祝你生日快乐

Accomplished self-trained pharmacist and educator from Ningbo and Nobel laureate for developing malaria treatments that have saved the lives of untold millions, Tu Youyou is celebrating her eighty-seventh birthday today. It can seem very confusing but I suppose it’s really quite a straightforward matter to wish her a happy one. Ms Tu relates that her given name comes from a verse in the Shih-ching (the Chinese book of classic poetry) that the deer bleat ‘youyou’ as they gaze on wild Artemisia (hao)—a type of sagebrush whose chemical derivative (artemisinin or qinghao su), Tu would come to discover, can be used as an anti-malarial drug.

messianic complex

Norwegian photo-journalist Jonas Bendiksen set out on a three-year spiritual sojourn (trying to be open-minded and receptive to the experience) to document the lives of seven individuals who style themselves as the Second Coming of Jesus and it was from those intimate portraits readers get the community of believers as profiled in The Last Testament.
The big questions of whether the spiritual leaders rise to their followers’ expectations is perhaps not outside of the scope of the book but leaves them unanswered, allowing readers instead to contemplate the crusades done in the name of original namesake. All those appearing in the gospel, who seem blissfully tolerant of their pretenders (perhaps there is enough geographical separation to avoid competition) despite the apparent stakes, are worth investigating but Vissarion, the charismatic figure of Siberia who leads a worldwide congregation of around ten-thousand centred around a settlement in a hollow called Minusinsky. Vissarionites preach a message of reincarnation, vegetarianism and sobriety of the soul (many points in common with his Japanese and Brazilian, Inri Cristo, counterparts) and consider their leader to be technically the word of God (the Logos) returned and not divine, despite some elaborate personal hagiography and celebrating Christmas on Vissarion’s birthday, 14 January—which is even closer to the Orthodox observation date.

yearbook

Though perhaps not the finest, challenging or most emotionally-wrenching moments of the past year, we did appreciate this curated gallery of photographs from the Atlantic that truly lives up to the label of the most 2017 images ever. There’s been a lot this year we could really do with less of in the next. There are certainly some iconic—rather unforgettable moments and movements captured here. What else would you include? If you we making a time-capsule to explain this time to future generations, what says 2017 like nothing else?

7x7

bbc dad: via Kottke, the five or so times that the internet was collectively fun over the past year

stratagem: Sun Tzu’s the Art of the War on Christmas

earworm: the United States of Pop 2017 Edition

data discrimination: US attorneys general and congress mount legal challenges to the Federal Communication Commission over Net Neutrality

holiday jumpers: the history of the garment and the Vancouver get-togethers that launched the Ugly Christmas Sweater phenomenon

a matter of timing: more Comedy Wildlife Photo Awards winners

luke starkiller: concept trailer for Ralph McQuarrie’s original 1975 vision for Star Wars

décades

Not only did the French Revolution of 1793 unseat God and king it also sought to redefine time and did so with its Revolutionary Calendar—the official civil calendar of the Republican government in use for about a dozen years until a compact between the Pope and Napoléon restored the traditional Gregorian calendar.
Wanting to strip the calendar of all royalist or religious contexts, anno domini was abandoned in favour of recording events either before or after the storming of the Bastille (sort of A.F. for after Ford in Brave New World or the Battle of Yavin in the Star Wars universe) with 1793 reset to year one. As part of a greater push towards decimalisation, a month consisted of three ten day weeks (with interstitial holidays peppered throughout) called décades and adapted from Greek and Latin numbers rather than mythological terms and dropped saints’ days in favour of terms from agriculture and domestic economics. The months themselves were rebranded according to the harvest or weather one might expect to encounter at that season. Although intuitive I suppose, it was all terribly complicated with neologisms for winter time Nivôse (Snowy), Pluviôse (Rainy) and Ventôse (Windy) and to be specific, today would be known as IX primidi (the first day of the ninth décade of the year) An 226 de la République Français, that falls in the month of Frimaire (from frimas for frost) and dedicated to Cire—that is wax. As with many other efforts at calendar reform or spelling reform, the change proved too disruptive despite appeal to reason and the best intentions and without government sanction quickly reverted to old ways.

