division bell

We’d heard the term of course from the Pink Floyd album but hadn’t realised what the eponymous title referred to until encountering this helpful civics lesson from Atlas Obscura.
In parliamentary procedure, a division of the assembly is a more formal way of gauging the consent or non-consent of the house on an item—especially when a issue is contentious or demands a super-majority. By house rules, once a vote is challenged, members have eight minutes and not a moment more to return to their respective lobbies (sides) and cast their ballots or lose their chance to weigh in on the matter. Most of the alarms are within the halls of the Palace of Westminster itself—also signalling the start of the start of the session (the House sits)—but as proceedings, speeches and debate can be a drawn out affair, exterior restaurants, public houses and clubs in the vicinity are also outfitted with division bells to recall members who might be taking a personal recess. Sort of like referring to the Beltway as the figurative boundary separating Washington, DC from the rest of America, the geography of the division bells stakes out the Westminster’s bubble.

15 x 15

Delightfully, some eight decades after it was first prototyped and trialled in the basement of a Methodist church in the neighbourhood of Queens, the board game Scrabble, still enduring and having gone multi-lingual, has earned a semi-official historic marker in the form of this street sign.
In 1938, out of work architect Alfred Mosher Butts (*1899 – †1993) came up with the concept of play and conducted a frequency analysis on letters, assigning values to the tiles. The street sign may not be a high-scoring hand and was originally probably an homage of an enthusiastic Scrabble club but the city’s department of public works have dutifully replaced the modified marker when it was inevitably pilfered.

𝄐

Interred with honours in the Composers’ Corner of Moscow’s Novodevichy Cemetery close to Dmitri Shostakovich who influenced much of his works, German-Soviet symphony writer Alfred Garrievich Schnittke (*1934 – †1998) chose for his gravestone the musical notation fermata—the pause or hold sign, indicating an enduring and profound (fortissimo) rest. Here’s the energetic overture from his Gogol Suite as a sample of his music.

dia da saudade

The subject of many songs—like the blues—and yet whose exact definition is elusive with English lacking an equivalent, today in Brazil (plus for the wider Portuguese-speaking diaspora) is the official celebration of the emotional state known as saudade. More than homesickness or nostalgia and not wholly melancholy, this frame of mind recalls the longing and yearning for something absent mixed with the consolation of the memory that lingers and its non-transferable nature. To add to the intrigue of untranslatable sentiments, we could not find anything to point to why this commemoration is assigned to this particular day of the calendar, so if any of our Brazilian readers know, we would appreciate being informed. 

7x7

sp!n doctor: this is indeed a clever top

take a number: considering queueing theory and misconceptions about waiting one’s turn

bismillah: an homage to “Bohemian Rhapsody” (previously here and here) in dank meme form—stick with it at least until after the first Brian May guitar solo

like some cat from japan: archivists uncover hitherto unknown footage of David Bowie’s first televised appearance as Ziggy Stardust

oppositional research: a desperate Facebook deputises young people as data-dragnets—updated

cornucopia: artist Uli Westphal artfully arranges produce to highlight agricultural diversity

hanziverse: an interactive exploration of Chinese characters, via Maps Mania