stock character

Previously we’ve explored how the business and technology of the printed word leaves linguistic fossils but we found ourselves rather dumb-struck over this bit of etymology and extended sense in the rather non-intuitive term stereotype, which like its French equivalent cliché, is derived from the trade and describes dabbed printing from a duplicate plate instead of the original. Both words quickly moved from specialist jargon to common parlance as a way to express platitude, generalisation and bias. The στερεός incidentally does not convey in its original sense anything two-channelled, binocular or immersive but rather something firm or solid and three-dimensional whereas a stereotypical person if pretty one-dimensional.

saut de seconde

Introduced for the first time on this day in 1972 and originally delegated to the Bureau International de l’Heure (BIH, the International Time Bureau at the Paris Observatory) to schedule their addition or subtraction, leap seconds (see also) are a way to adjust Universal Coordinated Time and synchronise the invariable atomic clocks that informs most civilian timekeeping with observed solar time, the Earth’s rotation prone to go off-kilter a bit due to geological, climatic changes or meteor impacts. Though implemented as a means to ensure accuracy and uniformity in an increasing interconnected and networked world and announced six months in advance, the irregularity of leap seconds can also reveal flaws in underlying programming, the pictured time-stamp causing Linux-based systems to crash back on that date.

8x8

billboards and hoardings: the evolution of outdoor advertising  

ptychography: a high resolution imaging of atoms—see previously  

the village: lovely Mid-Century Modern accommodations in Portmeirion—where The Prisoner was filmed  

vqgan+clip: Picasso’s Persistence of Memory with Lisa Frank filter applied—via Waxy  

ems: composer and sampling pioneer Peter Zinovieff has passed away, aged eight-eight—via Things Magazine  

pulp tarot: a divining deck (previously) informed by Mid-Century illustrations from Todd Alcott

siss-boom-bah: a Japanese pyrotechnics catalogue (see also) from the 1880s  

indexing: a look at how the adoption of vertical filing helped ushering the Information Age—see also here and here

le pont de trinquetaille

Seeing that on this day in 1987, a Van Gogh (previously here and here) of a bridge scene in Arles fetched a then record twenty million dollars at auction made me reflect on a recent podcast episode about the individual responsible for the artist’s posthumous and compelling fame promoted out of necessity and circumstance, Johanna van Gogh-Bonger (*1862 - †1925), widow of theretofore Van Gogh’s greatest champion, his brother Theo, and sister-in-law who had acquired a great deal of the then worthless works and against the advice of friends and family brought them back to their native Holland from Paris after losing her husband. In order to provide for herself and her child, Van Gogh-Bonger collected and edited an epistolary exchange and between the brothers and family biography, helping to establish her brother-in-law’s fame and reputation, as well as arranging exhibitions, helping to define not only Vincent as a celebrity but the attendant marketplace of the art world as well.

t. hee

With a bit of a nod to acquired nominative determinism (previously) we learn the identity of the writer and animator with a rather distinctive style through his 1953 Christopher Crumpet cartoon, courtesy of Fancy Notions, Thornton Hee (*1911 - †1988)—always credited as T. Hee. Starting his career with the studios of Leon Schlesinger Productions in the mid-1930s as a character designer, Hee came up with many celebrity caricatures for Merrie Melodies. Following a brief stint with Disney, notably directing the Dance of the Hours interlude of Fantasia, Hee resumed work back in a more comic vein (Gerald McBoing Boing being a stand-out work) and was also a titlist and made opening animated segments for sitcoms.

heavy-line geometric abugida

Taught in secretarial schools in the UK widely through the 1970s as a practical stenography tool (see also), the system of note-taking developed by language teacher and vice-president of the Vegetarian Society Sir Isaac Pitman (knighted by Queen Victoria for the former contribution) and the basis for written syllabaries for some Native American and First Nations peoples, we really enjoyed the introduction to namesake shorthand through this narrative from Lit Hub correspondent Richard Sanger to which his father’s long and distinguished in journalism was committed. Finding a home for his archives and notebooks was an undertaking full of surprises and ultimately brought together a cohort of expert translators and transcribers to unabbreviate the field notes and interviews to work together on a massive project, talents renewed—see also—during a winter of lock-down.

