turnverein (10. 323)

As a socio-political movement meant to promote German culture, liberal politics as well as physical fitness, the gymnastic club movement, the Turners, was founded in the early nineteenth century by Turnvater Friedrich Ludwig Jahn (see also) as a way to also introduce conversation and action for statehood at a time when the constituent states were under occupation by Napoleon and ultimately suppressed and exported with immigration to the United States in the aftermath of the failed European revolutions of 1848. One of the largest associations, the Cincinnati Turnverein, was founded on this day in the same year—a centenary stamp was issued by the US Postal Service, the members of the Bund fighting for the North (Union) during the American Civil War and acted as bodyguards for Abraham Lincoln and through the turn of the century an important and influential civic organisation. Despite being a wholly domestic institution having little to do with German roots or contemporary geopolitics, Turners’ clubs were regarded with suspicion during the World Wars and active groups dwindled from the thousands to just a few dozen which still host events today.

7x7 (10. 314)

umwelt: a short video to compliment Ed Yong’s exploration of animal cognition—previously 

what9whos: a proprietary geocode system based on the names of the actors who’ve portrayed the Doctor from Gallifrey 

lexical lists: the index, the listicle are the oldest forms of narrative  

commit to being extremely hardcore: the Twitter exodus continues  

speaker of the house: after two decades of party leadership in the lower chamber, Nancy Pelosi is stepping down 

chart-topper: a collector has amassed every single number one single in the UK—see previously  

mockingbird: you’ve likely been fooled by an avian friend––see also

7x7 (10. 284)

big bounce: some astrophysicists suspect that things were happening in the Cosmos prior to the Big Bang—via Damn Interesting’s Curated Links  

nogoodnik: Russia reactivates its bot and troll army to muddy the US mid-term elections  

fivethirtyeight: mapping out when individual voting jurisdictions announce results  

jazz harp: the musical stylings of Turiyasangitananda—a.k.a. Ms Alice Coltrane—via Messy Nessy Chic

false prophets: a denunciation of America’s Christian nationalism—via Miss Cellania  

battleground states: artists reflect on the consequential American election 

hero’s journey: avoiding the perils of the monomyth in storytelling

level 42 (10. 255)

Was really pulling for my Team Europe to pull into the lead—albeit this is a strangely weighted scale given that we’ve resided in three different Bundesländer, had extended stays in different regions within several of these countries and have been there on vacation multiple times (plus discounting the other two dozen nations in North America), but nonetheless—courtesy of Maps Mania, we enjoyed tallying places we’ve lived, made holidays or just transited through. There are expanded, more cosmopolitan versions to be found at the link up top. Do let us know your score.

we’re a culture, not a costume (10. 245)

City Hall of the town of Prossler in the state of Washington with a supreme lack of awareness ordered an Halloween display gently ridiculing the class of entitled white women whose litany of complaints and slights run from minor perceived offences to using law enforcement officials as their own personal racism concierges taken down after a Karen found the installation to be incendiary and a personal attack. The effigy, the Kare-Crow, while not meant to be a Karen-cature of certain individual felt singled out for public humiliation and in response, municipal authorities pledged there would be mandatory trainings as to why such statements were insensitive and offensive to the community. That’s ghastly and pretty terrifying.

qualifying life event (10. 179)

Via Waxy, videographer Brian David Gilbert, American with lapsed health coverage commissioned Louie Zong to compile a retro treasury of corporate music (see also) as accompaniment to his expert, genuinely helpful explainer (and insightful indictment) of the dread and kafkaesque jargon and fraught terminology of the US insurance industry as an aid for the next hapless soul to find themselves in this situation.

potus (10. 157)

Premiering on this day in 1999 on NBC and running for seven seasons with two specials, the serial political drama created by Aaron Sorkin with ensemble cast including Stockard Channing, Allison Janney, Rob Lowe, Moira Kelly, Martin Sheen, Dulé Hill, Bradley Whitford and Janel Moloney The West Wing covered the fictitious administration of US President Josiah Bartlet. Showered with accolades including two Peabodys, three Golden Globes and twenty-six Emmys, the series ranks among the best television shows ever produced. The short segment from the pilot episode shows the first occurrence of Sorkin’s signature ”walk and talk” expository technique.

