5x5

amelia bedelia: reading suggestions for adults informed by one’s favourite children’s literature  

the suwałki gap: Lithuania blocks some supply trains that transit its territory to the Russian exclave Kaliningrad  

mall rats: a huge collection of 1990s consumer aesthetics 

fluxburgh: a selection of offerings gamifying architecture  

children’s television workshop: a lost, pulled episode of Sesame Street with the neighbourhood terrorised by Margaret Hamilton, the Wicked Witch of the West—via Super Punch

to each his dulcinea

Revived on Broadway for the first of four times on this day in 1972 with Richard Kiley in the role of Miguel de Cervantes and alter-ego Don Quixote, the 1965 musical by Dale Wasserman (devolved from his 1959 non-singing DuPont Show of the Month teleplay), Mitch Leigh and Joe Darion (replacing W H Auden as lyricist as his words were considered too arch) is a nest, play-within-a-play performed by the imprisoned poet and errant knight and fellow inmates awaiting their hearing before the Spanish Inquisition. A cinematic version was produced this year as well—with the main part going to Peter O’Toole. Tossed in a dungeon along with Sancho Panza, Cervante’s manservant, the other prisoners are eager to take the contents of the trunk that they brought were allowed to bring with them—to which Cervantes suggests that in his defence, he be allowed to perform a play. The room consents and Cervantes is told he can keep his property if his acting and story are judged up to muster and introduces Don Quixote and his adventures, producing make-up and costumes from his trunk for himself and supporting cast.

dénouement

As a bit of insight into the formulaic writing (previously here and here) of every streaming show, JWZ breaks down the first, often orphaned series into: 

• 
  Episodes 1 and 2: The Mystery Episode 
• 3 - 6: The Fambly and Crying 
• Episode 6: Mild cliffhanger Episode 
• 7: Deep Flashback—prequel that exploits the whole show mythology 
• Episode 8: Resolution for Episode 6 but proffers several more cliffhangers for a Season Two that’s probably not going to happen 

Once this pattern becomes established, it becomes hard not to find this arc-of-narrative.

yes i said yes i will yes

On this annual commemoration and celebration of Irish author James Joyce by reliving the events that took place in the novel set in Dublin on this day in 1904 as related in his 1922 novel Ulysses, friend of the blog Nag on the Lake directs our attention to the fiftieth anniversary celebration of Bloomsday reenacted by local writers, academics and a dentist cousin of Joyce, whose pilgrimage stalls at Eccles Street—where Leopold Bloom resided after too much libation. Ulysses is a stream-of-consciousness accounting of the author’s alter-ego (the Odyssey writ-small) concluding (had the re-enactors got that far) with the first sex-positive romantic assignation from the title between the character and his wife to be, Molly Bloom (a.k.a, Nora Barnacle), whom never cared for this book.

uovo di colombo

An example of hindsight bias and apocryphally attributed to the Italian navigator—though there’s no evidence that this exchange occurred, the Egg of Columbus is an expression that reduces the extraordinary to the inevitable after the fact but counters that assessment by showing that the solution was not an obvious one. Told by fellow explorers, reportedly, that discovering an oceanic trade route to the Indies was no great accomplishment and ships would have eventually gotten there without him, Columbus challenges his critics to balance an egg on its tip. Once his interlocutors fail to do so, Christopher bluntly demonstrates how its done by tapping the egg until it flattens just enough. The inelegant solution appears in literary references by Mary Shelley in her Frankenstein as well as in War and Peace by Tolstoy and in The Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald. It is also cited as a heuristic device by Charles Darwin and Nikola Tesla.

the tiffany problem

Although as a given name it has a pedigree of over eight hundred years, the English, Bretagne version of the feminine form of Θεοφανία, given to those born on the Feast of the Epiphany, it strains credulity to use in a historical, fictional context because we believe the name to be something thoroughly modern. Welsh-Canadian fantasy writer Jo Walton (see previously) was inspired by this counter-anachronism to coin the titular quandary as a stand-in for our recency biases—moreover the illusion that what’s recently popular is in fact recent—and the disconnect in how we perceive past and preface.

8x8

scotch tapes: commercials, idents and continuity from British television from 1984 salavaged from VHS casettes  

boldly go!: a medley of songs from and about the Star Trek franchise—see also  

apiculture: a survey of bee hives throughout the ages  

latex: Goodyear and the US Department of Defence are partnering to manufacture tyres from dandelions—see previously  

kleksographien: revisiting the blotograms (previously) of Justinus Kerner plus other inspired symmetries  

red wine and ginger ale: Vulture correspondent Rebecca Alter samples all the food combinations referenced in Harry’s House  

diagrammatic map: another look at how Massimo Vignelli presented mass transit to the masses—see previously here and here—via Things magazine  

the fantastic journey: an obscure 1977 time-travel series starring Joan Collins and John Saxon

