sede vacante

With already burgeoning anti-Catholic sentiment channeled and thrust to the next level with the assassination of Abraham Lincoln whose conspirators included Mary Elizabeth Surratt, a practising Catholic and hung by the neck until dead, and her son John Harrison Surratt—fugitive from justice who fled to Europe and briefly served as a Pontifical Zouave (the Papal States’ infantry—pictured in uniform) before being recognised and extradited back to the US, on this day in 1867, America suspended consular relations with the Holy See—diplomacy not to be restored until 1984. In the interim, special envoys and emissaries were appointed to negotiate deals and coordinate participation on specific political and humanitarian issues. Kindred sympathies between Ronald Reagan and Pope John Paul II both over their shared crusade against Communism and a bond formed after each survived assassination attempts in 1981.

hachimoji

From the Japanese 八文字 for eight letters, researchers at Harvard are reported to have successful synthesised a DNA analogue that incorporates additional four artificial base-pairs to complement the four natural ones that assumes the familiar double-helix structure. For moment, this potential expanded genetic repertoire could not escape the laboratory as it requires constant chemical nourishment that does not occur in natural biology but the potential is there for some incredible applications—including the search for extra-terrestrial life, pathology, enhanced data storage and nano-scale engineering.

idle, torrent

We are quite enjoying these soothing amorphous abstractions, courtesy of Colossal, as they grow and disperse across the screen from artist Alex Moy. The dripping transformations and ink-traps made us think of that psychedelic Sesame Street interstitial animated piece with the Yo-Yo Man and the Lost Kid. “Try to remember everything I passed but when I go back, make the first thing the last.” More to explore at the links above.

falsche flagge

Having become a metonym for actions facilitated or at least capitalised upon by authorities to forward their own interests and selectively deny elements of the opposition—or mere scapegoats (Caper emissarius)—their civil rights, the Reichstag Fire occurred this night in 1933.  Though later investigations and court proceedings suggest that the act was that of a lone arsonist (though pyromaniacal tendencies were never established), Nazi leadership—including the newly named Chancellor Adolf Hitler with just a week to go before a decisive vote that would eventually grant the party and executive plenary powers—that there was a vast conspiracy of Communists working to keep Germany down.
Firefighters extinguished the blaze by 23:30 but the complex was gutted and heavily damaged. Immediate consequences were cemented the very next day, when at the request of Hitler and Hermann Göring, President Paul von Hindenburg signed an incendiary decree into law that suspended the right to appeal unreasonable detention, freedom of the press, public-assembly and the expectation to privacy over the telephone or in the mail. These strictures were in place throughout the Dritte Reich. Parliamentary sessions were held in the Kroll Opera (accounting for the theatrics and stage-craft) adjacent to the ruins of the Reichstag building.

this is … npr

Among many other grand and tragic moments that share this anniversary, our faithful chronicler Dr Caligari informs, that on this day in 1970 , by an act of the US Congress—following the passage of the 1967 Public Broadcasting Act, which also provided for a Public Broadcasting Service to cover the TV airwaves too—the National Public Radio network was established, the mandate signed into law by Lyndon Baines Johnson.

payload

In addition to its cargo of satellites, SpaceX’s latest and literal Moon Shot had in its manifest a back-up copy of human civilisation, a thirty-million page anthology of history, literature and genetic code stored in a format meant to be prone to obsolescence.
This lunar library—part of a larger initiative to preserve a record of humanity flung around the Cosmos and lasting a billion of years, irrespective of what transpires on Earth, since other hedging for doomsday seems already under threat—we seriously have to do better. A privately funded landing module (Beresheet, which means “In the beginning” in Hebrew) will ferry this curated disk and primer on the human condition to the surface of the Moon in mid-April.

muster and moquette

CityLab made a quite wonderful and inspired appeal with their international, publically-jured round-up of mass-transit upholstery (previously here and here) sourced from trains, busses and metro-lines in service all over the world.

A few that I’m acquainted with can be reviewed here and I can completely relate to the feeling of pride and affection that passengers develop for these dreadfully excellent and challenging creations in textile that need not only to be practicable and identifiable (like this specimen of priority-seating for ScotRail) but have to also remain fresh, colourfast and rebuff graffiti for quite some time. Do share the distinctive seat-covers from your local public transport—and support them with your ridership and patronage. Much more to explore at the link above.

reverse look-up

In much the same way as a neural network can conjure people into existence before wishing them to the cornfield, we find a rather mysterious Swiss registered website—via LitHub—that seemingly authors short bits of stream-of-conscious fiction in the comments section of a Whois domain ownership query.
A refresh yields a different story with a different cast of characters and trajectory and only the holding company (a safe and infamous target in a former affiliate of bounty-hunting collections agency that was scandalous dissolved in 2011) remains the same. What do you make of this? Beyond the writing prompts offered up out of random noise—assuming that there is not some deeper feedback experiment going on here—we are all eager and programmed to tease pattern and intention out chaos and disruption, jolting something out of a background of near non sequitir, much like the reaching reassurance of a horoscope or fortune-teller.