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Saturday, September 14, 2019

The birds seem to like Joining him in the garden



“For moviegoers to get the idea of real combat, you’d have to shoot at them every so often from either side of the screen.”
~ Samuel Fuller, A Third Face
"I invite everyone to choose forgiveness rather than division, teamwork over personal ambition."
--Jean-Francois Cope



The birds seem to like
Joining him in the garden.
Coffee and seed cake


… Britain’s political system is broken. America’s isn’t | Spectator USA
The whole purpose of democracy is to manage situations in which everyone believes they’re right and everyone disagrees. The dangerous game Remainer politicians are playing could indeed result in a win. But what good is triumph, if in the end your system of governance looks a farce, its ‘democratic’ decisions revealed as rigged by the lowlife electorate’s haughty betters?
Trump won in 2016 because he ran a better campaign than his opponent did. Hillary's larger vote totals came from a few concentrated urban areas. Also, she and Trump were not the only candidates. She won a plurality of the vote, not a majority.  Let's see what the people decide next time.


Think your credit card is safe in your wallet? Think again. - Washington Post –  …“Card-not-present” credit, debit and prepaid card fraud has ballooned in the United States in the last few years, reaching $4.57 billion in 2016, up 34 percent from the year before, according to the most recent Federal Reserve Payments Study. These shadowy crimes hurt both small businesses and the customer shopping experience. If you’ve swiped a credit card at a gas station that has a hidden skimmer, your information was compromised during the Equifax data breach, or you ordered something from a website infected by malware, it is more than likely that thieves have your card information, according to cybersecurity experts, who often find themselves one step behind international criminal networks.
George Orwell was a democratic socialist all his life. So why are 1984 and Animal Farmcommonly read as indictments of  socialism 




Washington Post –  …“Card-not-present” credit, debit and prepaid card fraud has ballooned in the United States in the last few years, reaching $4.57 billion in 2016, up 34 percent from the year before, according to the most recentFederal Reserve Payments Study. These shadowy crimes hurt both small businesses and the customer shopping experience. If you’ve swiped a credit card at a gas station that has a hidden skimmer, your information was compromised during the Equifax data breach, or you ordered something from a website infected by malware, it is more than likely that thieves have your card information, according to cybersecurity experts, who often find themselves one step behind international criminal networks.


Kurzgesagt are known for their animated explainers about science and society. For their latest video, they’ve applied their signature style to a metaphysical short story by Andy Weir (author of The Martian). It’s called The Egg — you can read it here.

You were on your way home when you died.
It was a car accident. Nothing particularly remarkable, but fatal nonetheless. You left behind a wife and two children. It was a painless death. The EMTs tried their best to save you, but to no avail. Your body was so utterly shattered you were better off, trust me.
And that’s when you met me.
“What… what happened?” You asked. “Where am I?”
“You died,” I said, matter-of-factly. No point in mincing words.
“There was a… a truck and it was skidding…”
“Yup,” I said.
“I… I died?”
“Yup. But don’t feel bad about it. Everyone dies,” I said.
You looked around. There was nothingness. Just you and me. “What is this place?” You asked. “Is this the afterlife?”
“More or less,” I said.











The Irish Novelist Edna O’Brien Wants To Tell The Truth – And ‘Go Out’ Fighting



O’Brien’s new novel Girl is her 19th, and it’s different from the rest. The veteran writer is now 88, and she says it may be her last. Her first three novels, in the 1960s, “articulated what, until then, had remained relatively unspoken in staunchly Catholic Ireland: female sexual desire, active and acted upon.” – The Observer (UK)

 
Victorian councils launch community program for startups
LOCAL COMMUNITY OUTCOMES: The Springboard program will focus on issues related to transport, waste, and health and wellbeing.


33 billion records to be cyber stolen by 2023 
Identity theft and bad credit ratings just two of the ways cyber security breaches can affect Australians. Read more to make sure your agency is protected. 


Web scraping doesn’t violate anti-hacking law, appeals court rules ars technica 
 

Hand-Sculpted Archaeological Reconstructions of Ancient Faces

Working from remains discovered during archaeological excavations, sculptor and archaeologist Oscar Nilsson combines his two disciplines to reconstruct the faces of people who lived hundreds, thousands, and even tens of thousands of years ago.


Via I learn of DETECt -- Detecting Transcultural Identity in European Popular Crime Narratives -- which:

investigates the topics of identity and popular culture and aims to show how, from 1989 to the present, the transnational circulation of crime narratives from various European countries has contributed to the formation of a plural, shared European identity
       Could be interesting -- especially given the scope, and institutions involved. (And: it must be nice to have EU funding, sigh .....) 
       They're also holding a conference soon, about: 'Producers, distributors and audiences of European crime narratives':Euronoir at Aalborg University, Denmark, 30 September to 2 October. 
       I look forward to hearing more about this, as well as to seeing some of the resulting work and research. 
New York artist Jane Benson has been exhibiting a series of hand-cut archival inkjet-prints called “Song for Sebald.” In the exhibition, the prints are accompanied by music Benson has commissioned from Matthew Schickele. Here’s the full description from her website:

In “Song for Sebald,” Jane Benson explores the themes of separation and belonging through a radical encounter with the writer W.G. Sebald’s novel, The Rings of Saturn.  Benson begins with the physical text of the novel and a knife.  By carefully excising every part of the text except the syllables of the musical scale – do, re, mi, fa, so, la, ti – she uncovers what we might call the “potential music” of Sebald’s prose:  a set of notes with a full tonal range hovering both inside and outside of the novel, untethered from the original text and radically disjointed within itself.  


In the hands of an expert photographer, a single pinhole can serve to transform the world we normally see into something visceral, something that can play tricks with our sense of time. An exhibition of color pinhole photographs by Karen Stuke called “Wanderhalle: after Sebald’s Austerlitz” opens September 1 in Berlin at Kommunale Galerie Berlin (Hohenzollerndamm 176, 10713 Berlin). Here are the details from the website of the exhibition’s co-organizers The Wapping Project:

The Wapping Project in partnership with Kommunale Galerie Berlin and PhotoWerkBerlin restages its 2013 commission by German artist Karen Stuke responding to W.G. Sebald’s masterpiece Austerlitz (2001). The novel is one of literature’s most haunting meditation on time, loss and retrieval. It tells the story of Jacques Austerlitz, an architectural historian who, aged 5, was sent to England on a Kindertransport and placed with foster parents in Wales. As he rediscovers his past, Austerlitz embarks on a journey through time and space, from mid-20thcentury mitte-Europa to contemporary England.

  The Beautiful Ones, a memoir/autobiography/scrapbook by the artist forever after known as Prince, comes out next month. Prince wanted the tome to be “the biggest music book of all time”, a treasured object that would be “passed around from friend to friend”. The actual book is not that — Prince died in the early days of making it — but he had selected an editor/co-author to assist him. In a piece for the New Yorker, Dan Piepenbring recalls how he came to meet Prince and the early days of working with him on the book.

Behind his sphinxlike features, I could sense, there was an air of skepticism. I tried to calm my nerves by making as much eye contact as possible. Though his face was unlined and his skin glowed, there was a fleeting glassiness in his eyes. We spoke about diction. “Certain words don’t describe me,” he said. White critics bandied about terms that demonstrated a lack of awareness of who he was. “Alchemy” was one. When writers ascribed alchemical qualities to his music, they were ignoring the literal meaning of the word, the dark art of turning base metal into gold. He would never do something like that. He reserved a special disdain for the word “magical.” I’d used some version of it in my statement. “Funk is the opposite of magic,” he said. “Funk is about rules.”
























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