spokes model

A source for pageantry of the bizarre variety, we were loving how Weird Universe is following up on these niche industrial and sometimes agricultural beauty contests (see also here and here) and limning the winners as more than a promising pretty face with as full of a biography as possible. The champion for the state of Illinois, Miss Trudy Germi only managed to come in third overall in the national competition for Miss Continuous Towel held in Atlantic City in 1949—however she did realise her aspirations for musical comedy in a production of South Pacific. These rolling washroom installations—for hygienic reasons—are not very popular these days but can still be occasionally found. Germi went on to marry a naval captain who was given the task of retrieving the crew of Apollo 11 after splash-down and was present aboard the rescue vessel to greet the astronauts. Much more to explore with Weird Universe at the link up top.

icty

Established by the United Nations Security Council in 1993 with special jurisdiction to prosecute war crimes and crimes against humanity incurred in the territories of the former Yugoslav Republic since its dissolution in 1991, on this day in 2001, Serbian president Slobodan Milošević was extradited to the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia in the Hague to stand trial for genocide. The date coincides with Milošević’s 1989 presiding over the sixth-hundredth anniversary of the Battle of Kosovo, commemorating the rather pyric victory of the Serbian army against Ottoman invaders and enflaming an already tense situation between different ethnic groups that shared the constituent republics. The date also coincides with assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand by a conspiracy of the Black Hand secret society, the Bosniak and Serb group hoping to foment unrest and outrage and secede from the Austro-Hungarian empire with the provinces reconstituted as an independent Yugoslavia.

non-verbal signals

Via the New Shelton Wet/Dry, we are directed towards a host of proxemics, gestures from daily encounters and how to interpret isolated and clustered circumstances from the Body Language Academy whose evocative sketches really do speak volumes, as with the ensemble in Figure 176: The man on the left and the man on the right have taken the closed body formation to show the middle man that he is not accepted into the conversation. The middle man’s attitude shows superiority and sarcasm and he is using the lapel-grasping gesture with a thumb-up (superiority) plus a thumb-point gesture toward the man on his left (ridicule) who has responded defensively with crossed legs and aggressively with the upper-arm grip gesture (self-control) and side-ways glance. The man on the left of this sequence is also unimpressed with the middle man’s attitude. He has crossed legs (defensive) palm-in-pocket (unwilling to participate) and is looking at the floor while using the pain-in-neck gesture. The man on the left and the man on the right have taken the closed body formation to show the middle man that he is not accepted into the conversation. The middle man’s attitude shows superiority and sarcasm and he is using the lapel-grasping gesture with a thumb-up (superiority) plus a thumb-point gesture toward the man on his left (ridicule) who has responded defensively with crossed legs and aggressively with the upper-arm grip gesture (self-control) and side-ways glance. The man on the left of this sequence is also unimpressed with the middle man’s attitude. He has crossed legs (defensive) palm-in-pocket (unwilling to participate) and is looking at the floor while using the pain-in-neck gesture. 

It’s worth your while to explore all the rubric and learn one way of reading a room, with practica covering interviews, poker and dating.

8x8

into the bantaverse: a bot ghost-writes a Star Wars story—see also  

green guerrillas: the role that radical gardeners play in fostering community out of urban blight  

earth, wind and fire: combine basic elements and create new substancesas an alchemist—via Waxy  

fourth world: celebrating the life and career of trumpeter and electronic music pioneer Jon Hassell (*1937)

in frame: see the untrimmed, original version of Rembrandt’s Night Watch (previously) thanks to the help of a curating algorithm   

homo longi: recently discovered ‘dragon man’ skull may be a transitional species from Neanderthal to modern humans  

ine bay: hidden, historic boathouses (伊根の舟屋, funaya) in Kyoto—via Nag on the Lake’s always excellent Sunday Links 

