a book by its cover

Appreciating the inherent, joyful weirdness that can adorn paperback novels—especially the of the science fiction and fantasy genre—the Seattle Public Library system has challenged readers to stage recreations of their favourites (see also) using items that they can find around the house. Check out the full thread and get inspired to stage your own.

maulwurf

After more than a year of inactivity due to the unexpected impacted character of the soil where it landed and deployed, NASA and DLR (previously) can report that one of the instruments included on the Heat Flow and Physical Properties Package (HP3) payload on the lander InSight is slowly, carefully making progress, burrowing below the surface.
Nicknamed “the mole,” the probe has the technical designation of a mobile penetrometer, a sort of self-hammering nail—will dig to a depth of up to five metres and generate (albeit miniscule, truly a mountain out of a mole hill) seismic activity that can be used to determine the composition of the core and study heat flows from the planet’s centre through the substrate and to the surface.

blursday afternoon is never ending

Through the lens of Australian English, Jason Kottke directs towards an intriguing overview of portmanteaux and slang are accelerated by the powerful drivers of novelty paired with angst and anxiety.
A few neologisms that we found especially resonant were coronials, an alternative to Generation C and predicted baby boom resulting from confinement, “Blursday” originally applied to a hangover that one couldn’t shake but repurposed to describe the untethered sense of days passing into one another, sanny for hand-sanitiser, COVIDiot and so on. There’s some gallows humour but of course new coinage is a form of commiseration and a way of coping and finding hope.

and we can dress real neat from our heads to our feet

Reaching its apex on this day in the Canadian Singles Survey (these charts give me great joy) in 1983, Men Without Hats’ hit The Safety Dance was inspired after band leader Ivan Doroschuk was tossed out of a night club by bouncers for pogoing on the dance floor during the transition from the slow death of disco to new wave in the early 1980s, despite the efforts of some to read more meaning into the song, interpreting it as an appeal to practise safe sex or protest nuclear armament though those are noble take-aways. The music video, directed by Tim Pope was filmed in the village of West Kington in Wiltshire, features several superannuated styles of dancing including mummers and maying.

vittore e corona

Feasted on this day in parts of northern Italy, Austria and Bavaria, Saint Corona (or sometimes going by her Greek equivalent, Stephanie, στέφᾰνος—both denoting one who is crowned) is forever twain with Victor of Damascus, an early Christian martyr serving as a soldier in the province of Syria.
Before being ultimately beheaded for refusing to renounce his faith in 170 A.D. during the reign of Marcus Aurelius, the imprisoned Victor was brought provisions and encouraged to preserve despite the bodily tortures he was made to endure by a woman called Corona, identified according to different sources as either the sister of one his fellow enlisted men or Victor’s wife. The authorities decided to apprehend her as well—and according to her hagiography, and as depicted rather bizarrely on this turn of the century fruit sticker—the crest of the greengrocers’ guild of Vienna, was put to a rather gruesome death for comforting the imprisoned by being bound to opposing palms trunks and being torn asunder once released. Rather than being invoked in times of plague, Corona is the patron of gambling and the lottery and called upon for circumstances involving money or treasure.

erbario farmaceutico

Building on a history of reference, anecdote and experimentation already established for millennia at the time of publication of this fifteenth century volume from the Veneto, we appreciated the prompt to learning more behind this category of guidebook known as the herbal (Herbarius, Erbario).
Pairing images that aid in identification with others that represented supposed pharmacological merit—as well as toxic, tonic, culinary and magical properties, extensive accompanying texts and captions inform modern ideas (but certainly do not supplant them—a feature of such collections is that they advance and improve tempered by science and scholarship but are always good to peruse for perspective and perhaps insight) of taxonomy, chemistry and medicine. Much more from Public Domain Review at the link above.