lathe of heaven

Our gratitude to Boing Boing for bringing to our attention sad news of the passing of one of our favourite authors, influential and inspiring writer of speculative fiction writer Ursula Kroeber Le Guin. Raised by anthropologists who fostered her talents, Le Guin’s body of works addresses matters of sociology, ethnography, psychology and conservation as allegorical exercises not only of the fantastic but also of the political and identitarian imagination, making a distinct impression on many readers and fellow writers. Surely she had many more stories to tell and we hope that more take this opportunity to revisit or to discover her novels.

cross-promotional

I’ve reconciled myself to the fact that some of the traffic to PfRC is robot-driven, like everywhere else—especially since prostituting my posts on social media—but part of the appeal of blogging for me was being privy to the analytics and demographics (which are carefully guarded trade-secrets on any other platform) and finding out what accidental, organic readership was curious about and what might have brought them here.
The top search key words of all time remain things like “knecht rupert” (the name for the Simpsons’ dog Santa’s Little Helper in the German Sprachraum or “satanic symbols” but narrowing the window to any lesser period of time just yield these bizarre three character alpha-numeric strings, like those spooky, inscrutable numbers stations. Is anyone else receiving these transmissions? If it is just random noise, I hope it doesn’t continue to out shout human inquisitiveness.

jet programme or english as she is spoke

We enjoyed this introduction from Public Domain Review to the woodcuts executed in 1887 by Kamekichi Tsunajima for an instructional series titled “Ryūkō eigo zukushi” (A Fashionable Melange of English Words) that depict a sampler of everyday objects, plants, animals, people and activities with their English and Japanese names. The undertakings “looking moon,” “cross child,” “shampooer,” “game of ches” and “cuting rice” struck us as meditative and very zen-like and a refreshing departure from the usual Western foreign language primers.

aquaculture

We are finding ourselves spoiled to distraction with Present /&/ Correct’s latest batch of postings which are all pretty visually stunning but we found ourselves especially taken with the photography of the award-winning, Hong Kong based Tugo Cheng whose keen eye captures (refined with a background in architecture) the contrasting and complementary symmetry and geometry of China’s coastal fishery operations. Find more images at the links above.

import/export or war and cheese

The Atlantic features a short documentary from Ben Garfield on the self-proclaimed saviour to Russian turophiles named Oleg Sirota, a former IT professional who realised his true-calling once trade embargos were enacted on all sides in response to the annexation of Crimea in 2014 and the importation of European cheese was banned.
While I’m pretty sure that this is very much against the spirit of the legal protections extended to geographically distinct food products, Sirota is supplying otherwise unavailable varieties of Italian, French and English cheeses from his factory, the profile does present some interesting questions on patriotism, nativism and opportunism. Cheese is an especially interesting item to “traffic” because of its cultural resonance and attachment to a specific location and given the fact that for a perishable item, it is pretty portable and was among one of the first food traditions that people exported.

7x7

fungus among us: spore- and nutrient-infused concrete could create self-healing structures

his master’s voice: speech-recognition-based surveillance poses concern for digital assistants

vermicular control: a consideration of the in-house espionage network of the once largest residential complex in Europe, Moscow’s House on the Embankment

power to the polls: a selection of creative and powerful protest signs from the 2018 Women’s March

ugly duckling: a bevy of robot swans have been deployed in Singapore to monitor water quality

comfy cosy are we: an inviting cinema in Japan recreates the experience of watching a movie curled up in bed

diffraction: still life photographs of food distorted by water and glass