synchronicity or time and tide

If you are not already a regular listener, be sure to check out Futility Closet’s phenomenal podcasts. In their most recent episode, they tell the story of a multi-generational career of London’s last time-carrier, a dedicated woman who bore the precise time to subscription-holders up until the outbreak of WWII by consulting the only definitive source available, the Astronomer Royal of the Greenwich Observatory—who, in turn, stole the exact time from the heavens.
All Futility Closet shows are regaled with fascinating facts but what I find consistently intriguing is that their well researched topics invariably make us think about some aspect that hadn’t occurred to us beforehand. I knew that standardising civil time came with shipping and the railroads, eventually transforming into an oppressive bully that conjured up the idea of punctuality and made rushing a virtue, but never considered how reliable time-keeping devices were commercially available before the whole world was on a time-table. Even though the clocks kept very good time, there was no way for the owners of these fancy devices to set them to the agreed upon hour (no means of broadcasting time and tide and bell towers rang on their own schedule, as well) rendering them rather useless, so they engaged the services of said time-carriers in order to ensure that they were properly synchronised by means of a pocket-watch carried around the city in a handbag.

smarter than your average bear

It made me laugh how Bob Canada suggested that a potential buyer for this distressed property, the headquarters of the Longaberger company in Ohio, manufactures and direct-marketing purveyors of luxury picnic baskets, which has since seen a significant downturn in its market, might be Yogi Bear. Whatever the case, I hope the building is preserved—perhaps as a haunt for occupational-therapists, the basket-weavers.

these kids today with their y2k

Though I could not say whether the potential y2k cataclysm turned out to be a non-event because of assiduous preparation or the dire prediction of tigers falling from the heavens were somewhat exaggerated, but I do wonder if the anticipation and collective-relief was not somehow instructive on a sociological level.
Attuning us in a sense to future-shock, we were given a reasonably credible apocalyptic scenario that we each were able to do something about—other than repent. It is not as if we are powerless in the face of climate-change, political corruption or exploitive business, but there’s no tidy patch for it, deadline that everyone can agree on or easy to convey, process underlining problem. Computers would wink out of existence if the clock is dialled back and all those subsequent versions were never born. We dodged a bullet here. Now there’s talk of tipping-points and saturation, but we are just as readily shouted back from the ledge as we are led on. I wonder if those who survived such prophets of doom and lived to tell the tale have a different threshold for resignation when it comes to contemporary big problems than those who did not. What do you think? What do you remember about minutes to midnight on the last day of 1999?

from the blotter

The splendid arts and culture blog, Hyperallergic, has a weekly feature called Crimes of the Art, documenting offenses ranging from harmless vandalism, forgery to censorship and grand and daring daylight museum heists. Here are the latest cases on the docket but one can browse an extensive archive of past wrongdoings.

best-boy or no small parts

In order to illustrate the wage- distribution various acting roles and stagehands can expect for their role in producing a Hollywood blockbuster, Vanity Fair crafted this nifty credits-crawl. Having one’s name immortalized and associated with a grand project—involving more individuals seemingly than the top-level government of a moderately sized nation—is probably reward enough on its own but it would be a little disheartening to know that one’s contribution was less valuable that the play-or-pay contract of a feline extra.

trümmerfrau

The secretive Bilderberg Group will be meeting at an undisclosed location in Dresden, as Quartz reports, this week, and although proceedings are not subject to public-scrutiny in any sense, apparently one item of their agenda will be the so-called precariat.
Coined by economist Guy Standing, the term refers to the working-class suspended in a precarious situation—not rightly any longer called the proletariat since they were afforded more protections and securities—unsure whether they can enjoy continued employment or face redundancy, replaced by immigrants or robots. Siding with the author’s take on this anxiety-causing arrangement in the labour-force, I agree that the lizard-people who rule the world will be rather aghast with what their underlings are facing and what kind of toll this takes on society.