supergau

Today marks the thirtieth anniversary of massive meltdown of the experimental nuclear reactor at Chernobyl, which is being marked by remembrance and memorials in Ukraine. A host of other events occurred on this fateful date, as Doctor Caligari informs, including the first on screen appearance in 1956 of a radioactive monster called Godzilla for American audiences, and the 1937 carpet-bombing of a Spanish village that inspired Pablo Picasso to create Guernica. It is also national pretzel day in the US and Brot Tag in Germany.  Be sure to follow the Cabinet to stay abreast of history repeating.

big brother and the holding company

The always interesting TYWKIWDBI directs our attention and sadly abject resignation to this non-descript office building in Wilmington, Delaware that dwarfs other company registers—like Ugland House, as the source article from the Guardian reports, of Georgetown in the Cayman Islands.
Though only hosting a fraction of letterbox businesses, Ugland House was incredulously called “either the world’s largest building or the biggest tax-scam on record”—but as the official address of some three-hundred thousand companies, ranging from the portfolios of politicians (making for some strange mingling of assets) to the world’s richest and most powerful corporate entities, this little yellow building is a clear and unequivocal answer as to why no Americans were tripped up in the Panama Papers.  After all, why risk engaging an offshore tax-haven when there’s something far closer to home? More than a million firms (including the media outlet cited), foreign and domestic, have been lured by the state of Delaware’s business-friendly posture, opacity and low-tax burden, whose structure openly encourages companies to shift earnings from other jurisdictions, costing other states and countries untold billions in tax-revenues.  Obviously such loopholes like this inspire rage and indignation, but given its prevalence and the duplicity of custodians, is it any wonder that this sort of thing is happening and no one is willing to do a thing to stop it?

asia-minor or turkish delight

The middle of next month (16 May 2016) marks the centenary of the signing secret pact known as the Sykes-Picot Agreement that carved up the Middle East in an arbitrary fashion, drawing the modern borders of Iran, Iraq, Syria and Palestine. Covert negotiations went on for the previous five months, in anticipation of the defeat of the Ottoman Empire by the Triple Entente, Britain, France and the assenting third party, Imperial Russia, but pivotal battles of the Great War were yet to be fought.
The outcome on the fields of Amiens, Ancre, Marne and Megiddo did not negatively diminish the apportioned claims of the UK for Jordan, Palestine and strategic points along the Mediterranean and for France, the Levant, represented by the eponymous ambassadors—however, Imperial Russia, who had been promised Constantinople, the straits of the Bosporus and Armenia (but consulted in matters as much as the Arabs or the Persians were) lost their territory due to the intervening destabilising of the Bolshevik Revolution that transpired in November of the following year. This forfeiture allowed the other powers to proceed with a second wave of colonialism and though the resulting architecture has fuelled overwhelming sectarian strife but did also engender a framework of protections, tolerance for minorities in the region. This imperfect and shaky geopolitical architecture endured as a legacy for nearly a century and though the formal lines in the sand still exist, what precious little about the Agreement that was sheltering and steadying was dismantled with violence and prejudice by the Cosplay Caliphate. The Agreement only came to light thanks to a leak from the Bolshevik brokers to the newspaper Pravda, in retaliation for having their claim denied, and later picked up by the Manchester Guardian. The revelation led to massive uprisings in the Middle East as World War I itself drew to a close, which was countered with damage-control measures that were not more flattering than the secret partitioning , the buzzards circling, to begin with.

someone once said pflegermaus

The German word for bat is Fledermaus (Flying Mouse) but I turned it into an ambulatory nursing mouse, like Krankenpleger. I suppose they’d also be good residents of one’s belfry.

daisy-chain or paper mario

Thanks to the always interesting JF Ptak Science Book Store, we learn a bit about the contributions of American engineer Vannevar Bush, one of the early administrators of the Manhattan Project and organising force behind the National Advisory Committee for Aeronautics, the fore-runner to NASA.
Despite those consummate and heroic (America was all but ignorant of the potential for rocket-warfare beforehand) achievements as a manager, Bush is probably due a greater debt for his work in the 1930s that previsioned the internet and the concept of memex (indexed memory) that was sort of a mechanical version of hypertext protocols—later set forth in a 1945 article for The Atlantic Monthly called “As We May Think,” describing how computational-assistance could enable individuals to amass and share an archival database of research material by following chains of associative-traits . Throughout his professional career, Bush seemed to eschew the idea of digital computing, preferring analogue models (but perhaps as something illustrative only, not schooled in a world of circuits and relays) but was also prescient in his worry about information overload and the glutting of real progress as input exceeds optimal processing capacity.

dearly beloved, we are gathered here today to get through this thing called life

Via Hyperallergic’s Required Reading links comes the fascinating and forward-thinking tale of how the Artist solved the dilemma of branding himself with a symbol that was unpronounceable and naturally was not in the ASCII or Dingbats gallery of glyphs. Having resolved to commit to his new moniker, Prince designed his own font and began to send out hundreds of publicity diskettes (with instructions) from Paisley Park to media outlets in 1993.
Some believe that this move was a passive-aggressive way at getting back at his recording label, unhappy with his contract, but the Artist formerly known as Prince was able to get the magazines and newspapers to play along, at a time when the on-line world and graphic-interface was just emerging and no one spoke in emoji. I really appreciated this artefact and remembrance and as with the loss of another legend earlier this year (2016 needs to seriously stop killing musicians but we know there are some wondrous jam-sessions happening in Heaven right now), sometimes it’s easier to pick out and latch on to the minute details (like the equally pioneering bowie.net) in order to esteem careers that are too momentous to celebrate with the standard obituaries.

rosencrantz and guildenstern

For the four-hundredth anniversary of the death of playwright William Shakespeare, Kronsborg castle—the inspiration for Elsinore, where the tragedy of Hamlet was set, was open for an overnight stay for one lucky and devoted fan for the first time in a century.
The winning application was in the form of a clever to the Bard in iambic pentameter. Runners-up and local gentry were wined and dined earlier in the evening with a fancy banquet—and that would have sufficed for me since I don’t know about staying the night in such a haunted place. There are some pretty keen hotelier promotions happening lately, and we do trust that the couple slept soundly, but this opportunity strikes me like bedding-down in the head of van Gogh.