blursday afternoon is never ending

Through the lens of Australian English, Jason Kottke directs towards an intriguing overview of portmanteaux and slang are accelerated by the powerful drivers of novelty paired with angst and anxiety.
A few neologisms that we found especially resonant were coronials, an alternative to Generation C and predicted baby boom resulting from confinement, “Blursday” originally applied to a hangover that one couldn’t shake but repurposed to describe the untethered sense of days passing into one another, sanny for hand-sanitiser, COVIDiot and so on. There’s some gallows humour but of course new coinage is a form of commiseration and a way of coping and finding hope.

and we can dress real neat from our heads to our feet

Reaching its apex on this day in the Canadian Singles Survey (these charts give me great joy) in 1983, Men Without Hats’ hit The Safety Dance was inspired after band leader Ivan Doroschuk was tossed out of a night club by bouncers for pogoing on the dance floor during the transition from the slow death of disco to new wave in the early 1980s, despite the efforts of some to read more meaning into the song, interpreting it as an appeal to practise safe sex or protest nuclear armament though those are noble take-aways. The music video, directed by Tim Pope was filmed in the village of West Kington in Wiltshire, features several superannuated styles of dancing including mummers and maying.

vittore e corona

Feasted on this day in parts of northern Italy, Austria and Bavaria, Saint Corona (or sometimes going by her Greek equivalent, Stephanie, στέφᾰνος—both denoting one who is crowned) is forever twain with Victor of Damascus, an early Christian martyr serving as a soldier in the province of Syria.
Before being ultimately beheaded for refusing to renounce his faith in 170 A.D. during the reign of Marcus Aurelius, the imprisoned Victor was brought provisions and encouraged to preserve despite the bodily tortures he was made to endure by a woman called Corona, identified according to different sources as either the sister of one his fellow enlisted men or Victor’s wife. The authorities decided to apprehend her as well—and according to her hagiography, and as depicted rather bizarrely on this turn of the century fruit sticker—the crest of the greengrocers’ guild of Vienna, was put to a rather gruesome death for comforting the imprisoned by being bound to opposing palms trunks and being torn asunder once released. Rather than being invoked in times of plague, Corona is the patron of gambling and the lottery and called upon for circumstances involving money or treasure.

erbario farmaceutico

Building on a history of reference, anecdote and experimentation already established for millennia at the time of publication of this fifteenth century volume from the Veneto, we appreciated the prompt to learning more behind this category of guidebook known as the herbal (Herbarius, Erbario).
Pairing images that aid in identification with others that represented supposed pharmacological merit—as well as toxic, tonic, culinary and magical properties, extensive accompanying texts and captions inform modern ideas (but certainly do not supplant them—a feature of such collections is that they advance and improve tempered by science and scholarship but are always good to peruse for perspective and perhaps insight) of taxonomy, chemistry and medicine. Much more from Public Domain Review at the link above.

unmasked assailants

In a tragically recurring, typically, predictably American phenomenon (conversely these past two months marked the first time in decades that there has not been a major school shooting being that the schools are closed), involving shoppers not abiding by emergency hygiene standards enforced to keep us all safe violently attacked the store employee who gently admonished them, we are reminded of the light, careful tread of the exonerative tense that news outlets, to shield themselves from legal liabilities often are trained to repair to.
This indirect tone is not the needed foil for the passive apology of public figures—mistakes were made—does not speak to the principles of being unbiased or non-prejudicial but rather—instead of holding people, in whatever capacity to account for their bad behaviour, gives reporting the swaggering, deputised tenor of police-procedurals and victim-blaming.

hr 6819

Building on their previous discoveries the European Southern Observatory (ESO) based in Chile has found a so called quiet black hole relatively quite nearby in a star system visible to the unaided eye, located somewhat ironically in the minor constellation of the southern celestial hemisphere called Telescopium.
One of the fourteen of the eighty-eight star formations credited to the astronomer and geographer Abbé Nicolas-Louis de la Caille (*1713 – †1762) who catalogued over ten thousand stars, Telescopium like many of the newly mapped groupings was named after contemporary tools and implements: a clock, a microscope, a chisel, navigation devices, etc. A thousand light years distant, the black hole is dark companion to a binary star system (QV Telescopii), its presence betrayed by its gravitational distortion of the orbiting pair, giving researchers the clues and tools to find more cryptic black holes in the neighbourhood. Learn more at the Universe Today at the link above.

unnamed

Synonymous with anonymous and from the Greek ἀδέσποτος—that is, without a master or owner, adespota is used in classical scholarship as a collective term to cover writings that were not attributed to any particular author, especially epigrams taken from plaques and monuments whose provenance and history was lost when they were anthologised.
The related German borrowing for use primarily in the context of art history rather than written work is Notname—not a not-name a bit confusingly like a Notausgang on an exterior door isn’t No Exit but rather Emergency Exit—is a contingency or convenience name given to the portfolio of an artist or their school whose true identity is unknown—such as the Master of the Embroidered Foliage or the Berliner Maler.

flash jump!

Via Boing Boing, we are treated to an unreleased promotional video that was to be put out by Queen to herald their soundtrack to the cinematic, operatic adaptation of the Flash Gordon comics. The rock band having also furnished the score for Highlander in theatres and television and provided the soundtrack in its entirety including incidental music and character motifs, only singing for two tracks but letting movie dialogue be the libretto of other songs of the album.