15 x 15

Delightfully, some eight decades after it was first prototyped and trialled in the basement of a Methodist church in the neighbourhood of Queens, the board game Scrabble, still enduring and having gone multi-lingual, has earned a semi-official historic marker in the form of this street sign.
In 1938, out of work architect Alfred Mosher Butts (*1899 – †1993) came up with the concept of play and conducted a frequency analysis on letters, assigning values to the tiles. The street sign may not be a high-scoring hand and was originally probably an homage of an enthusiastic Scrabble club but the city’s department of public works have dutifully replaced the modified marker when it was inevitably pilfered.

𝄐

Interred with honours in the Composers’ Corner of Moscow’s Novodevichy Cemetery close to Dmitri Shostakovich who influenced much of his works, German-Soviet symphony writer Alfred Garrievich Schnittke (*1934 – †1998) chose for his gravestone the musical notation fermata—the pause or hold sign, indicating an enduring and profound (fortissimo) rest. Here’s the energetic overture from his Gogol Suite as a sample of his music.

dia da saudade

The subject of many songs—like the blues—and yet whose exact definition is elusive with English lacking an equivalent, today in Brazil (plus for the wider Portuguese-speaking diaspora) is the official celebration of the emotional state known as saudade. More than homesickness or nostalgia and not wholly melancholy, this frame of mind recalls the longing and yearning for something absent mixed with the consolation of the memory that lingers and its non-transferable nature. To add to the intrigue of untranslatable sentiments, we could not find anything to point to why this commemoration is assigned to this particular day of the calendar, so if any of our Brazilian readers know, we would appreciate being informed. 

7x7

sp!n doctor: this is indeed a clever top

take a number: considering queueing theory and misconceptions about waiting one’s turn

bismillah: an homage to “Bohemian Rhapsody” (previously here and here) in dank meme form—stick with it at least until after the first Brian May guitar solo

like some cat from japan: archivists uncover hitherto unknown footage of David Bowie’s first televised appearance as Ziggy Stardust

oppositional research: a desperate Facebook deputises young people as data-dragnets—updated

cornucopia: artist Uli Westphal artfully arranges produce to highlight agricultural diversity

hanziverse: an interactive exploration of Chinese characters, via Maps Mania  

get back to where you once belonged

On this day in 1969, the Beatles staged one last, impromptu concert together from the Savile Row headquarters of the band’s Apple Corps headquarters. Though unannounced and very much to the surprise of all within earshot and beyond, the event was not a spontaneous—the planning at the set-up taking place over the previous few days. Accompanied by Billy Preston on keyboards, the group played nine takes of five songs, including the title one three times, which was to be their last public statement together before disbanding. John Lennon bowed out with, “I hope we’ve passed the audition.”

claroscuro

We appreciated Colossal’s introduction to Spanish artist and photographer Javier Riera through his series of luminous projections on trees and branches to tease out depth and perspective though his geometrical highlights. Nature tends not to admit hard edges but it’s sometimes that imposition that brings out the organic, like with these chequerboard forests that the project reminded us of. Learn more and see a whole gallery of Riera’s pictures and installations at the links up top.

they know, daniel

Via the always excellent Miss Cellania, we discover that former Trump associate Roger Stone’s recently retained attorney, Robert C Buschel Esq., wrote a political thriller back in August of 2016.
A member of the twitterati has helpfully “live-tweeted” it complete with memetic footnotes and annotations that enhance the special prescience of the work. One does not necessarily need the insight or confirmation of how these people think—the unreadable “By Silent Majority” is predictably problematic even by pre-Trump standards, but it is nonetheless beneficial to know what one is dealing with, replete with self-recrimination.

briar rose

On this day in 1959, Walt Disney’s adaptation of the fairy tale “Sleeping Beauty” (previously) went into theatrical release.
Despite the grandeur of the storytelling, wonderful villainy and Academy Award-nominated score, critical reception was mixed and tepid at best, accused of being too much like Snow White. This reaction prompted the studio to abandon the folklore genre altogether, not to again revisit princesses and magic (the reserve of anthropomorphic rodents and canines, arguably with the exception of the other commercial failure of 1985’s The Black Cauldron, loosely based on a Welsh myth that nearly bankrupted the company) for three decades until the 1989 release of The Little Mermaid.