birthday suit or trooping the colours

Though I’d say that the Queen’s choice of posh-frock for her birthday procession was a slight wardrobe malfunction, but the Photoshop battle royale that it inspired was in good spirits. Her highly visible dress (not quite day-glow) did really look like a chroma-key green-screen—and the fun ensues.

Via Madam Jujujive’s Everlasting Blört, comes a moving gallery of grief and solidarity of vigils and memorials voicing support for the victims and families of Orlando.

and now for something completely different

For many years, Atlas Obscura has been our expert tour guide for many weird and wonderful places and always a good resource to consult when vacation planning to discover what oddities might be hidden near one’s desitnation. We continue to find the web-site’s edifying, educational trips to be quite serendipitous as well—like the recent sourcing of the iconic mashing foot, animated by Terry Gilliam, that segued from the opening-credits of Monty Python’s Flying Circus, to a detail in the mannerist masterpiece of Agnolo “Il Bronzino” di Cosimo called Venus, Cupid, Folly and Time—wherein Cupid seems about to carelessly crush a hapless dove with his hammer-toed foot. One can view the entire allegory that inspired the surrealist troupe in the National Gallery in London.

rotoscope or dance, dance revolution

Here’s a delightful and spirited celebration of the amazing, evolving possibilities of motion-capture technology from Method Studios. Follow the link to watch the show-reel and experience the full performance at Colossal. Such special-effects are already at our disposal and we can have a dance-off as well and try our hands at composing this sort of choreography. 

mugshot or surplus to needs

Formally it seems that one could easily hang some signature accessory on a villain, a passably sinister profile, trim of moustache or a particular brand of smokes that might be forever reviled by the horrified public and associated with notoriety. Currently, however, we are all essentially naked with no distinguishing uniform or props (other than the occasional posing) and are just left with rather non-descript—though susceptible to certain judgments, reflective, innocent, ill-informed, poorly counselled, discordant, overly-tuned or just plain skanky in the same fashion as we might rate the cascade of loose-associates—parade-ground of our social-mediators, I wonder where those strains of repulsion dwell, unsafe in the knowledge that we all have a virtually immediate connection. We ought to all delete our accounts—if that meant more than acquiescing to an archive. There’s incubating speculation as well about how the perpetrator of the massacre in Orlando worked for a security contractor that supplements services to the US government’s Department of Homeland Security, including the goon squads at airports and the farming out of newly arrived immigrants by bussing them to points beyond. And while the parent company may enjoy such a position of public-trust and does perhaps deserve to have its employment-screening practises looked into, that particular fiend only had the warrant of a mall-cop. It’s chilling nonetheless, to imagine that he might have been deputised as something more, although this identification and aversion (like the avatars above) is like the high incidence of engineers attracted to radical groups. It is not that they are recruited for their potential bomb-making skills, as one might think, or for their ability to design some diabolic juggernaut, but mostly because they’ve pursued a certain career path and found that there’s not the jobs in the industry to support their numbers. The preponderance of (failed) engineering students is not a commentary on the field, but rather a criticism of the schooling systems of many places in Africa, the Middle East and Asia that puts all its resources in post-primary education for the few, mainly males who survive a childhood of neglect and discouragement.

mordantly queued litheness

Though perhaps better known for their compendia of infernal characters, the Lesser Key of Solomon (definitively edited by Aleister Crowley) and the Pseudo- momarchia Dæmonum (the False Hierarchy of Demons) that inspired the former, the grimoires also contain a range of mandalas—magic circles for summoning and casting-out above referenced malevolent forces, but naturally (although unlike the cleromancy of I-Ching divination or Tarot whose permutations are mathematically defined and all possible oracles are set forth) not all variants, whose compliment of iconography includes fimbriation suggestive of the works of Piet Mondrian and bar-codes and all sorts of symbols, could be contained in a single tome, no matter how big. The Lesser Bot, however, could—in theory—generate every possible spell. This achievement sounds quite dangerous but without an incanter, I wonder if it counts.

With such hate and suffering in the world, nuancing the politics of the outcome with a foresight that’s only the lens of hindsight mean that truly the Tea Party teaydists have won and are playing right into the clutches of chaos and division that obscures any chance for change for the better.
As much as we all are united in prayer for the victims, family and friends (and for those who’d discharge compassion without stint or judgment), I think we most also rally behind the prayer for strength to stand up against tyranny and intolerance, whenever and wherever. One cannot simply throw back the argument that those who want a better homeland, be it America or Syria or Afghanistan, must be willing to fight for it is not wholly fair as there are significant roadblocks and the same intrigues erected all around that can lame an uprising (mostly by proxy) even before it can be conceived, but I’d wager that immigration policies—whatever the intent—have attracted a desperate class who’ve gotten out through alternate routes that are in the minority but mostly undifferentiated from the network of rubbish and opportunist smugglers that brought them and would willing exchange roles. Any one of us can gain security through strife but it is not a rewarding boon to pass along, neither as guest nor host.