alpha predator

Via the always brilliant Nag on the Lake, we learn of the successful trial run of a robotic monster to mitigate human and wildlife competition for resources that’s a sort of next generation of scarecrow. Orchard-keepers and rice farmers in Japan can now summon the juggernaut Super Monster Wolf as a means of keeping wild boars out of their chestnut groves and rice paddies without resorting to more lethal countermeasures.
Its prowling and howls are adaptive so its quarry does not grow inured to its presence and the terrifying turns into the laughable. Having had a close-call with one of these hulking beasts (not pictured—this one was relatively tame and confined to a wild park), we wonder if Super Monster Wolf could be persuaded to patrol different beats besides safeguarding crops in order to keep animals away from busy roads and out of harm’s way. Be sure to visit the links up top to learn more and see a video demonstration of Super Wolf in action.

railroaded or letter of the law

The legal fiction of natural and corporate personhood—apparently with all benefits and responsibilities appertaining to, including the right to unimpeded free speech and no abridgement of religious liberties (though it is difficult to envision what that looks like for a corporation) has probably the basest and most twisted phoney, flimsy precedence that I’ve encountered since perhaps the selling of papal indulgences—and given the kleptocracy, kraterocracy that we’ve inherited, that speaks volumes.
About a decade after the passage of the Fourteenth Amendment to the US Constitution that provided that no person can be denied the citizenship and civil rights afforded to anyone without due legislative process that applies to every individual equally in the summer of 1868, a train magnate and Civil War Reconstructionist Robber Baron and a corruptible justice who fabricated accounts of deliberations of the constitutional amendment that ensured formerly enslaved people would be less systematically marginalized be testifying that the original version of the draft used the term “citizen” instead of person and by a patently sophistical argument by extrapolation if it was unconstitutional to discriminate on the basis of identified or attributed racial background, it stood to reason that it was equally a protected category when it came to natural versus agglomerated personhood—otherwise corporate citizenship. Though many landmark and recognisable cases appeal to the standard set by the Fourteenth Amendment: Plessy v Ferguson, Brown v Board of Education, Dred Scott v Sandford (the impetuous for the amendment that it overturned, an earlier finding that proffered Americans descended from enslaved people could not participate fully in civil society) and even latter day decisions like Gore v Bush in the disputed outcome of the 2000 presidential election or the bevvy of cases pertaining to marriage equality, the celebrity is overshadowed by the rather dull realm of the infringement by state or private institutions on corporate mission and vision whose litigations (despite the speciousness of the argument) make up the bulk of its legal exercise.

umzugstag

grimoire

By way of Oxford English Dictionary’s Word of the Day, we’re drawn to perhaps summon a demon or two. The first exorcise is in deference to a maleficent entity, who is either facing redundancy owing to the eternal, infernal memory of the internet or is now finding himself racing to beat the devil for a backlog of old business, by the name of Tutivillius, the Worthless One.
Tutivillius is charged with maintaining one’s permanent record, as it were, recording one’s misdeeds—specifically the sack of syllables that represent the mumblings, grumblings, gossips and complaints dropped unwitnessed—like so many crumbled cookies of one’s digital footprint—during church service, when one’s thoughts were supposed to be at their most refined and rarified. This recorded testimony is used against an individual on Judgement Day. A second—related or conflated demon and the creation of his own handywork—is called Titivillus, whose duty which he gladly discharges on behalf of Lucifer is to introduce errata into copy and text that escapes the keen eyes of scribes and editors and is the bane of proofreaders: namely in infamous publications like the 1631 edition known as the Wicked Bible since some of the Commandments omitted the not part from thou shalt. The two are probably one and the same—owing to a typo which the demon trafficks in. Titvillus is also blamed for mispronunciation and other slips of the tongue. The superstition that the latter possessed orators and haunted the presses is the reason a printer’s apprentice is referred to a printer’s devil, charged with the most onerous of tasks and was the brunt of blame (perhaps nowadays a jamming, problematic laser-printer) when an error popped up.

十代のスタイル

Enjoying a brief two year run from 1968, Teen Look was a weekly publication brilliantly illustrated by Satsuku Okamoto meant to promote a harmonising dialogue (which I guess all teen interest magazines are and always were) between adolescents and their parents.
We liked exploring the gallery of covers curated by Dangerous Minds and appreciated—as this is the case with many captivating works of graphic design (especially foreign ones) that are circulated widely but often without background or context—moreover the appeal for more information (nothing easily retrievable), both on the magazine and its readership and on the artist.