the skeleton crew: our friendly artificial intelligencer (previously) trains a neural network to write a horror story

sleeping very soundly on a saturday morning i was dreaming i was al capone

Billed as Smile, the previous band of drummer Roger Taylor and guitarist Brian May under which the booking had originally been made, those two were joined by bass-player Mike Grose and Freddie Bulsara on lead vocals to perform publicly together for a charity fund-raising event at the City Hall of Truro in Cornwall on this day in 1970. Welcoming the singer, the group was convinced to change its name to Queen by a persuasive Mercury who also took that moment to redefine himself, inspired by the lyric, “Mother Mercury—look what they’ve done to me” for the draft that would become song “My Fairy King,” which would feature on their first eponymous record album. The ballad itself inspired by Robert Browning’s poem The Pied Piper, it quotes directly “and horses were born with eagles’ wings” and immediately preceding the lament, “Someone, someone has drained the colour from my wings / Broken my fairy circle ring / And shamed the king in all his pride / Changed the winds and wronged the tides.” The titular opening lines are from an early version of “Stone Cold Crazy” was among original material performed at the first gig, with a small show, under their new name, following in London on 18 July.

siebenschläfertag

This feast day marking the legend of the Seven Sleepers, a group of companions who hid in a cave outside of Ephesus to escape Roman emperor Decius’ persecution of Christians and emerged three-centuries later, also recalls one of the oldest and widespread artefacts of forecasting and weather lore (see also here, here and here) stemming from medieval Europe. The conditions on this day are supposed to be preview of how the skies and temperatures will be for the rest of the summer. I’d say, judging from here and now, we have a fine season ahead of us.

our lady of perpetual help

The Marian aspect as represented in a fifteenth-century Byzantine icon, the Cretan artefact held in a Roman monastery since, is venerated with devotionals on this day as patron-protector of Haiti, parts of Valencia, the Philippines and the diocese of Leeds. Against a gold background representing the Kingdom of God and that there was no place not filled with the holy spirit, the Hodegetria (Greek for ‘She who points the Way’) presents her child, frightened (symbolised by his losing one sandal) and buffeted by tiny archangels that are bearing instruments of the Passion, on the left the lance and sponge of the Crucifixion and on the right, a cross and nails. All figures are captioned: MP-ΘΥ, Mother of God; ΟΑΜ and ΟΑΓ Michael and Gabriel (with hortative modifiers) and the christogram IC-XC for Jesus Christ. The ritual novena prayers recited before an image of the icon include thanksgiving, petitions, prayers for the sick and divine praise.

queequeg

Though not critically received as well as a project of this stature and pedigree ought to have been afforded, the epic retelling Herman Melville’s Moby-Dick (see previously), directed and produced by John Huston with screenplay by Ray Bradbury and starring Gregory Peck, Orson Welles and Richard Basehart (Ismael and the narrator for Knight Rider) debuted in theatres in the United States on this day in 1956. The cinematic poster for twentieth anniversary re-release anachronistically references its summer box office revival and the screenplay places the whale’s home waters in Bikini Atoll—which is not in the text—to address the massive nuclear tests being conducted in the Pacific at the time of filming.

your daily demon: purson

Governing from today through the first of July, the twentieth spirit is an infernal king that commands twenty-two legions. Heralding his own appearance with a mighty blast of trumpets, Purson presents as a man with a lion’s head bearing a viper and astride a bear. Matched with Pahaliah, both with the angelic rank of the Order of Thrones, the demon can be persuaded to reveal the secrets of creation and foster good familiars.

horse

Though first synthesised as diamorphine twenty years earlier by an English chemist trying to distil perceived beneficial affects from opium without the need for cultivation or the deleterious side-effects and consequences for Empire, the experiment led nowhere and only popularised once it was independently rediscovered by pharmacist Felix Hoffmann (see also) on this day in 1896, working for the Bayer concern in Elberfeld and assigned the task of creating codeine as a less potent and less addictive substitute for morphine.  Instead of diminishing the strength and habit-forming nature, however, efficacy increased two and a half fold with the new formula. The head of the research and development department described it as heroisch and coined the drug name heroin from the Greek root, marketed under the trademark Heroin until 1910 as a cough suppressant. The 1914 Harrison Narcotics Tax Act stopped the sale of it as an over-the-counter medication and required a doctor’s prescription. The Health Committee of the League of Nations banned the substance in 1925, though it took more than three years more until the prohibition became enforceable, Bayer having lost the trademark rights to heroin—as well as aspirin, under the Treaty of Versailles after World War I.