week-by-week

As we are rapidly propelled to the end of another year and the time comes for annual superlatives, we are treated again by Kottke to fifty-two things that consultant Tom Whitwell has gleaned over the past year personally and professionally.
The index is a fascinating revue of not only contemporary times but also many are contextualised as historical development, like the bit of trivia that the first Automated Teller Machine cards were mildly radioactive paper vouchers that were machine readable or that phosphorus-rich dust from the Sahara carried aloft is crucial for the sustainment of the Amazon rainforest. What are some of the facts that you’ve learnt this year? Be sure to check out the whole list and you might come across a few items you first heard of at PRfC.

arc of narrative

Our faithful chronicler, Doctor Caligari, informs that among many other notable events, on this day in 1983 an audience of over one hundred million Americans tuned in to watch the made-for-television movie, “The Day After.”
Suppressing a potential military coup in East Germany, Soviet forces blockade West Berlin—an act that NATO forces interpret as an act of war and responds in kind. Things escalate rather quickly with Russia pushing towards the Rhein and nuclear bombs used on the US Army bastions of Wiesbaden and Frankfurt. As the war expands beyond the German frontier, a nuclear exchange takes place, culminating with a high-altitude burst that results in an electro-magnetic pulse that disables the remaining technologies that the survivors of the first strike can avail themselves of. The director, Nicolas Meyer (also known for his cinematic Star Trek adaptations), reported suffered influenza-like symptoms during production, and when doctors could find no somatic cause, they determined Meyer was suffering under a bout of severe depression due to having to contemplate the horrors of war.

reporters without borders

The PEN International foundation—the acronym originally standing for Poets, Essayists and Novelists, which I never realised, sort of like TED Talks (Technology, Entertainment, Design)—has since 1981 designated this day as a time to honour and support writers who speak for those silenced, fight against oppression and for the freedom of expression, often to their peril. Such gadflies, imprisoned or censored, have been supported by the organisation since the 1960s with special committees formed to advocate on behalf of inconvenient dissenters, but the Day of the Imprisoned Writer was established to show solidarity and to showcase the profiles of courageous individuals that speak up.  The day has now also come to commemorate all the journalists killed in the line of duty between this November and last November.

elfter-elfter

I went to the other bank of the Main river and joined compatriots (despite not dressing up—I’m sure a union suit would have kept me warmer) in the courtyard of the Osteiner Hof of Mainz as we celebrated the beginning of the so-called fifth season, Fasching, that carries one’s spirits through the dreary days of winter all the way through until Lent.

 

deciduous

We were rather taken with this stunning ensemble of trees turning from green to gold with red-accented vines in a parking lot near home—there’s happily quite a spectacle to see with the changing of the seasons but sometimes there’s the most contrast when it’s removed from the forest a bit. The chloroplasts in plants would be optimised for absorbing light across all spectra should leaves be black and while there’s a wide range in colouration, botanists aren’t sure exactly why most vegetation is green and not a darker shade. I wondered if the changing colours was just the onset of shedding them, the parts dying—or whether the process weren’t something more poetic, like the death of a star with the different phases and outcome it goes through as its energy sources dwindle.
I don’t think one can quite bear out that metaphor but it turns out that it’s a gross over-simplification to say that trees shed their leaves because of the cost of maintaining a green mantle during the winter months outweighs the photosynthetic benefits. The chemical responsible for the yellow and orange hues is always present in the leaves but is masked by renewed chlorophyll during the growing season.
The chemicals responsible for purples and reds are produced at the end of summer and slowly become a part of the tree’s complexion. Brown is the absence of pigment altogether.
Trees undergo this transformation to prevent water loss primarily and in certain climes to stave off freezing of extremities but there’s a whole host of other reasons including foiling the camouflage of herbivores, avoiding infestation, advertising its seeds and berries and to even stunt the growth of close neighbours. The clusters of dead leaves that remain attached and aren’t dropped, called marcescent, are even kept around by design as in the Spring they are a store of nutrients and they mask growing buds and ensure that any animal foraging for these new shoots gets a nasty taste for the effort.

