The procession* of simulacra

As with Hollywood, so with this golden age of news-o-tainment. People will trust any old nutjob if they somehow inhabit the role, and then they're hooked. There was a long-running series of US pharmaceutical ads that would feature doctors from daytime soaps, who'd begin with the words "I'm not a doctor, but I play one on TV …" And viewers would flock to buy the medicine. The guys on Fox News aren't newscasters, but they do play them on TV – so we can't be all that surprised when people buy those drugs too.

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Marina Hyde

Of course we trust team Fox.

The Guardian 20–Jan–2010 >>>

(*sic)

The calm & the storm

8.05 pm New Year’s Eve Daylesford

An ear for a nose (a sound for a smell)

Would anyone who could actually dine on the smell of roast beef not be making a fine saving? [127] ... [127] Allusion to a famous legal tale related by Rabelais: a chef complained that a fool was savouring the smell of his roast beef: the judge ordered the fool to pay for his pleasure with the sound of his coins.

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Michel de Montaigne

from ‘III:5 On some lines of Virgil’

The Esssays: A selection. Trans. MA Screech

Penguin 1993, p.309 (fn 127)

Sight-specific

In developing nations, where over half the population requires corrective lenses but often do not have the money to purchase them, Oxford Physics Professor Joshua Silver has a viable solution. Adaptive Eyecare glasses are a liquid-filled alternative whose prescription can be altered at the time of fitting simply by adjusting the amount of injected liquid into the flexible membrane lens. By injecting more or less liquid using the attached syringes, the lenses become more convex (a stronger prescription) or concave (a weaker prescription). The patient, at the time of fitting, simply alters the amount of injected liquid while wearing the glasses, until they can see perfectly. The syringes are then removed, the lenses sealed, and the glasses are ready to wear. Each pair currently sells for just under $20 USD, though Joshua Silver, who is now director of the non-profit Centre for Vision in the Developing World at the University of Oxford, hopes to soon offer them for under $5.

FROM HERE

Project H Design

Design Revolution Roadshow

10 December 2009 >>>

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POSTSCRIPT

Fetishised form facilitates refined function ...

LE CORBUSIER c.1938

edge of the lake

I braked the car against the kerb and switched the headlights off and sat with my hands on the wheel. Under the thinning fog the surf curled and creamed, almost without a sound, like a thought trying to form itself on the edge of consciousness.

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Raymond Chandler The Big Sleep

Penguin reissue 2008 p.163

First published Hamish Hamilton 1939

The Place to PPP

For example >>>

Unavoidable fact

The fact that there's so much about which I know nothing.