iSlave's Web Context

Concentration camp uniforms were just pulled off eBay. Image Source: Daily Mail.

Currently, there is an article on Yahoo about concentration camp memorabilia that was posted on eBay (see also reports here, here and here). This story about enslavement reminded me how the Web has a buried symmetry (see my posts on this here and here), because it led me into tabloid territory, to this story about Steve Jobs.

Image Source: Daily Mail.

Not only does the Web have a buried symmetry, but a vast potential for false associations. Any given news story or marketing campaign will be subliminally interpreted in terms of the other stories which are randomly juxtaposed with it on the same day. The old context in which we used to grasp information - say, regularly at 6 and 11 o'clock p.m. - has disappeared. It has been replaced by the new context of the 24-hour Web landscape of a particular day, which includes new articles from that day and any older material that Web users will unconsciously float to - before, during and after - looking at the given story in question.

But is browsing unconscious? Just by chance, juxtaposed with the nasty and distasteful eBay concentration camp memorabilia story was a piece on Steve Jobs' ex-girlfriend, Chrisann Brennan. Brennan has just published a rambling tell-all about the early years behind the scenes at Apple.

Brennan's memoir is a portrait of how the boy she knew in high school, obsessed with computing, became a corporate mogul, all filtered through her understanding of reality. She mentions Jobs' guru, Kobun Otogawa, and a lot of personal details (see an excerpt here). This dirty laundry led me to two videos which address Apple's Chinese production problems. Oddly, these videos were suggested to me. I wondered how quickly Google tailors your viewing experience on Youtube, depending on your browsing history and which news stories you've just read. Isn't the tailored browsing experience instantaneous? In which case, did Google bring me to the Youtube video about Apple's Chinese outsourcing because I had just looked at a news item about eBay concentration camp memorabilia sales?

What Really Happened During the Recession?

Michigan Central Station, Deroit. Image Source: Next Nature.

The Great Recession did not hit everyone equally. The suffering went deep, but not everyone felt the downturn to the same degree. There is a quote attributed to Harry S. Truman: "It's a recession when your neighbor loses his job; it's a depression when you lose yours."

Some people still consume in a pre-2007 fashion. And the recession is only reaching some industries and economic regions now. As a result, understanding what really happened during the recession is skewed between the experiences and corresponding perceptions of the new haves and the new have nots.

All Hallows' Eve Countdown: Happy Hallowe'en!

"I can't see. Where are my teeth?" Image Source: Facebook.

Happy Hallowe'en! Here are some great photos for today from around the Web.

All Hallows' Eve Countdown: The Curse of Tolkien's One Ring

The Vyne ring, aka the Ring of Silvianus. Image Source: BBC.

BBC has reported on the likely original source for Sauron's One Ring in J. R. R. Tolkien's stories. The history of the ring is complicated. It was found in a farmer's field near Silchester, in Hampshire, UK, in 1785. In 1929, with Tolkien's help, archaeologist Sir Mortimer Wheeler connected the ring to a curse tablet in a late Roman Celtic temple in Gloucestershire, 100 miles away. The curse tablet describes a stolen ring. The area around the temple was also awash in superstitions about elves and dwarves. It is commonly believed that this research helped inspire Tolkien's The Hobbit (1937) and the The Lord of the Rings trilogy (1954-1955).

All Hallows' Eve Countdown: The Curse of the Purple Sapphire

The Delhi Purple Sapphire, in an arcane setting designed by one of its owners to contain its maleficent power with binding spells. Image Source: Live Science.

Today's Countdown to Hallowe'en post is about a curse of imperial plunder. Above, a gemstone with a reputation for leaving disaster in its wake. The gem is in fact an amethyst, stolen by a British soldier from a Temple of Indra - Hindu god of rain and thunderstorms - around the time of the 1857 Indian Mutiny. The current owner, the Natural History Museum in London, claims that it was stolen in 1855. From Kanpur, India, the stone made its way to Britain in the hands of Bengal cavalryman, Colonel W. Ferris. According to Live Science and The Indian Express, the gem spread misery to all who possessed it.

