Photographer Alice Smeets, assisted by Atiz Resistans, a group of Haitian artists, created a photographic version of the Rider-Waite Tarot deck using Haitian locations and motifs.

Dangerous Minds

Telegraph:

A young male leopard injured six people as it eluded capture for 12 hours after it ventured into the grounds of an elite school in the Indian city of Bangalore. …

The leopard was first spotted strolling around the thankfully empty corridors of the Vibgyor International School on surveillance video by security guards. The CCTV footage later showed it had entered the grounds at about 4am.

As crowds gathered to watch the animal prowling around the school premises, forest department personnel arrived on the scene equipped with dart guns and tranquillisers.

But the animal then went into hiding and remained out of sight for several hours before it was spotted outside the school in nearby bush.

As locals descended on the scene, the animal darted back inside the school where the near fatal case of hide-and-seek intensified.

With officials closing in on its hiding place in a classroom, the big cat made a run for it and raced towards the swimming pool, sending people dashing for cover.

It lunged at one man who managed to ward it off. But it then took Sanjay Gubbi, a wildlife expert, by surprise as it raced towards him.

Mr Gubbi tried to scale a compound wall, but the animal caught him and dragged him to the ground, mauling him next to the pool as he fought it off.

It was after this encounter that one of the forestry team finally managed to shoot it with a tranquilliser.The animal retreated towards a bathroom where it finally collapsed.

“It was a long struggle to capture the leopard,” senior police official S Boralingaiah told reporters. “Although it was injected with tranquilisers it could be captured only around 8.15pm local time when the medication took full effect.”

The leopard, which is thought to have ventured from a nearby forest, has now been moved to a national park. The six injured people were treated for minor injuries.

Evidently they hired the Japanese firm that designs the controls of all the new automobile radio-CD-players to come up with a nifty new electronic automatic transmission gear shift selection system.

The Globe and Mail:

Electronic gear shifters on some newer Fiat Chrysler SUVs and cars are so confusing that drivers have exited the vehicles with the engines running and while they are still in gear, causing crashes and serious injuries, U.S. safety investigators have determined.

The National Highway Traffic Safety Administration, in documents posted during the weekend, has doubled the number of vehicles involved in an investigation of the problem, but it stopped short of seeking a recall. The agency found more than 100 crashes and over a dozen injuries, mostly in Jeep Grand Cherokees.

Agency tests found that operating the centre console shift lever “is not intuitive and provides poor tactile and visual feedback to the driver, increasing the potential for unintended gear selection,” investigators wrote in the documents. They upgraded the probe to an engineering analysis, which is a step closer to a recall. NHTSA will continue to gather information and seek a recall if necessary, a spokesman said. …

Jake Fisher, director of auto testing for Consumer Reports, expects more problems and investigations as auto makers continue to roll out new electronic controls that are unfamiliar to drivers. “I think the manufacturers need to be much more responsible as they try these new technologies,” he said.

The government’s probe now covers more than 856,000 vehicles including the popular Jeep Grand Cherokee SUV from the 2014 and 2015 model years and the 2012 through 2014 Dodge Charger and Chrysler 300 sedans with 3.6-litre V-6 engines.

In the vehicles, drivers pull the shift lever forward or backward to select gears and the shifter doesn’t move along a track like in most cars. A light shows which gear is selected, but to get from Drive to Park, drivers must push the lever forward three times. The gearshift does not have notches that match up with the gear you want to shift into, and it moves back to a centred position after the driver picks a gear.

The vehicles sound a chime and issue a dashboard warning if the driver’s door is opened while they are not in Park. But investigators found that the push-button start-stop feature doesn’t shut off the engine if the vehicles aren’t in Park, increasing the risk of the vehicles rolling away after drivers have exited.

“This function does not protect drivers who intentionally leave the engine running or drivers who do not recognize that the engine continues to run after an attempted shut-off,” investigators wrote.

Thus far, the investigation has found 314 complaints, 121 crashes and 30 injuries from the problem. Three drivers reported fractured pelvic bones, while four others needed to be hospitalized with a ruptured bladder, fractured kneecap, or severe leg trauma.

Fiat Chrysler says it is co-operating in the probe. The company changed the shifters in the 2016 Grand Cherokee and 2015 Charger and 300 sedans so they function more like people are used to. But FCA said it did so to increase customer satisfaction and not for safety concerns.

This is why we should have kept the property qualification for voting.

Hat tip to the News Junkie.

I logged into the Oldest College Daily web-site the other day, in the course of looking for blog fodder editorials or news items. I didn’t find anything of interest in either category, but I could not avoid noticing how different today’s Yale Daily News is from the paper in my day. Obviously, there’s been a lot of technological change. I can remember night-editing and pasting up the entire paper piece by piece out of bits of paper to be printed before dawn on an enormous press down in the News building’s basement. I expect that it’s a bit easier to do all that on a PC today.

The paper’s online edition has one of those floating advertising blocks, sitting just below the paper’s logo. The advertising changes with every new mouse click or page selection. But I happened to hit the ambulance-chasing legal advertisement you see above.

Now that’s change for you! In my day, we would have had an ad for the now-extinct Quality Wine or for J. Press. Today, the politics of resentment have created such a witch-hunting atmosphere at places like Yale that enterprising law firms recognize the existence of large potential client base in the male undergraduate community.

