oxen free

Hyperallergic directs to a rather delightful little illustrated study from 1801 that researcher and engraver Joseph Strutt compiled on the games, sports and pastimes of the people of medieval England. Before the advent of modern, genteel distractions, social affairs were really physically demanding and verged towards the sadistic.
The thirty-nine colour plates inspired by Middle Ages painting, song and nursery-rhymes speculate on the rules of hoodman blind (an early version of blind man’s “bluff”—traditionally called buff as in to push or shove around in Old English but as that term fell out of common-usage and play was less violent bluff started making more sense), wrestling, something called “hot cockles” as well as ones whose play defied hazarding a guess as well as more recognisable sports, like jousting tournaments and birding. These fun and games of course were more than a way to stave-off boredom and moreover in a conservative society a way for the sexes to mingle in an albeit regimented but acceptable manner—and makes us wonder how our contemporary games might be regarded by future generations.

the great game or rules of engagement

Just for those who might have harboured a kernel of doubt about Russia’s meddling in Western elections, Jason Kottke directs our attention to a 1997 publication by Duma-advisor and noted fascist and eschatologist Aleksandr Gelyevich Dugin, which is essentially an Orwellian play-by-play script for the destabilisation and subterfuge that we are experiencing presently.
The geopolitical book sets forth that the struggle for world dominance for Russia did not end with the dissolution of the Soviet Union and that the country remains the venue for the new anti-American revolution, with a Eurasian Empire united against a common enemy. Across different theatres of influence, sophisticated instructions are given to ensure absolute and enduring Russian victory—including the suggestion that Germany should be the dominant power over western and central Europe, the United Kingdom ought to be cut off from the continent, Ukraine should be annexed. For the Middle East, Dugin advocates supports that the Iranians, Kurds and the Armenians ought to be supported—especially insofar as they could create chaos in Turkey. China poses a serious threat to Russia and should be dismantled and encouraged to focus it’s only expansion towards Indonesia, the Philippines and Australia. Moreover, Russia should cede the disputed Kuril Islands to Japan to as a way to weaken their allegiance with the Americans. For the USA, Dugin prescribes that special forces be used to provoke instability with racial and social strife, blackmail and undermine internal political processes. With Brexit, Dear Leader, proxy wars, Crimea and fake news, it’s chilling how many chapters have already become headlines and scary to speculate how much further this manual might be carried out.

//ORIGINAL SIGNED//

Not being wholly unfamiliar with official presidential statements, it was more than a bit jarring and sobering to see, via Boing Boing, that there is a decided subroutine that turns Dear Leader’s social media fugues into authentic-looking missives on White House letterhead formatted in accordance with the prevailing style-guide, Army Regulation 25-50.

over a barrel

Arguably emboldened by Dear Leader’s strange and strained whistle-stop tour of the centres of faith of the Abrahamic religions that unanimously positioned US policy and patronage squarely behind regimes that he didn’t come to lecture—code for not wanting to address the hypocrisies of diplomacy based solely on business interest and drag down negotiations with more rarefied talk, Saudi Arabia led others in the region in suspending relations and closing borders with Qatar.
The top US diplomat and former swaggering oil-man himself, despite the fact Qatar is host to the largest US military installation in the Middle East, assesses that this action will have little to no impact on the global war on terror. Tensions already existed between the Saudis and the Qataris over their allegiance with rebellious elements and Iran, whose oil reserves are seen as a match for the kingdom’s, but the timing seems pretty suspect after Dear Leader stomped all over a sectarian hornets’ nest—praising those Sunni majority nations willing to be franchisees of his brand and condemning Shi’a countries, though most perpetrators of terror to include the Cosplay Caliphate have had Saudi associations and have been of the Sunni persuasion—and the simultaneous decision to sell stock to Western investors in the kingdom’s national oil-drilling operation for the first time. Though Dear Leader’s attempt to discredit the world’s commitment to not destroy itself is a fitting failure, one wonders if that too wasn’t decided in concert somehow—in his mind only, as conspirators are not dolts, with a bit of insider-knowledge, which has now been elevated to a crime against humanity.

executive function or appeal to emotion

The outstanding NPR podcast Invisibilia (previously here and here and here) is back for a third season and opens with a rather arrestingly provocative two part episode that has too much on offer to effectively summarise blow-by-blow but really delivers a wallop in the form of an alternate way to view the nature of human emotions. Rather than an unconditioned reaction to outside stimuli, feelings might be the product of one’s brain continually assessing the body’s internal functions to make sure everything is working as it should be.
Instead of some finely calibrated and detailed status report on our various systems, the brain only makes a few distinctions spread out over all the organs—hunger, satisfaction, arousal and repulsion. Anything more, on a conscious level at least, would prove overwhelming and might even be beyond our mental capacities. These internal senses and their input are called interoceptions. Consider how one’s sense of sight is compartmentalised and far different than the illusion of continuous perception that we’re presented or how our brain directs the body to adjust the blood-pressure with one’s intention to stand. There’s quite a bit of housekeeping going on behind the scenes. These internal, primitive emotions become—following the somatic theory of evolutionary psychology, which was en vogue in the nineteenth century but has fallen out of favour, dismissed as being not far removed from the idea of bodily humours ruling our moods only to enjoy a very recent resurgence—magnified and informed by our experience and upbringing. Surely it would be hard to divorce oneself from the notion that fear and anxiety—and by extension, the positive experiences too—are not something intrinsically connected to the encounter or experience (and the dread or excitement of anticipating it) but rather the product of strongly cultural and idiomatic enforcement. Of course too that mode of thinking manifests itself extrinsically by framing situations with their culturally endorsed, emotional window-dressing. Regardless of the completeness of explanation for one’s temperament, it is a comfort to keep in the back of one’s mind that one’s emotional response is provisional and very much subject to change.

fromageries occitanes

On this day, as our faithful chronicler Doctor Caligali informs, among other things in the year 1070 according to turophile lore (a highly specific date), Roquefort cheese was accidentally invented when a shepherd stashed his noontime repast in one of the Combalou caves in order to pursue a fair maiden—or what have you. Returning to retrieve his lunch after the appellation d'origine contrôlée standard number of months for maturation, the ewe’s cheese had transformed into Roquefort, which perhaps came in handy after such a dalliance as clinical trials have shown that the mould in the cheese can combat gangrene and venereal diseases.

curation

Not the output of a machine-learning algorithm (check those out here, here, here and here) alone but rather a collaborative effort between human artist and robot that demonstrates that the two types of intelligences together are better than at odds, artist Isabel Kim’s Infinite Artwork Simulator project generates such absurdity precisely because the descriptions—for all their airs—strike one as perfectly plausible and something one could find attached to any item in a gallery or modern museum collection. Check out more of these formulaic recipes whose ingredients generally call for a pinch of something from pop culture, a bit of art history, a bit of cultural appropriation, plus something edgy to yield a useful blurb at Hyperallergic at the link above

star-crossed

A century after it was first conceived, the very personal tale of a forbidden romance between a human and an elf which the author struggled to complete over the span of his entire literary career, has been stitched together and edited by JRR Tolkien’s son and collaborator, Christopher, and is available as a stand-alone book. Set during the first age of Middle Earth and whose ill-fated love are alluded to as legend in other works, the mortal man Beren and the immortal elvish maiden Lúthien are faced with difficult choices, unsupportive parents asking the impossible and werewolves and is an allegory for Tolkien own difficult courtship. Though the project defied completion in Tolkien’s life time, the author’s burial plot that he shares with his wife Edith also bears the inscription Lúthien and Beren.