thirty-eighth parallel

While menacing Asia next week, Dear Leader will visit South Korea, and while the agenda has not yet been released, I do hope his security detail and handlers can dissuade him from going to the Demilitarized Zone in person because I don’t think the dotard has the restraint to keep from petulantly dangling a foot over the border, like a tourist posed straddling at the Four Corners Monument, the quadripoint in the US southwest where four of the boxy states touch and is surprisingly under the administration of the Navajo Nation and Ute Tribe who probably found such a demarcation unwelcome and untoward, possibly like many on different sides of the peninsula. Perhaps he can be taken to a film-set or a holodeck instead—at least as a trial-run. I wonder if any of this stuff is rehearsed ahead of time.

eccentricity

Unprecedented but long suspected, astronomers believe that they may have observed and recorded an interstellar comet passing by for the first time.
The hyperbolic trajectory that they’ve tracked of the small object—already fast receding into the void of space and becoming too dim to follow—suggests that it originated outside of our Solar System and sort of dropped into the plane that the Sun and planets are on from above—in the direction of the constellation Lyra. Using the Sun and the inner planets for a gravity assist, the object was then sling-shot out of the Solar System, headed toward the constellation Pegasus. If the observations are confirmed, it could lend credence to the theory of panspermia—that the organizing principles that we associate with living things might have extra-terrestrial origins and be seeded through the Cosmos by hitchhiking on such comets.

7x7

yōkainoshima: Charles Fréger photographs the monsters of Japanese folklore (more yōkai here, here and here)

arm + bend = elbow: more clever word sums from Futility Closet

oктя́брьская револю́ция: to mark the centenary since the start of the Russian revolution curators at

the Hermitage ceremoniously re-started the clocks stopped the moment Bolsheviks stormed the Winter Palace

tessellation: gorgeous drawing game inspired by Islamic art and architectural forms, via Waxy

zeroth law: Saudi Arabia confers citizenship on an android plus plans to build a robot pleasure megacity

moment factory: Montreal’s basilica transformed into an immersive multi-media experience in hopes to renew appreciation for the landmark

monsterpiece theatre: a nice appreciation of Cookie Monster, the academic muppet

regnum, cladus, ordo

Though only introduced (I believe despite having grown up in their natural range) to the oversized fruit via a vicarious taste-test just a little while ago, I was pretty intrigued by the suggestion that the Osage orange (Maclura pomifera, known by a variety of names including hedge apples ) might be a remnant of days when mega-fauna roamed the plains of North America. In evolutionary terms, ten thousand years—especially for long-lived, hardy trees (there was a campaign to plant them across farming regions as wind-breaks after the Dust Bowl) has not given the species sufficient time to notice that there are no longer giant sloths, mammoths or buffalo to propagate their seeds and shrink their fruit down to something more portable and appetising.
The avocado might be another candidate as a prehistoric hold-over—though our intentional cultivation efforts has caused major changes in the past epoch to the taste and size of fruits and vegetables as well and in the wilds, left to themselves, take other paths for other palettes.

as one does

In addition to the royal “we” or pluralis majestatis, there is the contrasting practise of invoking the pronoun when expressing opinions referred to as the editorial “we”—pluralis modestiæ, in the sense of either acting as a spokesperson or referring to the reader and the author. In general, addressing oneself (or another, usually with in a patronising, shaming tone) with agreeing inflections in the first person plural is called nosism.

pseudomonarchia dæmonum

We enjoyed exploring Jacques Collin de Plancy’s comprehensive reference on demonology, le Dictionnaire Infernal, with Public Domain Review as our dark companion and guide. First published in 1818 to a rather startlingly resounding reception (given relatively enlightened nature of the era) it was the sixth and final version that was illustrated by maritime painter Louis Le Breton (working from earlier engravings) that cemented the book’s popularity in 1863 and haunted the reader with superstitions which the author and the age had believed themselves to have matured beyond.  The occult has always managed to gain a purchase in times when rationality and reason seems on the rise and de Plancy himself vacillated in his belief as he embarked on his project, but in seeking to formally classify and describe the hierarchy of that universe may help to reconcile that dissonance.