guardians of the galaxy (10. 154)

Via Neatorama contributor Miss Cellania, we are treated to newly released song of America’s newest military branch, the Space Force (previously). It’s right to lampoon the idea that a rousting, jaunty anthem engenders cohesion and raises moral and completes the ethos and thought it was an apt comment to call it a TV sitcom theme tune composed by John Philip Souza, but as someone who regularly has to hear and occasion sing-along with the “The Army Goes Rolling Along”—and rarely “Anchors Aweigh”—Valley Forge, Custer’s ranks / San Juan Hill and Patton’s Tanks… Then it’s Hi-Hi-Hey! / The Army’s on its way, I would have to concede Semper Supra (we hope they are never given the occasion to add a verse with specific battles) fits in with the rest of the branches’ anthems. What do you think?

s1:e1 (10. 140)

On this day in 1972, the CBS television network first aired its dark-comedy series—based on the 1970 feature film—about a team of doctors and ancillary staff stationed at the 4077th Mobile Army Surgical Hospital in Uijeongbu during the Korean War. The first episodes, set in 1950, were broadcast while the US was still mired in the Vietnam War and were presented as the most careful kind of allegory, detached yet openly questioning the proxy wars of the Cold War and the value of offensive ideology. The ensemble cast included (by rank) Henry Blake McLean Stevenson (thanks, Dad), Loretta Swit, Alan Alda, Wayne Rogers, Gary Burghoff and Jamie Farr and the show became less political and more character-driven after 1975 and the withdrawal of US troops—also removing the controversial laugh-track of earlier seasons.

goodnight john-boy (10. 132)

Having debuted the prior year with a Christmas Special (see also), the historical drama The Waltons was released by the CBS network on this day in 1972. Running for nine seasons until 1981, the series relates the story about a family in rural Virginia during the Great Depression and World War II (1933—1946) and is based on Earl Hamner’s semi-autobiographical novel Spencer’s Mountain. Hamner also contributes the opening and closing narration for each episode as the eldest son grown-up. After its cancellation, a rival network produced a string of made for television reunion movies before CBS reclaimed the franchise with three more specials in the mid-1990s. Below is a thirty-second synopsis of the pilot with all episodes similarly summarised.

peace, little girl (10. 113)

Although airing only once—on this day in 1964 (Labour Day and shown at a time when children would not be watching) as part of the US presidential campaign for incumbent Lyndon B Johnson—“Daisy” played an outsized role in his victory over the Republican party’s candidate Barry Goldwater as well as signaling a point of departure in political messaging. Aimed to emphasise Goldwater’s inclination to use nuclear weapons in Vietnam and stance against disarmament and re-enforce Johnson’s pacifist approach, the advertisement depicts child model and actor Monique Corzililus picking flowers in a meadow and counting, out of order, from one to nine, triggering a booming narrator to start a countdown, cutting to footage of a mushroom count and ending “The stakes are too high for you to stay home.” Corzililus, who also appeared in commercials for Velveeta, Kool-Aid and Prudential Life Insurance, was recruited in 2016 by Hilary Clinton for an advertisement against Donald Trump. Johnson’s voiceover that precedes the final exhortation “These are the stakes—to make a world in which all of God’s children can live, or to go into the dark. We must either love each other, or we must die” echoes the line of the W H Auden poem “September 1, 1939”—Hunger allows no choice / To the citizen or the police; / We must love one another or die.

unquote (10. 104)

Though not wholly spurious, the attribution does seem a bit suspect—verging on the never said ever, but in a rebuttal given on this day in 1858 during the series of Lincoln-Douglas debates hosted in Clinton, Illinois, the statesman sort of said, maybe “You can fool some of the people all of the time, and all of the people some of the time, but you can not fool all of the people all of the time.” There is a distinct lack of reliable contemporaneous notes but if Abraham Lincoln said it at all, he said something more to the effect: “Judge Douglas cannot fool the people: you may fool people for a time; you can fool a part of the the people all the time; but you cannot fool all the people all the time.”

