pacific 231 (11. 547)

The most often performed of his orchestral arrangements and originally given the working title Mouvement Symphonique for the compositional exercise in building momentum whilst slowing tempo, the tone poem by Arthur Honegger, a member of Les Six—a group of composers working in Montparnasse who collaborated on projects and produced albums during the interbellum and WWII when audiences could not attend live performances—had its premiere on this day in 1924. A tribute to steam locomotives and named for a class of engines with two axles for pilot wheels, three for the driving wheels and two for the trailing, Honegger was a noted train enthusiast, declaiming that “I have always loved locomotives passionately. For me they are living creatures, and I love them as others love women or horses.” The below 1949 award-winning short by director Jean Mitry of the same name scores railyard operations to Honegger’s music.

hardhat riot (11. 546)

As our faithful chronicler reminds, on this day in 1970, around noon a group of more than four-hundred construction workers—many working on the World Trade Center—converged on a group of anti-war protesters, mostly college students picketing the New York Stock Exchange and rallying on the steps of Federal Hall, originally a Customs House on Wall Street, setting up a memorial for those killed at Kent State four days prior and calling for an end to the fighting in Vietnam and Cambodia, release of political prisoners and an end to military-related research on university campuses. By lunch time the clashes turned violent with some eight hundred office workers joining the ranks of the agitating construction workers, breaking through a thin line of police separating the two sides and pursuing students and onlookers and beating them safety equipment and tools. Law enforcement, sympathetic to the counter protesters, did little to intervene or stop the melee. Two weeks of protests followed before the demonstrations, pitting labour union leaders against pacifists, subsided and towards the end of the month, the organiser of the initial riot and a delegation of representing some three-hundred thousand unionised trade workers, were invited to the White House to meet with president Richard Nixon, who said he sought to honour those labour leaders “and people from Middle America who still have character and guts and a bit of patriotism,” accepting hard hats as a gift. For his loyalty and role in starting a culture war, a values war that divided traditionally shared sentiments among Democratic voters, that leader Peter J Brennan was appointed secretary of labour and the cabinet official outlasted the Nixon administration and served under Ford as well.

 

synchronoptica

one year ago: an early fifth century bog man

two years ago: the Nebra Skydisc

three years ago: a classic Eurodance number, assorted links worth revisiting plus more photographs from Pete Souza

four years ago: the death of Tito (1980), more links to enjoy plus Russian borderlands

five years ago: more links worth the revisit plus Heath Robinson contraptions

rabbithole (11. 545)

Via Mx Tynehorne’s Cabinet of Curiosities (previously), we found ourselves drawn into a web of unsolved, enduring mysteries, fringe and pseudoscience theories, cryptozoology, and urban, internet legends with this extensive and growing list of obscure phenomena from Iceberg Charts. Of course the trajectory from hesitancy, to skepticism to contrarian and conspiratorial thinking can be a slippery slope and most of the cited examples are tempered with a dose of rebuttal and academic remediation and many catalogued are harmless fun. Among the newer links, we found an enticing selection of alternative histories (see previously) plus a new one in the form of the Roman Senate’s capital condemnation of a poet, grammarian and plebeian tribune of the Late Republic called Quintus Valerius Soranus. A contemporary and correspondent of Cicero and credited with the intention of the reading aid in the form of a table of contents, Soranus was put to death by crucifixion under the dictatorship of Sulla for ostensibly, publicly revealing the arcane and sacred name of Rome. Though unclear the manner of the publication, perhaps in a poem’s acrostic—or whether this was a political pretext to rid themselves of a troublesome colleague—such evocatio was considered a grave taboo and never mentioned outside of exclusive, secret ceremonies as divulging the name was calling forth the civic, tutelary deity, which if known by Rome’s enemies could cause the protector god to abandon and defect. No one knows if the city truly had such a classified name or what it was—possibly after the elder goddess called Angeron—and the popular but possibly creatively incorrect that it was what Rome spelt backwards spelt was inspired by a dual temple built by Hadrian to the city and Venus with altars back to back and hence the ROMA-AMOR inversion.