parc des ateliers

Opening to the public, Frank Gehry’s twisting tower for the Luma Arles campus is informed by the city’s Roman architecture and the craggy promontory that inspired Vincent van Gogh’s Starry Night—painted near there. Clad with eleven-thousand stainless steel panels, the structure houses an exhibition space as well as seminar rooms and workshops for various projects.  Much more at the link up top.

beige

Commissioned originally by a paint company for voice-over artist Ken Nordine to write and perform radio spots in the style of signature his “word jazz” albums (also long-time WBEZ Chicago public radio host of the programme of the same name), the work expanded by 1967 into a full recording of some thirty tracks, personifying a different colour each, kind of like Eighty-Eight Lines about Forty-Four Women. Covered hues include Puce, Chartreuse, Ecru and Mauve. The reverse of the sleeve and liner-notes included byzantine instructions for a board game and make a finger-painting based on the order prescribed and scoring was self-apparent.

bravo nuvo

Appreciative of the chance to revisit some advertising psychedelia we’ve encountered in the past, like for drive-in cinema concessions, and strange, culturally-informed McDonald’s commercial pitches being in a category of their own, we quite enjoyed sampling this roundup of seemingly drug-addled ad-campaigns. Particularly we enjoyed this mellow trip through McDonaldland and try-hard nature of a decaffeinated coffee substitute that really had to overcompensate to be convincing. It’s strange to witness this unironic appropriation of counter-culture by marketing executives appealing to conservative middle America.

local flavour

Though again not a fan of ubiquitous coffee giant and what impact it has had on independent ventures, we can support this other jimoto-oriented initiative planned to mark a quarter of a century’s presence in Japan by the company later this summer in August by making every surprising, palette-pleasing local lait frappé drink available in every outlet across the forty-seven prefectures. The province of Aichi has red bean paste coffee, Yamaguchi has green tea with sesame and matcha, and Hokkaido has creamed corn flavour.

djet et décoratifs

Though we tend to mostly imagine the chassis of classic automobiles as neatly unadorned, artist Sonia Delaunay, co-founder of the movement known as Orphism, a branch of Cubism emerging as distinct from 1912 onwards, bestowed a quite remarkable and unexpected amount of detailing to the bodies of older autos, especially in the 1920s when a

custom job was very much in order. First living woman artist to enjoy a retrospective exhibition in the Louvre and officer of the Legion of Honour, Delaunay’s introduction of geometric abstraction as a regular and customary feature helped establish brilliancy and the Gestalt across her chosen canvas. More to explore at the links above.

8x8

autobus park № 7: explore Kyiv’s derelict modernist transportation hippodrome—via Things Magazine  

blue: listen to rediscovered demos and outtakes from Joni Mitchell’s album on its fiftieth anniversary 

i’m chasing martian: excellent auditory illusion illustrated—see previously—from chanting fans  

dark matter, dark fish: the overwhelming biomass of Earth’s ecosystem is essentially undetectable for us (see also) yet we claim the right to rubbish it  

warriors of the zenith, warriors of the nadir: a 1904 ethnograph of Zuni ritual masks  

work-life balance: Japanese government proposes four-day work-week  

shareware: a look at the App Store’s predecessor, Software Labs  

private viewing: the collectors who saved modernist Soviet masterpieces

lullusglocke

Though we didn’t know what the belltower of the ruins of the monastery contained last time we visited Bad Hersfeld, we now know to check out next time the oldest, dated cast church bell in Germany, named after a sainted abbot of the town and later first archbishop of Mainz, Wessex-born Lullus. According to a highly abbreviated, Latin inscription the thousand kilogramme bell was moulded on this Feast of Saint John the Baptist in 1038. Hanging in the Katharinenturm amidst the church’s foundations and partial walls, it is rung to herald the town’s Lullusfest, held in the second week of October to commemorate the passing its namesake and other special occasions.