tube alloys (10. 097)

Commencing before the Manhattan Project (which ultimately subsumed their efforts) and with the intentionally misleading codename, the joint United Kingdom and Canadian programme to develop nuclear weapons was approved in secret by Winston Churchill on this day in 1941—the first national leader to do so—the scientific consensus acknowledging the potential explosiveness of nuclear fission and the “atom bomb” was firmly ensconced in the popular imagination thanks to the 1913 novel by H G Wells, The World Set Free. Researchers working on Tube Alloys made the crucial discovery that just a few kilogrammes (rather than a quantity of several tonnes) of uranium isotope was sufficient to sustain the chain-reaction and propelled the race for armaments. The preceding working group, the MAUD committee, formed to study the feasibility of making a nuclear weapon and nuclear-generated power, was named after a strange last line in a telegram from Niels Bohr to Otto Robert Frisch (credited with discovery of fission along with Lise Meitner) then working at the University of Birmingham just after the Nazi invasion of Denmark, “Tell Cockcroft and Maud Ray Kent.” The recipient believed it might have been a coded message regarding the imminent development of atomic weapons—an anagram for “radyum taken.” Although it turned out that the physicist was wanting to get in touch with his housekeeper, Maud Ray from Kent, the enigmatic name stuck. Subsequent transatlantic cooperation and pooling of resources forged the Special Relationship (often tested and contentious) between the UK and the US.

sweetheart of the rodeo (10. 096)

The sixth studio album by The Byrds, released on this day in 1968, represented a significant departure from the band’s signature, psychedelic sound and featuring the additional talents Gram Parsons was not commercially well received, alienating some fans with this decidedly outlaw country bend—as well as the establishment in Nashville who felt they were being encroached upon by these subversive outsiders—but has had an oversized legacy in terms of establishing the genre and introducing it to audiences, reviving and sustaining the style at Country’s nadir for US and UK audiences. Originally conceived as an exploration, an anthology of the past century of popular American music, featuring Jazz, Gospel, Rock, Rhythm and Blues and several other genres, Parsons convinced the group to produce a strictly Country album.

and here we have idaho (10. 077)

Occupied by native peoples since at least the past ten thousand years and the subject of a territorial dispute between British America and the United States, the state cleaved from Oregon territory in the Pacific Northwest—with the above anthem—has quite jarringly (though I suppose not surprisingly) a wholly fabricated name. Lobbyist, prospector, fraudster (partnering with the baronet of Arizona) and putative physician George Maurice “Doc” Willing was a unrecognised delegate championing the creation of the State of Jefferson in the Midwest and in 1860 suggested the name for the successor region created from existing territories, claiming it was a Shoshone expression for “gem of the mountains”—now the state motto, but no such term existed in the newe taikwappeh language (representation is important and the widest known Shoshone word ought not to be an infamous, fake one that some white settler made up). Recanting years afterwards, Willing offered that he was inspired to name the area after a girl named Ida—though that statement was never verified either. The US Congress wanted to name the whole Rocky Mountain region Colorado Territory instead of using one completely fabricated—there was some resistance to employing a foreign, Spanish toponym as well—but as Idaho Springs was already incorporated as well as a eponymous county and a namesake steamship christened, the US government let the name stay.

transatlantic (10. 066)

