i’ve got a mule and her name is sal

In order to better protect the body of water and the ecosystem it supports from pollution, residents of Toledo on the shores of Lake Erie voted by a sizable margin to great it legal personhood, granting the lake (or some one championing it) the ability to sue (or be sued). The concept of a judicial personality (persona ficta) has been fraught and arguably abused in the past with the notion of lifting the corporate veil and giving businesses the rights, responsibilities and liabilities of the stakeholders (natural persons) but can in some cases be a force of good, this being the first under US jurisdiction.

duty to warn

The investigative team over at Muckrock, through a recently declassified file, refreshes our memory of the ill-received goodwill tour that vice president Richard Nixon (previously here, here and here) undertook in 1958 through Latin America. The Central Intelligence Agency faulted Communist infiltration of student protest groups to account for the indignities the entourage encountered on nearly every leg of their whistlestop mission, and the near diplomatic disaster of the trip overall prompted Congress to open an inquiry into the CIA on the grounds of criminal negligence in failing to prepare the vice president adequately for how unpopular his presence would be received. Much more to explore at the link up top.

bjórdagurinn

A dry spell lasting from New Year’s Day 1915 to this day in 1989, Iceland placed a prohibition on beer for seventy-four years. A 1908 referendum that went into effect seven years later banned all alcoholic beverages outright for the island nation, but under pressure from the Kingdom of Spain, who threatened to stop importing Icelandic fish unless they were allowed to export Spanish wine, caused the Alþingi to relax their strictures a bit and a 1935 plebiscite allowed for the possession, sale and consumption of spirits.
Beer, however, remained excluded in order to appease the powerful temperance lobby, reasoning that beer by dint of its cheapness would result in greater dissolution. By the mid-1980s, the availability of international travel and greater tourism reconnected a generation of Icelanders who had grown up without beer back in touch with it and bars in the country were improvising with an expensive and potentially dangerous mix of non-alcoholic beer (which was legal) stiffened with shots of liquor. The Alþingi finally entertained the question again and lifted prohibition—an event observed annually.

7x7

la pittrice: the outstanding life and career of female Italian Renaissance painter Sofonisba Anguissola

sentoculture: artist and drafter Honami Enya creates cross-sections of Japanese communal bathhouses

blockhead: good old Howie Schultz explores running as a third party candidate

all the rembrants: Amsterdam’s Rijksmuseum displays all the works in its accession (previously) by the Old Master

sent from my iphone: Apple curates some superlative photographs taken by telephone

newlyweds: exploring the kitsch and social conventions of the mid-century honeymoon resorts of the Niagara Falls

muse and museum: the enigmatic subject of some two-hundred fifty Andrew Wyeth paintings he’d kept secret from everyone 

styx

From the BBC Monitoring desk, we learn that years of neglect and crumbling infrastructure may be turned the Athens’ advantage and lead to the revival of an ancient and storied river that used to course through the city unimpeded but has been buried for decades after a post-war building boom.
Flowing down from Mount Hymettus and emptying into Phakeron Bay, the banks of the River Ilisos (Ιλισός, a demi-god, son of Demeter and Poseidon) was a favourite spot for Socrates and his pupils as well as being dotted with shires and temples to Zeus, Diana and Pan along its route. Rather than repairing the tunnel that contains the river, the plan is to return it to the surface and line its banks with a public park, emanating from the Pantheatnaic Stadium—the venue for the first modern Olympic Games in 1896.

sede vacante

With already burgeoning anti-Catholic sentiment channeled and thrust to the next level with the assassination of Abraham Lincoln whose conspirators included Mary Elizabeth Surratt, a practising Catholic and hung by the neck until dead, and her son John Harrison Surratt—fugitive from justice who fled to Europe and briefly served as a Pontifical Zouave (the Papal States’ infantry—pictured in uniform) before being recognised and extradited back to the US, on this day in 1867, America suspended consular relations with the Holy See—diplomacy not to be restored until 1984. In the interim, special envoys and emissaries were appointed to negotiate deals and coordinate participation on specific political and humanitarian issues. Kindred sympathies between Ronald Reagan and Pope John Paul II both over their shared crusade against Communism and a bond formed after each survived assassination attempts in 1981.

hachimoji

From the Japanese 八文字 for eight letters, researchers at Harvard are reported to have successful synthesised a DNA analogue that incorporates additional four artificial base-pairs to complement the four natural ones that assumes the familiar double-helix structure. For moment, this potential expanded genetic repertoire could not escape the laboratory as it requires constant chemical nourishment that does not occur in natural biology but the potential is there for some incredible applications—including the search for extra-terrestrial life, pathology, enhanced data storage and nano-scale engineering.