7x7 (11. 544)

group tape №1: a 1981 compilation from the International Electronic Music Association collective  

the light eaters: plant cognition and agency—see previously  

hardfork: the duality of Vernor Vinge’s Singularity 

to share something is to risk losing it: an update on the beloved Broccoli Tree (not pictured), which was loved to death—see also  

mai-1: Microsofts new AI model could potentially over take rivals 

pod squad: Project CETI gains more insights into whale communication  

haus 33: a ride on the Techno Train that loops from Nürnberg to Würzburg

synchronoptica

one year ago: the Devil’s Bible

two years ago: a classic from Spandau Ballet

three years ago: cheugy plus Kraft Television Theatre

four years ago: cereal and straw craft, Kraftwerk plus Shelter-in-Place

five years ago: the long-delayed passage of a US constitutional amendment, designer Georg Elliot Olden, the unending attraction of nature plus haunted dolls 

 

prophets, seers & sages: the angels of the ages/my people were fair and had sky in their hair… but now they’re content to wear stars on their brows (11. 543)

Originally released as separate records in 1968, the group’s debut and follow on collection of psychedelic folk, the double-album reissued by T. Rex (see previously) and reaching the top of the UK charts on this day in 1972 and retains the distinction of the longest title of any number one hit. Tracks from the combined project by Marc Bolan on guitar and vocals with Steve Peregrin Took on percussions, kazoo and pixiephone (a kind of toy glockenspiel) showcased experimentation (like the boustrophedonic and backmasking reprise of their hit “Debora” as “Deboraarobed” as an opener well before The Beatles dared lead with such radical departures) and linguistic invention, half word play and half speaking in tongues.

 synchronoptica

one year ago:  symbols of state for the coronation of Charles III, illustrated congratulatory letters to box office winners plus assorted links worth revisiting

two years ago: more links to enjoy, architect John Outram plus a visiting peacock

three years ago: more marginal maps, the Flash Crash of 2010, a vigilant prosthetic eye, Lego lost ships, a holographic Star Trek dogfight plus a treasury of optical illusions

four years ago: a survey of timekeeping, vintage Polish computing plus more Brutalist architecture

five years ago: the opening of the Chunnel plus botanical misogyny

8x8 (11.542)

komoot: one testimonial for the international route-finding applicant to which we can personally endorse for its hiking trails recommendation and active community of contributors 

zillow gone wild: absurdist real estate listings go mainstream

dodecahedron: more on the mysterious Roman artefact puzzling archaeologists—see previously  

eidophone: a Welsh singer in 1885, wanting to give flower, fern and tree a voice, pioneered the discipline of cymatics 

democracy dies in darkness: amid faltering peace-talk, Israel shutters al Jazeera bureau in Israel  

live people ignore the strange and unusual. i myself am strange and unusual: a trove of behind the scenes stills from the 1988 production of Beetlejuice—see previously 

finsta: photo-dumps circa 2006 are the new chaotic and authentic social media trend—via tmn  

trudge: an arduous animated journey of many flights by Stephan Schabenbeck through the lens of taking relatable longer than expected excursions

the santilli film (11. 541)

First screened to invited members of the press and UFO researchers on this day in 1995, packaged and

produced by various media outlets within months and broadcast world wide with several encores and iterations, the pseudo-documentary by British entrepreneur Ray Santilli, despite its poor quality, grainy black-and-white footage and overall incredulity, became a cultural phenomenon and garnering high-ratings, an amateur video likely subjected to as much public scrutiny and debate since the release of the Zapruder film, according to some monitoring the sensation. Purported to show the postmortem conducted on an extraterrestrial crew member found in the wreckage of the Roswell Incident, a military cameraman leaked the footage from 1947 to the producer and promoter. Ahead of a 2006 feature comedy (of the same name) lampooning the infamous hoax, Santilli recanted, admitting it was a fabrication though maintaining it was a “re-creation” inspired by true events and a lost tape. The home video itself was sold as an NFT in May 2021 with the physical master-copy apparently destroyed.

