best-of-show

Though I am not sure why the source website has nominated Borg Seven-of-Nine to represent the ideal of humanoid attractiveness, but I thought I’d repeat the gesture (maybe there is some joke that I am too dense to get or perhaps we are berthing an old meme ourselves), I found this rather detailed research (peer-reviewed apparently by the US National Institutes of Health) study that demonstrates that chickens recognise and register their appreciation of beauty pretty interesting, in so far as it suggests that it’s more than skin deep and is embedded in our nervous composition.
The study looks to date from 2002 but in an age where we readily submit our looks and esteem to computer algorithms or the hive mind (resistance is futile) for judgment, it might be a subject worth revisiting. What do you think?

black tie, white noise

Speaking surely not ex cathedra, one prominent cardinal of the nuncio (the Holy See diplomatic corps) simply wrote in the big remembrance book in the æther, “Check ignition and may God’s love be with you,” which really made me tear up.
That’s a nice little prayer of comfort to come out of trying, unbelieving loss, like LLAP—the Vulcan salute. I’ll bet scribes are already at work producing some bit of symbolic shorthand. Not that Aladdin Sane is wholly wholesome, we ought to be cautious that we don’t only celebrate what’s suitable for general audiences (South America!) at the expense of what’s dangerous and delightful because it might need to be uncomfortably deferred for parental guidance, like Diamond Dogs, Velvet Goldmine, Jean Genie.

stardust or tvc15

I am no good eulogist, and sometimes it seems that if I were that’s all any of us would be doing. It’s an unenviable job—I’m sure, to be an obituary writer and I understand that these editors face a sorry annual chore of updating epitaphs on a regular basis, so as to break the news gently and with due celebration. Chief among what David Bowie gave to his audience was that it was OK to be an oddity. Full-stop. There was no moralising or apologies—just curiosity, I think, that manifested itself in realising the revolutionary. That sort of cultural prescience, which a lot of the present class of moguls owe a debt, is reflected in a little (seemingly) footnote of praise picked up in this Guardian article about bowie.net.
Reflecting on his 1998 debut of an internet service provider, after having been the first big recording artist to release a single available on the internet already two years earlier, Bowie said that if he were nineteen again, that time around he’d bypass music and go straight for the online venues. Promising an uncensored web experience, bowie.net offered all sorts of firsts that are really taken for granted presently, like internet simulcasts and one’s own email address, paralleling a few other pioneers but back then I don’t image that most businesses, let alone celebrities, had even an inkling of its potential. We would not have that collective literacy or dexterity had David Bowie not launched this venture. Secondly, and no one cares much for the hyperbolic litigiousness that characterises intellect-property these days, but I believe that Bowie’s joint suit with Queen over the riff from Under Pressure against the performer of Ice-Ice Baby (given that Bowie’s latest album is interpreted as an allegory about al-Sham, I won’t refer to them as the Cosplay Caliphate, but henceforth as Vanilla ISIS, as that was rather an insult to historical caliphate—as much as ISIS is an insult to faith—which were typified by tolerance and religious harmony) was also informed and culturally formative, not exactly codifying the rules of sampling but not letting derivative artists off without proper homage. As much as we could recite that one song word for word played at the roller-rink, I think we’re astute connoisseurs and acutely aware of later lifted compositions. The music and the personality live on and will inspire generations to come, and we can take solace in that.

rest in peace, Mister Bowie

orrery or keeping up appearances

Recognising elegance in simplicity—though the push to preserve the conceit that the Earth was at the centre of the Universe, convoluted as it is, displays a lot of genius and endured, placating our egocentrism for fifteen hundred years. Contrary to appearances, Claudius Ptolemy of Alexandria, in contriving his model, even acknowledged himself in his introductory remarks that it would be far more straightforward if we orbited around the Sun.
Possibly astronomers and mathematicians of the time even derived a heliocentric arrangement, as a purely academic (if not heretical) pursuit. Insistence that the heavenly spheres must sweep out perfect circles—rather than degenerate ellipses, also was a major contributing factor in the overall refusal of the public and the scientific community to entertain any other sort of cosmology. Revolutionary as it was, the sun-centred solar system of Nicolaus Copernicus and Galileo Galilei and despite the hard slog for acceptance, though ostensibly still true and accurate enough (when it’s not rocket-science), did not reign long itself before being toppled by Johannes Kepler, whose keen perception of the motion of planets—as the expression of gravity—displaced the Sun too, realising that it is not our star that leads in the waltz of planets. The principle of Ockham’s Razor does usually hold and these animations certainly impart a lesson in perceptive and relation but I wonder what else we might not be seeing for our clouded biases.

winterval or delogistics

It’s always a little sad to finally be packing up the Christmas decorations and decorously escorting the tree to the tree graveyard. We bid the ornaments a fond adieu until next year. With all that science can give us, however, one would think that they at least could genetically engineer Angels’ Hair (tinsel) to mature in that tatty green basket grass in time for Easter—or the municipal Christmas tree to shed down to a ready Maypole.  Maybe that’s how it used to be done.

6x6

nxnw: striking storyboard illustrations for Alfred Hitchcock films, from Everlasting Blort

baby grand: enjoy the musical stylings of this virtuoso of the toy piano

minifig: get a LEGO head made in your likeness

chewie lewis and the news: clever series of Star Wars album cover remixes—Rebel Rebel is my favourite

barons of industry: an appreciation of the bold and post-modern artwork of Fortune magazine

allemande, promenade: dinosaurs probably performed elaborate mating-dances like birds do—it would be funny to see a tyrannosaurus hoedown