All Hallows' Eve Countdown: Devil's Horse Cake

Sorry for the slowdown in posts, everyone. There was an unexpected family crisis here. Never fear, there are more posts to come in the last few days leading up to Hallowe'en! The photos of the day go to edible horror from Tattooed Bakers in London, UK. This very sweet monstrosity is a super scary devil horse cake - a red velvet cake body with rum pouring out of its flared nostrils. From i09:

How do you follow up a pony-sized unicorn cake with rainbow filling? If you're the Tattooed Bakers, you don't rest on your equine laurels and instead concoct a demonic rotting horse-shaped confection with liquid rum snot.

Following the unicorn's meadow that was Baketopia, the Tattooed Bakers participated in Feed The Beast 2013, adding this monstrous confection to the festivities. Kraken rum poured from the horse cake's nostrils and into a skull font below. And the cake's interior is red velvet, meaning it looked perfectly gory even as the partygoers dug into its sugary hide.

Head over to Miss Cakehead's blog for more photos of the cake; all of its various gashes look much better photographed up-close than from a distance.

You can see a gallery of other cakes from Tattooed Bakers here. Images from i09 and Eat Your Heart Out.

See all my posts on Horror themes.

See all my posts on Ghosts.
 

Check out other blogs observing the Countdown to Hallowe'en!

Amnesia Around the Present Moment

Illustration by Lonni Sue Johnson. 

After a bout of encephalitis, Lonni Sue Johnson suffered brain damage to her hippocampus in 2007. Since then, she has lost all her memory and lives entirely in the narrowest sliver of the present moment. Time has covered her case, with a focus on the ways she has retained her creative knowledge, talents and skills after her unfortunate affliction. For example, she can still recall how to play the viola - but cannot remember that her father died many years ago. She illustrates her experiences in the present moment in order to continue to retain and build ideas through the course of the day. See the video below the jump.

All Hallows' Eve Countdown: The Girl Who Survives

Image Source: Djano23 at deviantART via In the Mouth of Dorkness.

In Halloween II (1981), Donald Pleasence's psychiatrist character mumbles about the meaning of Hallowe'en. He says it really refers to the pagan Gaelic festival of Samhain, the start of the darker half of the year. This seasonal shift provides an elemental connection to the other world, to memory, death, and ancestors. The spiritual dimension is also an elaborate folkloric metaphor for access to the darker parts of ourselves. The screenplay combines Christian symbolism with these ideas:

Samhain, it means the loft of the dead. The end of summer. The festival of Satan. ... In order to please the gods, the druid priests held fire rituals. Prisoners of war, criminals, the insane, animals were burned alive. By observing the way they died the druids believed they could see elements of the future. 2000 years we've come no closer. Samhain is not spirits, it's not goblins, ghosts or witches. It's the unconscious mind. We're all afraid of the darkness inside ourselves.

Dr. Loomis says repeatedly that Michael Myers is not human; he is "pure evil." Michael is a violent supernatural force, an instinct to kill that never stops, which is why he can be shot repeatedly and not die. Of the first 1978 Halloween film, director John Carpenter said, "The movie's about the 'revenge of the repressed' and Jamie Lee has a connection with the killer because she's repressed too."

Horror films are morality plays. The horror stems from some transgression or violation through indulgence of the unspeakable. The story is about a collapse due to that degradation and the effort to correct the problem, to return to safety and security, to survive.

A collection of African horror stories on Wattpad offer typical examples. Swish, Swish! is a warning against laziness, vanity, selfishness, shortcuts around hard work, and hurting others to get ahead. Another, The Witch's Mist, is a grisly injunction against black magic and vampirism (here the literally cannibalistic form, not the soul-sucking variety). Cannibalism, the ultimate horror, is never far away, as the current lifestyle and tribal subculture of human-blood-drinking vampires show.