eine guten rutsch ins neue jahr!

Previously we’ve learnt that wishing someone a good stumble into the new year wasn’t exactly like telling someone to break a leg but rather just to have a good start, but regardless of how you’re ticking off these final moments of 2016 and what lucky rites you’re practising, we’ll cross that threshold together. Thanks for visiting and best wishes for a healthy and auspicious new year from us at PfRC.

shooting-gallery or swords into ploughshares

The always engrossing BLDGBlog informs that the US Department of Defence, who’ve committed to dozens of projects to protect the environment and encourage sustainable practises, is entertaining a proposal by the Small Business Administration that would have the armed forces at least train with ammunition whose bullet shells are biodegradable.
They would contain a small amount of seeds to be released as the casing is broken down, in order to sow the tactile grounds and ranges with native brush and wild flowers. The DoD is seeking out companies with the material expertise to make this a reality and urges people to come forward. Geoff Manaugh goes on to ponder how this initiative—which sounds potentially quite the opposite to the notion of salting the fields of one’s enemies, reminds him of a tree bombing-raid campaign he blogged about over a decade ago that might result in mass-reforestation after wildfires or allow woodlands to reclaim fallow pastures.

nineteen-wonderful

In case you had forgotten the about the pure, unbound theological and metaphysical bizarreness that comprises Rankin and Bass Christmas specials, here’s a brief plot summary of Rudolph’s Shiny New Year. Spent from having just helped deliver Christmas gifts, Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer finds himself again in contract by Father Time, seeking his help urgently to find the missing Baby New Year—Happy, before the strike of midnight on New Year’s Eve, else the year will never progress with the incumbent never able to retire.

Father Time conjectures, rightly, that Happy, bashful, has hid somewhere on the archipelago of years past, where superannuated, old Babies-New-Year step down to rule an era similar to their calendar year. Having enlisted extra help, they locate the baby only to see him abducted by a vulture called Eon the Terrible, who is predestined to expire at the passing of the year and is determined to stop the procession of time to avoid dissolution into ice and snow. The vulture is a bit endeared to Happy and by being persuaded to release the baby back into Rudolf’s custody, is spared his fate and Happy is flown back to Father Time’s castle to herald in the year ‘Nineteen-Wonderful,’ Rudolph adding that he wishes it a shiny one.

7x7

watch the birdie: delightful feeder and photo-booth for our feathered friends

cozyduke, miniduke: operation Grizzly Steppe publishes the alternate aliases for the Russian spear-fishing campaign that hacked Democratic Party emails

sms: a space consortium plans in 2018 to begin to incessantly, obsessively bombard select exo-planets with messages

for the benefit of mister kite: the artist behind the Sgt Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band album cover tribute to those we lost in 2016 had to be updated far too often

matinee at the bijou: documenting threatened cinemas around the world

rue du brexit: on French town plans to honour the sovereign stand of half of the British people, via Marginal Revolution

cargo cults: online emporia plan for floating, aerial warehouses for seamless drone delivery

cowboys and indians: historiography

The brilliant host of the History of the Crusades podcast, Sharyn Eastaugh, has just finished the last instalment of her current series on the Crusade against the Cathars with a fascinating episode on the legacy of the Cathars, which has proven just as engrossing as learning about the adventuring in the Holy Land.
It’s really incredible how she as the presenter was able to present this closing chapter of the narrative with great but intriguing brevity—including the scholar and reluctant Nazi Otto Rahn who first sold the world the idea that the Albigensian campaign to the secrets of the Holy Grail in the early 1930s—believing that transposing the Parzival legend to Occitan locations would unravel the mystery. True to her commitment, however, to address the history of the Crusades and not just produce a podcast on some of the Crusades, this excitingly won’t be the last of the podcast, with Ms Eastaugh launching in the coming months on the Baltic Crusades between the Teutonic Knights and the pagan Finns, Poles and Saxons.