6x6

that’s like comparing apples and mass shootings: idioms updated for American contemporary culture

store brand: Christmas advertisement aimed to educate the public on habitat-loss due to palm-oil plantations banned for being “too political”

across the stars: John Williams’ fresh arrangement for the Star Wars prequels—which if nothing else continued the tradition of arch and on point scores

perhaps not forty-two after all: the answer to the ultimate question of life, the Universe and everything is instead one hundred and thirty-seven, the fine-structure constant that haunted Richard Feynmann and Wolfgang Pauli—via Strange Company

sacred and profane architecture: this is the church you go to when God is in the volcano forging a ring of power, a Twitter thread via Art of Darkness

bauhaus 100: the next instalment profiling Herbert Bayer who helped create a universal typographic identity for the movement

waffenstillstand

Previous ceasefire agreements already had pulled out belligerents Bulgaria, the Austro-Hungarian and Ottoman empires from the fighting but the Armistice of 11 November 1918 (the eleventh hour of the eleventh day of the eleventh month) formally ended the Great War with Imperial Germany’s defeat and withdrawal jenseits the Rhein, holding the peace until the Treaty of Versailles could be negotiated.
 

 

Terms of what was technically not a surrender to the Allied powers were largely determined by Supreme Allied Commander Marshal Ferdinand Foch and parties to the truce were transported incognito across war-torn northern France to the marshal’s private carriage on a secluded railway siding in the Forest of Compiègne and representatives came to an agreement and signed pre-dawn—with the armistice effective noon German time, eleven o’clock in Paris (France was on Greenwich Mean Time until World War II when it came under German occupation and decided not to switch back afterwards).
 

From the field, there was a sense of relief and hope but little jubilation as fifty-two months of fierce fighting and over seventeen million lives lost had left many hollow and exhausted. This post has featured a few images from our visit to the memorial site in the summer of 2008. I remember that being the year that the last surviving veterans passed away and the war slipped from living memory.  The act of contrition and cooperation was later characterised as betrayal and facilitated the rise of more terrors but for now there is peace and that is holy.

tmz

Sadly, as Paleofuture reports, the Paramount Ranch, the location of a number of large scale-sets that was a major actor in a number of film and television productions since its 1927 acquisition as a film ranch—falling within the traditional bounds of the studio zone, a thirty-mile zone (TMZ) that radiates out from West Beverly in Los Angeles and an easy drive from Hollywood—has been engulfed by the Woolsey wildfire, sustaining significant damage. The allure of this spot, backdrop for 1981’s Reds and 1968’s Herbie the Love Bug plus many others and numerous television shows like Westworld, The Bachelor and Doctor Quinn: Medicine Woman was that it was also open for public inspection, provided that nothing was filming at the time. Wildfires devastating the region are burning California from both ends, with at least twenty-five fatalities and thousands of homes and businesses burned.

i want my lavender spats, and in addition to them, i want my honey-coloured gusset with the herringbone hem

Having been a reader of Damn Interesting for many years, I was pleased to find that they’ve significantly revamped their website and their investigations into the weird and wonderful and now for your convenience, their stories are narrated and syndicated in podcast format (est’d in 2012).
Having a vague memory of seeing this movie on television when I was pretty young, I was pleased to have the details limned in (though still so many questions) behind the making of Theodore Geisel’s (Doctor Seuss’) only feature, the Technicolor, 1953 musical fantasy The Five Thousand Fingers of Doctor T. Granted the chance to make a full-length film after the award-winning success of his featurette Gerald McBoing-Boing, the author came to describe the undertaking as a most debaculous fiasco. Though Seuss’ style could be seen in the costuming, choreography and set-designs, the majority of the musical numbers were cut—the best one in the score, the Dressing Song (Do-mi-Do-Duds) that is quite in the same spirit as Mister Burns’ See My Vest from “Two Dozen and One Greyhounds” was kept in—and the screenplay went through so many rewrites that Seuss’ original themes of dominance, oppression and austerity that marked the world recently were also excised. Despite later enjoying somewhat of a revival as a cult-classic, Seuss disowned the film and didn’t mention it in his biography, eliding to his string of successful book adaptations that were to follow.

extra, extra

Teaming up with a pair of correspondents from the network’s finance desk, Janelle Shane (previously)—considering that one Chinese news agency looks posed to replace its anchors altogether with artificial intelligences (I wonder how the human anchor this tireless clone feels about making himself possibly redundant)—fed her neural network thousands of CNN headlines to see how it might reinterpret them and highlight trends that were otherwise invisible against all the noise.
The output was somewhat bleakly nihilistic and highlighted businesses behaving corruptly. Some of our favourites were:

Its iPhone Look it
Million do Regret
The US China Trade War is so Middle Class
The Best Way to Avoid Your Money

See the whole list and learn more about the methodology behind this and other experiments—with a lot more weirdness to discover—at the links above.

drawing board

We had encountered the proposal to put a triumphal ziggurat in Trafalgar Square beforehand but until now—thanks to Things magazine, we had not appreciated the whole scope and scale of London’s alternative monuments and transport plans. Visualised and superimposed over the modern city, the gallery contains rejected and rather fantastic architectural ideas like an elevated runway for a Westminster airport pitched in 1934 or the 1967 plans for monorail servicing central London. Check out the whole collection at the links above and discover more on the theme of unbuilt cities.

novemberpogrome

Acting on the pretext of the assassination of a Nazi Germany diplomat in Paris by a teenaged refugee of Polish-Jewish descent, and with mobs already worked into a furore over the commemoration of the failed putsch of 1923, on this night in 1938—five years after the Nazis overthrew the Weimar Republic (founded on the same date in 1918)—riots broke out across Germany and Austria with stormtroopers as well as German civilians engaged in plunder and violence against Jewish owned businesses, places of worship and homes.
Laws were already in place that excluded the Jewish population from engaging in social and political life, but Kristallnacht (so called after the shards of broken glass) became a turning point with the neighbours and the global community attending more closely to the horrors that people were capable of and how we can stand by and allow such things to happen. At least ninety-one people were killed overnight and over thirty-thousand individuals arrested and sent to concentration camps the next day in what Reichsminster of Public Enlightenment and Propaganda Joseph Goebbels characterised to the world press as “spontaneous manifestations of indignation over the murder of Herr vom Rath”—the Paris-based diplomat by Herschel Grynszpan, whom were rumoured to have been lovers. The power of shame and insecurity are not to be underestimated either and usually result in foisting otherness on others.  This dread incitement precipitated in something far worse but also showed the world that stances of containment and appeasement were no longer tenable. 

nasty, brutish and short

Building off of a long tradition of social contracts and utilitarianism, philosopher John Rawls developed his original position hypothesis as a thought experiment in order to temper our thinking towards discourse and a way from a savage state of nature as the impetus for the polis and social conventions, introducing the heuristic tool of a “veil of ignorance” in order to gauge the morality and empathy of policy decisions.
Perhaps we do slide into anarchy but order and concord are not the consequence of chaos necessarily. Politicians and decision-makers, donning this veil, become blind to their place in the hierarchy and don’t know if they will fall into the category of haves or have-nots, until the veil is lifted, and would in theory make equitable decisions that maximises welfare for all, regardless of where they fall on the spectrum. One can immediately appreciate the urgency of justice and equanimity should one be weighing decisions with the insight of ignorance that disfavours or privileges the rights of the enslaved over slave-owners and vice versa.