 

synchronoptica

one year ago: assorted links worth revisiting plus a classic from The Stranglers

two years ago: more on defining the metre plus the 1984 EuroVision winner

three years ago: your daily demon: Buer, malingering on the metric system plus a modest proposal for solving resource scarcity from 1983

four years ago: Lusophone Culture Day, a view of the village, artist Howard Arkley, more on the unwritten rules of English plus a green office block in Düsseldorf

six years ago: the material properties of silk plus self-destructing emails

the recording academy (11. 540)

Originally presented as the Gramophone Award on this day in 1959, as our faithful chronicler informs, the first ceremony was hosted simultaneously in California’s Beverly Hilton and the Park Sheraton in New York City—though not televised live until 1971 (although the second confusingly took place later that same year, hosted by Frank Sinatra and was aired on NBC)—and had its roots in the Hollywood Walk of Fame project with industry executives realising that their top artists might not receive the same level of recognition as film stars. Following the tradition of the Oscars, Tonys and Emmys, the organisers first proposed calling the honours the Eddies after Thomas Edison (see also), inventor of the phonograph before eventually settling on the Grammys. Twenty eight trophies were awarded for the first ceremony including winners Ella Fitzgerald, Count Basie with record of the year going to Nel Blu, Dipinto di Blu (“Volare”) by Domenico Modugno and The Champs’ Tequila taking Best Rhythm and Blues Performance.

8x8 (11. 539)

an elegant weapon for a more civilised age: the physics and power demands of a lightsaber  

defective fleet of fly sky-wreckage: nothing good has the acronym MRSA (Material Review Segregation Area) 

chic boutique: Messy Nessy to open a brick-and-mortar clubhouse and shop in Paris  

wopr: US urges China and Russia to pledge that AI will never have command and control of nuclear weapons  

poultice: an orangutan observed self-medicating a wound in the wild with a paste made of plants with healing properties 

serenity amid disaster: a short animation from Amanda Forbis and Wendy Tilby, “The Flying Sailor,” examines the wonder and fragility of existence  

peak wtf: gun-mounted flashlights popular with American police officers 

oh, the asthma guy: a conversion with that one friend who’s never seen Star Wars

xavier roberts (11. 538)

Somewhat cognisant of the strange lore surrounding the adoption process surrounding the dolls introduced in 1983, though we were completely taken aback by this account—via Damn Interesting’s Curated Links—of attending the “live birth” experience at Babyland General Hospital (a nursery and gift shop in rural northern Georgia, an area tragically underserved in terms of actual clinical care with the procedure at the maternity ward described unironically as “planned parenthood”) of a Cabbage Patch Kid. With truly unexpected ritualistic gravity, like something out of The Handmaid’s Tale, the visiting public is summoned to witness Mother Cabbage, truly the object of devotion for a mystery cult like some plaster-cast oracle of Delphi, presided over by a pretend nurse who also plays the role of high priestess urging the children in the room to help with the labour. More on this unbelievably strange ceremony at Thrillist at the link above.

progress without pollution (11. 537)

Opening on this day with the above motto with the park grounds divided amongst the islands of Canada and Havermale and the adjacent south bank of the Spokane River, Expo ’74 was the first environmentally themed World’s Fair, distancing itself from the tech-centric events of the past (another first for not looking to a utopian future but instead addressing present and emergent issues), drawing a sizeable crowd and hosting several UN symposia to address regional and global environmental concerns. Whist mostly foregoing the established tradition of debuting new innovations like the telephone, escalator, video games, the waffle and the ice cream cone, the Washington World’s Fair did showcase the first IMAX theatre (screening Man Belongs to the Earth) and had pavilions cooled without air-conditioning, as well as demonstrating telecommunications relay services and previewed the roll-out of a national emergency 911 service.

synchronoptica

one year ago: the Flatiron building (1902), assorted links worth revisiting plus Saint Florian

two years ago: Dave Brubeck Day, Gaslight (1944) plus more links to enjoy

three years ago: default fonts, Margaret Thatcher and Star Wars plus more links to revisit

four years ago: the Kent State Massacre (1970), the formation of Greenpeace (1972), even more links plus more Star Trek: TAS

five years ago: May the Fourth Be With You, Always

riptide (11. 536)

Released as the second single from the titular eighth studio album from Robert Palmer was originally intended to be a duet with Chaka Khan but her vocal contributions were removed due to contractual obligations with another label, the song made it to number one on the US charts on this day in 1986. Reminiscent of the concept music video for Elton John lyricist Bernie Taupin’s vision for Benny and the Jets, the noted homage also references the work of Patrick Nagel and with several tributes to follow.

anemoia (11. 535)

