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The visual search engine Same Energy has been circulating for a few days and while we found it to be a clever idea and there was definitely correspondence among images by a word prompt it seemed a little predictable. Uploading a picture, however, like I did with this art work from Tadami Yamada Japanese surrealist in this 1983 composition that features elements of a still life, chequerboard and a strange framed tarot motif in the background and taking in a mosaic of what the algorithm makes of the visual cue really is engaging and demonstrates a virtuosity that we weren’t expecting. Do give it a try and see what it serves up. 

 

patient-zero

Re-emphasizing that the 1918 influenza pandemic only became known as the Spanish Flu because its journalists untethered by war-time propaganda and the need to uphold troop morale and public confidence were free to report on the emerging public health crisis, from the American perspective, according to convention, the first cases of the particularly deadly viral strain were recorded in the hospital wards of Camp Fuston, a training centre for new army recruits and part of the compound of Fort Riley outside of Manhattan, Kansas on this day in 1918. Though impossible to reconstruct a century on, epidemiologists believe that either this military installation in the US or a British staging hospital in Étaples-sur-Mer near Calais—with troops from the former’s 89th Division were deployed to France in the Spring of 1918.

eine symphonie des grauens

Premiering on this day in 1922 in the Marble Hall of the Berlin Zoological Gardens (previously), this silent, Expressionist horror film directed Friedrich Wilhelm Murnau (see also), Nosferatu, was considered and unauthorised, unsanctioned cinematic adaptation of Dracula, despite significant changes to the story of Count Orlok, and all copies were ordered destroyed by the estate of Bram Stoker. A few reels, however, did survive and the world of film retains the legacy of this pioneering and influential masterpiece. A relator (Makler) from the fictional town of Wisborg dispatches one of his employees beyond the Carpathian Mountains to arrange their purchase of a property in his hometown for a mysterious and feared Transylvanian aristocrat.

and there’s no one there to raise them—if you did

Released as a single on this day in 1972 from the studio album Honky Château, the song parenthetically titled I think It’s Going to Be a Long, Long Time by Elton John and Bernie Taupin, the narrative lyric was inspired by elements of the eponymous short story by Ray Bradbury in his The Illustrated Man collection and David Bowie’s 1969 “Space Oddity,” the pieces all triangulating on the lament that astronauts were no longer heroes and that space travel was becoming routine, mundane.

vaccine, vaccine, vaccine, vaccine, i’m begging of you, please don’t hesitate

Country music star who helped fund the Moderna laboratories COVID-19 inoculation, Dolly Parton, received the first iteration of the regimen, breaking into song with a spin on her classic ballad Jolene. Parton, in no uncertain terms, is joining with other celebrities to encourage fans and the public to get their jabs and expedite a return to a new normal.

6x6

spongmonkey: though not a cultural shibboleth for myself personally, this history of the Quiznos’ submarine sandwich franchise’s mascot was an interesting object lesson in internet culture—via Miss Cellania  

backmasking: fun with that portrait animation application, via Super Punch  

puce chintz alert: a truly cursed McMansion built in 1978  

micro-face: a fascinating, multistage look at the process of acquiring a super hero with the Planet Money podcast  

garage mahal: vlogger pays house-calls to the ostentatiously wealthy, asks what they do for a living

previous tenants: buildings that used to be a Blockbuster video rental shop—in the tradition of This Used to be a Pizza Hut—via Things Magazine

telex

Via Weird Universe—striking us as rather incredulous as well that we’ve not blogged about this topic before though there are some corresponding posts (see here and here)—we are introduced to commercial code, a method adopted by companies to save on cablegram expenses when telegraph companies charged per word or character and thus elaborate and competing systems of encoding and decoding were developed and broadly used from the 1870s through the 1950s, both for general use and industry jargon. Secondarily a means of keeping communications private and confusing unless one had the right reference book, some systems used less common words as a cipher for a series of phrases on the same subject and sometimes included non-words, like HAUBARER for “charterers will allow the option of carrying horse for the ship’s benefit,” BYOXO for “are you trying to weasel out of our deal,” ENBET for the “captain has gone insane,” AZKHE for a clean bill of health and COSNOSCO as shorthand for “dining out this evening; send my dress clothes here.” More to explore at Weird Universe at the link up top including a good resource of scanned codebooks.

tachygraphy

First demonstrated to the public in Paris on this day in 1792, inventor and engineer Claude Chappe (*1763 - †1805) took the principles of flag signalling from the merchant navy and applied them for terrestrial use in a series of communication masts and towers within successive line-of-sight in a network that eventually covered all of France. Operators viewing their neighbouring link through a telescope could pass along the message to the next relay station (see also). Dubbed the télégraphe Chappe, alternately the inventor coined the neologism semaphore—from the Greek σῆμα + φορός, sign-carrying—and was the first practical means of telecommunication of the Industrial Age, in use until replaced by the electric telegraph in the 1850s.