itsy, bitsy or swimsuit edition

Over at Weird Universe, they’ve posted a pair of newspaper clipping from 1939 and 1940 that show models sporting a sun dress and hula skirt (respectively as the term bikini was not coined until 1946 as a rather dark reference to the Bikini Atoll, a captured Nazi Pacific outpost—in German it was known formally as the Eschholtzinseln whereas bikini meant the place of coconuts in Marshallese—where the US, in Operation Cross-Roads, carried out its first peace-time nuclear test) that celebrate the bounty of the harvest and local vegetation.
The prickly cactus two-piece swimwear model apparently in fact made it into the annuls of contemporary German propaganda as an indictment against America for its lack of good taste and sophistication, although those associated with the shoot were more upset that the dateline was wrongly attributed to Florida rather than the desert southwest of Arizona where members of the sponsoring Sunshine Club gathered.

polyglotinous or said no one ever

A linguistic curiosity plucked from the vast archives of Futility Closet comes in the form grammarian and instructor Heinrich Gottfried Ollendorff whom, following the cues of education reformer Jean Manesca who believed that the classic scholastics that taught moribund languages like Latin and Ancient Greek was not the best approach for imparting fluency in pupils of a living one, refined his methods and published his grammars and foreign study guides in the 1840s that contain the familiarly stilted and strange sounding scenarios that one is unlikely to encounter outside of a foreign language class or ever utter verbatim.

One wonders if bi-lingualism was not frowned upon prior to Ollendorff, borne in part out of personal frustrations while travelling.  Sort of like a googlewhack—inputting a search-query that yields exactly one or zero results or a hapax legomenon, those practise sentences (you know the sort) that are well-intended and for Ollendorff’s students at least accurate and possibly memorable for their strangeness—and not like those one might find in that infamous Portuguese primer, “English as she is Spoke.” His signature, repetitive syntax earned him an immortal literary epithet in HG Wells’ The Island of Doctor Moreau (a bit like something out of Dick and Jane but far more arch)—“Yesterday he bled and wept,” said the Satyr (presumable ESL). “You never bleed nor weep. The Master does not bleep or weep.” “Ollendorffian beggar!” said Montgomery, “you’ll bleed and weep if you don’t look out!”

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.

doxbin of history

With predictable irony, the White House’s election integrity commission charged with the prevention of voter fraud that it intends to fulfil by doing away with the right to a secret ballot allayed fears of the public that the registry would disclose personally identifiable information of private citizens by revealing the details (to include full names, emails and phone numbers in some cases as the on-line form to lodge a complaint asked for this information) to the public in raw form, not bothering to mask any of the personal information. While it’s unclear whether the commission’s webmaster was careless or vindictive towards those who wrote in to express their dissenting opinions of this initiative (and actively encourage a bit of vigilantism), it seems to definitely reaffirm the fact that government ought not to be trusted with this scope and breadth of data—which they surely already are in possession of, but contempt for domestic intelligence agencies has made this regime thankfully far from omniscient.