Derived from an Ancient Greek portmanteau of wind and mind in The Dictionary of Obscure Sorrows, the titular coinage refers to the wistful nostalgia for a time and place one has never known, and via ibīdem we are directed towards a reflection that we’ve often pondered perfunctorily with the gratitude that we didn’t grow up in the lens of social media where every embarrassing moment could be captured and preserved for posterity and really captures a generational disjunction, perhaps unique, and being expressed through infatuation with the vintage, the retro and sometimes regressive as those experiences liminal and just out of reach can be romanticised and recalled or imagined better and more interconnected than they really were, just like other appeals to a Golden Age. The crux of the thesis hinges on one particular high school graduation home video from 1999 and the reactions it has drawn from an anxious and aching audience of Gen Z’ers (and others truly nostalgic and older cohorts dismissive of the novelty of coming of age) for a time when one was present and not curating, documenting or checking their status for a sinewy broader group of acquaintances, and commodified by constant connectivity. Isolation transfixed as escapism is a trade-off, however unwilling, for convenience and instant gratification. More on the appeal for sentiment and sympathy from Freya India at the link above.

apogee and orbit (11. 534)

Via Web Curios (lots more to explore there), we are referred to this rather calming life-stream of the International Space Station transversing the over the Earth below (see previously) from an external camera triangulated with its coordinates in realtime, atmospheric conditions as well as the positions of the Sun and the Moon.

poise and charm (11. 532)

Via Weird Universe, which astutely demonstrates that despite advances in technology there’s little new under the sun with this 1964 print-out pageant winner Miss Formula with unobtainable measurements, we learn that the first generative beauty contest is being organised under the justification that such competitions, to be judged by a panel of two humans and two AIs, are dehumanising so should be safe to export more of this sort of exploitation and biased unrealistic idea of perfection to the synthetic and rates entrants on beauty, technical achievement and social clout—no mention of congeniality. Much more at the links above.

hjelp (11. 531)

This is cute. Previously we’ve posted about how internationally distributed entertainment is sometimes retitled for different audiences, but we didn’t known about this rather clever former convention employed in Norway to signal to viewers that the film was a foreign comedy with a simple and often hilarious formula of prefixing “Help” to a brief description of the situation, like Airplane! as “Help, we’re flying!” or the National Lampoon trilogy as “Help, We have to go on Vacation,” followed by “Help, We Have to go on European Vacation” and “Help, We Have to go on Christmas Vacation.” It’s sort of like the Carry On series. The practise began to wane in the 2000s with increasing English literacy in the country but some later domestic comedies have used the same taxonomy.

synchronoptica

one year ago: more on the Populuxe design movement, a space alphabet plus drone strikes over the Kremlin

two years ago: el Tres de Mayo (1808)

three years ago: NPR’s first broadcasting day, World Press Freedom Day plus the Benty Grange helmet

four years ago: Future Shock (1970), Cetacean Ops, a timeline of the pandemic, rock-paper-scissors not legally binding, more on Star Trek: TAS plus assorted links worth revisiting

five years ago: Sun Day, more links to enjoy plus nuisance lawsuits

national day of reason (11. 530)

In response to the statutory observance of the National Day of Prayer—codified into law at the urging of conservative evangelical preacher Billy Graham in 1952 during the Korean War with US president Harry S Truman signing a bill proclaiming that each subsequent administration was to declare this annual holiday on the date of his choosing—this secular counter-convocation has been held on the first Thursday since 2003 by humanists and freethinkers to assert freedom from religion after unsuccessfully petitioning the federal government from endorsing the former, supported by public monies and time for Christian-dominated religious ceremonies. The latter having gained in popularity in recent years as a demonstration that nonbelievers can contribute to their communities in positive and life-affirming ways and be good without god, activities include organised food drives, blood donations and giving to other charities.

space cowboy (11. 529)