After a benedictory message from the directors of the Atlantic Telegraph Company in Great Britain to their US counterparts, “Europe and America are united by telegraph. Glory to God in the highest; on Earth peace, good will towards men,” Queen Victoria and president James Buchanan—from his summer residence in Bedford Springs, Pennsylvania—exchanged congratulatory greetings on this day in 1858, with the former observing that the submarine cable would “provide an additional link between the nations whose friendship is founded on their common interest and reciprocal esteem” to the latter’s more effluvious response “It is a triumph more glorious, because far more useful to mankind, than was ever won by conqueror on the field of battle. May the Atlantic telegraph, under the blessing of Heaven, prove to be a bond of perpetual peace and friendship between the kindred nations, and an instrument destined by Divine Providence to diffuse religion, civilization, liberty, and law throughout the world.” These inaugural overseas telegrams were quite laborious to encode and decode (see also), with the queen’s shorter missive taking sixteen hours to transmit and reception was quite poor but there was no dissuading the public’s enthusiasm—commercially, however, investors balked at the outcome considering the expense of the expedition to lay the cable and when the original linkage broke three weeks later—probably an inevitability due to faulty materials and manufacturing—confidence was sunk and delayed efforts to replace it. The termina (see previously), the most easterly and westerly points on land, were in Sunnyside, Bull Arms Bay, on the Avalon Peninsula in Newfoundland and Telegraph Field on Valentia Island, County Kerry.

private equity (10. 064)

Reinforcing the reality that the US is the biggest tax haven, the carried interest loophole, whose perennial but feeble attempts at reform nearly cost the US government and people a significant legislative win in terms of environmental protection and financial recovery, represents the bonus cut an investment manager—arguably a fee earned for enhancing the performance of stock portfolio—which are not in America taxed as regular earnings. Although the concept dates back to the sixteenth century and the age of colonialism—ships’ captains taking a share of profits ultimately earned on goods carried or transported as a way to build and maintain boat and crew and avoiding the prohibition against usurious loans, the idea was not codified, incentivised until 1913 and the explosion of domestic hydrocarbon exploration. Applying a lesser tax liability to the explorers’ profit (versus the share that the partners received) based on the above reasoning that the explorers were also shouldering a risk if their venture was unsuccessful, the immediate returns were classified as capital gains and due to the difficulty of assessing future value, taxes on carried interest can be deferred until cashed out. This is why poor-mouthing billionaires take out successive loans rather than reify their worth on paper. Moreover, with this continued concession to current regulations, wealth managers, hedge fund operators and the like are able to further exploit the returns on an investment above and beyond their individual exposure to the total profits earned by gambling with other people’s money, taxed at about half what earners in a much lower income bracket would be liable for.

tin lizzy (10. 054)

Designed by the engineering team of Joseph Galamb, Eugene Farkas and Childe Harold Wills and hailed as the United States entrée into the modern machine era, the first Ford Model T was built on this day in 1908 at the Piquette Avenue Plant in Detriot—leaving the factory at the end of the following month. Proceeding through the alphabet sequentially starting with Model A in 1903, though not all vehicles went into production, Henry Ford ended the series here with the first mass-produced automobile, using an assembly line (though credit for the concept is owed to Ransom E Olds) and interchangeable, standardised parts—marketed to a growing middle class that was in the reach of most. Just under fifteen-million were produced (a record not surpassed until the Volkswagen Beetle in and within a decade over half the cars on American roads were Model T, and while Ford’s pronouncement to his managers, “Any customer can have a car painted any color that he wants so long as it is black,” was not apocryphal during the first four years of production only green, grey, blue and red was available

xxii olympiad (10. 003)

Beginning on this day and running through 1980 Summer Games hosted by the Soviet capital was the first such event held in a communist country until 2008 Beijing Games, with quite low participation—the US leading a boycott by sixty-six countries over the Russo-Afghan War. A few countries took part but competed under the Olympic banner rather than as a national team, and Philadelphia hosted an alternate Liberty Bell Classic for those not participating in the other venue. The Soviet and Eastern Bloc athletes reciprocated by staying out of the 1984 games hosted in Los Angeles with the closing ceremony absent conspicuous elements of the handover.

match of the century

The opening game occurring on this day in 1972, the World Chess Championship pitted US challenger Bobby Fischer against defending champion Boris Spassky of the USSR (see previously), the former after twenty-one matches played over the course of five weeks ending a twenty-four year Soviet monopoly on the title. The tournament was hosted in Reykjavík, and Fischer didn’t score a win until round three, most ending in a draw (the scoring convention was a bit skewed and encouraged whomever was in the lead to play for ties rather than an outright conquest)—though at 12½ to 8½, Fischer could be proclaimed as the undisputed overall victor under those rules.