bridges and islands

To alleviate traffic congestion, a law-maker in the State of Washington is proposing lashing together some retired aircraft carriers as sort of a permanent pontoon bridge. If it materialises, it would be a keen enough idea on its own but the suggestion has caused the brilliant author at BLDGblog to launch into some really delightful, signature brainstorming. By leaps and bounds, he imagines how the ships’ hulls could become a unique business environment for all sorts of ventures and more akin to the bustling bridges of the Middle Ages and not just a way to unsnarl one’s commute.

five-by-five

trust building exercise: a retrospective look at vintage corporate board games

franking privileges: more things Maya Angelou never said in stamp form

indian blanket: mid-century map of US of wildflowers, via the Everlasting Blort

reforestation: using drones to help rebuild woodland biotopes

wedge antilles: Hungarian artist Tibor Helényi’s take on Star Wars movie posters

quintain

Among all the varied and interesting books in my parents’ library, I discovered an old jewel in this big Playboy Press volume of ribald limericks, vintage 1972. The pictured verse was really the only one I could find safe to share and the poems were organised on all sorts of different subjects and themes, sort of like a cocktail recipe guide, including a very cosmopolitan gazetteer of international cities—should the occasion call for specific and regional innuendo.
One—for which you’ll need your filthy, filthy imaginations to limn the ellipses—began, “There once was a Queen from Bruges...” …. …. …. “And the King did exclaim, ‘Mon dieu! Après moi, le déluge.’”

taking the waters or four freedoms

While visiting my parents in the state of Georgia, H and I saw Franklin D. Roosevelt’s retreat in Warm Springs, called the Little White House, though not a place for politicking per se and constructed at the beginning of FDR’s political career in 1921 when New York governor Roosevelt was stricken with polio and almost saw his prospects cut-short, whether or not the presidency a decade later was included in his aspirations. Local luminaries and physicians (possibly mistresses as well) gathered at the Little White House but politicians and dignitaries were mostly feted at either Camp David, the big White House or stately Hyde Park. FDR sought out a thermal spa treatment and the clean air of this town, building his private residence and going on the found an institute to try and cure other polio sufferers.
Of course FDR was wheel-chair bound and kept that from public-attention and appropriately, the grounds are handicapped-accessible but I thought it was quite upsetting and telling that there was a fleet of mobility-scooters available that otherwise able-bodied visitors used pretty shamelessly and rather gratuitously. The tour was pretty interesting and engaging but the experience was made even more so by a pair of strange coincidences. First, to the day, our visit fell on the seventieth anniversary of FDR’s death from a stroke suffered while sitting for his official presidential portrait in his study there, which remained unfinished—and that made the experience more poignant.
Second, I happened to be reading the brilliant alternate history novel by Phillip K. Dick set in a present (1960s) where a protracted World War II was won by the Axis Powers.
In this parallel reality, Nazi engineering has continued a pace and there are regular excursions to Venus and Mars and one character took a commercial Lufthansa flight (as we did) that took a mere three-quarters of an hour to fly from Scandinavia to San Francisco in the Pacific States of America and it took more time to collect one’s luggage at the baggage claim, but The Man in the High Castle, named after a reclusive author who’s penned a naturally contraband book that wonders how the world might have turned out if the Allies had been victorious, portrays a nasty and brutish dystopia.  The Earth has been divided from east of the Caucasus to the western seaboard of America under the control of the Empire of Japan, Europe and the East Coast under control of the Great Nazi Reich—the Mediterranean was drained for reclamation of agricultural land, the Holy Land under Italian control, and most of Africa depopulated—with lesser races enslaved or eliminated.  A nominally independent Finland, Canada and the Midwestern states offer some pockets of resistance and neutrality.
Terrible and inverted as it is, it is affecting how some of the same geopolitical prejudices and sentiments, with a few substitute words, are still common-parlance and the world is still a hostile and polarised place.
Though there was a line or two that identified the point-of-departure, the hinge-event that diverged into the present of the story, I don’t think I would have picked up on it without the visit to Warm Springs. There was a time-line of FDR on one of the displays that mentioned the assassination attempt, just months into his first term, at the hand of one Giuseppe Zangara, who missed and killed the mayor of Miami at a speech. In the novel, the assassin’s aim was truer and as a result, there was no New Deal, no economic recovery from the Great Depression that allowed America to bolster its manufacturing capacity, no Lend-Lease policy that allowed a tenaciously isolationist America to undermine the German and Japanese advance while still begging neutrality. Seeing FDR’s achievements and artefacts really made the contributions he was able to impart and his legacy even more extraordinary and made the wonder of how things might have been (and how things become the same) all the more disquieting.

