Wednesday 8 July 2015
significant digits or wholly unscientific post-script
catagories: ๐, ๐, ๐ญ, ๐งฎ, networking and blogging
Tuesday 7 July 2015
5x5
gom jabbar: The Guardian features a tribute to the Aquarian coming of Age science fiction masterpiece Dune, fifty years on and examines its legacy, via Super Punch
our castle and our keep: exquisite off-the-grid motor home converts to an enchanted castle at rest, via the enchanting Nag on the Lake
all work and no play: free to download 1998 board game based on Stanley Kubrick’s The Shining
o double-good: a look into the recent incorporation of milk as a staple food, via Neatorama
mathmagic land: dividing one by nine-hundred-ninety-nine quattuodecillion—nearly infinity—spits out the Fibonacci sequence
catagories: ⚕️, ๐, ๐ฌ, ๐️, ๐, ๐งฎ, Dune, environment, food and drink, lifestyle
taxa or nomina dubia
Harking back to a time when humour was considered both an indemnifying and heuristic tool even in academic circles, stuffy, impenetrable old Michel Foucault deferred to the classification of the animal kingdom not down Linnaean lines but rather thus, alluding to the comprehensive Jorge Luis Borges having himself been influenced by the oriental method:
- A: Those that belong to the emperor
- B: Embalmed ones
- C: Those that are trained
- D: Suckling pigs
- E: Sirens
- F: Fabulous ones
- G: Stray dogs
- H: Those that are included in this classification
- I: Those that tremble as if they are mad
- J: Innumerable ones
- K: Those finely drawn with a camel hair brush
- L: Et cetera
- M: Those who’ve just broken the flower vase
- N: Those which from a distance resemble flies
Monday 6 July 2015
5x5
szene: via the Everlasting Blort, a fine gallery of the Swiss rebellious rocker subculture of the 1950s
guano islands act: the happenstance and acquisition of the US minor outlying territories
sibyl’s leaves: the Athenian Oracle, an early nineteenth century precursor to question-and-answer websites—all you wanted to know but were afraid to ask
velvet underdogs: right proper send-up for the much-maligned medium
patrimoine mondial: though Hanseatic Hamburg, Champagne and Burgundy are getting deserved attention, UNESCO’s latest inclusions go much farther
grexit, stage left
Naturally the chorus of international observers and lenders bemoaned the Greek referendum up until the last moment after the polls closed and the ballots counted, crying that such a move to distance itself from the European Union, notably a political experiment and not an economic bloc primarily, did not behove the country and would not give them a better bargaining position. I don’t know that I would place much trust in any of the oligarchs championing one course of action over the other, since they undoubtedly have obscured agendas and some stand to benefit regardless—or in spite—of the outcome at the expense of others.
Sovereign debt was not what brought Greece to wrack and ruin, and after six years of being in arrears with economic contraction and punishing privations and in an even sorrier state—who could blame the people for vocalising one way forward when a decision was forced upon them, steering towards the sea-monster Scylla and knowing there would be sacrifice to avoid sure destruction if they got too near the whirlpool of Charybdis, like Odysseus and his crew—but rather the world-wide recession is to blame. perpetrated by market bubbles that exposed borrowing countries to faults in EU refinancing mechanisms. Obfuscation also on the part of the supranational banking sector, shoring up Greece’s portfolio for an EU who wanted to hear exactly that—not a Europe without Greece or a Greek state that was only on the periphery, like the other Balkan marches. The parallel is imperfect, chiefly due to Greece’s dues-paying membership in the EU, but a sanguine and constructive comparison is to be found in Argentina’s bold decision, facing bankruptcy a decade hence, to unpeg its currency from another sort of hegemony, the US dollar, and face down months and years of chaos and hardship, to emerge the more robust for the dare—though an opportunity arguably squandered by not undertaking more lasting reforms in the good years. If Greece does adopt this tacking manลuvre after all, let’s hope it does ultimately flourish.
catagories: ๐ฌ๐ท, ๐, ๐, ๐ฑ, foreign policy, labour, myth and monsters