cultural attache (12. 184)

It was refreshing how in the Roman Empire dictators would prolong their term by declaring a holiday, instead we have a president-elect in the United States as Los Angeles continues to smoulder and burn appoint three special envoys to Hollywood, not to help with repair and recovery from the devastation but rather act as celebrity legates to revitalise a failing industry and bring back its Golden Age. Ceremonial sine cure titles were awarded to actors, known for their MAGA boosterism, to Mel Gibson, Jon Voight and Sylvester Stallone (see previously)—assuredly to the disappointment of others to hooked their star to that movement—Trump announced his special ambassadors to “a great but very troubled place” which has “lost much business over the last four years to Foreign Countries” as his eyes and ears, pledging to get done what they suggest. The equivalent of DOGE for the movies, its unclear how they might brooch this situation and what countries are undermining Tinsel Town and whether it is a problem at all and not another manufactured crisis that’s in their modus operandi to invent and then pretend to solve with a new code of standards to appeal to grievances—if anything the industry is under threat from AI, studio greed and independent cinema.

10x10 (12. 183)

compliments of the season: Poseidon’s Underworld reviews 1973 British anthology series Orson Welles’ Great Mysteries 

hagiography: breathtaking hidden murals in the Cathedral of Angers depicting the life of local saint called Maurille, who fled due to embarrassment for failure to perform a miracle, unveiled for the first time 

wmw: a list of endangered historic and cultural sites for 2025, around the world and beyond 

infinite nonsense honeypot: a lure for AI scrapers  

there is a plot—what would be the point of just a bunch of things: legendary director David Lynch dies, aged 78—see previously

run the bricks: a mother in New Zealand completes a hundred metre sprint barefoot over a track of Legos—setting a Guinness Record—via Metafilter 

but is it like the old playboy magazine—do you have essays there by the modern day equivalent of gore vidal and william f buckley jr: US supreme court justice Samuel Alito asks if people visit PornHub (previously) for the articles—via Super Punch 

cozy rewatch recommendation: the 2003 New Wave film The Dreamers (Innocents) that follows the exploits and adventures of an American university student in Paris during the 1968 riots—via Messy Nessy Chic  

𒀸𒋩𒆕𒀀: a paranoid ruler’s illiteracy and a torched library behind a glimpse of everyday life in the Assyrian Empire 

celebrity is a broad church: BBC1’s 1985 entertainment magazine Friday People

synchronoptica

one year ago: artist Monica Sjöö (with synchronoptica), generational perceptions, an ethnographic study of bathroom graffiti, another banger from ABBA plus words for lighthouse

seven years ago: laser-cut note pads, Madrid reinstates direct rule on Catalonia plus free-floating exoplanets

eight years ago: theatres protest the inauguration of Trump 

nine years ago: a slipper-shaped wedding chapel

ten years ago: misattributed quotations plus McDonald’s new slogan

philadelphi corridor (12. 182)

US president Joe Biden and Qatari prime minister Sheikh Mohammed bin Abdulrahman al Thani separately announced that Hamas and Israeli, after fifteen months of fighting and incursions into Palestinian, Lebanese and Iranian territory, have reached an agreement for a multiphase ceasefire, committing to end the war with the truce beginning on Sunday. Hostages will be freed and the end to violence will allow a surge of humanitarian aid to reach Gaza. Although basically the same peace plan proposed and endorsed by the UN Security Council last May by the Biden administration, some are crediting the pressure that in-coming president Trump exerted on the Israeli government (envoys from both teams involved in the negotiations) but significantly, the terms of the treaty are expected to be ratified under Biden’s watch—see previously. More importantly, those kidnapped and held will be reunited with their families in exchange for a thousand Palestinian civilians held by Israel and the suffering caused by this long and deadly conflict which has claimed nearly fifty-thousand lives will begin to ease. Still the consequences of all this death and destruction will have lasting effect for a seemingly intractable generational clash that has lasted decades and the killing continues up until the last minute.

trade wars are good—and easy to win (12. 181)

Here’s a compelling argument for Canada, in particular though it could apply to other economies under a capricious threat of tariffs, not to introduce retaliatory measures in kind—NAFTA and its successor under a different name plus America’s most-favoured nation seal of approval was on balance beneficial to corporate barons by enabling chasing cheap labour and off-shore environmental damage and in its latest incarnation enforced a hallmark of the rentier economic model with the proviso that enshrined IP and forbade the circumvention of digital locks and greatly eroded the right to repair for manufacturers and consumers. As with car parts, printer ink, streaming-services and charging plugs, this inability to seek out third-party solutions, this subscription system locks people into leases over ownership and ensures a steady stream of rents rendered and fears of sunk costs for everything invested in activating the extra features. As much as the US is seeking Canadian raw material and natural resources and exploitable manpower elsewhere, for which embargoes would be a pyrrhic victory at best as reliant on exports, any target could instead invoke a regime of jailbreaking, a domestic app store that bypasses American-based fees, kits that would overcome non-original parts, carve-out to warrants (this is not technologically difficult to do) and offer ways to get out of lease contracts and not experiencing reciprocal price-rises, which is a proven accelerant for populism.

