iconoclasm

Courtroom sketch artist extraordinaire Atlas Obscura brings some excellent and thoughtful reporting on the proceedings of the International Criminal Tribunal, which for the first time—fueled by revulsion, terror and heartbreak of the cowardly and wanton deportment of the Cosplay Caliphate—is hearing a case against with cultural heritage is the plaintiff and victim.
Though there is sadly thousands of years of precedence regarding the wilful destruction of ancient artefacts and unexplored archaeological sites (not to mention pilfer and plunder), no case has been successfully lobbied before in this venue. It was not the recent tragic losses of our shared patrimony in Syria or the destruction of Slavic and French landmarks and monuments by the Nazis a few generations removed (although the beginnings of a legal framework came out of those events), but rather a lesser-known (and perhaps the greater loss for its lack of public attention) incident where an individual attempted to steamroll the cultural landscape of Mali, near Timbuktu. The world is trying the thugs of today’s headlines in absentia, of course, but with this docket the Court hopes to create laws and language sufficient to to deter future losses and craft the codex to throw at the current perpetrators.

round-house

Beginning in the twelfth century down to modern times, families in the Hakka highlands took to designing unique earthen dwellings in order to protect themselves and their livestock from gangs of bandits.
This housing arrangement is called tulou, in the specific architectural style of the Fujian region, eventually came to be more like little self-contained cities—not like gated-communities, with meeting halls, warehouses, wells, coops and pens. In addition to affording residents a great degree of security, even withstanding cannon-fire, the structures were also ideal for climate-control and robust when encountering tremors of earthquakes. Be sure to check out the piece on Kuriositas for a comprehensive gallery of these buildings and learn more about their history.

doggerel

Like realising that to the rest of the world, in normal parlance the abbreviation LWOP would probably not signal “leave without pay” but “life without parole,” a conceit fit more for a country-western lament rather than the docket, I discovered that for most of the world the phrase quid pro quo does not connote primarily reciprocation—tit-for-tat—but rather misapprehension or even substitution, to mistake one thing for another or appearing in cookbooks as QPQ when one can use olive oil in place of tallow and for prescriptions when one medicine was unavailable.
Similarly while quis might now be a gauge for user- friendliness in the Questionnaire for User- Interaction Satisfaction, a battery of tools used to rate the experience for different platforms—it used to signify something quite different in schoolyard vernacular. If we could borrow a page of dialogue from the salad days, courtesy of Oxford English Dictionary’s word of the day, quis, the Latin pronoun akin to who, was often used as a much more elegant and compact way of inquiring “who among you wants this particular thing which I am offering?” Quis? The claimant would respond with ego, me. Whether any bright young things ever had such an exchange outside of Brideshead Revisited, I’m not sure, but it ought to be brought back, nonetheless.

allele, alelo or progressive trait

While neither condemning nor condoning the practise of tinkering with genetics, the science desk of Buzzfeed (ironically, as it is the males who buzz and annoy but only the silent females that bite and suck blood) presents a really solidly comprehensive article that at least exculpates and explains the methodologies from a community health standpoint behind releasing hundreds of thousands of genetically-compromised males into the wild breeding population to keep it under control. The problematic mosquito that is the vector of dread disease in Brazil and is spreading to neighbouring regions is an invasive species—an import from the Nile region—and although very much still a scourge in its native habitat, the humans, living lived with them for generations, are less prone to outbreaks.
Getting rid of this unwelcome invaded might allow indigenous insect populations to return and bring further natural regulation to the ecology. It is unlikely there’s any correlation between the trials, conducted in 2012 and the present emergence of viral infections—due to time and distance with the incubation period of the Zika virus and the other diseases it transmits being mere weeks. The surge in cases most likely indicates that the testing produced victims of its own success, in much the same way as a concerted campaign in South America to eradicate disease-carrying mosquitoes decades earlier worked just well enough to shove off public notice and eventually caused a relapse. What strikes me as really surprising, however (and again, the mutated males could not spread the virus as they don’t bite), is that the male mosquitoes are not engineered to have woefully short life-spans in a straightforward manner: the mutants, programmed to self-destruct, will live out their normal adult lives provided they are given an antidote, an antibiotic, once every four days. Outside of the laboratory, this substance cannot be found and after mating, the males die and pass along this trait to their offspring. Maybe it was that little detour for sterilisation management gives the conspiracy-theorists ample purchase.