8x8

nebeský most 721: a walkway spanning two peaks in in eastern Bohemia 

shunpikes: byways constructed to bypass toll roads, like spite houses

‘no way to prevent this,’ says only nation where this regularly happens: America’s gun culture enshrined by an eighteenth century constitution illustrated in seven charts—via Miss Cellania 

i guess i have to put your flat feet on the ground: astronaut Sally Ride (*1951)  

imagen: Google tool turns input text to images—see previously  

security detail: firearms off-limits during Trump’s speech to the National Rifle Association Leadership Forum—via Boing Boing  

fahrenheit 451: Margaret Atwood’s fire-resistant edition of The Handmaid’s Tale—see previously 

liminal places: a portrait of the Estonian border town of Narva on the frontier of the EU and NATO and the Russian Federation

ancient aliens

Opened to the public on this day in 2003 (bankrupt and shuttered three years later and three years after that rehabilitated as a children’s theme park—named Jungfrau after the alpine mountain it is framed by), Mystery Park in Interlaken was designed by Chariots of the Gods? author Erich von Däniken and included several pavilions featuring what the pseudoscience proponent described as the great unsolved mysteries that could only be explained by the theories he espoused on paleo-contact and ancient astronauts, including the Mayan calendar, the pyramids of Egypt and monoliths like Stonehenge explaining how the achievements of the primitive past must be linked to extraterrestrial encounters, his showmanship being chiefly responsible for the popularity of this rather narrow and dim view of a world just beyond record.

riches & poverty, a tree of misery

Previsioning zines and other aspects of cut-up culture, William Blake’s (previously) incredible acumen for printing and engraving as compliment to his prose are best illustrated and enabled by his 1827 engraving and etched print of Laocoön—replete with tags touching all aspects of day-to-day life, both the sacred and the mundane and an earnest attempt at finding syncretion. More at Open Culture at the link above. All is not Sin that Satan calls so.

7x7

homo loquax: Futility Closet refers us to an expanded listing for the taxonomical name sapient human with some choice Latinate adjectives to describe us 

crate-digging: Jimmy Carter’s grandson is exploring the White House’s surprisingly hip vinyl collection—via Messy Nessy Chic  

le bestiaire fabuleux: a 1948 artists’ collaboration of a surreal and abstract menagerie—see also  

sabbatical: Jason Kottke takes a break from blogging and poses the questions that probably haunt everyone in this community—come back soon  

mörkrets makter: the very different (though retaining the epistolary format) unauthorised translation of Bram Stoker’s Dracula familiar to Icelanders  

stratification: exploring the historic map layers of London—via Things Magazine  

word-horde: daily vocabulary lessons in Anglo-Saxon words

dmsmh

Celebrated as Dianetics Day in the Church of Scientology (previously), today marks the 1950 anniversary of the first sales of the foundational book by L Ron Hubbard subtitled The Modern Science of Mental Health. Colloquially and canonically referred to as “Book One,” it outlines the system developed by the author out of personal experience, his understanding of some tenants of Eastern philosophy and the psychoanalytic traditions of Sigmund Freud. Despite outright rejection by the community of medical and mental health professions and most critics who compared the repetitious and immature tautologies to the works of Wilhelm Reich, it was a best-seller and found an audience as well as an attendant religious movement, which number their years relative to its publication—this year being 72 AD—that is, after Dianetics.

rapunzelstiltskin

Though off-the-shelf as it were an under-nuanced in my hands, we are finding this text-to-image generator inexhaustibly engrossing (previously), especially once we were able to get a better feel of how it operated and could choose an accessible subject and prompt equally familiar thematic variations. We selected a coquetry of “Disney Princesses” with each panel filtered through the style of commercially popular, ideally mononymous, artist. Here is an assortment of some of the better and less nightmare-addled results, and mouse over the images to see the influencing painter. I think Rembrandt is my favourite.  Give Latent Diffusion a try yourself and be sure to share the outcome. 

 

 

 

never look a gift horse in the mouth

Though this kind of exact date for something semi-legendary, laden with cultural baggage and millennia hence is notoriously hard to pin down, the attestation by among others Eratosthenes, polymath and librarian of Alexandria who calculated the circumference and axial tilt of Earth to a remarkable degree of accuracy (thanks in part to his access to extensive geological data at the library), traditionally places the Fall of Troy, the end of the decade-long siege of the impenetrable city by the Achaean armies when they were let into the gates, hiding inside a wooden horse, a ruse thought up by Odysseus—a creature sacred to the Trojans, on this day in 1183 BCE. Left on the beach as an offering for their return home, the Greeks had apparently decamped. Many were suspicious, including Cassandra and Laocoön—with of course no one listening to the former and the latter being devoured by a sea serpent along with his sons sent by Athena to keep the priest’s mouth shut but they ultimately decided to keep the horse and celebrated the end of their long blockade with an evening of drunken revelry. Most of the population was massacred in their sleep as the Greeks sacked the city—save for Aeneas who went on to found Rome in some traditions, with most of the Greeks also denied a safe homecoming by the gods for their atrocious behaviour as victors and for their desecration of temples and holy sites and were doomed to wrack and ruin.

