durchstoßenes herz

On this day in 1988, the until-then world’s worst air-show disaster occurred at the US Air Base in Ramstein when jets of the Italian Air Force display team (Frecce Tricolori) collided while attempting a formation called the piercing-heart (il Cardioide) before a huge crowd of some three-hundred thousand spectators, killing sixty seven audience members and three pilots with hundreds more sustaining serious injuries.
The scope of the disaster revealed some grave logistical and compatibility shortcomings between the coordinated response between German and US military emergency services and this confusion and delay (since redressed through investigations, reform and closer cooperation) were the potential causes for more fatalities. Formed in 1989, Rammstein took its name from the catastrophe, with the original billing for the band being the Rammstein-Flugschau. It is disputed whether the second “m” was a misspelling or a reference to door-stops, Rammsteine.

ius gentium or a separate peace

On this day in 1928, the France and US sponsored Kellogg-Briand Pact—officially the General Treaty for Renunciation of War as an Instrument of National Policy—was signed in Paris by representatives of Australia, Belgium, Canada, Czechoslovakia, Germany, British India, the Irish Free State, the UK, New Zealand, Poland and South Africa to go into effect the following summer.
Named for the authors and chief negotiators US Secretary of State Frank B Kellogg and French Foreign Minister Aristide Briand, as the treaty was framed and acceded to outside of the League of Nations, the treaty remains in effect with Barbados ratifying it (along with most other countries) as late as 1971. Though failing rather spectacularly to prevent World War II (thirty one states had signed on by the 1929 effective date, including Austria, the Kingdom of the Serbs, Croats and Slovenes, Spain, Switzerland, Japan, Italy, China and the Soviet Union), aggressions and occupations continued apace but without any formal declarations by the treaties signatories, it did subsequently encourage diplomacy through its requirement to establish conciliation commissions (normalising sanctions and tariffs as weapons preferable to military force) for conflict resolution and provided the framework to prosecute war-crimes, conceived as crimes against peace.

hazy cosmic jive

Via our peripatetic friend the Everlasting Blört we are introduced to artist and entrepreneur Todd Alcott who creates rather clever, anachronistic pulp fiction/pop culture mash-ups in the form of book covers. With special attention to the generally lurid imagery and typeface, Alcott has employed these compositions to—among other things—encapsulate songs and albums of musicians who arguably were informed by the Midcentury Modern aesthetic themselves to create lovely librettos of David Bowie, The Talking Heads, New Order and others.

the wombles

While this market and era of television was not exactly my formative and cultural-informing shibboleth, I did nonetheless appreciate Curious British Telly’s analysis of lesser-known vintage children’s programming.
I do recall seeing an episode or two of ITV’s Hattytown Tales (1969 – 1973), which I remember being quite keen and well composed (distributed by the production studio FilmFair who were known for this distinctive style), as stop-motion animation of anthropomorphised hats that recursively resided in hats that resembled themselves. Do you recognise any of these other titles?

nüshu

Sixth Tone brings us a poignant story about a disappearing tradition whose last caretakers are to a degree contradictory to the reason that the nüshu system of writing was contrived in the first place.
As opposed to the thousands of logographic characters of standard Chinese, nüshu was developed as a syllabaric simplification, a phonetic alphabet, for women to use to communicate and record their thoughts around the thirteenth or fourteenth centuries (the Song and Yuan dynasties) without the benefit of formal education that was afforded to their male counterparts in the county of Jiangyong in Hunan province. As the Cultural Revolution ensured that access to education was universal and equitable, the secret and confessional form of writing became—which locals refer to as “long-legged mosquito script”—antiquated and the last proficient and native user, a woman called Yang Huanyi, passed away in 2004, nüshu is now only known through study and research, instead of being passed on from mother to daughter as a provisional form of literacy Unfortunately, despite its new-found visibility with on bilingual shop signs to appeal to the tourists, it’s no longer the exclusive outlet of the under-valued but initiated (the in-grouping of the out-group) and much of what’s preserved with this resurgence is distorted and incorrect.