all presidents rail against the press—it goes with the turf

Sharing the same birthday as President Obama (*1961), reporter and author Helen Amelia Thomas (†2013) was born on this day in 1920.
A veteran member of the White House Press Corps, Thomas had a career as a correspondent that covered ten US presidential administrations, beginning with coverage of President-elect John F. Kennedy in 1960. Over the decades establishing herself as an unrelenting fixture of news media and commanding respect of all world leaders, when asked once what was the difference between democracy in America and democracy in Cuba, Fidel Castro quipped that he did not have to answer to Helen Thomas—which Thomas took as a great compliment.

sant sezni

Having immigrated from his namesake village in Cornwall to the Breton coast and there founded a monastery, according to local lore, Sithney, who is venerated on this day († c. 529), was appointed by God to be the patron of young women seeking husbands. The saint however pled that he would never be at peace and would rather be the patron of mad dogs. Invoked against rabies and for the recovery of the afflicted, water from wells in both Sithney and Guic-Sezni are considered to have restorative properties for our canine friends.

escape artist

Miniature modeller Tatsuya Tanaka (see previously) has been faithfully producing new dioramas of everyday objects repurposed into creative tableaux daily since 2011 and has recently taken to transforming face masks—symbols of the pandemic—into the outdoor summer scenes that we are foregoing for the time being for the sake of each other. Much more to explore at the artist’s website and at the links above.

fotografia di strada

From the always excellent Everlasting Blört, we are given a preview of what looks to be the incredible portfolio of Udinese hobbyist photographer Alberto di Lenardo, discovered posthumously by his granddaughter. Critics privy to the full cache of over eight thousand candid snapshots are comparing him to Vivian Maier—another prolific and accomplished street photographer from Chicago also found and appreciated after her death.

borussia

With a national hymn dedicated to the King of Prussia, Friedrich Wilhelm III (Fridericus Rex Borussiae) on the occasion of his fiftieth birthday, composer Gaspare Spontini brought the New Latin coinage (see also) into common-parlance on this day in 1820, first suggested as the name for an ancient tribe in the region in an early sixteenth century treatise by Erasmus Stella—now regarded as fictitious and bad scholarship.
From the anthem also came the sense of Borussia as the female personification of the old kingdom (previously) and is one aspect of the golden figure portrayed atop the Victory Column (Siegessäule) in Berlin, the Prussian capital, commemorating their win against Denmark in 1852—otherwise identified as Nike, the Greek goddess, and her Roman equivalent, the sculptor, Friedrich Drake, styling her features off of the-then crown-princess of Prussia, future Queen Victoria. Because of the kingdom’s unifying and modernising drives through the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, it became the namesake of many football clubs, preserved there more than its association with the old empire.

monobloc

Thanks to Pasa Bon! for enlightening us about the name and design history of the ubiquitous plastic chair—so called as it’s forged as a single piece from polypropylene.
Based originally on the drafts of Canadian designer D.C. Simpson and informed by the success of industrial artist Joe Colombo’s Chair Universal 4867 in 1965, production of the stool began in the 1970s with close to a billion in existence. Their affordableness and easy deployability somewhat discounts their endurance to the elements as a consequence of our disposable society but there are creative ways to mend broken seats—which seems like a quite worthwhile endeavour since we’ll have to live with them forever. Much more to explore at the link above, including repairs and intervention ideas plus a short documentary on the Monobloc.

i might just fade into bolivian

Though a slip-of-the-tongue is usually a charitable excuse for all of the pettiness, name-calling and generally uncollegiality in the US congress, I’ll accept that a fellow party member referring to Representative Louie Gohmert (shill of a law-maker turned disease-vector) as “Congressman COVID” is an honest malapropism—both being generally reprehensible and irresponsible with their shared framing of the pandemic as a hoax. Such epithets are telling whatever the mechanism for substitution and this particular variety where the intended word or name is crowded out by something phonologically similar and more handily available comes from the character Missus Malaprop in Richard Brinsley Sheridan’s 1775 comedy of manners The Rivals, named in turn for the French phrase mal à propos, coined first as an error in speech (see also) by Lord Byron in 1814.

holy fool

Today [N.S. 15 August] marks the veneration of the Blessed Basil of Moscow (*1469) on the occasion of his death in 1557 and his subsequent glorification (canonisation) the following year.
An adherent of the Russian version of foolishness for Christ is known as yurodivvy (юродивый), Basil went about unclothed in all weather and weighed himself down with chains, though managing to pilfer items from the markets to aid the poor—especially championing those who were ashamed to ask for charity and shaming those who were above sharing their blessings of wealth with the less fortunate. The saint is the namesake of course of the church in Red Square associated with the Kremlin—also known as the Cathedral of the Intercession of the Most Holy Theotokos on the Moat, commissioned by Ivan the Terrible after Basil’s rebuke to the czar that he was ignoring his spiritual duties.