foundscape or crowd-surfing

From the ever fascinating shelves of antiquarian JF Ptak, comes a fun little exercise to try for oneself and I’ve noticed that I tend sometimes to zero-in on the same sort of details in scanning crowds: locate a historic picture of gathered masses, like this detail from 1903 when people had come together to hear US presidential incumbent and candidate Teddy Roosevelt and see what sort of details and stand-out expressions one can find amid the sea of headdresses. Foundscapes he calls them. It’s certainly more fun than finding the panda hiding among skunks—or whatever that was—to look for one’s own Doppelgänger or probable time-travelers lost in the crowd. Be sure to check out the book store for many more curiosities.

yoiking and taxonomy

Recently, as the large settlement of Tromsø was anticipating the return of the sun after six weeks of perpetual night (surely an event to celebrate but it was not as if the locals were emerging from dread and depression after this long, dark, sacred night, though I can’t say I was not very relieved to see the days waxing longer) and heralded the first patch of daylight with song.
The city and region that’s traditionally Sàmi (the older and rather pejorative term for the people was Laplander) is a big music scene—including the for a sort of ancient tone-poem called a yoik or joik. These chants, though wordless, are very evocative and full of meaning, and it’s said that the Sàmi peoples were taught yoiking by the elves and fairies and at birth, a yoik is composed for an individual, this personal signature being as important as one’s name—admitting later improvisations, of course. Places, animals, plants and the elements have their own special tunes as well. As with many aboriginal customs, joiking was regarded with suspicion and condemned as spell-casting and suppressed (along with their language) for generations but both have seen a strong resurgence in recent years—migrant children hosted in these northern communities are excited to receive yoiks of their very own. A lot more than just a salutation of the sun, one can listen to a selection of yoiks here or by searching the internet for more of these hauntingly beautiful folk chants, perhaps even composing your own signature sound.

have some madeira, m’ dear

Expected to be a direct conduit between South America and Europe ready late next year, the underseas cable that Brazil is preparing to anchor over revelations that that country’s government was one of the many targets of American electronic surveillance is not only courting the interests of those who feel directly affronted and betrayed but also of some giants—not of the same spying-industry per se but at least of the enabling kind—of the internet.
The cable, side- stepping the American monopoly on trans-Atlantic submarine lines of communication, links the former colony with her metropolitan, Portugal, with a landing at Cabo Verde, another former Portuguese holding.  Called EulaLink, other nations too are interested in joining this network. I wonder, in response, what sort of slant-drilling operations might be enjoined to siphon-off some of this traffic. The terminus of the cable will be in the coastal city of Madeira—which made me think of the old tune that tells the story of a lecherous old man who tries to persuade an innocent young girl to dally a bit longer by plying her with drink: the result is that she does stay but her character is transformed to something akin to his own, which probably wasn’t exactly what he wanted. Maybe that is a cautionary tale for this enterprise.

matriculation

Among the more shocking and horrific acts that the Cosplay Caliphate has committed that no one could be blamed for averting their eyes from such atrocities—and children have even been allowed to hone their skills as future fighters—it is easy to overlook what’s truly subversive and cause to shudder in their dysfunctional state: the curricula of their educational system, such as it is.
When not busy as human shields or in paramilitary-training, the young boys (and only the boys, as females are to receive no instruction outside of religious-education and fulfil her obligation as a mother and a homemaker with divine “sedentariness”) are taught in the few institutions still standing that their empire stretches from China to the Mediterranean and indoctrinated fully and frighteningly in this world-view. Sadly this phenomenon is not unique and there have been generations that have had to be de-programmed before but the learned capacity for de-humanising those outside this movement seems distinctively terrible and this damage will be difficult but not impossible to undo. Faced with this nightmare, it’s little wonder that families wouldn’t risk life and limb to flee it for parts unknown and wrest any future from none at all. It’s absolutely despicable that opportunists have joined this flight, I think, and have compounded the woes of those seeking refuge, diluting and turning the sympathy of potential hosts and helpers. No nation has gone without great periods of upheaval—recently or in the fleeting past—and it is a universal obligation to recognise (especially for those whose disdain and brinksmanship fostered these problems to a degree) the humanity of others and not let our compassion be twisted by scepticism and suspicion.