take a jumbo across the water, like to see america

The cover art of Supertramp’s 1979 LP is not only famous for its latter day conspiracy lore but also for the contemporaneous success of its design which prompted the band to bring the actress who appeared as Libby the Waitress on tour with them as a master-of-ceremonies.
Kate Murtagh had appeared in numerous roles from Breakfast at Tiffany’s in 1961 to Ed Silverstein’s 1977 horror film The Car before appearing on the cover and going on to feature as a walk-on part to the music video of “It’s Raining Again.” Murtagh continued to have credits to her name, decades later stepping down from show business in 1999 but keeping busy as a student and coach for improvisational classes many years into her retirement, passing away just in 2017, aged ninety-six, ironically given the nature of the conspiracy surrounding the cover, on 10 September.

artistas no figurativos

Born this day in Buenos Aires in 1925 (†2004), we have found ourselves enchanted with the artwork and geometric abstractions of Martha Boto.
Known for exploring reflection through repetition, Boto sought through her work to defuse those anxieties that only art itself can address and considered her pioneering statements to be programmatic, placeholders where the audience might find themselves amongst the kinetics and pattern. Here are some pieces from various collections but Boto’s portfolio is surely deserving a comprehensive gallery of its own.

8x8

marci playground: an assortment of brilliantly mismatched audio-swapped musical performances 

i’ll level with you, virginia: the one time Trump might have been expected to be liberal with the truth, plus some additional background 

misery loves company: those within the Beltway and beyond are commiserating on the effects of the partial government shutdown

eye on the workforce: exploring the photography of Lewis Hine that transformed the way America and the world regards labour 

regift of the magi: newborns are hard to shop for

bantamweight: check out these portable, pad-like typewriters from the early 1900s, via Messy Nessy Chic

chariots of frolic: incredible Indian wedding carriages

metafilter: Miss Cellania begins curating year-end superlatives with 2018’s top books with the aggregated list available here

cga

In the Christmas package from my parents, they included a picture of a young master Johan at seated at the helm of one of my first personal computers—though not the first foray into programming but possibly the first home model that came as a package with floppy disk drives and monitor and not cassette-tape memory that one hooked up to a television set. I don’t recall if the display just didn’t show up on film or if in a fit of intense privacy, I was driven to shut the screen off, but in either case, I still give the same look (according to H) if I’m bothered or feel someone’s looking over my shoulder.

the beagle has landed

Mars, being a world populated exclusively so far as we know by robots, was visited on Christmas Day (sol five hundred ninety-nine) by the lander unit of the European Space Agency’s Mars Express to conduct an exobiology survey of the Red Planet by digging below the frozen surface, an ambitious feat not attempted again until now with the InSight mission’s dousing for water.
The Beagle 2, named after the HMS Beagle that famously transported Charles Darwin to the Galápagos archipelago, informing his thoughts on natural selection, had an impressive array of instruments but failed to establish contact with the orbiter or mission control after deploying. In February of 2004, the search mission was called off and the rover declared lost and it was not until another ordinance survey of the planet in 2015 that it was spotted in the spot where it ought to have touched-down. The solar panels failed to fully open, eventually starving the machine of power and also prevented the communication antennae from raising. Because the experiments were to begin upon landing under chemical battery reserves, it’s possible that the Beagle searched its immediate surroundings for some weeks before expiring—which perhaps another passing rover could confirm in the future and maybe reboot the original mission.