pogrom und pulverkessel

Twenty-five years ago this week and just separated by double the amount from World War II in 1992—a couple of years into the reunification, the Lichtenhagen district of Rostock experienced horrendous xenophobic riots. Despite thousands of by-standers applauding the attack of a hi-rise complex sheltering asylum-seekers with Molotov-cocktails and stones, no one was killed but the onslaught that lasted several days and tragically inspired parallel attacks was nonetheless a very dark moment in recent German history and seemingly one whose lessons were squandered.  Ignoring early rumblings that indicated the tensions in the city between residents and refugees were growing, government and law-enforcement authorities carry much of the blame for their inaction.  The focus of the pogrom, the first act of its kind since the war, was the so called Sonnenblumenhaus, which the state government had designated for the sheltering of some three hundred asylum-seekers per month while their applications were vetted.  As the world came to terms, however, with the new realities of a collapsed Soviet Union, the system soon became overwhelmed with over eleven-thousand individuals, mostly Roma from Romania, living in the building and camped out on the surrounding grounds.  Instead of increasing support, services were cut and living conditions soon became intolerable.  Police were inattentive to maintaining the peace and provocateurs grew emboldened, going so far to recruit outsiders that also haboured such feelings of hatred.  Unfortunately these episodes have become frequent occurrences and the culpability falls on all of us. 

eclipse de sol

The ever interesting Kottke shares the discovery of a striking postage stamp commemorating the 1970 solar eclipse that covered much of North and Central America—and was the first broadcast in living colour—designed by the graphic artist Lance Wyman, whose iconic reputation was established two years prior with his logographs for the Mexico City Olympic Games and the symbols for that capital’s (plus Washington, DC’s) metro systems.

living in a powder-keg and giving off sparks

Though not quite as infrequent as a total solar eclipse, it is a rare occurence to find out new facts about the same musician back to back.  We learned earlier in the week—but still not in time to book passage on the sold-out cruise—Miss Bonnie Tyler will be performing her signature 1983 power ballad on deck to guests (and surely with guests) as the ship passes in the path of totality and the sun is blotted out.
Total Eclipse of the Heart lasts slightly longer that the two minutes and forty seconds of civil twilight that cruiser-goers will experience, but there’s no word if there’s a special abbreviated performance might be given. Incredibly this is not the only news regarding the song from this past week—as Miss Cellania points out, the piece was originally written for Meat Loaf and was to appear on his next release but as his own 1977 landmark  Bat out of Hell album was such a run-away success and a tough act to follow, he dismissed his lyricist to rethink his next project. A few years later, the songwriter realised that the number would be the perfect way to showcase Tyler’s operatic talents. While I appreciate that perhaps in the grand scheme of things, pop songs may not be of the greatest pith and moment, but it’s a bit rough to imagine how karaoke nights, the development of the music video and the eighties genre might be radically different had things turned out otherwise.  What do you think?  Turn around Bright Eyes.

blogoversary

Remarkably on this day nine distant years ago, PfRC began as a little travelogue. Still wanting for a theme and some direction some four thousand posts later, we hope to continue making it worth your while to visit for years to come. Here are our top ten most viewed posts of all-time for your consideration, the rankings possibly being somewhat skewed due to gentle vandalism (or shameless self-promotion) but such is the architecture of things on-line, we suppose:

10: a recipe for a vegetarian shawarma sandwich

9: a collection of links from April of 2017

8: discovering the Germanic Yuletide demon and friends

7: civic disengagement does not correlate with religiosity

6: a Russian parking garage employs holograms to discourage able-bodied drivers from occupying handicapped spaces

5: the tenants of ´pataphysics and its discontents

4: socio-realism in art movements

3: a periodic table of typefaces

2: some office-place ephemera of the Satanic panic of the 1980s

 1: a collection of links from November 2011






Thanks for stopping by and making this hobby an enriched and rewarding experience.  Please stay tuned for continued curiosities and adventures.
 

path of totality

This 1982 reflection on witnessing a total solar eclipse by Annie Dillard, excerpted by TYWKIWDBI, is pretty alluring and seductive, making me want to experience the coming eclipse in person too. Although very young and far away in New Mexico from where one might experience civil twilight, I still have a vivid recollection of setting up a pinhole projection with my Mom on our driveway and being amazed to see that little sliver of a shadow bleed over the white disc of the Sun—the colours seeming strangely saturated like watching the skies in the spring two years ago.