the garden of forking paths (12. 180)

Via tmn, we were thoroughly engrossed with this glossary of terms, under development, that account for why knowing things is hard, which emulates the scholarship, didacticism and style of Samuel Johnson’s 1755 A Dictionary of the English Language, and covers an extensive list of rhetorical devices and biases (see previously) that we’ve touched on before—also presenting a wealth of new ones. For instance, there is Brandolini’s Law which governs the burden of proof principle of bullshit asymmetry, recognising that the effort needed to refute misinformation is an order of magnitude than was spent to create it, the autobiographical heuristic, which appends themes in a work to the author’s experience rather than assuming it was something handed down or imagined (see also euhemerism), goropising—citing a discredited hypothesis, after Dutch linguist Johannes Goropius Becanus’ strange thoughts on etymology, and testis unus, testis nullus, that the uncorroborated account of a single person should be treated with scepticism. Much more from Book and Sword at the link above.

synchronoptica

one year ago: Unwort of the Year (with synchronoptica) plus Happy Days (1974)

seven years ago: the collectibility of Fiji mermaids

eight years ago: neural networks and arcade games, Flemish proverbs, Dorothy Lange’s photographs of Japanese internment camps plus mapping Trump world

nine years ago: assorted links to revisit plus Nitrate Divas

ten years ago: a novel from Jo Walton about a time-travelling Athena plus early wireless telephony

keogram (12. 179)

Via the always data-driven Quantum of Sollazzo newsletter, we are referred to another incredible bit of astronomical imagery from star-gazer Cees Bassa, a professional astronomer working for ASTRON, the Dutch institute for radio astronomy, presenting their all-sky image above the Netherlands, a composition of nighttime photos taken at fifteen second intervals that illustrates the lengthening and shortening of the days, weather and phases of the Moon. Their fourth annual almanac, the title term, from the Inuit word keoeeit (ᑭᐅᐱᑦ) for aurora, originally applied to a method for graphing the intensity of the Northern Lights and is in broader use as a way of documenting the changing night sky in narrow bands for the entire hemisphere. Much more at the links above.

earthstreak (12. 178)

Though the crew of the Apollo missions who captured Pale Blue Marble and Earthrise might take exception to the accolade of best photo ever, we do think that this image of cities whizzing by taken by veteran astronaut Donald Pettit, on his third tour aboard the International Space Station having spent over five hundred days in orbit, is pretty spectacular. The dazzling nature of the foreground in motion belies other details, like the galactic core on the horizon and the streaks of other satellites and the transition from night to day on the world’s edge. A gifted science communicator making the most of his stints onboard the ISS, Pettit is well equipped with cameras and lenses and has conducted numerous experiments and demonstrations for the curious and enquiring as well as his regiment of assigned tasks and holds the first patent for an object invented in space, the Zero G Cup, a coffee mug that uses the wetting angle, the incline where a liquid and solid meet, to avoid the need of using a straw.

7x7 (12. 177)

alexiomia: from the Greek for no words for appellation, a study of the social anxiety of name-avoidance—via the new Shelton wet/dry  

white knight: Bytedance entertaining contingency plans to allow Elon Musk to purchase TikTok’s US operations ahead of the expected judgment against the platform 

out-of-office reply: a business card whose information only appears in sunlight  

screamboat willie: Disney begins to deal with its loss of IP—apparently a Popeye horror film is in the works too 

tl;dr: AI input and output  

open and shut case: the US Department of Justice election interference report suggest Trump would have been convicted if not re-elected 

 💌: the face of collective grief and the demands of acceptance that are far from passive

synchronoptica

one year ago: AI plagiarism and The Stepford Wives (with synchronoptica), a hands-free rosary plus Queen Margrethe II of Denmark abdicates

seven years ago: the Continental Congress (1784) plus Celtic burial mounds

eight years ago: authoritarians and the press, the former trolley line that ran between the US and Mexico, assorted links worth the revisit, Bart the Genius (1990) plus a secret WWII commando school

nine years ago: the dancing doctor plus genre blindness

ten years ago: more on the refugee situation in Germany plus an animated homage to Davie Bowie’s personae