missing link

Until seeing this apomorphic cladogram, we had forgotten how in cladistic nomenclature the branch that represents the point of departure for chimpanzees (Pan troglodytes, plus the Bonobos) from a common ancestor is labelled panini. Our human ape selves as well as our gorilla and orangutan cousins all sound rather like fancy grilled Italian sandwiches.

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don’t wait for me beneath the mistletoe: the Allusionettes compose a festive carol for 2020 

ashika: chubby seal pillows  

extravehicular activity: a brilliant infographic of every spacewalk undertaken—from Voskhod 2 onward 

your branches green delight us: a stunning abstract Christmas tree in Tokyo crafted from a thousand corded mizuhiki balls 

solargraph: a forgotten pinhole camera took the longest exposure photograph on record

oină: archiving images of a ubiquitous red ball with white polka dots in Romania’s recent past 

disbarred: US attorney general to step down before Christmas  

boughs of holly: a round-up of seasonal plants beyond the tree and trimmings

nefertiti

Representing chief consort and Great Royal Wife of Amenhotep IV, the iconic limestone bust was discovered on this day in 1912 by a team of archæologists working under the auspices of the Deutsche Orient-Gesellschaft (DOG—the German Oriental Society) led by Ludwig Borchadt in Amarna at site that housed the workshop of celebrated sculptor Thutmose. Since its first going on display to the public in a Berlin museum, Egyptian authorities at the bureau of antiquities have requested that the three-thousand three hundred and fifty year old artefact be repatriated, arguing the significance of the find was downplayed and had inspectors been allowed to fully examine the bust, they would have never allowed it to leave. Focus of aspirations for revanchism after the dissolution of the Prussian monarchy and defeat in World War I, Nefertiti was conscripted for a rather fraught political career of propaganda (see also) in the Third Reich in the years to follow. Presence in the Zeitgeist included the 1935 cinematic portray of the Bride of Frankenstein, patterned after the signature crown, and her role and cultural impact has now been rehabilitated insofar as she is considered the counterbalance to the figure of Tutankhamun and a good-will ambassador for representation, art and the field of Egyptology. The arguments against repatriation, characterising nations outside of Europe too unstable to properly care for their treasures and cultural heritage is particularly rubbished by the way Germany has torn itself apart, Nefertiti sent away for safe-keeping in a salt-mine and nearly lost to history.

dantooine is too remote to make an effective demonstration

Conservationists and connoisseurs of Brutalist architecture have found allies in Star Wars fandom—whether or not the iconic outline of the Hôtel du Lac of Tunis directly informed the sandcrawler of the Jawas on Tatooine (some sources disagree, saying that Ralph McQuarrie had come up with the mobile fortress well before location scouting) to help preserve the historic structure from perhaps imminent destruction. Scenes of the first instalment of the saga were in any case filmed in the deserts of Tunisia, the name and ancillary building style of the moisture farm after the governorate of Tatouine, Tiṭṭawin, ⵜⵉⵟⵟⴰⵡⵉⵏ. The presently abandoned (closed to guests since the early 2000s) and in a severe state of disrepair structure was built in the early 1970s and designed by Italian architect and painter Raffaele Contigiani (*1920 – †2008) as an inverted ziggurat and those room windows have their blinds strategically drawn to spell out Non à la demolition (لا للهدم) in Arabic.

alfabeti shqip

With the conclusion of the Congress of Manastir—now called Bitola, on this day in 1908 academicians from around the country met and achieved their goal of standardising the national language and script for the native population and the diaspora aboard and in neighbouring Kosovo and North Macedonia—who commemorate this Dita e Alfabetit—whereas prior to the democratic, deliberative and well-considered process the language was expressed in no fewer than six distinct scripts that drew from Greek, Cyrillic, Ottoman and Arabic. There was great potential for confusion between rho and pi, aitch and kha. The outcome was a variant of the Latin alphabet (see also) with thirty-six letters to best represent the phonology of Albanian with diagraphs including dh, gj and nj.

la chamber d’écoute

Born this day in 1898 (†1967) and pictured here posing with his painting The Pilgrim, René François Ghislain Magritte, son of a haberdasher and milliner, would go on to become an influential surrealist artist, informing pop, minimalist and conception art through a long and prolific career. Classically trained at the Académie Royale des Beaux Arts in Brussels, Magritte found instruction in traditional impressionism to be uninteresting and quickly thereafter discovered cubism and futurism as a point of departure, his signature style cemented once exposed to the metaphysical, juxtaposition of Le chant d’amour (1914) by artist Giorgio de Chirico.

