art of the title

Via an art round-up (with more choice curations to explore) from Super Punch, we are introduced to ad man and award-winning titleist Georg Elliott Olden (*1920 - †1975).
As the grandson of an enslaved individual from Birmingham, Alabama Olden did not conform to the Mad Men stereotypes of corporate design during the Golden Age of Television and played an influential role in shaping the fledgling medium, starting to work with CBS in 1945 at a time before other African Americans pioneers began making the slow but steady progress towards more equitable treatment, inclusion and acceptance.
Also a prolific postage stamp designer, Olden’s submission was chosen to commemorate the centenary of the Emancipation Proclamation, an executive order delivered by Abraham Lincoln on New Year’s Day 1863—which Olden unveiled with President Kennedy at a White House ceremony. Find out more about Georg Olden from his American Institute of Graphic Arts (AIGA) biography and explore a gallery of his commissions at the link above.

xxvii

To mark the ratification of the Twenty-Seventh Amendment to the US Constitution on this day back in 1992, we’re reprising the story of a college sophomore determined to vilify his case and made it his decades long mission to revive a tabled vote and see it through to passage and enactment, an inspiring and wonky story that illustrates the role that the resolve and passion of individuals play in government and policy.
 Intended to be incorporated into the Bill of Rights by drafter James Madison in 1789, among the first proposed but last adopted, the language states succinctly, “No law, varying the compensation or the services of the Senators and Representatives, shall take effect, until an election of Representatives shall have intervened.” In other words, a sitting Congress can’t vote on giving itself a pay-raise and has to defer matters to the next one. Proffering the idea that the pending amendment had no statute of limitations (period of prescription) curried our ambitious pupil not favour academically and a barely passing grade, but it gave him the motivation to turn his paper into a proof-of-concept campaign, which eventually put the amendment to a nationwide vote.

botantical mysogyny

Though admittedly a simplification of a host of factors and vectors coming together to exacerbate seasonal allergies and tree sex and gender are far more complex, we learn via the always excellent Kottke people experience outsized hay-fever and respiratory responses in part in America at least (and there’s surely counterpart problems created unintentionally elsewhere) because of a misguided appeal to urban planners decades ago to line the streets with greenery exclusively of the male variety, reasoning that then we could dispense with messy blossoms, fruits and pods that female tree would produce.
Not that trees were not incorporated into cities and sidewalks prior to the 1940s—but many of the stately, oldest residents had been blighted with the outbreak of Dutch Elm disease when production demands of World War II made the usual quarantine process that kept the pests at bay infected all American elms—and the reforestration effort was thought out along more deliberative but short-sighted lines, perhaps tidier and have a certain aesthetic like our ridiculous, manicured lawns but unbalanced with row upon row of bachelor trees spewing out too much pollen and making us noticeably suffer. What do you think? Sexism in the plant kingdom is not the same as the attitude that excludes women from medical studies and clinical trials as they are deemed unfit control subjects and most treatment and dosage comes from a pointedly male perspective but has consequence nonetheless.  I wonder what the second- and third-tier effects are that we can’t even begin to appreciate.

chunnel

A quarter of a century ago on the day, French president François Mitterrand (*1916 – †1996) and Queen Elizabeth II boarded the royal Rolls Royce, their spouses following in an inaugural Citroën, the cars loaded onto the autorack of a train—which would eventually ferry passengers and haul freight, to mark the opening of the Channel Tunnel with their fifty kilometer journey one hundred meters below the bed of the English Channel (la Manche). Despite being beset with delays and cost-overruns, this feat of engineering that significantly cuts transit time between the UK and the continent has proven itself to be an enduring success and is the culmination of project first envisioned over a century ago during the reigns of Victoria and Napoleon III exploring the idea of a mined tunnel under the water. Learn more at the link above.

may the fourth be with you—always

As we mourn the passing of actor Peter Mayhew, Miss Cellania happily reminds, that although twenty years late, Chewbacca is finally recognised as a hero of the Rebellion and bestowed a medal by Princess Leia, at a Lifetime Achievement Award ceremony with highlights reel at the 1997 MTV Movie Awards.