positive reinforcement

Wanting a routine and ritual to better her own practise, tinkerer and engineer Simone Giertz (designer of some hilariously unhelpful robots that are just glad that they can participate) is prototyping, we learn from Swiss Miss, a perpetual calendar with responsive buttons that light up like a golden star.
There are a lot of twee and coddling gimmicks lying in wait to ambush one’s attention but I certainly would not count this idea and method (you can use actual gold stars and a calendar too) among them. Sometimes by being too adult we are also too arrogant to understand how encouragement and motivation can nurture and enrich. Just as a recent episode of Hidden Brain masterfully exposited, many seasoned professionals might believe that their experience and expertise is insulted by consulting something as pedestrian and rudimentary as a check-list, much of the world—from rocket-science to brain-surgery—is run off simple protocols. None of us are above earning our gold stars either.

bellwether

Ten years ago today, world stock exchanges underwent their sharpest decline in modern history—causing some ten percent of global wealth to sublimate in a single day’s worth of trading, despite emergency measures. “Bloody Friday,” which precipitated a period characterised as the Great Recession, occurred on the same day of the month as “Black Tuesday” of 1929, bringing down Wall Street following the crash in London markets in September and set off the Great Depression that affected all Western industrial economies.

the funk of forty-thousand years

I can’t exactly pin-point the appeal of this vintage audio grimoire—released by Capitol Records in 1969 as a double eight-track tape—except to say that people respond to stories and can’t exactly vouch for the accuracy of the history and witch culture presented, but this recording from Vincent Price, “Witchcraft-Magic: An Adventure in Demonology” is incredibly soothing and somehow enchanting.  With interstitials by the witches’ chorus from Hamlet, Price masterfully delivers anecdotes and instructional lessons of how to summon the unseen, as well as the antithetical, graphic explanation for witch-hunts over the fragility of the male ego and challenging the hierarchy.

persons of exceptional prominence

The US National Archives in St Louis, Missouri, an independent agency of the government charged with curating the country’s historical records and transmitting the votes of the Electoral College to Congress, has a special collection of official military personnel files of war heroes, politicians and celebrities available for public inspection. There one can see the service records of notable people like Bea Arthur, Desi Arnaz, Joey Bishop, Frank Capra, Humphrey Bogart, Lucius Clay, Allen Funt, Theodore Geisel, Frank Herbert, Grace Hopper, the Kennedys, the Roosevelts and many others.