theatre-in-the-round

Sponsored by the League of Women Voters, the 1976 US presidential campaign for the first time saw more than one televised debate among the contenders and challenger Georgia governor Jimmy Carter and incumbent Gerald Ford (the first president not having been elected to office, having replaced Richard Nixon’s vice-president Spiro Agnew when he resigned and then Nixon himself as president when Nixon resigned in lieu of impeachment, pardoning his old boss afterwards) agreed to a series of three debates: one on domestic policy, one on foreign policy and one on the audience’s choice of topics.
After a fairly good showing when speaking on home issues, Ford stumbled and never recovered on geopolitics during the second debate, held on this day, 6 October 1976, announcing that “There is no Soviet domination of Eastern Europe,” adding that there never will be under a Ford administration. The vacillating pander of Trump’s relentless stumping and preening with the refrain “there was no Russian collusion” and “collusion is not a crime” has a strange echo of Ford’s words—perhaps too not so innocently offered.

i don’t care—do you?

As a gesture of goodwill after her husband vulgarly disparaged the continent as an undesirable source for immigration, former fashion model Melania Trump seemed to once again forget about the power of optics, donning jodhpurs and a pith helmet for her (thankfully) photographic safari at a nature reserve in Kenya.
Who has such things in their wardrobe? The nineteenth century headgear has been all but abandoned for more sensible cover, owning to the fact that most visitors do not want to project antiquated colonial attitudes and willingness to bear the burden of leading the world toward civilisation.

sans forgetica

Via Slashdot, we are introduced to a typeface developed and distributed at no cost (also compatible as a web font for some browsers) by the Royal Melbourne Institute of Technology Behavioural Business Laboratory to help boost retention by presenting text in a finely-tuned balance between legibility and obstruction—capitalising on a principle called “desirable difficulty”—in order to make passages more memorable.
Designed in consultation with a team psychologists and typographers, the founders hope it is precisely disruptive enough to make readers pause and take note but not so irascible as to repair to easier viewing, something especially useful for students cramming for exams or representatives saddled with tomes of last minute legislation to review before voting on it essentially sight unseen. The sans of course like Sas Serif signifies “without” like those flared ending and corners on letter strokes. See a font sampler and download Sans Forgetica at the links above.

john o’groats

Via the always interesting Things Magazine, we learn that the Islands Bill, passed by the Scottish Parliament back in May of this year, has recently come into force and includes a provision championed by Member Tavis Scott that prohibits the Shetlands to be depicted alongside the mainland’s coast in inset boxes, a geographical fiction quite irksome to the widely scattered archipelago’s residents, and demand that cartographers portray the islands accurately, empty space and all. The Ordinance Survey agreed with opponents who called the change impractical and warned it would reduce the level of detail that could be attained in all maps by changing the scale.

great railway journeys

Via Dark Roasted Blend’s weekly Link Latte, we find ourselves directed to the beautifully curated collection of vintage and antique European rail travel posters from Armand Massonet. Categorised and with a bit of provenance that allows one to date the ephemera and learn more, there’s a wealth of resources to discover. We especially liked the section dedicated to overnight expresses and sleeper cars (a less common luxury nowadays)—including automobile hauling service. The pictorial train map section, like this Bildkarte of Austria, is also definitely worth browsing through.

bavaria one: mission zukunft

Not to be outdone by Donald Trump’s desire to create his own strategic Space Force, our own slightly milder embarrassment of a minister president Marcus Söder (previously) is pressing for the German state of Bavaria to marshal its already significant contributions to the national German space programme and ESA into its own aeronautics agency.
I do not know exactly what to make of Herr Söder using his own face as the logo and perhaps is meant to either be a foil or a rival for narcissistic heights.  As with Trump’s directive, there was a notable paucity on how resources might be allocated under this already (mostly) future-oriented administration.

cпутник-1

Spanning from 1 July 1957 to 31 December 1958, the International Year Geophysical Year was a global science project called to thaw some of the frostiest periods of the Cold War that severely curtailed information exchange between the East and West and presented a grave threat to facing problems that affected the planet, no matter what one’s political leanings were.
Among the accomplishments of the scientific venture was the Antarctic Treaty, preserving the continent for peaceful and cooperative research and international data clearing houses where all researchers could freely share meteorological and seismological reports and promote its ongoing collection. The IGY also sparked some competition that could be characterised as more serious than merely friendly with both the Soviet Union and the US pledging to construct artificial satellites and beginning the Space Race. Originally designated as Object D, the satellite was to carry an array of scientific instruments to measure cosmic radiation and solar winds—which were eventually launched as Sputnik-3, but due to the complexity and anxiety that the Americans might indeed be the first to launch, researchers simplified the scope of the mission to radio transmission.
On 4 October 1957, the rocket carrying Sputnik-1 launched from the Tyuratam range in the Kazakh Soviet Socialist Republic (presently the Baikonur Cosmodrome) and orbited the Earth once every ninety-six minutes for three weeks, its highly polished surface visible to keen observers and continually broadcasting a “beep-beep-beep” that could be intercepted by any amateur radio operator when it came in range. After its batteries ran out in those first weeks, it remained aloft for another two months before burning up on re-entry to the Earth’s atmosphere, having completed fourteen hundred-forty circuits around the Earth and travelling a distance of over seventy million kilometres. The Americans eventually launched the Explorer I satellite on 31 January 1958 but not before the USSR launched Sputnik-2 just under a month after the start of their first mission, this time with a living passenger.

inching towards october

Taking a cue from a challenge that artist John Vernon Lord set for himself in 2016 to create a miniature illustration every day of the calendar year that fit in a little, standard square, we’re doing the same for this month—maybe longer. Just for fun, but it’s also a good daily practise to keep up with other things—like keeping one’s diary and other routines and resolutions—that we tend to let slip away. Here are our first four. How would you finish out the week?