pause for station identification

Please enjoy our tireless troupe with their interpretative Yule Log dance as you while away the holiday hours, or if care for more sedate spectacle, please check out this extensive bulletin-board of various artists’ take on the tradition—whose proceeds help young people like us off the streets by teaching them how to code. Thanks for visiting, as always, and happy holidays and may all your wishes for this season come true!

summary judgment or a betrayal of crust

If you haven’t already discovered the sheer hilarity of being an privileged witness or court observer to the Honourable Judge John Hodgman’s docket, I strongly encourage you to experience justice being dispensed first hand. In the tradition of television jurisdictions, plaintiffs—generally couples or neighbours, bring their cases, played out in extended podcast form, and pledge to abide by the court’s ruling.
All the episodes I’ve so far been catching up on are very entertaining with the right balance of lunacy and obscure cultural grounding, but I thought one case in particular would be a good introduction for those just getting acquainted with internet justice: a complex web of deceit is woven when a married couple want to give a gift subscription to a pie-of-the-month club but decide to do the baking themselves. After continuing this ruse for over half a year, one wants to come clean and confess but the other promises to take the secret to his grave.

découpé or humument

We are being treated to the five decade long planned demolition and brilliant reimagining of a rather unremarkable Victorian-era book by a historian and novelist called William Hurrell Mallock entitled A Human Document by London artist Tom Phillips. It is amazing to think about all the books that were in circulation during that time and how though we acknowledge that period (and others) as prolific, really there are very few titles out of the whole Phillips’ first iteration of the 1892 story came out in 1970—abbreviated as Humument, subjected to a sort of cut-up technique then being synthesised as an operatic performance of surrealism and then a critically acclaimed digital app in 2010. The work’s final form is ready for publication in early 2017 and each page is a poetic collage of few words that tell a profound story in fragments.

walled-garden

Via Kottke’s Quick Links, there’s an interesting editorial from the New York Times’ magazine exploring one major social site’s attested commitment to combating the spread of fake-news by enlisting users and fact-checking organisations—like the deputised urban-legend dispeller Snopes—is less about encouraging critical thinking among its community but rather policing the rest of the internet, already regarded by many as the same as the internet, and filtering out more and more attention-merchants that might siphon users off of their platform.
Sensational headlines are just the latest iteration of the catchpenny clickbait that the platform wants to counter but it is of course the chief propagator of the same and its “content” rather than something inward-looking, news generated by what connected and kindred users were doing (don’t get nostalgic, however, for a golden, pure age of social media that never happened) and personal details and accomplishments (updates, checking-in) that they wanted to share has become overly reliant on “pedigreed” outside sources. As the platform becomes more restrictive of dalliances down the garden-path and thus outside their sphere of influence (and revenue stream), leaving those confines become an experience perhaps something less and less comfortable, spammy and something one would regret sharing and all news becomes native. What do you think? That doesn’t sound as if it is promoting diversity of opinion and community discourse either—and perhaps worse than fake-news.

force-sensitive or non-canon

Though this ruling will probably not rock the faith of the hundred seventy thousand self-identified Jedi knights in the UK (according to the latest census figures), the Charity Commission found that the Temple of the Jedi Order fails to promote moral or ethical improvement to qualify as a charitable institution and lacked the necessary spiritual or non-secular element—questioning its cogency, cohesion and seriousness—that are the hallmarks of a religious system. Adherents of the seventh most popular religion in the UK took issue with this ruling but it will not deter them from continuing their outreach and charitable operations and re-applying. What do you think? Should a system of believe that’s based on a space opera be judged as something frivolous compared to other religious traditions? The commission was also concerned that Jedi practitioners did not positively impact broader society and fostered a world-view focussed inward on its members—which made me wonder if that wasn’t a veiled swipe at other institutions.

atlas and artefact

Our intrepid friends at Atlas Obscura are celebrating fifty-eight of the greatest discoveries of the past year in the realms of archæology, palæontology, art history and even cryptozoology. From a forgotten underwater train-wreck in Canada to the meteorite dagger of King Tut, explore these recently uncovered wonders on an interactive world map.

separation anxiety or we can remember it for you wholesale

Writing for The Atlantic, Rebecca Searles explores a strange new sort of metaphysical detachment that some users experience after testing out virtual-reality and then forced to confront their mundane, authentic realities. Somewhere on the scale between awakening from an odd dream and Total Recall, unreality can be a lingering thing (as sophisticated as it has become) and once oneironauts get their sea-legs and can cope with the physical disorientation, some can start to develop symptoms of post VR sadness when the experience is over. What do you think? Given that the point of VR is to deliver an experience as realistic as possible—and perhaps even a hyper-realistic one where humans aren’t bound by mortal weaknesses, perhaps it ought not come as a surprise and accepted as a natural consequence, especially when the sheltered existence is perceived to be something better than the everyday alternative.

lamp under a bushel

Having just learned of the name of the decoration myself through its gentle lampooning on BBC Radio 4 Friday Night Comedy, I appreciated reading more about the Christingle, featured as Atlas Obscura’s weekly object of intrigue. The comedian in the show could only justify adorning an orange with a red ribbon if one wanted to distinguish it from other oranges whilst one is attempting to retrieve it from the airport baggage claim conveyor belt.
Now we know, however, that a German Moravian (Herrnhuter Brüdergemeine) minister in the sixteenth century invented the Christingle as an allegorical device for children to teach them about Jesus—the red ribbon symbolising Christ’s blood and the candles’ flame representing enduring joy, the oranges being introduced later. The skewers of dried fruit or candies represent the bounty of the world and the four seasons. Also known for their advent stars, I wonder if this other Moravian tradition might spread as well, but perhaps not for all times and all occasions, like in the movie theatre—which the comedian above was reprimanded for by ushers for partaking in.