fors fortūna

Here depicted in the Carmina Burana manuscript, the Roman personification of fortune and luck often includes in her iconography a gubernaculum—that is a ship’s rudder for steering rather blindly for boon or for bane, the name of the goddess and what she represents seems to derive from vortumna—she who revolves throughout the year and whose temple was dedicated on this day, marked by celebrants floated downstream on the Tiber to the Forum Boarium for the event only after secret rituals were expected to row back to the city, bedecked with garland. The goddess has numerous aspects that were celebrated throughout the year and during life-events, including Fortuna Annonaria, luck in harvest, Fortuna Virilis, a lucky match, Fortuna Redux, to return home safely, Fortuna Huiuse Diei, luck of the moment and Fortuna Barbata, good luck in adolescents becoming adults.

rotation № 17

Born this day in 1926 in Berlin (†1999), Robert Rotar was a painter, sculptor and photographer whose contemplative, meditative repertoire drew on symbolism, instructions—flow-charts from alchemy and astrology and was quietly prolific and accrued many patrons from all over the world. Receiving artistic training in Köln after the war—his studies at the Waldorfschule and Vitte in Hiddensee interrupted, Rotar became a member of the Deutsch Werkbund, collegial with Mies van der Rohe, Joseph Beuys, Florence Knoll, Alfred Schmela and other gallerists and artists, departing somewhat from the school’s usual output with a doctrinaire opus that conveyed a certain philosophic correspondence, indulging a trance-like state as he worked, especially with spirals, which embraced the motif of coincidentia oppositorum—out of the union of opposites wisdom is gained and cultivated close friendships with such contemporary thinkers as Werner Heisenberg, Niel Bohr, Wolfgang Pauli and Erwin Schrödinger.

midsommarafton

Roughly corresponding with the June solstice and supplanting age-old rituals marking the changing season and agricultural and husbandry chores by calling it the eve of the Feast of John the Baptist, who according to liturgical sources was six months before Jesus, the festivities of midsummer making when the days start to diminish again after waxing longer to turn again on midwinter and Christmas, a reflection of the doctrine that John was preparing the way for Jesus and had to yield the stage at the right time. Customs leading up to the celebration include the lighting of bonfires and leaping over them—especially on the beaches, and the gathering of medicinal plants as those collected including verbena, rosemary, fennel, foxglove and Saint John’s Wort on this day are imbued with special potency. Originally titled St John’s Night on the Bare Mountain, Modest Mussorgsky’s iconic composition was renamed and revised to include a final daybreak movement and the peal of church bells to hasten away the mischievous and malevolent.

breatharians

As Slashdot reports, a research team studying molecular plant physiology under the auspices of the Max Planck Institute and the University of Naples is demonstrating that making food from air, isolating carbon-dioxide with a spark of energy from a solar cell in a process that mimics photosynthesis, is poles more efficient than growing food crops, such as soy, corn, wheat or rice. Feeding microbes in a bioreactor produces as a nutritious by-product a protein powder suitable for consumption.

daylight robbery

Once again via Things Magazine, we quite enjoyed this series of photographs from Andy Billman of bricked up windows from buildings across London that evoke the interesting and immediate aesthetic (see also) that falls into the category of being a Thomasson—that is, a preserved architectural relic without apparent purpose or historical significance—plus the contextualisation in the form of a window tax enacted the late seventeenth century, meant to be a progressive levy on the mansions of the wealthy but instead misapplied to tenement dwellings and prompted the restriction of light, view and ventilation, contributing to squalid conditions and spread of disease. Much more to explore at the links above.