After a failed first exhibition in the capital in the early 1920s, Magritte relocated to Paris where his work was better received and shown in galleries alongside Salvador Dalí (previously), Pablo Picasso, Yves Tanguy and Joan Miró (see also). During the war and living in Nazi-occupied Belgium, Magritte went through a painterly transition, called his “Renoir Period,” an interlude that expressed his feelings of abandonment and besiegement, though would later renounce that darker spell and committed with fellow artists to use surrealism to promote peace and reconciliation immediately after fighting ceased. Provisionally, Magritte supported himself and his family through forging Picassos and counterfeiting bank notes (he appeared on the genuine five-hundred-franc bill until it was replaced by the euro) until the arts sector was able to get back on its feet and by 1948 was returning to his pre-war style with Golconda (the raining men in bowler hats), The Lost Jockey, The Son of Man (a pop culture homage), The Balcony, The Empire of Light series, and The Listening Room (colossal green apple taking up a whole room).

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photos veritables: antique pre-prepared vacation picture albums  

necessitous men are not free men: FDR’s 1944 second, more equitable Bill of Rights 

conformal cyclic cosmology: Nobel winning astrophysicist Roger Penrose shares his Universe origin hypothesis 

la sape: Tariq Zaida documents the fashion of the sapeurs and sapeuses of Brazzaville and Kinshasa—reminding me of this other subculture  

author, poet, composer: the amazing virtuosity of Gordon Parks 

das neue europa mit dem dauernden frieden: revisiting an early proposal for the European Union, divided into Kantons converging on Vienna (previously) 

dss43: Deep Space Communication Complex re-establishes link with Voyager 2 

scarfolk & environs: a road & leisure map for uninvited tourist

nos sumus una familia

Declaring its independence on this day in 1977, residents of a triangle of streets in Notting Dale, West London formed the Free Independent Republic of Frestonia, inspired by Freetown Christiania in Copenhagen and the comedy Passport to Pimlico—putting the matter to a referendum with an overwhelming majority in favour of secession and many of those further advocating joining the European Economic Community.
Learning that the city council had designs on redeveloping the neighbourhood, the community of artists and squatters originally tried as a whole adopting the same surname (we are all one family, like the motto above)—Bramley, one of the roads forming the border of the micronation (see previously), so the city would be compelled to re-house them collectively, though that ploy failed. Lasting until 1982, the fully-functional state dissolved once an acceptable deal was reached with the developers—though not to everyone’s satisfaction. Architecturally, the art gallery The People’s Hall is all that remains from the days of independence—which also served as recording, rehearsal studios for The Clash and Motörhead. More to explore from Weird Universe at the link above.

mrs bart’s mom

Whereas we’ve heard of the conventions of patronymic names (see also), we hadn’t realised our not uncommon encounters with the phenomenon of teknonymy (from the Greek τέκνον for the child) and also known as a paedonymic title—that is, the formalised practise, the honorific (rather than an downgrade or identity) of referring to parents by the names of their offspring. Common to some Austronesian, Indonesian, Taiwanese aboriginals, south-eastern Africa and in some tradition in the Islamic world, fathers are given the title Abu/Baba/Pak plus the given name of their first born with the mothers bestowed with Umm/Mama/Mak respectively.

the great dictator

The same age and born into similar life circumstances and the only other who could pull off their signature facial hair, produced much to the consternation of his native UK as they feared the political satire ran counter to their policy of appeasement (though by the release date—on this day in 1940, that attitude had very much shifted) so changing venues to American cinemas—who maintained a stance of neutrality—the debut of the comedy-drama was a rousing condemnation of fascism and antisemitism. As skewering and honest in its assessment the film was—Chaplin playing both the protagonist and antagonist in the roles of the cut-throat dictator and the downtrodden Jewish barber (with cases of masquerade and mistaken identity), the creator later admitted that had he known the true scale of the horror of the concentration camps at the time, he would have never made the film. Below is a clip from the final address, with the Great Dictator recanting all he’s done.

ibīdem

From the same source as our previous post, we are really enjoying exploring this extensive, exhaustive collection of historic maps and surveys and finding our little pocket of the world through the ages. Easy and intuitive, see if you can find yourself in this cartographic collection and how much things have changed and/or remained the same. Here we are annotated on two different catalogues of the Henneberger holdings in the seventeenth century.

