five-by-five

canine confessions: Ze Frank presents Sad Dog Diary

hootenanny: big in Japan, owl bars are coming to London

a pox upon thee: gerbils should get the blame for spreading the plague

phonemic handshape: a video on how some of the latest slang and jargon is signed

monogrammed: dozens of vintage corporate emblems, mostly logographic to peruse

cross-promotion or courier-new

After learning about some clever entrepreneurs’ plan to partner an open all hours chain of diners with parcel delivery services for the sake of more convenient pick-up and drop-off—and just after hearing of a single US hotline number to order anything from pizza to a horse-drawn carriage ride around Fantasy Island, I must say, while clever and enterprising—and possibly well-connected, I don’t know about this middle-man economic model. Sim salabim!

People should not be discouraged from being resourceful and even innovate, and if for instance, car-sharing schemes, facilitated logistically, result in reduced pollution and profit all involved, then that seems like a very good thing. Hoteliers and taxi drivers ought not to have an industry monopoly, and there’s certainly the old way of connecting and sharing that I think will resist being compartmentalized by any middle-man, however ambitious and deemed indispensable, but there is too a certain level of expertise and the safe-guards of bureaucracy and that’s not acquired overnight nor by mere association. Besides, being a concierge, not even a courier, is I think not a career that one aspires to.

pious fiction or brother's keeper

This thoughtful essay from Æon magazine, which hangs the chief friction between faith and science on the transition of God from being a dissembler and a Noble-Liar for our own good to one incapable of deception, reminded me very much of a thin but engrossing book by Portuguese writer José Saramago called Cain that I read recently. Unflinching to the last, the author tries to answer that same paradoxical quandary that’s plagued philosophers and theologians (a subset of theodicy) since the beginning: why did a perfect and all-powerful God need to mislead or test his creations?  Cain, an ostensible victim of one of those trials (others including the expulsion of his parents from Eden, Sodom and Gomorrah, Job’s suffering, Noah’s deluge, etc., etc.) condemned to wander the Earth for the act of killing his brother—which arguably was not unprovoked, confronts God directly over this and other injustices perpetrated seemingly by a petty deity who was far from omnipotent, and doesn’t relent.
Neither side can afford to give in, nor really—kind of tenderly, is either willing to accept the argument that that business was all Old Testament or that God’s ways are mysterious and inscrutable, and the standoff echoes through the ages. In seeking to reconcile these founding inconsistencies, God, who was and is ever present, was made a bit mute and aloof and it was argued that was ever the case. In hardly something to pin one’s faith to but illustrative, Descartes posits that the feeling of being forsaken or deceived is akin to one suffering from dropsy (funky cold œdema), where one is retaining too much water but is nonetheless constantly thirsty. Our faculties are generally configured to drink when parched and one person’s unfortunate condition isn’t universal, invoking Ockham. A little strangely, Descartes also supposes that in the heavenly-sphere that God were to erase a star but still perpetuate the sign of it, it’s similarly a self-delusion that we ought not to project—though looking to the skies, we are looking to the past, which is a quandary that the philosopher could not have known, scientifically at least. What do you think? Has God stepped back after setting things in motion (as the re-discovered writings of the Greek classics that led to the Renaissance and Enlightenment revealed), have we gone deaf or is it something else that the troubled old folks have failed to question? I’d like an answer—and would even wrestle an angel for one.

octopus’s garden

When I first saw this feature as the frontispiece of a rather venerable and unfailing website, I had a moment of misgivings—wondering if they had surrendered to those catch-penny walls of copy-pasta when one strays too near the lower bounds of a webpage.

You’ve seen, no doubt, those unpalatable grasping advertisement, covert, as 11 Things You Didn’t Know about the Padishah Emperor Shaddam IV or Neglecting these 24 Things will definitely result in a Ghost Dog Peeing on Your Bed, but those fears were unfounded as this gallery of unearthly plants with a message to help keep such gardens growing was certainly up to snuff and worth a look. Sorry for the unwarranted criticism.  Catchpenny is such a better term than clickbait but I don’t know if there’s a better expression for copy-pasta, which for me connotes the writhing feelers of the cult of the Flying Spaghetti Monster—a fabulous argument to invoke—because...FSM—that I think can be wholly attributed to this same exceptional site.