a shining city on a hill

First spotted on Kottke’s Quick Links here is an excerpt from a short post-election observation from McSweeney’s contributor Andrew Singleton that is wholly spot-on. 

How can a nation capable of turning the simple act of revealing the gender of your child into a wildfire that burns down an entire state be so insistent on screwing things up? How could a country, one that birthed the timeless love story of 30 brown-haired white guys named Chad competing in an elimination contest for the chance to marry a woman, lack the emotional depth required to make the right decision for the future of all of us? How could a people that had to be explicitly told not to eat Tide Pods be so short-sighted? Or are some things simply beyond explanation? 

Do check out the piece in its entirety at the link above.  

the rembrandts

Previously we’ve looked at the expository nature of television theme songs and through the ballad of Gilligan’s Island but we were unfamiliar with some of these other tunes’ evolution and origin story until being referred by Miss Cellania’s Links.

Though one can detect the echo and cadence when one knows to listen for it, we didn’t realise that R.E.M.’s It’s the End of the World as We Know it (And I Feel Fine) was the placeholder opener for the pilot and the jangle pop rendition of I’ll Be There for You has the same librettist Michael Skloff who contributed to Earth, Wind & Fire’s September. More stories at the links above.

poll position

Via Everlasting Blört, we are directed to a gallery of outstanding photographs from the US elections as captured by the Reuters wire services, like this one of Little Ti Ti accompanying their human to the polling station to cast his ballot in Louisville, Kentucky. More interesting and arresting images to explore at the links above.

adventures in music

The award-winning sequel to Walt Disney’s first three-dimensional animated Technicolor romp in rhythm and melody (receiving the Oscar for Best Short Subject)—initially intended to span an entire series but ended here, Toot, Whistle, Plunk and Boom premiered on this day in 1953. The characters reprised as part of a compromise with RKO Radio Pictures—Disney’s distributor—in response to their desire to enter into the nature documentary business that the studio strongly opposed wanting Disney to focus on cartoons, Professor Owl returns to his schoolhouse full of bird pupils to present a lesson on the different sections of the orchestra and how respectively the brass, woodwind, strings and percussion work together.

ultima thule

Via Strange Company, we learn that on this in 1848, Edgar Allen Poe sat for a daguerreotype portrait with the vernacular caption above in a studio in Providence in the state of Rhode Island. From the Latin designation for the extreme limits of exploration and travel, the term comes from Poe’s poem Dream-Land: 

I have reached these lands but newly 

From an ultimate dim Thule— 

From a wild, weird clime that lieth, sublime 

Out of Space—out of Time 

This title was coined by spiritualist and romantic interest of Poe, Sarah Helen Whitman, whom had met three years prior through shared interests.

boy those germans have a word for everything

Having grown accustomed to the point of reliance on the term Schadenfreude, it was refreshing to learn that there is a perfectly cromulent English synonym, epicaricacy, that conveys the same sense of deriving pleasure from the misfortune of others. From the Greek From Ancient Greek ἐπιχαιρεκακία for “joy upon evil” (see previously), it is rarely found in print (other than in mentions of words to be adopted and rehabilitated) with one of the more recent citations being in C.S. Lewis’ 1933 Pilgrim’s Regress as a personified character, an eponymous gloating and sadistic woman.

bnt162b2

Though preliminary reports are from a company press release and have not been independently verified, news that the COVID-19 candidate vaccine being developed and trialled by a partnership between the Mainz-based BioNTech and the US drug concern Pfizer vaccine exceeds effectiveness targets by a sizable margin (on par with the best childhood inoculations against measles) and suggests that protection is enduring is significant and hopeful. No serious safety concerns or side-effects were observed and the companies are already under contract to deliver tens of millions of doses.