a harry alan towers production

Courtesy ibīdem, we discover the 1967 spy thriller featuring a female supervillain, demonstrating that megalomania is not an exclusively male trait, titled The Million Eyes of Sumuru.
Starring Shirley Eaton (later Bond Girl), George Nader and Frankie Avalon, the plot revolves around a plot for world domination by replacing world leaders with members of her Order of Our Lady. Eaton would reprise her role in the 1969 The Girl from Rio and there was a remake titled just Sumuru in 2003 from director Darrell Roodt—this time set on an remote off-world colony removed from the rest of human civilization where a matriarchy has taken hold. Such role reversals have fun, pulpy implications and are for a large part relegated to the past until one realizes how such gender stereotypes are baked in and how even the most progressive offerings often have truck in those same, tired ideas—exhibit one being the unceremonious end to Star Trek’s original run with “Turnabout Intruder” where James T Kirk and Doctor Janice Lester switch bodies with the implicit message that putting a woman in charge leads to hysteria.

chiamami col tou nome

Via our cyber peripatetic Messy Nessy Chic (who has gleaned a lot of interesting material in her latest expedition), we discover a gallery of scenes from Luca Guadagnino’s 2017 cinematic adaptation of the romantic drama by André Aciman inserted into the lush, Impressionist backgrounds of Claude Monet (the Cliffs of Étretat, the Houses of Parliament at Dusk, the Japanese Bridge over Water Lilies, Venice at Twilight). Pictured is a modified scene of Camille Doncieux (Monet’s first wife and subject of many works by himself, Manet and Renoir) at the Window in their home in Argenteuil, a Parisian suburb, painted in 1873.

i, in my great and unmatched wisdom

With no advance warning to Kurdish fighters or coalition partners, Trump announced the abrupt withdrawal of US troops from the Turkish-Syria border region.
This abandonment after five years of cooperation with Kurdish forces, whom have borne the brunt of defeating the Islamic State during Syria’s civil war though characterised as terrorists by Turkey, has prompted the Pentagon to deliver a stern warning to Turkey not to invade. Though Trump in principle agrees with the assessment that there should be no military incursion that would further destabilise Syria, pledging to economically destroy Turkey should it do so, removing soldiers from the cross-fire has essentially given Erdoğan a pass to carry on as he sees fit.

reference desk

Recently distinguished as Everlasting Blört’s curated pick of the day, we are finding this data visualisation from Hat Note both relaxing and engaging.
In real time, Listen to Wikipedia (best performance on mobile devices) signals changes to its articles, new entries and subtractions with plucks and peals and one can fine tune the criteria to track the new and novel as well as what’s possibly the target of vandals or subject to propaganda.

mechanical turk

Via friend of the blog par excellence Nag on the Lake, we find ourselves confronted with an interesting installation to help one better visualise one’s hourly salary.
This machine can be calibrated in a number of ways—illustrating, as in this configuration, how many turns of a crank it will take for the contraption to yield up a penny and by projection, the endurance and drudgery it takes over the course of an hour. The menial isn’t mindless of course and it’s not important whether it’s the floor or the ceiling so long as it’s a living wage. What do you think? Is tedium a luxury for those that struggle for fulfillment from a job? While perhaps unrewarding, there’s no pretense in doing this task, whereas other career-paths (with the support of professional sophists) do a good job of covering up that business of estrangement.  Someone will reinvent capitalism and undercut the competition with a machine like this. 

deustch-amerikanischer tag

Observed under the auspices of Public Law 100-104, 101 Statute §721 and proclaimed by Ronald Reagan on the two-hundredth anniversary of the landing back in 1983, German-American Day marks the 1683 arrival (see also) of thirteen families from Krefeld near Düsseldorf and Duisberg in Philadelphia, founding the settlement of what would eventually become Germantown, Pennsylvania.
The occasion was commemorated from the seventeenth century onwards and held in other parts of the colonies and country with German diaspora but was discontinued during World War I. This first group of Mennonite families had fled Prussia for religious freedom and established the Pennsylvania Dutch identity and were among the first, along with the Quakers, to petition for the abolition of slavery in 1688. Though coinciding with Oktoberfest, the largest celebration of German culture abroad, German-American Day predates the first Wiesn of 1810 by several decades.

detail & parody

Via Kottke, we find ourselves challenged to a bit of scansion and poetic graffiti in physician and writer William Carlos Williams’ (*1883 – †1963) 1932 modern, imagist kitchen table note “This Is Just to Say.”  Its perfectly self-consistent typographical structure, which reads more like the accidental symmetry of found poetry, makes the intensifier seem out of place anywhere. Williams’ wife, Florence (Flossie) née Herman (*1891 – †1976), herself penned a “reply” some years later—which I think far and away is the best “none-of-the-above” responses:

Dear Bill: I’ve made a
couple of sandwiches for you.
In the ice-box you’ll find
blue-berries—a cup of grapefruit
a glass of cold coffee.

On the stove is the tea-pot
with enough tea leaves
for you to make tea if you
prefer—Just light the gas—
boil the water and put it in the tea

Plenty of bread in the bread-box
and butter and eggs—
I didn’t know just what to make for you. Several people
called up about office hours—

See you later. Love. Floss.

Please switch off the telephone.