finger in every pie

Ernie Smith from Tedium has a thoughtful column that argues the case in favour of reducing rather than trying to expand one’s exposure to the unrelenting barrage of information available at one’s finger tips by closing one’s browser tabs.
Like the cult of Inbox Zero or the compulsion to have everything marked as read, it’s an exercise of course emblematic for the search for tranquillity and quiet in whatever context and any given setting and artefacts are bound to change. I really liked how the introduction referenced the concept of tsundoku (積ん読)—letting unread books like good intentions pile up—with a twist on the aggressive panopticon of happenings and updates in tab-sundoku, and I appreciate such mediations, especially when I catch myself getting irritated or anxious or feeling delinquent over things of my own making. Most (if not all) of these sorts of pressures come from within.

inter alia

While only briefly a signatory to the Treaty of Rome during the final years of the Clinton administration, Bush II withdrawing America along with Israel and the Sudan with the US being only an observer state during the Obama years under contingent provisions that US soldiers were immune from its verdicts or prosecutions, it is still far out of bounds for the US to excoriate the International Criminal Court (ICC) as irrelevant and capricious.
Beyond the gesture of refusal to cooperate (previously here and here), the US government is threatening dire consequences against the ICC should it move forward in investigating allegations against the US for war crimes perpetrated in Afghanistan to include sanctions and criminal charges against the members of the court and any parties cooperating with their case. A parallel inquiry into human rights violations and practising a policy of apartheid on the people of Palestine resulted in the US closing off all diplomatic outlets for the Palestinian Liberation Organisation (PLO)—evicting the group from its offices in Washington, DC—a move also characterised as an assault on sovereignty and a country’s right to self-defence undermined.

pay-for-play

Via Slashdot, we are reminded that while there has already been a rather crass slue of space-related advertising tie-ins and governments are not the only participants in pushing exploration forward, but I’d still rather not see astronauts and rockets covered in corporate logos like NASCAR racers as the NASA administrator is directing his staff to look into.
While nothing is official yet, any change in stance towards allowing sponsorship or endorsement would signal a significant shift in ethics rules that prohibit officials using public office for private gain. I suppose it is a natural consequence of allowing a tabloid tyrant occupy high-office.  What do you think? This does not even get into the value of inspiration and aspiration that would be squandered by staring off into the “moral equivalent of the side of a bus.”

miss simpson, do you find something funny about the word tromboner?

For this year’s International Trombone Festival, the talented Christopher Bill brought together a big ensemble of fellow players to produce an epic brass cover of the Queen song “Bohemian Rhapsody.” Learn more at Laughing Squid about the organiser, contributors and the fest.

north tower

Hoping to gather some stock footage of a placid skyline to illustrate the juxtaposition between expectations and apprehensions surrounding the hysterical build-up and climax to the Millennial Computer Bug and the quieter, calmer realities of the real world, Stuttgarter artist Wolfgang Staehle, an early adopter of technology in creating art, set up a webcam in New York City on 11 September 2001 and inadvertently captured the first plane’s impact into the World Trade Center and the subsequent collapse.
Because of the state of web-cameras seventeen years ago, the images are granular and advance in spans of four seconds. Though not the first time that the unique recording has been shown in remembrance and commemoration, on this anniversary the Brooklyn Historical Society will be projecting the film onto a custom screen and have synchronised the video so it plays out in precise real time. It is hoped that visitors to the screening will be able to incorporate this digital witness to terror in a resilient and circumspect way that recalls how the virtual world can both inform and contradict the real one.

well fiddle!

Our faithful chronicler, Doctor Caligari’s Cabinet, reminds that among many other things that occurred on this day, a quarter of a century hence saw the pilot of The X-Files, whose reboot didn’t seem to fare so well in a post-truth world, aired. Thirty eight years before that, CBS broadcast the first episode of Gunsmoke (imagine that mash-up), which ran until 1975, making it the longest running scripted television series of continuing characters in American primetime television until that honour was taken by The Simpsons just in April of this year.