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.

in memoriam

In the face of the heart-breaking sadness that’s befallen on the family of Carrie Fisher, one would do well to acquaint oneself (or reconnect as the case may be) with the multitudes of class-act performances from Debbie Reynolds and reflect on her recent and frequent walk-on roles, plus her outreach efforts.
As much as anyone is missing out by not knowing the Golden Age of Hollywood—still good for all its mythos and for its small-screen spawn—admittedly the legendary Reynolds may not enjoy the cultural immediacy that she’s due, but I’ll wager if we dangle Charlotte A Cavatica before you, whom Reynolds voiced in the 1973 production, it’ll all come flooding back to you. If you need a moment, please consider getting to know Pigcasso, the painting rescue pig in Cape Town who reminded me of the story of Charlotte’s Web although his talent emerged later and wasn’t what saved him from the slaughter house. Proceeds from Pigcasso’s artwork help fund charities that raise awareness of the poor living conditions of farm animals and encourage compassionate choices. Back to the family and friends mourning the loss of yet another luminary who have our deepest sympathies: requiescat in pace et in amore.

blue laws or désuétude

Neatorama features an interesting overview of sumptuary laws and practises from around the world that really prompts one to think about the relationship of different societies when it comes to alcohol consumption and how varied those jurisdictions are.
Where and when the sale and imbibing is suffered or permitted has as many or more regulations, regimes and schedules as tax code. From prohibition to the quirky and unenforceable laws, comparing and contrasting the different rules made me think of this mid-century French sobriety campaign that recommends no more than a litre of wine per day, which is debatably désuétudinal—that is, no longer custom and lapsed, obsolete advice. Did you know it is illegal to be found drunk inside a public-house in England? Or that the small-batch absinthe outside of Switzerland is missing rather key ingredients? I can imagine that some of these laws are so codified to encourage domestic consumption and is a matter of pride and patriotism.  What local regulations strike you as odd and byzantine?

minitrue

While the year might have been vituperated with “post-truth,” the rubric and culture that are a reflection of the term is not one of propaganda machines and the memory-holes of Nineteen Eighty-Four’s Ministry of Truth (Minitrue in Newspeak) or even the counter-factual insistence that two plus two equals five.
If anything the rhetoric spurns authority figures and the establishment—insofar as the appeal to our vanities and fears allow—and would not suffer even a benign dictator for long out of fear that he would become an expert, dispensing a bit of knowledge and experience in addition to the justice, which was the only thing bidden or expected. It’s not that we proles are lorded over by the fictions of an eternal struggle and those interested in perpetuating it—rather, it’s us that creates the demand for disinformation and hand back a manufactured crisis for the charismatic to champion. What do you think? We didn’t liberate ourselves from them it seems—if they ever were in control—and have ceded what agency we did have to oppressors of our own making, which is a perfectly paradoxical case against facts and edification.