gotham

The marvellous property-scout Nag on the Lake invites us to a rather breath-taking viewing of a unique bell-tower penthouse on Centre Street of Manhattan—where for price, the happy new tenants could enjoy panoramic views from the cupola of New York City. The Beaux Arts style building was built to purpose as the New York City Police Headquarters and served this role from 1909 to the early 1970s when the department outgrew its operations centre. In the late 1980s, the structure at the heart of the metropolis was converted into posh condominiums. This would be a pretty swank hideout for a brooding and mysterious superhero.

story hour

Via Neatorama, the Humane Society of Missouri is inviting young children into an animal shelter so that they can practise their reading-skills on an audience of dogs. Not only does the attention help acclimate and calm the animals, who may have been mistreated, back into the company of humans, the pilot-project also benefits the young narrators by giving them not only a highly receptive interlocutor that’s non-critical but also teaches them empathy and compassion, since we take in every stray ourselves. The Humane Society is hoping to expand this programme to all shelters in the state and bring cats into the conversation as well.

decodence or raygun gothic

I admit that the whole disappointment over hover-boards which didn’t actually hover and were powered by less than premium batteries that tended to explode underfoot, the paperless office that’s still of the future, but it’s easy to get excited over the heralding of flying cars.
Past the headlines, one realises quickly, however, that these vehicles of the future-past are not only airborne but also driverless. I suppose present that we have delivers the future that (no matter how unbidden) that we deserve, full of mass purveyance, skies already over-crowded with airliners unromantically shuttling people to and fro and relatively autonomous drones eavesdropping, delivering meals on demand (plus a few other clever missions), continued reliance on fossil-fuels, Big Data, Bigger Pharma, tele-presence instead of teleportation, contractual obligations to property no longer owned but licenced to us—and so on and so forth. I hope that our flying-cars don’t go down the same rabbit-hole and it is probably the responsible thing to leave the soaring up to machines less prone to pilot-error or dare-devil stunts, but I hope these aces don’t take us away from the controls altogether, making the experience just some expensive thrill-ride. What do you think? Please keep limbs inside the carriage at all times.

garden switchboard

For more than a century, botanists have known about the symbiotic partnership between fungi and plants—the networks of fungal mycelium bundled with the roots of shrubs and trees described as a “mycorrhiza” association that is mutually beneficial in helping the other extract certain nutrients from the soil. What researchers are just discovering, however, is the breadth and depth of those connections and the nature of that relationship that’s akin to a subterranean vegetable information superhighway: the long tendrils of the fungal mycelia link individual plants in myriad ways and are the lines of transmission for chemical signals through garden plots and whole forests.
In a fascinating overview from BBC Earth magazine’s archive, featured recently on Dave Log 3.0, ecologists examine how this fungal internet allows plants over great distances to not only warm one other of intruders, it facilitates the sharing of nutrients and even allows the older generations to aid new spouts with sustenance, sabotage of unwanted neighbours and even parasitic behaviours. I feel a little guilty for my potted companions now, who might feel essential restricted to solitary confinement. I suspect, however, there are other modes of plant communication. After seeing more devastating wildfires for Australia in the headlines, I learnt that not only are the eucalyptus trees evolved to be explosively flammable—not unlike the strange venomousness given to everything there—and many of the seeds of other trees will not germinate without a periodic scorched-earth policy (or alternatively, arson by self-immolation), further prior to the settlement of Europeans, the stretches of eucalyptus forest that are a familiar sight today did not exist. The Aborigines, who had been landscape artists for tens of thousands of years, were careful cultivators and kept the forests pruned back, favouring grasslands that acted as fire-breaks and foraging grounds for game. It seems the Aborigines knew the risk of letting Nature run its favoured course, and that begs the question: what is Australia’s (or any land’s) natural state—wild or tamed, either by exception or by tradition?

tammany hall

One of the perhaps unanticipated outcomes of mass-immigration might lead to the revival of the old-fashioned ward-bosses, patronage and the “rotten” boroughs of seventeen century England (and perhaps it is already manifest in some areas).
The coming iteration of the political machine may not incite violence or condone such practises as cooping, gangs kidnapping, disguising and liquoring up people off the street in order to stuff ballot boxes in favour of the politician who has contracted them (Edgar Allen Poe was probably a victim of such abuse, which led to his death), but we could see a reciprocal courtship being formed between local councils and a particular, predominate group that has come to settle in one’s jurisdiction. In order for local officials to stay in office, it would be in their political interest to encourage self-segregation over integration. Politicians have always pandered to their constituencies—and to a degree (enforceable or otherwise), beholden to their demands, but the prospects for manipulation by bringing refugees and their suffrage into the picture raises the stakes in representative governance and the definition of community. What do you think? I certainly would not place it beyond the ambitions of some to encourage sectarian and internecine divisions in order seize and hold power—on the neighbourhood and national level. What does a block-party, a pride-celebration start to look like when you try to concede to everyone’s liking—especially when tastes are made mutually exclusive through insufferable tolerance?

lutte contre l’incendie

The always entertaining Neatorama directs our attention to an item that I didn’t realise was missing from our kitchen in this offer from Wine Enthusiast of a fully functional fire- extinguisher in the guise of wine bottle—though at a foot tall, I’d imagine its volume somewhere between a Marie and a Jeroboam, or possibly even delivering a Rehoboam’s worth of fire-fighting expellant and foam. Safety does not exclude swagger, and the price seems comparable with a standard, non-camouflaged unit and looking at the sales-site above, the vendor it seems will even recharge it, should one have needed it to quell something burning.

tea. earl grey. hot.

While not exactly the replicator from Star Trek that’s just as adept as whipping up a spot of tea, delivering an advanced 3D printer to the International Space Station to make spare parts is a pretty big leap forward—which is seeming really obvious now—that will surely begin to untether the team of explorers. Scheduled to be included in the payload of a launch for next month, this new model will replace a more rudimentary device that the crew has been experimenting with already. It’s curious how the problems of logistics can drive technology in unexpected ways.

royal-flush or en suite

After rioting and much public discontent of Fuad I of Egypt’s particular penchant for exercising his royal prerogative and dissolving parliament when it was seen encroaching on his power finally convinced the king to restore the previous constitution that brought Egypt and the Suez back under the control of British influence, reportedly he lamented that soon there will only be five royal houses in the near future, “Britain—and diamonds, aces, hearts and spades.” If not for an interesting and informative article from Mental Floss, I would never have suspected that King Fuad’s vote of no confidence might be referencing a contemporary craze in the 1930s that was promoted by an Austrian psychiatrist called Walter Marseille who thought the additional cards—comprising a deck of sixty-five—would make games—bridge specifically, more challenging and engaging. The fifth suit of the English tarot nouveau was the Crowns or the Royals (Eagles in American decks). Though Marseille’s theory of skill-building through gaming didn’t quite catch on, his other works (let’s play global thermal war) involving higher stakes had lasting influence in weapons disarmament and peace-keeping.