sidereus nuncius

For the heretical cosmology espoused in his March 1610 booklet, the above-titled Starry Messenger and later works, that unseated the Earth as the centre of the Universe, on this day in 1633, Galileo Galilei was found guilty by the Roman Inquisition and “vehemently suspect of heresy”—sentenced to indefinite house arrest. Forbidden from publishing any new material, the astronomer was further required to publicly recant, repudiate and denounce his opinions, though according to popular accounts whilst delivering his abjuration, Galileo rebelliously muttered Eppur si muove—and yet it moves, under his breath.

zagato zele

Courtesy of the always interesting Things Magazine, we discover this delightful electric microcar (see also)—sold in US markets as the Elcar with Wagonette models available—from 1974 to 1976. Manufactured in Milan with a run totalling about five hundred, the cubic vehicles came in seven bold, harvest colours.

your daily demon: sallos

Governing the first degrees of Cancer—from this day until 26 June, the nineteenth spirit is an infernal duke ruling thirty legion of subordinates and presents as a soldier riding a crocodile, as can be seen in his sigil. Despite this fearsome appearance, Sallos is a peacemaker and helps to reconcile relationship strife and encourage fidelity between partners. Opposed by the angel Leuviah, Sallos is possibly a conflation of the iconography associated with the Ancient Egyptian goddess Taweret, a fertility deity often portrayed with Nile crocodile and hippopotamus attributes or the Hindu river gods often personified as carried by the reptile.

i have always valued my lifelessness

Along with many other anniversaries of great pith and circumstance, this day also shares its anniversary—according to our faithful chronicler, with the 1985 general release in US cinemas of Return to Oz, starring Fairuza Balk as Dorothy Gale on her continuing adventures over the rainbow, a loose amalgam of L. Frank Baum’s other books and not intended to be a sequel to the 1939 production. Committed as delusion by Aunt Em for her talk of Oz and confined in an institution about to undergo shock treatment, a mysterious inmate helps Dorothy escape by jumping from an embankment to a rushing, flooded river, washed away towards the Deadly Desert with her now talking chicken Bilina. Finding the Yellow Brick Road and Emerald City in ruins and all its people petrified (turned to stone), Dorothy is menaced by marauding packs of creatures with wheels for hands and feet. Cornered, escapes again and winds-up a mechanical sentry called Tik-Tok who relates to her how the kingdom has been overrun by the minions of the Nome King and Mombi, the Wicked Witch of the North. Though initially panned by American critics for its dark nature and twisted portrayals, it was quite popular outside of domestic markets and has since gained cult status.

long-play microgroove record album

First introduced by the Columbia Record Company at a specially convened press conference in New York City three days’ prior, the 33⅓ revolutions per minute (rpm) vinyl record became commercially available to music studios on this day in 1948. The format and standard still not having passed in obsolescence after all these years, the record had been under development since 1939 and put on hold during the war and though many studios and manufacturers harmonised with this arrangement for pressing for speed and length, others—notably RCA Victor with its parallel 45s introduced a year afterwards, refused to accept Columbia’s licensing and system, not to detriment of competition and innovation, since compatibility issues could be worked out through manual customisation—adjusting the playback speed and getting adapters to adjust for spindle size and stylus requirements.

stonehenge free festival

Though possible precursors began a couple of years prior—and down through ancient times too of course, the first well-documented modern music fair to be held at the prehistoric monolith (previously) was held on this day, the Summer Solstice, in 1974—after disbanding the Winsor Free Fest and itself suppressed after a decade’s run of gathering at the stones, a victim of its own popularity. Participating bands included Thompson Twins, Dexys Midnight Runners, The Raincoats, Killing Joke and several counter-culture representatives like Circus Normal, the Peace Convoy and New Age Travellers. A wealth of pictures, first-person accounts and ephemera from those years through 1984 and related events are at the resource at the link up top.

