures, developed as a to spread its over-sized seed by way of mega-fauna, such as giant sloths loping about on the pampas of South America, which are long-since extinct. Fortunately, the humans that displaced the intended distribution system are still around for tending.

wmf or brøderbund

Via Pre-Surfer comes a fine and heart-felt tribute from The Atlantic for the quirky galleries of clipart that came bundled in software suites, which are effectively being euthanised as one of main libraries of illustrative materials is being discontinued. Though better alternatives can be summoned-up with increasingly less effort, there is something a touch nostalgic to making do with a limited number of choices and the stock images that graced business presentations and school projects until just recently. I suspect that the genre might be perpetuated elsewhere, however, as linotype, stencil and other techniques are still used and appreciated. Fittingly, the eulogy is delivered in the media itself.

back-lot or quadratura

Berlin’s film museum, the Deutsche Kinemathek, is celebrating the work of set-builder and stage-crafter Sir Ken Adam, who conceived some of the most memorable, iconic and colossal cinematic backdrops of the past fifty years.  Adam’s vision of the White House War Room for the Stanley Kubrick classic Dr. Strangelove or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb even had the newly-elected real-life, Hollywood president convinced that was the command-and-control centre he’d inherit when he took office. Adam created the atmosphere of epics like Ben-Hur, several James Bond films and other cult movies.  Quadratura is an Italian term used to describe the technique that applied perspective and foreshadowing to flat surfaces to create the illusion of depth and space. 

domesticated ungulate or nectar of the gods

Though already rejected and ridiculed as coming straight from the teat of Frankenstein’s monster, a major soda conglomeration has decided to venture unabashed into one relatively untapped niche of the dairy market with a new and improved milk-like tonic. As if the non-browning apple was not bad enough, this new beverage is supposedly more healthy and nutritious than plain, old no-name milk. Despite initial public revulsion, I am certain that this concoction will be snuck into the food-supply surreptitious through the soda’s flagship distributors, fast-food franchises that pump out brand identification and loyalty. What an unholy alliance to scratch out a bit of profit from an industry that while not unsullied universally with growth-hormones and battery-farming remains wholesome in some places.
Interestingly, and mostly without notice, one of America’s (as the chief producer of these enhanced foodstuffs) geographically closest trading partners, which produces its own classic version of the above-mentioned soda incidentally, Mexico, has quietly repelled any overtures from US agri-business to sell crops or plant seeds on its soil. Though certainly not alone in worrying about the future impact of such experiments, this uncertainty is not the primary reason for Mexico’s distaste and it is rather out of a sense of reverence that such imports are blockaded. Like India’s sacred cow—who’s resisting advances but sadly under great pressure to assimilate, Mexico has an ingrained tradition of worshipful respect for their sustaining staple, maize, and consider it sacrilege to presume to improve upon Mother Nature.

small arms

A tragic break with tradition happened last year when for the first and only time in living-memory, possibly for the first time ever, police in Reykjavik were forced to shoot and kill a criminal after being fired upon themselves. Though the act of self-defense on the part of the officers was justifiable, an apology was subsequently issued to the family of the fugitive shooter. In a nation where weapons-ownership is relatively high so is mutual respect for human life, and I pray that is not just an aberration and that the same sense of peace can be fostered elsewhere. I think in general, though, that their guns ought to be taken away since we’re mostly capable of only treating them as play-things.

chronotype

Graphic artist Vahram Muratyan exposes the tyranny of our sense of time and timing through the media of creative illustrations. A lot of the pressures and abstractions are artificial constructs and symptomatic of other ills, but it is—as the interview with the author suggests, also emblematic of the blessing and curse of being human with the capacity to imagine how invisible forces are manifested. These visualisations are delightful and I think make good likenesses of our patterns that are anything other than circadian.

glücksbringer oder ganz happy

It always used to strike me as strange that one word in German, Glück, signified both luck and happiness—but somehow satisfying, comforting since the association with fortune, an unexpected windfall, is coloured as positively as they effort to create good cheer—until realising that English had a similar construction and derivation.

The state of being happy also harks back to a chance occurrence in the parent terms happenstance and mayhap, though these words are usually reduced to just something happening in the neutral sense, and English has borrowed a lot of different ways to convey fate, luck or fortune, as well as the more facetious sense of wishing lotsa luck. It turns out the French way of expressing the same feeling, heureux, covering both the portentous having derived from the Latin word for art of augury and the exalted, forms this zeugma. The ultimate source of this divining and the lucky omens themselves, however, are both unknown.  I wonder if in other languages the same connections hold.