commerce is our goal here at tyrrel—more human than human is our motto

On this day, as our faithful chronicler reports, among many other events of great pith and moment, and sharing the box office with John Carpenter’s remake of The Thing, Ridley Scott’s film opened in 1982.
Starring Sean Young, Edward James Olmos, Harrison Ford and Rutger Hauer with music by Vangelis, the initially polarising and underperforming film defined the genre of neo-noir and is loosely based on the Philip K. Dick novel, Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?—the name for the bounty-hunters coming from a William S. Burrough’s story about a dystopian future (set in 2009) reliant on an underground network of healthcare.

the awokening

Via Super Punch, we learn that the tiniest American state with the formerly rather outsized and outdated long-form name with the current and hopefully enduring public appetite for social justice and reform finally propelling a decades’ long debate to drop the onerous and hurtful postscript with the announcement from the governor that Rhode Island and Providence Plantations would no longer be using the latter part in official documents, correspondence or on state symbols.
The point of contention that opponents to the change cited in the past—that plantation was a contemporary term for colony when founded was finally mooted, recognising that the word has horrific connotations in the long and tragic history and the fact that after the American Revolution, Rhode Island choose to be incorporated into the Union with the word already having taken on that meaning despite the original context. Since no one really knows what Rhode Island refers to either—possibly a passing similarity to Rhodos (although the territory is a peninsula and part of the mainland) or due to ruddy fall foliage, they should go for a wholly new and fabulous identity. Legislation to change the state’s name officially will be taken up by the its House of Representatives for a vote in July.

gentilic

A demonym—or the above Latin form—is the word that gives the name that residents of a particular country, city or town use to describe themselves and their affiliation.
Denizens (gentile) of the north-eastern French town on the Moselle Épinal are known as Spinaliens. That’s pretty awesome and French naming-conventions are reliably uniting—the glottonyme Allemands being for example Berlinois, Bonnois or Hanovriem (see also endonyms and exonyms). Less straightforward but delightful formations occur in the British isles—including Glaswegian, Man of Kent, Loiner (from Leeds), Liverpudlian, Mancunian, Novocastrian or Paludian (from Slough).

highways and horizons

For its forward-looking pavilion (see also) known as Futurama for New York’s 1939 World’s Fair, General Motors commissioned theatrical and industrial designer Norman Bel Geddes, whom realising that means and aspirations of the middle-class were becoming commiserate with what the automotive industry could supply—this particular intersection commemorated with the interstate network of roadways and a unique flagship model in the Pontiac Ghost Car with a Plexiglas chassis, laying bear—at a glance—the hidden, in-built value—as stated in a press release. Afterward it was acquired by the Smithsonian and on display until the public found it tedious and antiquated rather than visionary, and which point it was deaccessioned and passed around various dealers as a promotional vehicle.

status non gratis

As cases of COVID-19 again surge in the US after the rush to reopen, the European Union mulls adding America to its no-fly list—along with Brazil and Russia, all countries which have not only spectacularly failed in containing the pandemic within their borders, have through their neglect and mismanagement been net exporters of virus and its deleterious effects.
According to twenty-seven-member block’s epidemiological threshold for designating a country safe zone, all three still exhibit dangerous levels of new infections which threaten to overwhelm the healthcare infrastructure should more be imported. In mid-March, the Trump administration imposed a foreshadowingly reciprocal travel ban (since lifted) covering all of Europe, excepting the UK and Ireland, though that carve-out might get Britain similarly blocked. Talks are ongoing but failure to reach consensus could result in more internal border controls and restrictions on regional travel.

the battle of bamber bridge

On this evening in 1943, there was a mutiny among the ranks of segregated US service members stationed in the eponymous Lancashire village, provoked by racist attitudes and the lingering tension of reports of the distant Detroit riots (see also) sparked in part by mobilising the military and ramping up the manufacture of materiel. The village hosted a sustainment regiment of trucking and logistics engineering, a unit of the quartermaster corps, that was compromised exclusively of Black soldiers in one part of the village and another military police detachment in another, whom were white.
Accounts of hospitality and accommodation vary slightly but according to most sources, the villagers were welcoming and supportive of their quartermaster unit—and in any case, treated immensely better abroad than at home—and when American commanders insisted that a separate bar be established, all three publicans, landlords posted “Black Troops Only” signs. Tensions rose at Ye Old Hob Inn during a confrontation between an MP patrol and a private accused of being improperly dressed during leisure hours and at the pub without a pass. The brawl turned violent when the armed MPs turned their machine guns on the others, whom were forced to raid their unit’s armoury in self-defence. Locals defended the GIs at the pub, siding with them as being attacked unprovoked. Once the melee had ended by the next afternoon, one was dead and seven were injured, with court martial proceedings taken up immediately. Though the mutiny was censored from the press and not disclosed until decades later, institutional reforms were almost immediate, with commands restructured and racist officers removed from leadership positions, and while still segregated generally for years longer, morale for Black soldiers stationed in Europe markedly improved and MP patrols were integrated and required to have a diverse makeup.

pienone

As a prelude to the opera house’s 2020/2021season, earlier this week the quartet on stage of Barcelona’s El Gran Teatre del Liceu played to a full house (pienone, casa llena), ever seat filled symbolically with over two thousand house plants as the kingdom ravaged by the coronavirus enacts its measured plans for reopening. Non-vegetal fans were able to tune in remotely via live-stream and the plants donated by local florists and garden centres will be presented as gifts to front-line workers. This is lovely.
The players’s selection of song was a fitting elegy, a threnody called Crisantemi that renowned composer Puccini created for his friend Amadeo (*1845 – †1890) upon his sudden and premature death. Duke of Aosta, Amadeo was elected as king of Spain during that land’s interregnum, but frustrated by politics and intrigues two years into his reign, He declared the people of Spain to be ungovernable, abdicated and returned to Italy for a quieter life. Spain was a republic for a brief period afterwards. His son via his second marriage, Umberto, Count of Salemi, died during the 1918 Influenza Pandemic.

an itch to scratch

An ancient and obscure word from the Greek κνῆστις for spinal column (and colourfully for a cheese-grater), the word saw a revival around a decade ago when rediscovered by a linguist who read the Oxford English Dictionary (see previously) cover-to-cover and echoed by many contemporary authors as a nominee for the favourite words, acnestis refers to the part of an animal’s hide that it cannot reach itself to relieve an itch—and by extension a blindspot or an Achilles’ Heel.
In a fashion similar to its more recent rediscovery and celebration, the word first appeared in print in the late eighteenth century in a compilation by a medical lexicographer: Acneſtis — that part of the ſpine of the back, which reaches from the metaphrenon (an obsolete term for the dorsal side of the body), which is betwixt the ſhoulder blades, to the loins...this part ſeems to have been originally called ſo in quadrupeds only, beſause they cannot reach to ſcratch it.