oh, inverted world

With everything seeming so unreal and draining—including the stages of disbelief that we or they as the cognizetti had to confront as assumptions collapsed—I was hoping to awake from this bad dream and find ourselves in a place where all the progress towards social justice as imperfect as it is and as far as we have to go was not refudiated and undone by the victory of chauvinism and exceptionalism.
America’s relevance that so many are clutching after is diminished both domestically and abroad, and as tragic as it is to valid the insecurities of groups whose support comes at the disenfran- chisement of others—no protection for the minority, the greater threats come in the form of contagion in this nativism, emboldening tyrants and charismatics globally, and in laxer attitudes—verging towards ignorance—regarding climate change and responsible stewardship for the environment. Not that we’re custodians of the Earth, but rather having the passion and curiosity to make the pursuits of the sciences accountable and transform our world safely. It’s bad enough that those holding power are loath indulge that sometimes uncomfortable and inconvenient self-critique that one’s presumptions may be wrong and sustain the intellectual and emotional wherewithal to wonder why others might see the same things differently, but it’s not just as if we’ve given some mustachioed caricature of a villain enough rope to hang himself but also an arsenal of nuclear weapons and a surveillance system without parallel at his disposal. With such toys, why aspire to anything higher?

chirality

Some weeks ago BBC Radio 4 featured the story of a lovelorn snail called Jeremy who because of a rare, one-in-a-million genetic mutation is coiled anti-clockwise and could never find a mate, being that the general population is right-handed.
The question of compatibility, however, does not come down to a matter of handedness and dominance we see in human dexterity—though this match-making is a tool for studying aspects of it, and is more akin (if parallels are appropriate) to the exceeding rare but viable mutation where some people have their hearts on their right sides: Jeremy’s sexual organs have the wrong orientation and would only work with another like him. This rare state however does not require extensive anatomical examination and is easily recognised by an attentive eye by the way the spiral of the shell radiates, clockwise or counter. The radio appeal, despite the odds, netted two potential suitors or sires for Jeremy (all snails being hermaphroditic and beyond gendered labels) one found by a snail-fancier (a conchologist) not far from the Nottingham labs where Jeremy was kept called Lefty, who’ve had their initial date. Jeremy’s other potential partner—yet unnamed and seemingly held in reserve, was rescued from the frying pan by a keen-eyed sous-chef in Mallorca and given that your garden variety snail is rather polyamorous, and they are scheduled to meet up at a later date.

tête-à-tête or rumpus room

In the early 1950s, avid gamer (backgammon and bingo) and fashion designer Bettie Murrie, recognising that the poodle skirt was “a conversation circle” thought to marry her interests, as Messy Nessy Chic shares, with a line of parlour game apparel for the fairer-sex. What a bizarre and potentially uncomfortable and trying way to be the centre of attention, surrounded by handsy players and patiently waiting out the rounds. The dresses had specialised patterns for different game boards and pockets to hold the dice and game pieces. It is unclear if plans to tailors skirts for all “intellectual levels”—from checkers to chess—were ever realised.

closing thought

I wasn’t aware, until consulting our faithful chronicler Doctor Caligari, that the US staple news programme Nightline whose format has been copied the world over had its premiere in November 1979, and was begun under quite different auspices.
At first, it was not presented and packaged as a feature segment to examine different topics more in depth, but rather it aired as a special broadcast, anchored by the network’s State Department correspondent Ted Koppel, to recap the day’s events regarding the Iranian hostage crisis—and to compete with rival late night talk- and variety-shows for viewership. By the time the hostages were released 444 days later, Nightline was firmly entrenched as an evening’s alternative to monologues, soliloquies and celebrity guests.