Before Star Wars or even the failed vision of Alejandro Jodorowsky’s Dune—see also, a writer-director called Tony Foutz, who was also friends to the planned main cast, conceived of a sci-fi, fantasy project called Saturation 70, a retelling of Alice in Wonderland, in which a Victorian child falls through a wormhole and discovers himself in a dystopian Los Angeles after the climate collapse and his befriended by a group of time-travelling aliens to save the Earth from pollution—the extra-terrestrials are outfitted in hazmat suits against the toxic atmosphere, the title referencing the tolerance for carbon monoxide in blood. To star the then five-year-old son of Rolling Stone Brian Jones, country singer Gram Parsons, Michelle Phillips of The Mamas and the Papas and Nudie Cohn, much of the principal footage had already been shot before funding fell through and the production called off, many scenes filmed without a permit during a 1969 convention of alien abductees at Giant Rock near Joshua Tree in the Mojave Desert. Douglas Trumbull who created the special effects for 2001 and later The Andromeda Strain was also involved. Aside from a brief showreel and a few stills, the film has been lost and regarded by cinephiles and Parsons’ fans as a rumour, nearly undocumented for nearly four decades, only a gallery showing in 2014 at London’s Horse Hospital but the story is being told in book form, featuring some never before published on-set photographs and scripts. More from Dangerous Minds at the link up above.

trench coat words (11. 528)

Via tmn, we really enjoyed this reflection and appreciation of the beautifully dissociative nature of the Japanese language and the noble attempt to articulate how the diglossia, digraphia of the written and spoken word, though a series of historical accidents, has created a unique and somewhat untranslatable perspective on the world. Beyond the embarrassment of choices that Japanese speakers have for writing (see previously) and those poetic terms with no equivalence—nonetheless important—the expatriate author a decade on explores how shoehorning the written word imported from China into a wholly oral tradition necessitates not only a pronunciation guide but context cues for orthography, adding an extra dimension to communication from the mechanics of morphology. Much more at Æther Mug at the link above including distinctive etymological class of compound words whose components are said the same but are disguised with a new kanji.

synchronoptica

one year ago: assorted links worth revisiting

two years ago: another MST3K classic plus a pivotal moment in the Falklands War

three years ago: record stamps, the debut album from Kate Bush, Peter and the Wolf, more links to enjoy plus an alternate Oktoberfest

four years ago: ambient sounds of New York City

five years ago: the Queen Elizabeth 2,  more on the Dictionary of Obscure Sorrows, possible etymologies of OK, geese in the city at night plus more acoustic visualisations

7x7 (11. 527)

the function of colour: more scans from a beautiful 1930 volume on design in schools and workshops

sporulate: scientist create a plastic first strengthened then digested by bacteria  

wck: resuming their mission of feeding people in Palestine, José Andrés’ cookbook is nominated for a prestigious gastronomical award  

aim high in creation: a survey of North Korea’s popular culture  

barnard 33: JWST captures a sharp image of the iconic Horsehead Nebula of Orion  

dead reckoning: the history of the Etak Navigator and other cartographical innovations  

architectural renderings: the Art Deco illustrations of Charles Perry Weimer—via Messy Nessy Chic

beginners’ all-purpose symbolic instruction code (11. 526)

The original version of the general-purpose programming language (see also) developed by Thomas Kurtz and John Kemeny of Dartmouth College in Hanover, New Hampshire designed in mind to build computer literacy for those outside of speciality fields executed its first code with immediate user-feedback and released after the initial demonstration on this day in 1964. With simpler and more intuitive syntax, the compiler was put into the public domain and immediately spawned several dialects based on terminals’ operating systems and memory constraints and was ideal for porting and inclusion for the growing mini- and microcomputer market for enthusiasts and hobbyists (I can remember being very pleased with some of my programs, however basic) and considered to be the first user-friendly family of high-level languages.

binomial nomenclature (11. 525)

Prior to the publication, on this day in 1753, of the work by Carl Linnaeus (see also), listing every known species of plant at the time (around six thousand specimens compared with the over four hundred-thousand of flowering plants alone described today), there was no consistent standard for the scientific naming of botanic organisms, later adopted by consensus for all forms of life, and most exemplars would be given a long though descriptive polynomials, like herbaceous perennial catnip—now Nepeta cataria, before called Nepeta floribus interrupte spicatis pedunculatis. The genus, the taxonomical rank between species and family, was followed by a specific epithet or “trivial name” developed out of a student project to classify what cattle forage. Arranged into a thousand genera, there were no accounts of what the species looked like in this text and one needed a companion volume to cross reference.

