munakata or men’s spaces

Similar to the monastic Greek island of Mount Athos, the Shinto maintain a remote and isolated brotherhood on an island in the East China Sea between Fukuoka and Busan, South Korea—which is strictly off-limits to women.
Since the fourth century, the waters where the group of islands which includes the sacred Okinoshima are found have been vital trade routes and the tradition of prayer for safe passage, invoking the three Munkata sea goddesses (the Virgin Mary is the only female that can be in the monks’ company on Mount Athos), and economic prosperity has continued unbroken since. Women are banned from the island at all times and under all conditions (though there’s no word if they have the same strictures for female farm animals, like Mount Athos), but even male outsiders are just barely tolerated, allowed to visit on one day in the year in remembrance of a tragic 1905 naval battle that took place nearby, and not allowed to talk of their experience. Since 2009, there has been discussion of inscribing Okinoshima into the UNESCO World Heritage registry and perhaps the island, with its ancient temples and vast collection of offerings ferried from passing ships on to its shores for a millennia and a half, will be so honoured but not without detractors for the place’s practises of exclusion, which some consider not in keeping with the principles of the United Nations. What do you think? Maybe boys should be allowed their clubs, but such traditions can also be used as leverage for institutionalising and justifying misogyny in other contexts.

/fɪʃ/ or inter-galactic phonetic alphabet

Upon learning that the Klingon word for love is bang (in the sense of a closing salutation as in with affection, whilst the act itself is muSh) whilst listening to back episodes of The Greatest Generation podcast reminded me of another linguistic Easter egg cobbled into the constructed alien language: ghoti.
I’m sure that the standard received Klingon pronunciation of ghotI’ holds but the term, which was also incarnated as a Christian punk band in the 1990s called Ghoti Hook, has its origins in an 1855 correspondence between a publisher and an essayist sharing the frustrations of the irregularities of the English language. Sounding out the gh as in enough, the o as in women and the ti as in motion, one gets fish. The Klingon word for fish has been used, rather unfairly it seems, to calibrate speech synthesisers, and we wonder how the Universal Translator would tackle this recursive case.

7x7

pantone 222: Italian designer matches landscapes to colour swatches, via Nag on the Lake

bucket list: an interesting POV piece about the visitors to a watering hole in the desert

love symbol: though the Artist’s scene didn’t make it into the film, he’s still included in the closing credits of Fargo
yertle and mack: a free-loading robot makes us wonder if cybernetic technologies might also become parasitic, via Super Punch

hat-p-26b: water vapour is detected in the atmosphere of Neptune-sized exoplanet

courtesy call: in Japan, one can arrange to have a hale and hearty fisherman act as their morning alarm

papa-oom-mow-mow: an appreciation of the novelty song Surfin’ Bird by the Trashmen, covered by many 

deceptive cadence

The always marvellous Nag on the Lake brings us a pleasant performance of the first digits of the mathematical constant π composed for piano by David Macdonald in the key of A minor.
The music is underscored with a series of factoids about the number, including the supposition that every possible sequence of numbers—a string of perfectly consecutive numbers, lottery winners, one’s past and future cell phone numbers—is contained in the infinite series but it’s never proven until calculated out, many argue. That piece of knowledge made me recall that I’ve encountered this quandary before—formalised as the Kate Bush Conjecture, wherein the singer on a 2005 album sings π to seventy-eight decimal places before skipping ahead to the one hundred thirty-seventh. The theory was advanced, arguing that that sequence would be found somewhere within the number, just not at the beginning. Infinite yet non-random, π is suspected to have that property though it remains unproven.

retronautics institute

First introduced at last year’s Geneva Motor Show, the darling little Microlino electro-auto by Swiss designer Wim Ouboter evokes the bubble chassis of the BWM Isetta of the 1950s. Priced at twelve thousand euros, the company is slated to reach its production goal of five thousand by the year’s end.

optics

Though Dear Leader was more than willing to levy an unfounded claim that the past administration was somehow spying on his activities via microwaves, he seemed to take no expectation with the idea that a cunning Russian agent posing as a journalist, unescorted and given exclusive access to the Oval Office, might have been capable of smuggling in a surveillance device.
Also, please do discount the fact that the photo-op was on the occasion of the Russian foreign minister and ambassador meeting Dear Leader for the first time—just fresh from firing the FBI director spearheading the investigation into Russian interference in the US presidential election and the same ambassador figures large in that network of associations. Stultifyingly, Dear Leader’s next engagement was to appear with the reanimated toad and noted war criminal Henry Kissinger whose superior’s modus operandi was compared to Dear Leader’s recent behaviour by a lot of people in many different forums.