meine tochter nimmer mehr

Featured in Amadeus, a favourite of the endearingly incompetent Florence Foster Jenkins and dispatched to the Cosmos on the Golden Records of the Voyager emissaries, we’re all familiar with the challenging coloratura passage, the trilled run spanning two octaves, of Mozart’s Die Zauberflöte but I failed to appreciate the piece’s message and that it’s classified as a rage aria (which sounds quite fancy—Yas Queen, the Italian terms being aria agitate or aria infuriate).
Entitled “Hell’s Vengeance Boils in my Heart” (Der Hölle Rache kocht in meinem Herzen), the Queen of the Night delivers a knife to her daughter Pamina and on pain of disownment, assassinate her arch-rival, the high priest Sarastro, whom had recruited her daughter and would be rescuer Prince Tamino and sidekick Papageno to his school of thought. Familiar with her vocal talents, Mozart wrote the part for his sister-in-law Josepha Hofer who first played the role, with words by librettist Emanuel Schikaneder—whom himself played the part of bird-catcher Papageno in the opera’s premiere.

bonjour farewell

In a private meeting between French and US presidents during the Ottawa G7 Summit of the summer of 1981, François Mitterand disclosed to Ronald Reagan of the existence of a Soviet defector, Colonel Vladimir Vetrov, a French intelligence asset codenamed Farewell with the notion that if apprehended the KGB would assume he was working for the Americans, and turned over an extensive collection of documents, referred to as the Farewell Dossier, demonstrating that the Soviets had been routinely surveilling and incorporating US and NATO partners’ research and technology.
The files also identified the espionage network that had taken years and considerable expense to build and thus precipitated the expulsion of hundreds of spies from countries in the alliance, but prior to taking action, the US Central Intelligence Agency instigated a counter-campaign of disinformation and disseminated faulty designs in the hopes that the Soviets would try to steal these sabotaged plans as well. Though the correlation is disputed and quite possibly just reflects the angst expressed by the Reagan administration that British and West German support for a trans-Siberian natural gas export pipeline would compromise their allies and make them reliant on Russia for energy, according to some accounts, the CIA delivered a Trojan Horse to pressure control relays that caused a massive explosion in the winter of 1983. The US was already imposing sanctions on the Soviets and restricting the sale of supplies needed for the monumental engineering project, which became operational despite these setbacks.

it’s the assault on freedom of the press. but it’s not just the assault on freedom of the press.

This essay, via Miss Cellania, from David Rothkopf at first glance reminded me of a punchline from Michelle Wolf, part of her monologue which ultimately led to the rubbishing of a time-honoured journalistic and comedic tradition for the White House Press Corps: “Trump is so broke he had to borrow money from the Russians and now he’s compromised and susceptible to blackmail and possibly responsible for the collapse of the Republic. Yay, it’s a fun game!”
It goes to demonstrate, however, how far we’ve lost ground and how present the threat of normalising, despite forewarnings, has become. Droning on in the best spirit and practise of demagogues, “It’s the dead in Puerto Rico and the at the border. But it’s not just the dead in Puerto Rico and at the border. It’s turning the US government into a criminal conspiracy to empower and enrich the president and his supporters. But it’s not just the turning the US government into a criminal conspiracy to empower and enrich the president and his supporters. It’s weaponisation of politics in America to attack the weak. But it’s not just the weaponisation of American politics to attack the weak.” Rejecting this point-of-view keeps it marginalised and keeps us focused and reminds us that this is not normal.

freigegeben ohne altersbeschränkung

Concerned that the Occupying Powers in post-war Germany had not prioritised censorship and protecting impressionable young minds from negative influences portrayed in film—also as a way to head off government- or military-mandated controls by demonstrating that the industry could police itself, those charged with rebuilding West Germany’s film industry (see also) with the consultation of the church and psychologists created a ratings scale—modeled off the US Hays Code and the standards that it imposed on cinema, finalised and submitted to the allied authorities for consideration on 18 July 1949, approved and granted autonomy on 28 September, one of the first prerogative that the country was entrusted with after the war.
The self-regulatory body (FSK, Freiwillige Selbstkontrolle der Filmwirtschaft) is based in Wiesbaden and since 2009 headquartered in the Deutsches Filmhaus, which also serves as a museum, theatre and broadcast studio, located near the Schlacthof Cultural Centre.

les horrible cernettes

Sharing their initials with the future Large Hadron Collider and with office chart-topping hits such as “Antiworld,” “Mister Higgs” and “Strong Interaction” the trio, the Horrible CERN girls, became the first music group to have its image on the world wide web when this cover became one of the first images (originally as a GIF) posted there—the photograph taken on this day in 1992 and then scanned at the request of Tim Berners-Lee so he could publish them on some sort of information system he’d just invented. Sticking together for two decades before disbanding, the members got back together five years afterward for an anniversary reunion concert in Geneva in the summer of 2017.

share and share alike

Though arguably the worst-kept secret in the international defence alliance but the inadvertent disclosure, confirmation of the location of the US nuclear arsenal forward-positioned in Europe seems at least to me a pretty dangerous exposé and far more tempting of a fools’ crusade than the storming of Area 51 to extract some supposed extra-terrestrial beings. An open-secret already with Wikipedia articles on the towns in Germany, Belgium, the Netherlands, Turkey and Italy that reflect the stationing of warheads, security and launch protocols one wonders how tautological and self-referencing the news is.
Indeed there are relics of a hopefully bygone era all over Europe (with official admission at least broaching the subject) and let’s hope there’s no new arms race with Russia that necessitates a further build-up, but seeing this unsourced report, since removed, reminds me of an anecdote—also from Wikipedia, that related how during the DDR, East Berliners referred to the grand boulevard now called Karl-Marx-Allee as “Stalin’s Bathroom” (Stalins Badezimmer) owning to the tiled facades (Fassadenfliesen) of the showcase buildings. Included in an article on Berolinismus (Berliner-isms, that is pet names for structures and other architectural features like the Bierpinsel instead of the tower-restaurant Steglitz or “Telespargel” for the TV Tower or the East Side Gallery), this new moniker was picked up by many journalistic outlets (both foreign and domestic) and perpetuated in the media. The contributor later admitted that it seemed to him like a fitting a term of affection and that the list was incomplete and he could help by expanding it but no one ever referred to Karl-Marx-Allee as Stalin’s Bathroom. I wonder if it might be a similar case of commission in the case of the nuclear weapons as well.

📅

Founded by entrepreneur, computer historian and member of the Unicode Emoji steering committee Jeremy Burge in 2014—a year after starting the reference site Emojipedia—today has been set aside as World Emoji Day.
The date was chosen in deference to the default date already displayed in the calendar application software of Apple systems (iCal) between 2002 and 2007, itself in reference to the debut of the cross-platform scheduling and sychronising assistant at the Mac World Expo that summer. Though now apps are dynamic and display the actual date, this design artefact is retained and reflected in modern parlance and used in most operating system emoji vernacular. How do you plan to celebrate?