It did not look like a dragon, although it looked more like a dragon than the moon. It looked like a lens cover, or the lid of a pot. It materialized out of thin air—black, and flat, and sliding, outlined in flame... You have seen photographs of the sun taken during a total eclipse. The corona fills the print. All of those photographs were taken through telescopes. The lenses of telescopes and cameras can no more cover the breadth and scale of the visual array than language can cover the breadth and simultaneity of internal experience... But I pray you will never see anything more awful in the sky... It is one-360th part of the visible sky. The sun we see is less than half the diameter of a dime held at arm’s length...

The mania is appreciable and can certainly understand the pilgrimages that people undertake. Indulge oneself with the essay printed in its entirety at The Atlantic, available through the day of the eclipse. Make the effort to be there if you can.

wayback machine

Brilliantly, as Waxy informs, the Internet Archive (previously here and here) is curating daily snapshots of a dozen of major internet properties (CNN, Reddit, YouTube, Amazon, the BBC, Yahoo! News, et al.) of how these web sites looked a decade ago. The historical chronicle elicits a sense of nostalgia and contextualises where we stand now.

fangoria

For World Emoji Day earlier this week (we’re still on the hunt for whoever is behind these endless and arbitrary celebrations) Apple released a preview of the way it’s rendering some of the cache of newly approved icons from the late June meeting of the Unicode Consortium—in case some of this seems familiar, it ought to. Though it was mostly squeezing some extra mileage out of old news, there was one fine coda to the story that no one could have anticipated by reminding the world that added to our visual lexicon, there’s now a zombie—coinciding with the death of the filmmaker George A Romero who famously gave culture its undead touchstone first directing the independently produced Night of the Living Dead (zombies were never mentioned in that movie, only ghouls) in 1968 and five subsequent spin-offs plus hundreds of homages. Thank you for all the nightmarish inspiration and requiescat in pace (seriously, do that), Mister Romero.

sea of time

Though not quite the phantas- magorical conveyance of the Beatles that had its animated debut on this day back in 1968 at the London Pavilion, a former dance hall in Piccadilly Circus that was the venue for many film premieres, the Golden Submarine is a race car that is celebrating its centennial this year—we learn via Messy Nessy Chic. The stream-lined, steam-punk dragster was built for the Illinois circuit back in 1917 by Barney Oldfield and Harry Miller with rigorous safety components added to the aerodynamic foil (actually put through the paces in a wind-tunnel) and enclosed, protective cockpit.

aye, aye captain!

Speaking of Bikini Bottoms (which makes one wonder if there’s not some sinister message behind the world crafted by a marine biologist turned animator), our faithful chronicler, Doctor Caligari, points out that today among many other things in 1999 (not counting the pilot that first aired in May of that year), the Nickelodeon network premiered SpongeBob SquarePants as a regularly scheduled programme. Whatever opinion one has formed for the show, its longevity, I’d venture, does demand some respect.

post-modern prometheus

Over the coming year ahead of the bicentennial anniversary of its publication, we learn courtesy of BCC’s Inside Science, that Arizona State University in collaboration with many other thinkers are releasing a special annotated, transmedia edition of Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein; or, the Modern Prometheus to encourage the vital political dialogue that is corollary to ethics and literacy in the sciences as well as celebrating all its influences and derivative works. The prescience of this cautionary tale has yet to be fully unpacked and its resonance and currency in today’s scientific milieu when one can without asking permission but perhaps forgiveness seemingly easily de-extinct not only woolly mammoths and sabre-toothed tigers but also Neanderthals is certainly to be heeded.