If Peter Salovey had any common sense, when he looked at the Yalie Daily and saw that ad, he would say to himself: “By heaven, when they are running ads like this, things have obviously gone outrageously too far, and something has to be done! Tomorrow morning I’m closing down the Womens’ (Cultural Identity) Center permanently, and I’m going to assemble a blue-ribbon committee of responsible faculty, students, and alumni to write another Woodward Report, this time affirming Yale student and faculty due process rights and rejecting federal interference and identifying inflammatory paranoia-inducing leftist agitation and propagandizing as dangerous to the comity of the university and the rights of the members of its community.

“Hereafter, we are going to start treating Yale students as individuals and adults, not as members of groups of victims entitled to special privileges and compensations and not as members of a historically-oppressive majority burdened with special intrinsic demerits and inherited guilt. If someone believes she has been a victim of sexual assault, if she is right, a crime has been committed and it is a matter for the police. The university administration has no business attempting to set up extra-judicial procedures to dispense justice. That is what the police and court system is for.”

A Japanese room might be likened to an inkwash painting, the paper-paneled shoji being the expanse where the ink is thinnest, and the alcove where it is the darkest. Whenever I see the alcove of a tastefully built Japanese room, I marvel at our comprehension of the secrets of shadows, our sensitive use of shadow and light. For the beauty of the alcove is not the work of some clever device. An empty space is marked off with plain wood and plain walls, so that the light drawn into its forms dim shadows within emptiness. There is nothing more. And yet, when we gaze into the darkness that gathers behind the crossbeam, around the flower vase, beneath the shelves, though we know perfectly well it is mere shadow, we are overcome with the feeling that in this small corner of the atmosphere there reigns complete and utter silence; that here in the darkness immutable tranquility holds sway. The “mysterious Orient” of which Westerners speak probably refers to the uncanny silence of these dark places. And even we as children would feel an inexpressible chill as we peered into the depths of an alcove to which the sunlight had never penetrated. Where lies the key to this mystery? Ultimately it is the magic of shadows. Were the shadows to be banished from its corners, the alcove would in that instant revert to mere void.

This was the genius of our ancestors, that by cutting off the light from this empty space they imparted to the world of shadows that formed there a quality of mystery and depth superior to that of any wall painting or ornament. The technique seems simple, but was by no means so simply achieved. We can imagine with little difficulty what extraordinary pains were taken with each invisible detail—the placement of the window in the shelving recess, the depth of the crossbeam, the height of the threshold. But for me the most exquisite touch is the pale white glow of the shoji in the sturdy bay; I need only pause before it and I forget the passage of time.

The sturdy bay, as the name suggests, was originally a projecting window built to provide a place for reading. Over the years it came to be regarded as no more than a source of light for the alcove; but most often it serves not so much to illuminate the alcove as to soften the sidelong rays from without, to filter them through paper panels. There is a cold and desolate tinge to the light by the time it reaches these panels. The little sunlight from the garden that manages to make its way beneath the eaves and through the corridors has by then lost its power to illuminate, seems drained of the complexion of life. It can do no more than accentuate the whiteness of the paper. I sometimes linger before these panels and study the surface of the paper, bright, but giving no impression of brilliance.

In temple architecture the main room stands at a considerable distance from the garden; so dilute is the light there that no matter what the season, on fair days or cloudy, morning, midday, or evening, the pale, white glow scarcely varies. And the shadows at the interstices of the ribs seem strangely immobile, as if dust collected in the corners had become a part of the paper itself. I blink in uncertainty at this dreamlike luminescence, feeling as though some misty film were blunting my vision. The light from the pale white paper, powerless to dispel the heavy darkness of the alcove, is instead repelled by the darkness, creating a world of confusion where dark and light are indistinguishable. Have not you yourselves sensed a difference in the light that suffuses such a room, a rare tranquility not found in ordinary light? Have you never felt a sort of fear in the face of the ageless, a fear that in that room you might lose all consciousness of the passage of time, that untold years might pass and upon emerging you should find you had grown old and gray?

Via Belacqui.

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Only six acres, but quite a trophy property!

Italian Tribune:

The eight-bedroom villa, located near Siena, was bought by the Renaissance master in 1549 and remained in the Buonarroti family until 1867 – more than 300 years after his death. The home is surrounded by the vineyards of Chianti, with views of Tuscany’s rolling hills. Since Michelangelo purchased the home in 1549, the home has only had three owners including the current owner, who possess the original deed to the property. The deed describes Michelangelo as “a dear sculptor and Florentine citizen”. The property, believed to date back to the 11th century, also comes with eight bathrooms, an old mill and a lemon grove and could be yours for $8,165,250 (excluding closing costs).

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Robb Report:

Located on over six acres above the rolling hills, the 12,915 square feet of living space is contained in three multi-story buildings, including an ancient tower, believed to date back to the 11th century. The original architecture is accented throughout with large stone fireplaces, beamed and barrel ceilings. Consisting of eight bedrooms and seven full baths, all rooms pay homage to the period and modern conveniences, though all available, blend into the background. The kitchen has all the rustic romance of the early centuries with high-end appliances that do not take away from the original architecture. Grounds are park-like with lawns and mature plantings with a lemon orchard, olive grove and Chianti vineyards, as well as the original olive oil mill. The listing agent is Joni Hazelton of Handsome Properties International.

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MLS #: H-40-08-010