synchronoptica

one year ago: assorted links worth revisiting plus Citizen Kane (1941)

two years ago: the Moonies, more text-to-image generation, more links to enjoy plus an Esperanto punk band

three years ago: Operation Neptune Spear (2011), Mister Rodgers testifies before Congress, dogs with torches in paintings, shrinking glacial maps, more Citizen Kane plus retiring the Op-Ed section

four years ago: Ballet Zoom, pigeon calls, the Penny Black (1840), the Feast of Saint Joseph, Soviet Winne the Pooh, a charting hit from Tim Curry, the flag of the territory of Florida plus an anime selfie filter

five years ago: edible seaweed containers plus an album from McGruff the Crime Dog

primary endosymbiosis (11. 524)

An endosymbiont is an organism incorporated into the cell of another organism in a mutually beneficial relationship—though it’s hard to draw the line from what we would consider weeds, hitchhiking genes or parasitism—and this rare and seminal phenomenon evolutionarily energised complex life roughly two billion years ago when a cell-attacking virus absorbed a bacterium that eventually became the organelle of all advanced cell structures known as the mitochondria, the cellular power-house. Going forward another billion years, a similar auspicious capture of a cyanobacteria led to the development of chloroplasts that are common to the plant kingdom. Not on the same level as the above symbiogenesis but not insignificant are the nitrogen-fixing bacteria that cohabitate in the root nodules of legumes, the chimeric lichens and the algae that live in coral reefs. Now—via the New Shelton Wet/Dry—we learn that researchers are uncovering evidence of another possible biological sea-change—possibly comparable to the way animals and plants have terraformed the Earth but we shouldn’t count on this as our saving grace for what we’ve done to the environment—with signs that common marine algae is engulfing bacteria—like pulses, peas and beans above—that enables seaweeds to fix nitrogen. Aside from possible insights into the once-in-a-billion-years enhancement, it could present a fundamental change in agricultural practises and mitigate some factors in climate modelling.

synchronoptica

one year ago: Wes Anderson’s Star Wars, the 1939 World’s Fair, hypertext markup language is released into the public domain (1993) plus more gashapon mania

two years ago: text-to-images plus modern medievalism

three years ago: your daily demon: Paimon plus a tiny Japanese fire truck on the streets of San Francisco

four years ago: the Church of Satan (1966), social-distancing headgear plus municipal flags of Russia

five years ago: more mass-transit upholstery, windowless houses, assorted links to revisit plus Walpurgis Night

kenshō seikatsu (11. 523)

Listening to a re-run of This American Life on human spectacle introduced with widespread delusion of being an unwitting main character in a simulation, articulated by The Truman Show, the first segment “I am the Eggplant,” about an individual conscripted into a very public psychiatric experiment—that because of its vintage, really went from one extreme of the panopticon to the a much darker, tortured place with several addenda. The Nippon Network’s reality game show Susunu! Denpa Shōnen (進ぬ！電波少年—Do Not Proceed, Crazy Youth!) that aired from 1998 to 2002 was wildly popular and known for putting participants in rather extreme and absurd situations, and among the best known long-running contests (unbeknownst to the player) was called Prize Life, that recruited, abducted a young, aspiring comic called Tomoaki Hamatsu, nicknamed Nasubi (なすび, eggplant) owing to his long face, after winning a drawing for a “show business related job” who as his reward was challenged to live in an apartment with no possessions (including clothing, which was censored for the audience with a strategically placed digital 🍆, hardly compelled to be modest since he did not know he was being live-streamed the entire time—wondering if that’s the origin of the emoji’s double-meaning) or food and no contact with the outside world (see also) for fifteen and could subsist only from his “winnings” by from mail-in sweepstakes from magazines. These prizes turned out to be rather useless but after fifteen months in isolation (moved from an apartment in Japan to an identical one in Korea by the producers to keep the location hidden from the paparazzi) his winnings finally amounted to enough a million ¥ , to be declared victorious. Reality television has been a mainstay of entertainment for the past twenty years but the disorientation, disappointment and the glib cruelty made me draw comparisons to Squid Game. A feature documentary is about to be released on Nasubi and his ordeal but you should listen to the interview and thematically related acts first.

