hommages posthumes

Born circa 1700 in Maderia and sold into a life of enslavement Marie-Josèphe dite Angélique (so named by her last owner) was tried and made a coerced confession under torture of setting fire to her master and mistress’ home, engulfing much of the old town of Montréal, and was executed by hanging on this day in 1734.
When the devastating fire had spread back in April, rumours circulated accusing Angélique of arson but there were no witnesses (other than a five-year old that took the stand by surprise, coming forward quite late in the proceedings) or corroborating evidence and prosecutors struggled to impose the sentence but the punishment was eventually meted out.
While until recent times, the court’s verdict was not re-examined, assuming that Angélique did in fact start the fire to exact revenge on her owners, closer inspection suggests it may have been accidentally and that Angélique was a convenient scapegoat—other historians do indeed find her culpable but in the larger context of the struggle for freedom and equal rights. There is of course no such thing as being a little bit owned and not one’s own person but conditions in New France were far different in other areas, there being a degree of civil protections for enslaved persons and rather a hierarchy of “unfreedoms” that restricted movement and liberty. In 2012, a public square facing the Montréal City Hall was designated Place Marie-Josèphe-Angélique in her honour and numerous adaptations of her life have been produced.

tituli

Friend of the Blog par excellence, Nag on the Lake, refers us to nice little application that allows one to remix the characters and style of the Bayeux Tapestry (see also) for retelling a modern saga with this clever historic construction kit. See more on the original embroidery and the tale it conveys at the source link above and share with us your stitched together yarns.

oligopoly

With the rather spectacular collapse in negotiations and the US unilaterally threatening to suspend talks moderated by the Organisation of Economic Cooperation and Development, the EU and the UK—despite, perhaps because of being put in the disadvantaging position of working out a trade deal with America in anticipation of the day when it is outside the European single market, are vowing to enact a regime of digital service taxes levied on the internet titans of industry and aggregation (see previously), infamously remanding little to the polities that enrich them.
Though Brussels would like to implement the regimen with the input of the US-based companies that dominate the data, demographics and social media market in order to avoid unwelcome countermeasures, Washington choose to suspend the discussion, characterising the talks as at an unhelpful impasse and are trying to intimidate the EU into backing down with more retaliatory tariffs and sanctions and possibly the next flashpoint in a sustained and inopportune trade war.

satellite news channel

Launching on this day in 1982 and several months prematurely due to its inspiration’s and competition’s debut of its spin-off channel Headline News (originally called CNN2) with a similar format to their planned approach to programming, the short-lived collaboration between the American Broadcasting Company and Group Westinghouse Satellite Communications, SNC, has a logo that looks like an generic, expository news channel from a movie if not completely out of a different timeline altogether.
It packaged world and national news reports in eighteen minute blocks allotting the rest of the newscast, repeating on the half-hour with alternating segments dedicated to weather, sports, business and entertainment, to regional and local reporting. Despite the network’s willingness to pay cable companies a fee to carry SNC—contrary to business practises at the time when cable companies passed the costs per channel onto prescribers—it failed to breakthough in US television markets—eventually conceding their transponder space to HLN as their intellectual, having adopted more of their programming rotation into their broadcast day, if not business heirs, and the venture folded after eighteen months of operation. Their theme music was briefly used by the Entertainment and Sport Programming Network, ESPN.

you’re gonna need a bigger boat

Appropriately as the world tries to restart the economy (which in its old form was irreparably doomed from the moment that this microscopic menace first began to spread) and return to a normal that we’ve been graced through it all with the chance of rejecting and eradicating and starting over as some new and more just, sustainable and equitable society and instead in many places chooses to ignore and disdain the experts in favour of return to the status quo, on this day in 1975, the motion picture Jaws went into general release. Mindful of the economic impact that closing the beaches will have for his town Amity (is a summer town—we need summer dollars), Mayor Vaughn decides to reopen despite the fact a marauding menace is still in the waters.

cher and cher-a-like

Unsure how this had escaped our awareness for so long but no matter has these twelve minutes have proven to be immensely fulfilling, we discover that Cher in a 1978 Emmy-nominated television broadcast in early April on the ABC network special performed a medley version of West Side Story where she played every part. In later acts, Cher shared the stage for this tribute with guests including Dolly Parton, Rod Stewart, the San Francisco punk band The Tubes and a walk-on appearance by Georgia Holt, the actress’ mother, with the penultimate number being a musical battle for the soul of Cher with the up-and-coming The Tubes trying to influence her career choices down a dark path.

kps 9566

Though only in use domestically, the DPRK (North) Standard Korean Graphic Character Set for Information Interchange, is ISO compliant and renderable across all platforms and is an efficient approach to translating the large repertoire of Hangul into a format for programming and transmittable all around the world.
While not all glyphs in the standard have Unicode equivalents (like the symbol of the Workers’ Party of Korea, the Hammer and Sickle and Brush, or personal cartouches for the country’s senior leadership) the standard is responsible for several indispensable emojis, like HOT BEVERAGE (☕) originally proposed as a map marker for a tea house, the black and white flags—again as map markers indicating battlefields, the ☔ and the ⚡, used as a lightning bolt or electricity but first used to warn of the dangers of high-voltage lines in the vicinity.