大阪万博

On this day fifty years ago, the World’s Fair Expo ‘70 (previously here and here) held its opening ceremonies in Suita, Osaka Japan.
Orchestrated by architects and civil engineers Kenzo Tange and Uzo Nishiyama, the overarching theme was to be strength in diversity and plurality, and the event that lasted through September was staged as more of a celebration rather than technical exhibition though there were plenty of innovative displays among the pavilions, including early mobile telephony, the first showing of an IMAX film and a maglev train. The area will once again be the venue for the 2025 World’s Fair.

white wilderness

Another instalment of Disney’s revisionist record (see previously here and here) and trying to prompt and preserve its wholesome image and promote its extensive and often problematic as worthy of our nostalgia wholesale comes to us courtesy of Hyperallergic in their staged series of nature documentaries with the particular cruelty of the Academy Award-winning White Wilderness, an exploration of our arctic animal friends that has been excised from available programming.
Though not the first time that the production company peddled a myth that was to awkward to otherwise own or disabuse, the film in question revived and reinforced the misconception that lemmings have the tendency to commit suicide en mass (the origins come from a pre-Enlightenment belief that the small hamster like rodents appeared during rain storms by spontaneous generation) by flinging the poor creatures rounded up and flung off cliffs at speed to portray this behaviour for entertainment value.

urban lagoon

The global architectural and civil engineering group MVRDV, evoking follies of artificial ruins with the remnants of pillars and pylons, has transformed the sub-basement foundations of parking garage of an abandoned mall in the centre of Tainan into an aquatic public square and park. This sort of intervention that restores some greenery and gathering to a municipality rather than replacing one commercially zoned space with another is quite refreshing and breaks up the frenetic monotony of the cityscape.

el tratado herrán-hay

Negotiated earlier in January of the same year between US Secretary of State John M Hay and Colombian chargé d’affaires Tomás Herrán y Mosquera, the eponymous treaty was ratified by the US Senate on this day in 1903.
Had the terms also been acceptable to the Colombian government—historians felt that Herrán’s deal undervalued the potential economic boon for the country and that they had a commanding bargaining position since he had acted without legislative or business oversight, the US would have been allotted a hundred-year renewable lease of a strip of land crossing the isthmus of Panama with permission to excavate a canal linking the Atlantic and Pacific oceans. The Colombians rejected the ten million dollar down payment plus a quarter million in annual rents, payable in gold bullion, especially considering that the US had already intimated their willingness to invest quadruple that amount in the project, which had been started back in 1881 by the French engineers that had built the Suez Canal to the Red Sea but later abandoned as unworkable. The US refused to renegotiate the treaty and instead provoked civil unrest in the region and lent military support for eventual Panamanian independence, acquiring the rights to proceed with construction under similar terms what was originally agreed upon. The American crews experienced the same hardships and toil as the French had encountered and the canal’s building—finished more than a decade later—was the origin of the phrase “another day, another dollar” for the low wage that workers were paid for this gruelling labour.

kapp putsch

On this day in 1920, Wolfgang Kapp and Walther von Lüttwitz with the support of the disbanded military staged an attempted coup aimed to undo the November Revolution and reinstate the monarchy since replaced by the duly elected government of the Weimar Republic—a historical designation and never used in official parlance with Germany retaining the name Deutsches Reich in use since 1871 due to its constituent states and better translated as realm rather than empire. Shock troops occupied Berlin and Kapp declared himself chancellor of a provisional regime with the government in temporary exile in Dresden.
Though initial resistance and opposition did not materialize, civil servants and other representatives refused to collaborate with the putschists and held counter-rallies and a general strike, which while paralyzing the country and causing the take-over to collapse after four days there was bloodshed and unrest. Although attesting the art movement’s political neutrality, Walter Gropius created a monument to the March Dead (Denkmal für die Märzgefallenen) to memorialise workers killed during the event erected in the central cemetery of Weimar. The Nazis demolished it in 1936 when they outlawed the Bauhaus school as subversive and promoting degenerate art but has been since restored. While the suppression of the coup and restoration of the legitimate government was mostly recognised as a victory for the republic and public confidence in their ability to rule, the Kapp Putsch stirred other, more violent uprisings in other regions.

march madness

As the World Health Organisation (WHO) declares the coronavirus outbreak a global pandemic, meaning there is little to no pre-existing immunity in the human population to this novel contagion, Trump—noted soi-disant germaphobe whom was ignorant of the fact that his own grandfather was a victim of the 1918 Influenza or that the flu could be fatal in general, declares a thirty day travel ban on foreign nationals coming to the US from twenty six European countries—the Schengen Area excluding the UK and Ireland and US citizens being repatriated, with the intimation that free movement exported the disease and that passports are personal protective gear—more and more public events are cancelled, including US National Basketball Association (NBA) games and political rallies ahead of the US presidential election. Given that there are already over a thousand confirmed cases in the United States and that military movements of America’s global army have demonstrated their efficacy as a reservoirs and spreaders, Trump’s efforts at quelling the outbreak is too little, too late and is pandering to base fears and insecurity as a means to assuage them rather than fight the infection and instead contributes to its comorbidities.

serafina

Sick and bed-ridden, though the aesthetically-minded Fina dei Ciardi (*1238 - †1253) of San Gimignano insisted on being laid up on a wooden pallet for the remainder of her short life after catching a paralytic disease, the subsequently venerated patroness of the Tuscan town reported that the day—today—and hour of her death was prophesied to her by a vision of Pope Gregory the Great, with which the suffering but uncomplaining girl conceded.

During her protracted illness, residents visited her regularly as a source of inspiration and encouragement and after death several miracles were attributed to her relics—including fragrant violets that sprang from the wood planks she was confined to which still grow along walls and towers of San Gimignano to this day and stopping two bouts of the plague that the town was spared from in 1479 and again in 1631, and is commemorated on the occasion of her passing as well as on the first Sunday in August as a feast of thanksgiving. A hospital constructed and maintained in her honour also contributed to the town’s resilience.