9x9

the incalculable loss: New York Times again dedicates its pages to giving voice to overlooked obituaries

ruputer: Seiko’s 1998 smart watch proves the adage plus ça change, plus c'est la même chose (see also)

air bridges and air gaps: COVID-19 curtails international travel

invisible woman: incredible, augmented reality fashion show—via Things Magazine

privatising profits, socialising losses: the grifting companies receiving and retaining millions from economic recovery stimulus programmes in the US—via JWZ

metadata and memory hole: the internet’s repository is under assault

peaceful transition of power: the nightmare scenario if Trump refuses to leave office—via Cynical-C

chaotic good: DJ Cummerbund presents Weird Betty—nearly as good as Play that Funky Rammstein

and may those who lament their loss find better heroes: Egyptologist usefully share instructions on how to topple monumental structures

three-fourths of the several states

Inscribed as the nineteenth amendment to the US constitution nearly a half century before once it passed the federal legislature and the requisite threshold of state legislatures and having gone into effect nationwide, Louisiana, one of the three holdouts, held a vote, symbolic but meaningful nonetheless and having previously come out against it 1 July 1920, to affirm the extension of suffrage and enfranchisement to women (see previously here and here). North Carolina followed suit in May 1971, and Mississippi finally ratified the amendment in March 1984.

vox in rama

First dispatched to Emperor Friedrich II and his son King Heinrich of Germany on this day in 1233, with many other furnished courtesy-copies later, the papal decretal, A Voice in Ramah (a village in Palestine with several Biblical citations), issued by Gregory IX established an inquisition commission to combat heresy and Gnosticism (which the Church defined as devil worship), eventually precipitating the Bosnian Crusade.
The letters patent which carried the legal force of a bull, a public decree, included detailed descriptions of initiation rites and the satanic familiars enlisted to do their dark master’s bidding and increase the numbers of the congregation—specifically shape-shifting toads and black cats. Not only did the directive sew distrust among neighbours and led to violence and plunder, the zealous prejudice against felines is strongly believed to be amongst the chief driving forces of the spread of the plague throughout Europe, with no cats to keep the rodent population under control, the fleas they bore were more readily able to infect human populations.

you cannot protest here nor there—you cannot protest anywhere

Within the space of just a few weeks homages, sloganising of Dr Seuss have pivoted from combating the novel health crisis whose notoriety laid bare a lot of broken and inequitable things about society to raging against an age old spectre and uncivil companion (via Miss Cellania) that was in part revealed by the former rift in preparedness and response but only pointed to a reckoning long overdue and far more systemic than marshalling resources against an organisation created solely to prop up and perpetuate the status quo. I am sure you could come up with a few couplets in the same style.

look for the helpers—you will always find people who are helping

Our peripatetic ally Messy Nessy Chic brings us a nice vignette remembering Patrol Officer François Scarborough Clemmons, who was a part of Mister Roger’s Neighborhood for over a quarter of a century, becoming one of the first reoccurring African-American characters on US television.
The two were acquaintances from church (a choir member who would go on to become a Grammy-winning singer) and the show’s creator approached him in 1968 about having a role as a policeman, which Clemmons initially rejected because of his bad experiences with cops growing up but eventually embraced the idea.  Fred Rogers, in a 1969 episode, had invited Clemmons to cool his feet and take a break from his regular beat and the two reprised the scene for their last appearance together in 1993.

možnosti dialogu

Courtesy of Weird Universe, we are introduced to the portfolio of retired Czech filmmaker Jan Švankmajer through his surreal 1982 stop-motion Dimensions of Dialogue.
Lauded by those who claim Švankmajer as their influence and inspiration including Monty Python’s Terry Gilliam, the award-winning short features first ornately articulated Arcimboldo-like visages that engage in eternal conversation, hybridising and then wearing down the ornamentation and reducing one another to constituencies of efficiency and economy. The second and final segments explore other avenues of interlocution and have equally consumptive, bluntingly transformative outcomes. Other works include re-animating lost and everyday objects to tell stories from Edgar Allen Poe, Lewis Carroll and others.

nachteil

The potential move to reduce US troop presence stationed in Germany by ten thousand by September is rooted in pettiness and really speaks to how far the relationship of the NATO alliance has degraded, especially in comparison to the last draw-down (of comparable reduction-in-force and rebasing which saw the closure of Heidelberg and several other posts but was done with coordination and planning that took nearly a decade to execute.   Reducing their footprint to a toehold is one thing and is a slight to an ally and does not foster a sense of partnership, and perhaps most significantly, the plan includes a cap that limits the number of servicemembers to twenty-five thousand and would severely curtail future large-scale exercises.

logline

Via Super Punch, we discover an archivist has collected and is in the process of curating choice samples of around one thousand unproduced properties acquired by a major film studio, yet for reasons have gone unproduced, dating from the fifteen-year period from 1983 to 1997, a broad span of time to condemn cinematically but we are—possibly just by being confronted with some of these elevator pitches—having difficulty summoning up any actual or good movies from that time at the moment.
Projects are neatly indexed with a card catalogue, a logline being an industry term for a brief synopsis with the plot, stakes and audience hook. Which ones of these spec scripts would you like to see made? We were intrigued by Airport Summer, a 1986 high-concept comedy about a high school graduate who has to work at an airport in order to earn tuition money to pursue his degree in aeronautical engineering.