8x8

trebizond: explore this detailed map of Eurasia in the year 1444—via the always interesting Nag on the Lake  

gotham nocture: a Batman gothic opera  in pre-production

arrowdreams: an anthology of Canadian speculative histories—via Strange Company  

passion project: former store worker curating every last Gap in-store playlist  

out of black ponds, water lilies: an Easter Sunday poem from Better Living through Beowulf  

crisis on infinite earths: Marvel’s inspired splintered dimensions and alternate timelines  

neoliberal pieties: the organised religion of social media is vulnerable to same corruptions and is no substitute for a public good  

latent diffusion: an AI generates maps (plus other artifice) from a text-prompt, via Maps Mania

universal day of culture under the banner of peace

Observed annually on the anniversary of the signing of the Treaty on the Protection of Artistic and Scientific Institutions and Historic Monuments—or short-form the Roerich Pact after its chief sponsor Saint Petersburg painter and philosopher Nicholas Roerich—in Washington, DC on this day in 1935 (incidentally the first international treaty to be signed in the Oval Office, Roerich I think is seated to the left of FDR) with the underpinning idea and legal standing that the defence of cultural heritage and artefacts is above their exploitation as nationalistic or propaganda purposes or wanton destruction and that the protection and preservation of cultural is always more important than military necessity. Lightly influenced by the Neo-Theosophical movement, the signatories’ wish was that this day would be “consecrated to the full appreciation of national and universal treasures” and hoped that it would become a secular catechism to remind us all of “creative heroic enthusiasm, of improvement and enhancement of life” through the edifying arts. The icon is of the artist’s design and has been flown at the poles and the world’s highest peaks and incorporated into the coat of arms of many institutions working towards world peace and conserving the culture of all humanity.

the forbidden zone was once a paradise—your breed made a desert of it ages ago

Opening to critical acclaim and considered an instant sci-fi classic, Planet of the Apes with screenplay by Rod Serling (previously) and starring Roddy McDowall, Kim Hunter, Maurice Evans and Charlton Heston went into general release in cinemas in the United States on this day in 1968. The original franchise spanning four sequels before the reboots, the film was based on Pierre Boulle’s 1963 novel La Planète des Singes about an Earth crew of astronauts who crash-land on a strange world where simians are the dominant species.

7x7

health officials warn of “second wave” of immersive van gogh exhibitions: symptoms to be on the look out for include a flattening of the artist’s legacy and an intense desire to watch Emily in Paris  

a book by its cover: the absurdist collages of Paperback Paradise  

match game: flawless digital recreations of classic TV game show sets  

111 west 57^th street: super tall, slender residential tower tapering from Steinway Hall is an homage to the piano-maker  

earendel: the Hubble space telescope images the oldest, most distant star  

old dutch master: a series of fifteenth century Flemish style portraits recreated in an airport lavatory—see also—via Things Magazine  

achieve hover status—everyone else will want to hover but can’t: an AI (see previously) comes up with pranks to play on the user

8x8

plotto: the prolific, formulaic writing of William Wallace Cook—see also  

harry lime: a Third Man tour of Vienna—see previously  

pinscreen: Claire Parker and Alexander Alexeieff animate Nikolai Gogol’s short story The Nose (1963)

anti-social media: Facebook organised a smear campaign against TikTok through a GOP shill—via Waxy 

zone: Dyson to offer noise-cancelling headphones that also creates a pocket of purified air  

the fauvist: the art of Marguerite Zorach, an early proponent of Modernism in America—via Messy Nessy Chic 

love me, feed me, don’t leave me: the strange saga of a Garfield-themed restaurant  

floriography: cryptological communication by means of floral arrangement through their symbolic and emblematic meaning

for my military knowledge, though i’m plucky and adventury has only been brought down to the beginning of the century

Caveats against drawing parallels respected, we quite enjoyed this lyrical military assessment of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine at a month on, which not only highlights how the aggressor is doing a reverse of what they did to Napoleon—as expounded by history and Tolstoy, but as one commentator finds, the rank inexperience and hubris of the Gilbert and Sullivan character (see previously). Here’s a couple of stanzas for an excerpt:

I am the very model of a Russian Major General

My standing in the battlefield is growing quite untenable

My forces, though equipped and given orders unequivocal

Did not expect the fight to be remotely this reciprocal

I used to have a tank brigade but now I have lost several

My fresh assaults are faltering with battle plans extemporal

I can’t recover vehicles but farmers in a tractor can

It’s all becoming rather reminiscent of Afghanistan