spirit of the games

Featured in part in Leni Riefenstahl’s documentary Olympia, we learn from Futility Closet second-place winner of the 1932 Los Angeles pole vault competition for the Japanese national team, Shuhei Nishida (西田 修平) repeated the feat during the 1936 games held in Berlin but tying by overall scores with his teammate and friend Sueo Ōe (大江 季雄). When the two declined to compete further against one another to end the stalemate, the decision was up to the team, who awarded Nishida the silver and Ōe the bronze (see also) as the former cleared the height, an impressive and record-setting four metres and fifteen centimetres, in fewer attempts. Once back home, the pair had their medals cut in half and then spliced together by a jeweller as unique friendship medals, alloyed half bronze, half silver.

aggregat 4

During a test launch taking place on this day from the proving grounds of the Peenemünde Army Research Centre (Heeresversuchsanstalt) of a V-2 / A-4 rocket, a manufactured object for the first time passed the Kármán line defining the edge of atmosphere and outer space (the after-the-fact boundary usually placed at one hundred kilometres above the surface of the Earth) and reached an apogee of one-hundred and seventy-six kilometres before falling back to the ground, not designed to attain orbital velocity. This particular achievement was the greatest vertical distance covered by a projectile thus far but the team of scientists, under the leadership of Werher von Braun, were more proud in with their 1942 feat of having penetrated the rarefied thermosphere—about eighty kilometres above and where ultraviolet radiation creates ions and the charged atmosphere allows radio wave communication to be transmitted and received beyond the horizon. Coincidentally one year later to the day, in 1945, the US Secretary of State and the Joint Chiefs of Staff approved a secret recruiting programme called Operation Overcast to bring scientists from Nazi Germany to America to assist in shortening the war with Japan and augment post-war and peacetime rocketry applications. Interviewing US Ordnance Corps officers would attach a paperclip to the files of those they wanted to be brought to the States for work, importing through 1990 more than sixteen hundred researchers as intellectual reparations claimed by the Allies (minus the Soviets that had their own recruitment campaign) with an attendant $10,000,000,000 worth in associated patents and industrial processes.

the rose mary stretch

While later reviewing tape recording of a conversation held on this day in 1972 between White House chief-of-staff H.R. Haldeman and Richard Nixon three days after the Watergate break-in occurred, presidential secretary Ms. Woods admitted to a terrible clerical error during replay when she took a telephone call and held the combination of buttons and pedals that caused a portion of the tape to be re-recorded. Obliging Ms. Woods later demonstrated the pose that would have allowed for this accident to happen to a doubtful press, making her story all the more incredulous once it was revealed that the gap in the transcript was not the five-minute duration of the call but rather eighteen and a half minutes long. Three days after those lost conversations were held, the “smoking gun” reel documented—between the same two interlocutors—the plans to cover-up the bungled burglary and to curtail investigations by directing the Central Intelligence Agency to falsely assert to the FBI and local police that it was a matter of National Security. Once this tape became public, all remaining political support for Nixon, including fifteen Republican senators favouring acquittal, evaporated—though Nixon resigned in lieu of impeachment.

for the nonce: nubivagant

This rare, obsolete adjective, used first in 1656 from the Latin for clouds, nubes, plus the vagant, vagus for wandering describes something emerging from the clouds or moving through the sky. Though not among the shameful paucity of subsequent citations of the word—only three lexical occurrences since the mid-seventeenth century, it does evoke William Wordsworth’s 1804 sentiment for all of us with our heads in the clouds and not fully grounded: 

I wandered lonely as a cloud
That floats on high o’er vales and hills,
When all at once I saw a crowd,
A host, of golden daffodils;
Beside the lake, beneath the trees,
Fluttering and dancing in the breeze.

hauptstadtbeschluss

Casting their vote on this day in 1991, the Bundestag of reunified Germany made the decision to move the seat of government and departmental headquarters from Bonn to Berlin. As stipulated by the second article of the treaty between East and West—which also established 3 October as der Tag der Deutschen Einheit—Berlin was already declared the capital in 1990. The transition took place over the ensuing decades with field offices of several ministries retained in the western conurbation, near Brussels and Germany’s most densely populated region.

fabric swatch

Via Web Curios, we quite taken with this simple, unassuming tool that generates textile-like patterns either at random or to a wide range of adjustable specifications that can then be saved as image files or exported as tiles for use as web-backgrounds if so desired.

