maison du bœuf

I don’t know if this herd of happy, drunk cows still roams the prairies of Canada, and I don’t think its experiment whose conclusions I’d care to try, but apparently cattle served red wine are not only more contented and healthy, produce higher quality beef, but also release less methane—a greenhouse gas whose contribution to climate change is nothing to sniff at.

five-by-five

pantheon: murals of Greek gods superimposed against chaotic graffiti

fourth wall: a look at the pilot of Daddy-O from 1961, a sitcom that would have broken the fourth wall

sharper image: due to popular demand, Sky Mall catalogs are returning

these kids today and their y2k: classic countdown to Armageddon

the flower of battle: a beautifully illustrated fifteenth century guide to marshal arts

backmasking and beelzebub

From the Red Scare to recovered memories (with all the cringe-worthy hysteria of satanic sacrifice, subliminal song lyrics, and the general hallmarks that typify the industry of scaring the privileged classes), Alternet presents an outline that covers in brief the eruption of successive social panics in the US. Even though some of these terrors passed in the main as quickly as they came, their formative causes that appealed to the mass imagination and insecurities on a resounding level and their knock-on effects are still lingering and primed to champion the next. These assaults are not only against science, understandably fuelled by businesses outside of public-purview whose own privilege is fail-safe, but can be rallied against reason itself. This does not seem to bode well for the world at large, who's now even more closely committed to the rage
and mania of Americans.

duktig or arts and crafts

Daily Beast features a nice chart and timeline of the Bauhaus movement.

The design school that sought to create the harmonious and practical—durable and affordable too—which rose out of the rubble and ruin of Germany after the Great War, was dismissed as degenerate and subversive but those principles of design and economy certainly did win out in the end. It’s easy to take for granted how those founding visions of simplicity and democratisation have endured and sustained our sense of style and environment, sometimes reflected imperfectly but still without distortion, but the movement is very vibrant in terms of typography and elements of presentation—and of course in the Swedish furniture giant that dominates domiciles the world around.

five horsemen or executive-decision

Slate magazine has a pretty provoking essay on the nature of our executive faculties of decision making, also known as free-will, and how technologies emerging a-pace is altering the landscape of choosing and prerogative.
In some ways, buffeted by legislated morality disguised as cautious health and safety regulations, our feelings of being in control, having a choice translated into a statement and stance, individual will seems strengthened. There is some hint of distaste, however, that that confidence is illusory, and that seed of doubt is sown in a very fecund field. Maybe when faced with a paucity of alternatives, we’d like to imagine that we’re still being deliberative in a narrow framework—where the technology has already decided for us. The article speaks of five horsemen, those galloping fields of bio-engineering, robotics, artificial intelligence, nanites and the manipulation of judgment, perception and reason (also said to embrace free-will itself), that are canting leagues—some say, of the institutions, laws and even our own ability to cognitively cope, which while not heralds of assured destruction do seem to announce an era of difficult choices and direct dialogue.