 

salon d'automne

In 1936 the MoMA published a textbook as a supplemental catalogue and historical (albeit a narrow and myopic one) survey of its retrospective exhibition on Cubism and Abstract Art with a flowchart conceived by the museum’s first director Alfred H. Barr, Jr. to show the connections and development of various movements. 

Overlooking the question of geopolitics and focusing on the assertion of the European dominance, the graphic receives an update from conceptual artist Hank Willis Thomas for a new exhibit in Brussels that not only brings forward the timeline through the 1970s but also re-contextualises art history in terms of colonialism and social structures that informed and enabled their work with emphasis on Belgium’s own particularly cruel record. Click through to enlarge.  Though some of the connections might seem tenuous at first, one begins to penetrate the linkages, like epoch of Art Deco following more aggressive excavating for copper, to take one example.

tweeblaarkanniedood

The unique monotypic gymnosperm Welwitschia mirabilis, native to the deserts of Namibia and Angola was first taxonomically described according to European conventions by its namesake botanist Doktor Friedrich Welwitsch (*1806 – †1874, also credited with the discovery of the Rhipsalis baccifera, the only cactus that naturally occurs outside of the Americas).

Also going by the Afrikaans designation above meaning two-leaves-cannot-die, most of the plant is underground in the form of a taproot like trunk and sprouting a pair of leaves that branch off into smaller clusters and can thrive for millennia. Believed to be the missing link between coniferous plants and the true flowering variety (angiosperm), Weltwitschia are postulated to be the first to rely on insects for pollination and have become a national symbol, featured on the compartment of the coat of arms of Namibia along with the country’s motto.

empire shops

Though the above euphemism for a colonial goods store (ultramarinos, comptoir des colonies, coloniali), a nineteenth century speciality retailer that sold non-perishable items like coffee, tea, spices, tobacco, etc. as opposed to butchers, bakers and green-grocers, has fortunately fallen out of common-parlance, retained through the 1970s when most former colonies were achieving independence, it is still present, fossilised in some unexpected places, like in the name of our local chain supermarket, an affiliate of the large co-op Edeka, founded in 1898 as E.d.K.—that is, Einkaufsgenossenschaft der Kolonialwarenhändler im Halleschen Torbezirk zu Berlin (Purchasing Cooperative for the Traders of Colonial Wares of the Halle Gate District of Berlin), phonetically abbreviated (see also) out of necessity.

zwei kleiner jägermeister

Today marks the veneration of Saint Eustace (Eustachius) on the occasion of his martyrdom in 118 AD, whose life and legend were limned out and elaborated by medieval troubadours—beginning with a Roman General called Placidus separated in a wood from the rest of his hunting party while pursuing a stag. The deer at first gives chase but then charges back and leaves the hunter awestruck by a vision of the Cross in the antlers of the deer, followed by a booming commandment that Placidus and his family are to be baptised by the bishop of Rome. Placidus complies and takes the name of Eustace (from the Greek for “steadfast”). Soon afterwards, Eustace receives a second message that he and his family—much like Job—will be made to suffer a series of ordeals including loss of property and status.

Eustace contrives a plan to escape this fate and requests to resign his military commission to move out to the provinces—to which his superiors are amenable. Upon arriving at the first ferry crossing, however, they find that they don’t have sufficient fare and the boat’s pilot abducts Eustace’s wife Theopista and abandons Eustace and his four children. They are compelled to continue travelling on foot but have to cross the river at some point. Eustace successfully manages with the two unnamed children and attempts to do so with Agapius and Theopistus but fails and losses them to the swift current. Rather broken and alone, Eustace is employed tending a farmstead and protecting the fields for fifteen years when two envoys of the emperor find Eustace and summon him back to Rome to suppress an uprising, offering him back his former rank and position. The unrest is not started by those upstart Christians as one might suspect and might make for a better narrative but rather a run-of-the-mill skirmish at the frontier. Eustace is dispatched back to the ferry-point and puts down the rebellion and his reunited with his wife—sort of like Penelope and Odysseus, who recognises him after all these years, and with word spreading about the happy coincidence two soldiers come forward who were separated from their father while crossing the river but were rescued and raised respectively by a lion and a wolf and the parents realise it’s their children Agapius and Theopistus. Liking a good reunion story, the whole family is feted once they return to Rome by Emperor Hadrian (presumably the unnamed ones as well—let’s call them Barron and Tiffany) and after their lavish celebratory dinner and asked to make propitation to the pagan gods. Speaking for his whole entire family whom had yet to be consulted on their father’s plan for immortality, Eustace refused and Hadrian had them thrown to the lions, who declined to pounce. Frustrated, Hadian had Eustace and his family put in a brazen bull. They all expired this time but their bodies were uncorrupted by the heat and flames. With several miracles and interventions attributed to him, Eustace is considered the patron saint of firefighters and along with his co-patron Hubertus who had a similar, transformative vision the protector of huntsmen.

