satellite news channel

Launching on this day in 1982 and several months prematurely due to its inspiration’s and competition’s debut of its spin-off channel Headline News (originally called CNN2) with a similar format to their planned approach to programming, the short-lived collaboration between the American Broadcasting Company and Group Westinghouse Satellite Communications, SNC, has a logo that looks like an generic, expository news channel from a movie if not completely out of a different timeline altogether.
It packaged world and national news reports in eighteen minute blocks allotting the rest of the newscast, repeating on the half-hour with alternating segments dedicated to weather, sports, business and entertainment, to regional and local reporting. Despite the network’s willingness to pay cable companies a fee to carry SNC—contrary to business practises at the time when cable companies passed the costs per channel onto prescribers—it failed to breakthough in US television markets—eventually conceding their transponder space to HLN as their intellectual, having adopted more of their programming rotation into their broadcast day, if not business heirs, and the venture folded after eighteen months of operation. Their theme music was briefly used by the Entertainment and Sport Programming Network, ESPN.

you’re gonna need a bigger boat

Appropriately as the world tries to restart the economy (which in its old form was irreparably doomed from the moment that this microscopic menace first began to spread) and return to a normal that we’ve been graced through it all with the chance of rejecting and eradicating and starting over as some new and more just, sustainable and equitable society and instead in many places chooses to ignore and disdain the experts in favour of return to the status quo, on this day in 1975, the motion picture Jaws went into general release. Mindful of the economic impact that closing the beaches will have for his town Amity (is a summer town—we need summer dollars), Mayor Vaughn decides to reopen despite the fact a marauding menace is still in the waters.

cher and cher-a-like

Unsure how this had escaped our awareness for so long but no matter has these twelve minutes have proven to be immensely fulfilling, we discover that Cher in a 1978 Emmy-nominated television broadcast in early April on the ABC network special performed a medley version of West Side Story where she played every part. In later acts, Cher shared the stage for this tribute with guests including Dolly Parton, Rod Stewart, the San Francisco punk band The Tubes and a walk-on appearance by Georgia Holt, the actress’ mother, with the penultimate number being a musical battle for the soul of Cher with the up-and-coming The Tubes trying to influence her career choices down a dark path.

kps 9566

Though only in use domestically, the DPRK (North) Standard Korean Graphic Character Set for Information Interchange, is ISO compliant and renderable across all platforms and is an efficient approach to translating the large repertoire of Hangul into a format for programming and transmittable all around the world.
While not all glyphs in the standard have Unicode equivalents (like the symbol of the Workers’ Party of Korea, the Hammer and Sickle and Brush, or personal cartouches for the country’s senior leadership) the standard is responsible for several indispensable emojis, like HOT BEVERAGE (☕) originally proposed as a map marker for a tea house, the black and white flags—again as map markers indicating battlefields, the ☔ and the ⚡, used as a lightning bolt or electricity but first used to warn of the dangers of high-voltage lines in the vicinity.

royal fanfare or call-and-response

Via Strange Company’s Weekly Link Dump, we learn that Queen Bees direct the hive through a series of tooting, honking and quacking that researchers were able to record, amplify and interpret. Like a flourish of trumpets, the toots herald her presence as she moves around the colony. The quacking comes from matured queens not yet released into society by the workers so as to prevent a power struggle and will continue to toot until the current monarch either abdicates or absconds in a swarm, splitting the hive.

third time’s the charm

Via Slashdot, we learn that Trump has again been censured, flagged by at least one hemisphere of social media (notwithstanding a political advertisement removed for what the campaign for his re-election as an emoji)  for amplifying propaganda that his voice could, for some, lend credence to.
After first being called out for promoting the idea that mail-in voting, ballots per post was essentially an invitation for fraud and would imperil the election as opposed to real voter disenfranchisement, then for inciting violence by unleashing police forces on peaceful protesters and channelling the spectre of racism that’s never left us with the charged phrase “when the looting starts, the shooting starts,” the latest missive from Trump—an actual racist todler—was labelled as manipulated media, showing video clip of a two babies edited to include a CNN-style chyron suggesting that the news outlet is either exaggerating the problem of systemic racism and social injustice in the US or that racist attitudes are something humans are born having. I’m not sure which message is more repulsive. Bombastically, the segment (which was apparently already in circulation prior to Trump’s re-tweeting) with the statement that “America is not the problem. Fake news is.”

razzle dazzle

Via JWZ, we’re directed to a doorway whose fresh paint job is inspired by the 1918 dazzle camouflage scheme (see also) of the HMS Argus—which looks absolutely brilliant and it makes me want to do the same, though it might throw one off balance when trying to enter. Many more examples of this aesthetic at the source up top.

privilegium clericale

Vis-à-vis our last article touching on religious invocation and the law, we are directed to an engrossing dissection of the legal question whence cometh the benefit of clergy, dating back to the jurisprudence of the Middle Ages when those outlaws affiliated (apparently the degree of tenuousness was a question) with the Church were outside of the secular jurisdiction of the king and were eligible to stand trial in ecclesiastical courts and could expect a more lenient sentence.
This carve-out (a similar, parallel system applied to universities) proved particularly vexing for Henry II and his former friend and trusted advisor Thomas Becket, Archbishop of Canterbury, who put up resistance to the notion that those whom the king characterised as “criminous clerks” should be made to stand trial in civil court. Backlash from Becket’s assassination caused Henry to reverse his stance and extending this benefit to anyone professing Holy Orders, no matter how minor—a precedent lasting until reforms of the late 1820s through in the meantime some capital crimes were deemed “unclergyable” offenses, leading to the misapprehension of the phrase as meaning without absolution administered by a priest. In order to establish some threshold, the courts established a litmus test, requiring defendants to appear before the court tonsured or in some sort of recognised ecclesiastical dress—later to be replaced by a literacy test by reading from a Latin Bible. As the Benefit of the Clergy further devolved into the realm of a legal fiction, the loophole broadened to include claiming affiliation through recitation of a Bible verse—the favoured one for memorisation being Psalm 51—Miserere mei, Deus, secundum misericordiam tuam, figuratively and literally saving one’s neck since condemned to hanging was the most common judgment in secular trials. Though spared from harsher sentences, the ability of the justice system to mete out punishment—even of a more commiserate nature, was severely eroded and new coping methods to maintain order beginning in the sixteenth century included banishment to North America and Australia.