7x7 (11. 522)

diddly doodly: a live action, 1950s version of The Simpsons in the works

trylon and perisphere: rides and attractions of the 1939 New York World’s Fair  

so your property has been banksyed—now what: conserving the artist’s murals and the difference between the studio and the street 

unfrosted: Netflix’s Pop-Tarts movie from Jerry Seinfeld  

the aethererius society: the London cab driver who became the voice of the Interplanetary Parliament in 1954  

the complete mashography: DJ Earworm takes on Taylor Swift  

anti-social network: Aaron Sorkin plans a sequel to the Facebook film, blaming the social media giant for the January Sixth Insurrection

synchronoptica

one year ago: the Roddenberry Archive, custom game cartridges plus the fired Florida principal gets to visit the David

two years ago: a Martian probe encounters the wreckage of an earlier mission plus viewing tectonic shifts

three years ago: International Dance Day with Colin’s Bear plus deepfake satellite imagery

four years ago: the evacuation of Saigon, the Golden Hat of Schifferstadt, daily constitutionals, zen toast plus assorted links to revisit

five years ago: the inspiration for Thanos’ power glove plus not taking God’s name in vain

i got this in the second world war ii (11. 521)

Receiving its popular-become-historic designation on this day as a result of a poll conducted by the American survey company Gallup in 1942, with—no spoilers—the 1914-1918 global conflict referred to as “The Great War” or the “European War” by the US until they entered it in earnest in 1917, there were plenty of journalistic antecedents for calling the new crisis World War II, imbuing by force of habit, in much the same way we refer to contemporary geopolitical struggles as World War III, both hyperbolically and litotically. US president FDR called it such in press conferences but not particularly liking the term as too neutral and nothing one could get behind, he directed Gallup to ask the public. Roosevelt’s own suggestion was the Survival War, with the War for Civilisation or the War against Enslavement being other contenders—compare with the Soviet name, “The Great Patriotic War.” After fighting had subsided in Europe and the war was ending in the Pacific Theatre, FDR’s predecessor Harry S Truman signed a request in September of 1945 from his Secretary of War to make it official.

café rouge (11. 520)

Often performing in the title nightclub of the Hotel Pennsylvania in midtown Manhattan along with other Big Band ensembles that the spacious venue could host, Glenn Miller and his orchestra recorded his instrumental version of the tune (originally by Jerry Gray with lyrics by Carl Sigman—Numbers I’ve got by the dozen, everyone’s uncle and cousin but I can’t live without buzzing…) on this day in in 1940 at the RCA Victor Studios in New York. One of the oldest telephone exchanges still in use, the accommodations closed permanently in 2020 during the COVID pandemic and lost efforts to declare the building as a candidate for historical preservation (the club itself converted into a basket ball court in its final decade), currently being demolished to make way for new skyscrapers on Penn Plaza. Only Sigman’s refrain was retained after the telephone sound effect, shouted by band members. The foxtrot hit would go on to be recorded by many other artists, with homages and parodies, including Transylvania 6-5000 and Weird Al’s Plumbing Song with the number “Roto-Rooter 6-5000.”

synchronoptica

one year ago: a pocket phonograph plus assorted links to revisit

two years ago: Rome’s Cinecittà plus more links to enjoy

three years ago: the impasses of Paris, antique furniture trade cards plus the animated Dutch version of Lord of the Rings

four years ago: wargaming the next US civil war

five years ago: Ukrainian Easter, the stained glass hall of fame of The Champion pub plus mutiny on the Bounty

adrift (11. 519)

Having previously learned of the modern mudlarking off the coast of Cornwall through the Lego Lost at Sea project, a collecting and clean-up initiative that’s been very eye-opening about the amount of micro- and macroplastic in the oceans, we were delighted to get an update in the form of this rare discovery a of piece (numbered as it were like Pokémon cards since there’s a precise accounting of the shipwrecked manifest) in this octopus figure that went down with a cargo ship at Land’s End in 1997 recently by a local teenager. Some five million bricks in total went overboard when the vessel, the Tokio Express, was hit by a rogue wave in a storm, with the same teenager collecting nearly eight hundred parts—plus some nice fossils and shells—over the past two years.

nederlandse verenigning van en voor computer- en tech-liefhebbers (11. 518)

Founded on this day in Leiden in 1977 at the initiative of Dick Barnhoorn, inspired by the success of the 1973 establishment of the Amateur Computer Club by Mike Lord in England, the Hobby Computer Club—modelled off of model train enthusiasts and often caucusing with those sorts of groups, drew individuals together with the goal of creating custom, powerful mainframes and form a software exchange (see also). Though membership is declining and interest in homemade systems is waning to a degree, the association is still active, with irregular meetings, conference, fairs and workshops held across the Netherlands.