rendered realities

Via Waxy, here is a compilation of the top one hundred alternate, richly detailed and embellished protagonist making the long slog through different backgrounds and environments transported from paracosm to paracosm selected from a challenge that over twenty-four hundred computer graphics artists participated in.  Though not quite the same parameters, it reminded us of this remarkable rotating, side-scrolling Castlevania cube.

blanc joue et mate en 2

Via the morning news, we learn that not only is there a developed, strategic version of free to print and play one-dimensional chess, there’s quite an extensive history of 1D chess variants going back decades—even as early, in the form at least of single row, constricted practises, as 1925.

8x8

here fishy, fishy, fishy: a tale of a talking fishing lure and sixty counts of mail fraud  

goldenrod: behind-the-scenes footage of droids C3PO and R2-D2 trying on their costumes  

plastic tracker: monitor the likely course of one’s discarded waste to the seas—see also—via Maps Mania 

discothek: a commercial photographer captured the golden age of nightclubs with all their eccentricities and exuberance  

juneteenth: America gets a new federal holiday to commemorate the end of chattel enslavement in the United States  

downfall: dégringolade n. a rapidly deterioration of circumstance or position, from the French to take a sudden tumble 

foreign exchange: a beautiful animated short of grains of sand and fiat currency explores the tenuous, specious agreements that underpin capitalism and the global economy  

the most compact, neatest, cheapest, and durable reel on the market: advertising niche that distresses and antiques modern sundries

endianness

In what sounds like a passage out of Gulliver’s Travels (which etymologically speaking, it does and I think about the Big-Endians when I put eggs in the egg-cooker for breakfast on the weekends and sometimes have difficulty telling which way goes up) the little-endian method of day-month-year described the sequence of expressing dates (numerically) in most European countries. In German dots are used as separators to indicate ordinal numbers, “der zweite erste” for the second of January for example or the 2.1.—and while a leading zero for days of the month under ten is permissible in Switzerland or Austria, the grammatical rules particular to Germany do not allow for it. The format leading year-month-day, going from general to specific, is called the above big-endian method and used in China and much of Asia and the style employed in the United States, uniquely, month-day-year, is called middle-endian, used as an auxiliary method by virtually no other polity.

black to the future

Recommended by Fresh Air’s jazz critic Kevin Whitehead, we very much enjoyed discovering the musical stylings bandleader and saxophonist and clarinet player Shabaka Hutchings through his recent sessions leading a reed quartet called Sons of Kemet. Much more at the link above.

iso 646

Considered one of the early and foundational milestones in electronics engineering and developed as an offshoot of telegraphic encoding (see previously here and here), the American Standard Code for Information Interchange (ASCII) was first published by the American Standards Association (ASA—presently organised as the American Nation Standards Institute, ANSI) on this day in 1963. Its application in linking networks of machines was formalised and demonstrated by 1969 (see also) and has been since elevated to an internet standard, undergoing multiple revisions from conception through 2017. Initially recognised for its ability to aid in sorting list, character order is called ASCIIbetical and the collating sequence of data puts numbers and punctuation before letters and upper carriage letters before their smaller versions. While ASCII is constrained to a character set of only one hundred twenty eight, it is rolled into the larger and more inclusive, international Unicode standard.

avonymic

As Iceland drops fees and bureaucratic onus to change one’s (to opt out of the matronymic or patronymic construction scheme) name and gender marker, the Czech Republic is poised to enact legislation that would reform the centuries old requirement for feminised surnames, further dismantling the patriarchy. If successful, all women will be able to choose whether or not to formally adopt the “-ová” suffix upon marriage and buck the declension rules of the language—exemptions granted in rare cases when the betrothed intends to live outside of Czechia or marries a foreigner. There is a heated debate between progressives and purists. Though many media outlets have chosen not to respect the naming convention, the rule applies to public figures as well with activist and tennis star Martina Navratilova rendered in the domestic press as Martina Navrátilovaová.