ciceroni

Presumably sourced to the agnomen of Marcus Tullius Cicero (previously), which itself means chickpea or garbanzo bean, in reference to the orator and statesman’s loquacity of speech, a cicerone is a mostly antiquated way of identifying (possibly self-appointed) a guide or docent who conducts sightseers in touristed locales and explains items of historic and artistic interest for their benefit and edification.
During the age of Grand Tours, such retained escorts and chaperons were known colloquially as bear-leaders (referencing the cruel and medieval practise of bear-baiting and conducting the poor animal from village to village) and were responsible for keeping their charges out of trouble whilst ensuring that they got the most educational value out of their trips abroad and had due appreciation for the places they visited. In the United States, a cicerone is a by-word and certification programme for a sommelier that specialises in beer who can speak to hobby-brewing, glassware and food-pairings.

our lady peace

With high dome and colonnade inspired by St. Peter’s, le Basilique Notre-Dame de la Paix, among the largest churches in the world, in Yamoussoukro, administrative capital of Côte d’Ivoire, was consecrated on this day in 1990 by Pope John Paul II.
It was designed and built from 1985 to 1989 under the supervision of Lebanese-Ivorian architect Pierre Fakhoury. A basilica minor, the distinction from a cathedral is one in terms of rank, conferred in writing by a papal breve and certain privileges to display the baldachin and bell—that is, the canopy (conopaeum) of state and the right to wear special vestments during Divine Office. Most basilicas receive the designation for housing a shrine meant to be a pilgrimage destination.

ihf

We are really enthralled and excited about every last detail of the new promotional campaign for Egypt’s 2021 hand-ball tournament of champions that’s receiving due hype and cheer a year out. The logo is a stylised ankh, the Ancient Egyptian hieroglyphic symbol meaning key of life, and the official national team mascot is the sky god Horus. Check out more from Super Punch at the link above.

rennfahrerin

Passing away in her adopted home of Sweden on this day in 1990 (*1901), accomplished automobile racer Clara Eleonore “Clärenore” Stinnes, accompanied by film-maker Carl-Alex Söderström and a two-person engineering crew, became the first person (see this counter-claim) to circumnavigate the globe by car. In just over two years, Stinnes crossed the start/finish line in Berlin on 24 June 1929, having completed a journey of over forty-seven thousand kilometres—with the aid of ferries—crossing frozen Lake Baikal, the Gobi, transversing the Andres and through Central America to the US and Canada and finding herself in many spots with no navigable roads to speak of. The event, with a prize of a hundred-thousand Reichsmarks, was sponsored by Adler, Aral and Bosch, titans of the German automotive industry.  After the round-the-world journey, Stinnes and Söderström wed and spent many happy years together on their farm in southern Sweden.

dateline

Born on this day in 1920, Marguerite Higgins Hall (†1966 having contracted a skin disease spread by the bite of sand flies while on assignment that turned out to be deadly) would go on to attend journalism school at U.C. Berkeley and Columbia and become a reporter and war correspondent.  Covering World War II, Korea and Vietnam for the New York Tribune and the wire services, Higgins advanced equal access for women journalists in combat zones and became the first female to win a Pulitzer Prize for international reporting. Stationed in Europe early in her career, Higgins was reassigned from the Paris bureau to Germany in March 1945 and was witness to the liberation of the Dachau concentration camp a month later, decorated for her coverage and assistance during the surrender for the SS guards. Afterwards from the German desk, Higgins reported on the Nürnberg Tribunal and the Blockade of Berlin.