10x10 (11. 517)

age inappropriate: amid a the aggressive banning and policing of reading material, “disturbing” titles help teens become more empathetic and literate—via tmn 

brolly: a faux Britishism for umbrella—from an American regionalism—with an interesting history 

 …but often rhymes: what historian Thucydides would make of parallels and analogies 

true facts: Ze Frank on smart bees—previously

moulin rouge: the red windmill blades on the Parisian landmark collapse—via Nag on the Lake—more here 

completist: venturing to the remote US national park that requires a passport 

what’s the truth about mother goose: a search for the personage behind the nursery rhymes  

never-ending cash machine: a collection of lost and unreleased 

to the manor born: a series of articles on how to quantify a castle, palace and stately home—via Strange Company 

house penguin: recent anti-trust case over the acquisition of one publisher revealed sobering insights about the state of the industry

synchronoptica

one year ago: the evacuation of Prypriat (1986)

two years ago: a single from Harvey Danger (1998), more removal of Soviet monuments plus no new applications for flag icons and emoji

three years ago: Saint Zita, redrawing geopolitical boundaries according to indigenous lands, peaceniks, Dr Mabuse (1922), etymologies of company names and brands plus sustainable diets

four years ago: All Quiet on the Western Front, another Roman holiday, a comic make-up tutorial plus engine sounds for electric cars

five years ago: ranking the 404 landing pages for the US presidential candidates

 

villa of the papyri (11. 516)

Using a dual process of optical coherence tomography and infrared hyperspectral imaging to eke out characters from carbonised scrolls housed in Herculaneum and preserved after the eruption of Vesuvius in 79 AD but inaccessible until recently with the aid of artificial intelligence, researchers have been able to more accurately locate the burial place of Plato, student of Socrates and teacher of Aristotle, in the Academy, destroyed by Roman general Sulla in 86 BC, as well as a previously unknown account of the philosopher’s last days that relates how he found the night’s entertainment, a Thracian musician’s performance, rather grating. We wonder what else might be digitally unwrapped from this trove kept in what’s regarded as one, the site originally designated Villa Suburbana either residence of Lucious Calpurnius Piso Caesonius—the father-in-law of Julius Caesar or the purported author himself, Epicurean Philodemus of Gadara, of the most luxurious and with a well-apportioned library in the Roman world.

memory alpha (11. 515)

Courtesy of fellow internet-caretaker Everlasting Blört (a site that sadly we don’t get to frequent nearly often enough these days but always serendipitous and worth the visit), we are referred to a massive Pinterest-type gallery of Star Trek images, character profiles, peeks behind the scenes, ship schematics, chronologies, ephemera, merchandise and other appearances and publications and cast photos from every series and films of the franchise—see previously. It was a lot of fun to browse through and like the drop-down effects as one scrolls about. The title is taken from TOS S3:18, The Lights of Zetar, where a storm-like phenomenon is approaching at warp speed to the planetoid in the Teneebia sector that hosts the Federation’s central archives and inspired the eponymous, definitive database of lore and fandom.

8x8 (11. 514)

flightline: stunning visualisations of air traffic  

splinternet: ByteDance does not plan to divest itself of TikTok following US ultimatum  

megadeath: modelling the destruction caused by a nuclear bomb on a major city  

mtv buzz: a surreal montage of audio and video clips arranged by Mark Pellington (1990)  

celebrity endorsement: musicians, artists and novelist pose with the Sears’ appliances in this 1969 ad campaign for Kenmore—see also  

undiscovery: the Map Men chart phantom islands—including some that have made it into the era of Google Maps—see previously  

22,5 light hours: engineers debug a forty-seven year old computer remotely from twenty-four billion kilometres away to revive the data stream from Voyager I—see previously  

embarking: a luxury airline that caters to canines above their human companions

synchronoptica

one year ago: assorted links worth revisiting

two years ago: dismantling Soviet-era monuments

three years ago: more links to enjoy plus a special issue of LIFE magazine

four years ago: fantasy urban map generators, more links worth the revisit plus geopolitical optics

five years ago: an elegant and modern personal seal, even more links plus a Victorian houseplant