old-timer

The always fabulous Everlasting Blört introduces us to a classic automobile that’s an absolute Art Deco icon (though considered too pricey at $10,000 and ugly at the time with another beetle more favoured) with the Stout Scarab from 1934, which most credit as the first mass-produced minivan and a later model was the first with modern suspension and a fibreglass chassis. Engineer and contemporary of Buckminster Fuller William Bushnell Stout built his pioneering vehicles—which included a prototype flying car, in Detroit and his line was eventually absorbed by the Ford Motor Company. The source blog, Just a Car Guy, is certainly worth a gander and there’s also a video of a Scarab in operation at the link up top.

the art of the deal or fool me twice, we don’t get fooled again

Via the always brilliant Boing Boing, we are directed (despite the redirections and distractions, “You can call us Aaron Burr from the way we’re dropping Hamiltons) to the New York Times’ massive expose on the president-elect’s outside business interests and potential for conflict of interest. Whilst there’s no law banning a sitting president from having commercial investments and like the expected nicety of disclosing one’s tax returns, it is strongly suggested—per the reasonable person clause, but there’s no teeth to it.
Scholars cite the emolument clause, which was inserted into their constitution to prevent future British monarchs from becoming too cozy with the president, and could be interpreted, abstractly as billeting foreign heads of state at his own hotels rather than the rink-a-dink White House. More than just disdain for tradition and perception (also begging what sort of legal precedence and ruling could be construed in this environment) one needs to ask when leader negotiate with the US president, whom are they addressing: the politician with the American public’s welfare at the fore, or a business man looking after the continued prosperity of private ventures. The reporters believes that this conflict has already been demonstrably challenged by the president-elect’s accord with the government of Agrabah Turkey over its purge following a staged-coup attempt that saved his resorts on Bosporus Riviera and persuaded people to overlook all that talk about banning Muslims—or previously with golf courses in Scotland and Ireland. Of course corruption and graft have always accompanied politics and arguably full-disclosure and transparency in the vein of a media-magnate like Silvio Berlusconi might be preferable to those whose connections are behind the scenes. What do you think? It’s not as if from one day to the next the president-elect’s empire came into being, but to protect those properties, the stakes for the wheeling and dealing just got exponentially higher, trillions to investment valued in the tens of millions and untold fringe benefits for foregoing a salary of a couple hundred thousand dollars per annum.

far, far away

Properly that little world of one’s own, the Universe of any given fantastic saga is called a paracosm. Though first minted during a study into imaginary friends that some adults felt were lingering too long into the socially formative years when school began conducted in the mid-1970s, the word has since come to embrace all connotations—the spectrum from shy and retreating to those with the gift for engineering civilisations apart that are at the same time archetypal and immensely creative.

6x6

miracle on thirty-sixth street: the tangled story of the popularisation of Christmas lights by a Thomas Edison hanger-on, via Strange Company

ground level ozone: following Rotterdam, Beijing has installed an air-pollution scrubbing tower that is improving atmospheric quality and reducing smog, via Nag on the Lake 
gentlemen only, ladies forbidden: for a taste of what a Trump administration might mean for America, one should look to his golf resort in Scotland, via Boing Boing

biomediated structures: Martian rover Spirit has stumbled across a landscape that looks a lot like terrestrial hot springs and may be a sign of ancient life

facepalm: an illustrated 1644 treatise aims to codify the universal language of hand gestures

eat an apple every day then see the doctor anyway: an appreciation of the art of the fruit sticker plus a calendar for this ephemera that might encourage healthier eating habits