primidi vendémiaire

Coinciding with the autumnal equinox for the Northern Hemisphere of that year and derived from the Occitan term for grape harvester, this date in 1792 on the French Revolutionary Calendar (see previously) marked the first day and décade of the new system of time-keeping for the Republic—the month corresponded with the season of the vintage of northern France’s wine producing areas. In following years, the new year was proceeded by five or six epagomenical days (jours épagomènes) called the Sansculottides, ending the summer quarter and aligning the calendar with the tropical year and named for the partisans “without knee-breeches” that underpinned the uprising and overthrow of the Ancien Régime.

rip rbg

Incredibly, following a private service in the Great Hall and after lying in repose at the US Supreme Court building’s portico Thursday, Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg will be the first woman to lie in state at the Capitol rotunda.

Rosa Parks was accorded a similar honour when she passed away in 2005, but because she was not a public official, was said to be resting. Thirty-four men have been granted a viewing in the halls of Congress. Since the president’s 1865 assassination, all those who have lain in state have been presented on the Lincoln catafalque, a funeral bier originally constructed for the funeral services for George Washington but like the cenotaph two storeys below the Capitol known as Washington’s Tomb (unoccupied and where the caisson was customarily stored when not in use), was not implemented at the time. With the high holy day of Yom Kippur beginning at sunset on Sunday, Ginsburg won’t be lain to rest at Arlington National Cemetery until next Tuesday.

ok looter

Via Pluralistic, we are familiarised with the latest development in a series of leaks over the past few years since the Great Recession that have served to expose the endemic financial crime and money laundering and through such accommodation and facilitation have negated efforts to stop bad actors through sanction and freezing accounts.

Warnings issued and ignored from the international banking system’s own internal watch-dog mechanism for flagging suspicious behaviour, FinCEN (the US Financial Crimes Enforcement Network) and counterparts, were routinely ignored, thus depriving and de-fanging governments from efforts at enforcement and combatting fraud. Oligarchs, mobsters and criminal cartels are the beneficiaries from such lax oversight.

disrupted chess

Via the always excellent Nag on the Lake, we are introduced to the range of multi-sensory board games—fluxchess sets—conceived and crafted by studio artist (see previously) Takako Saito to question the primacy of vision to play and in the artistic aesthetic in general by tethering experience to higher planes through the richness of perception and incorporating all the senses.

In addition to the pictured version where players have to ascertain each phial-piece’s rank and range of motion by sampling the liquor it contains, there is also spice chess with the chessmen identical and distinguished into one of the six by its scent and more tactile and acoustic games. Much more to explore at the source link up top.

empire shops

Though the above euphemism for a colonial goods store (ultramarinos, comptoir des colonies, coloniali), a nineteenth century speciality retailer that sold non-perishable items like coffee, tea, spices, tobacco, etc. as opposed to butchers, bakers and green-grocers, has fortunately fallen out of common-parlance, retained through the 1970s when most former colonies were achieving independence, it is still present, fossilised in some unexpected places, like in the name of our local chain supermarket, an affiliate of the large co-op Edeka, founded in 1898 as E.d.K.—that is, Einkaufsgenossenschaft der Kolonialwarenhändler im Halleschen Torbezirk zu Berlin (Purchasing Cooperative for the Traders of Colonial Wares of the Halle Gate District of Berlin), phonetically abbreviated (see also) out of necessity.

there and back again

First published on this day in 1937, English author and academic John Ronald Reuel Tolkein’s (*1898 – †1973) premier work of high fantasy, The Hobbit (previously), was received with critical success and an avid readership with an appetite for more, retroactively finding a niche in the mythopoetic legendarium which Tolkien had been developing privately for decades, realised in his follow-on work The Lord of the Rings. Aside from his keen interest in Norse philology and folklore, Tolkien’s prose is influenced by designer, poet and activist for social justice William Morris and his correspondents C.S. Lewis and W.H. Auden, the latter recollecting the author’s moment of inspiration while grading papers, jotting down: “In a hole in the ground there lived a hobbit.”

order uśmiechu

Distinguished from other knighthood and foreign honours, the Order of the Smile is conferred on recipients after being nominated and voted on by children in recognition of their love, care and aid.  Bestowed biannually from Świdnica outside of Warsaw since 1968, laureates—knights and dames, though the right to use the title is restricted to only those decorated with an official ceremony at one of the organisation’s chapters—include Astrid Lindgren—author of Pippi Longstocking, Saudi pediatrician Abdullah bin Abdulaziz Al Rabeeah, the Fourteenth Dalai Lama, Steve Spielberg, German singer Peter Maffay, Pope Francis, Nelson Mandela, Peter Ustinov, Oprah Winfrey, Mother Teresa and Tove Jansson, creator of the Moomins.