deus ex machina

A Jonbar Hinge or a change-point is a literary trope that refers to seemingly inconsequential events whose influences and repercussions are greatly magnified through time-travel. This bone of speculation is introduced in the science-fiction series Legion of Time by Jack Stuart Williamson when the protagonist’s simple choice leads to two very different futures and he gets to witness both outcomes. Alien Space Bats, on the other hand, are counterfactual gremlins that are invoked as sort of a supernatural agent to bridge gaps in a plot, especially when one has painted oneself in a corner in terms of a far-fetched storyline or a spindly scientific explanation. Black holes are portals to the soul or we can mess with the time continuum, because… you know ASBs.

mullets & barry

Although a lot of convenient and flattering myth-making goes into every nation’s founding fable—and America is certainly no exception ranging from the preternatural, the chimerical to Lincoln ate here, the incarnations and the avatars of the so called Continental Colours go through an interesting evolution to arrive at the archetypal flag that’s credited to seamstress Betsy Ross.
Early banners were mostly ravaged Union Jacks set on a barry (striped) background, captured during the US war for independence, cobbled together and something like the modern flag of the state of Hawaii—however, raising these improvised standards led the British to believe that the rebels were surrendering on more than one occasion. Statesman Benjamin Franklin, whom also nominated the turkey as the national bird though the bald eagle was more favoured, suggested the Don’t Tread on Me design but was not deemed dignified enough for the ages. A standised and recognisable symbol had to be decided on. And while it is debatable whether Miss Ross’ contribution to the complete achievement which was conceived by a professional armourer was limited to making the mullets (stars—which were not very popular heraldic devices at the time) five-pointed rather than the six-pointed variety the menfolk in conference believed to be easier to stitch, not being practised in the art apparently, or whether she took further liberties with the design, the national flag did become her exclusive bailiwick, holding a virtual monopoly on its production for the first decade of the fledging republic.

sugarbakers or mostly ghostley

While I fully agree that the world would be a richer place for having a Lego diorama set of the Golden Girls, there’s another television series that I’ve always associated with it, Designing Women—known as Sugarbakers: Mann muss nicht sein auf Deutsch and wasn’t aired until 1993 and for only a short time.
Maybe the show’s on my mind as we’re going to be flying into Atlanta soon, and though the sitcom-scenes are not a foremost connection, there was an element of Southernness portrayed and discussed that was not addressed elsewhere. And though it’s not quite of the same vintage as Golden Girls, it did have a lot of talent, sharp dialogue and memorable moments, but I certainly don’t feel it’s gotten its due of nostalgia and following.
The show deserves at least a cast of minifigs for the principles and for the recurring characters, like Suzanne’s housekeeper Consuela—who was never on camera expect when Anthony Bouvier in drag pretended to be her in order to take a citizenship test and avoid deportation, Aunt Bernice (Alice Ghostley), Mark Twain (Hal Holbrook) or maybe even Raydon Simpson, the relentless auditor that went after the Sugarbaker sisters for tax-evasion after Suzanne’s personal accountant, Reggie Mac Dawson, absconded with her funds, and tried to make it up to her with a fairy-tale princess parade with circus elephants. It would be fun to be able to recreate these scenes as well.

five-by-five

torsion: lovely mesmerizing animations from Big Blue Boo

menagerie: humourous dialectic creating a medieval bestiary

reaction faces: British Library exhibits Sino-Japanese war prints

neologism: a look at some of the unique vocabulary of Indian English

which anyone could whip up on a rainy day: nice remembrance of the biographical cookbook of Alice B. Toklas