mamie smith and her jazz hounds

Released on this day in 1920 by the label Okeh Records, Smith’s (*1883 – †1946) “Crazy Blues” marks the first commercially successful hit of the blues genre and was the first blues title by a female African-American performer. The B-Side featured “It’s Right Here for You (If You Don’t Get it – ‘Taint No Fault o’ Mine)” and the single’s popularity played a major role in creating a performance space, market and audience for African-American artists to follow.

simhall

Using surplus modern construction materials in combination with antique glass, handmaid locally in the1950s, and ceramic ornamental elements, the design duo Folkform—we discover via Dezeen—created a beautiful mural for the public bath of the community of Spånga (Dolph Lundgren’s hometown) outside of Stockholm whose ordered mosaic is informed by the village plan as seen from above. Upcycling such elements in a public and shared milieu is hoped to inspire others to apply the practise to their own designs.

endliches und ewiges sein

Along with Bridget of Sweden, Benedict of Nursia, Sts Cyril and Methodius and Catherine of Siena, Edith Stein—taking the religious name of Teresia Benedicta a Cruce—who is venerated as a martyr for her murder in Auschwitz, along with her younger sister and nine hundred eighty-five others in the same deportation, on this day in 1942 (*1891) is considered one of the six co-patrons of Europe and is the only one from the modern era.
Philosopher, teacher, women’s rights advocate, Stein was of Jewish heritage but was not practicing and was later an avowed atheist until turning to the writings of church reformer Teresa of Ávila (see above) to help her process the human toll the Great War had and was member of the community and on staff at religious schools in Speyer and Köln and tempered her theological beliefs with scholarship and introspection, authoring several metaphysical treatises, including On the Problem of Empathy, Finite and Eternal Being and The Science of the Cross. Stein’s protestations to the pope may have encouraged the Vatican’s censure of the Third Reich but the timidity of the papacy paled Stein’s deserved criticism. Stein is called on for intercession by the converted, called or coersed and is the patroness of orphans and the displaced.

7x7

r.o.u.s. (rodent of unusual size): a LEGO Princess Bride playset

fifteen men on the dead man’s chest: beach sand skeletal impression kit

colouring london: an ongoing project amassing architectural statistical data from Maps Mania

antimandering: redistricting software that illustrates the trade-offs of proportional representation, via Waxy

splinternet: discouraging trend championed now by the US towards compartmentalising the once global web—via Slashdot

duly appointed rounds: another one of Trump’s antithetical department heads bent on dismantling the institution he is in charge of (see previously)

mind the gap: subway and metro announcements from around the world

major arcana

We rather enjoyed this preview of an anthology of plus centuries of divinical card decks (see previously for more on the subject) surveyed in the upcoming coffee table, conversation piece book Tarot from Taschen.
Over five hundred cards are featured from Antiquity, to the Middle Ages to Post-Modern times whose iconic symbolism is enchanting on so many levels and we particularly liked these contemporary interpretations from Olivia M Healy whose Fool, classically depicted as someone standing on the edge of a precipice and usually is understood to signify a point of departure, is evocative of spiritedness associated with Carnival. The Pre-Raphaelite vision of Treviso-based graphic artist Elissabetta Trevisan’s Justice, meaning probity and prevailing of the virtuous, was also quite arresting. Learn more at Colossal at the link up top.

naming conventions or format cells

Via Kottke’s Quick Links (now archived) we learn that rather than trying to carve out exceptions in the programming of the world’s most prevalent spreadsheet software that is a little notorious in trying to anticipate one’s intentions and be helpful or trust that the next person to collaborate on a research project remembers to disable automatic formatting, geneticists are modifying gene names and initialisms so that Microsoft Excel doesn’t misconstrue (see also here and here) them as dates.
Personally my biggest frustration is inheriting a Frankenstein of a document that has conflicting source margins and artefacts of older surprises built into it unsuspecting of its future consequences and accom- modations but it’s rather astounding and frightening to read that fully twenty percent of known errors in published papers can be attributed to errant aliases like SEPT-1, gene that encodes the protein septin needed for cell division and may play a part in Alzheimer’s disease, or MARCH1 (Membrane-Associated Ring-CH Type Finger 1). Scientists and universities are working on reforming the nomenclature retroactively and going forward (though I imagine it is hard to future proof such things) to reduce the chance of misinterpretation by a computer try-hard, like Mister DNA from Jurassic Park.

i/o

Again from peripatetic curation of Things Magazine we find ourselves directed to what one might be forgiven for thinking was merely a fun, visual romp through the control panels (see previously) and user-interfaces of Lego playsets—which in itself is reason enough for indulging it—but the object lesson turns out to be highly illustrative of design ramifications that one could extrapolate to real-life engineering and remote-operations scenarios, not to mention the toy-manufacturer’s eye for such details. In common-parlance, we only talk of colour-coding but our panels encode for other relationships as well according to function and enhance (or sometimes detract from) the user experience (UX).

in xanadu did kubla khan a stately pleasure-dome decree

Although singles from soundtrack charted until supplanted by Olivia Newton-John’s next hit “Physical” and it has since gained a sizable cult-following, the Robert Greenwald movie starring Michael Beck and Gene Kelly in his last cinematic performance was so bad as to be the impetus for the Razzies—the Golden Raspberry awarded to the worst production of the year in 1980.  The Electric Light Orchestra was the house band with support from Cliff Richards and The Tubes, a San Francisco based rock group that would soon feature prominently on the early days of MTV.
The retelling of a 1940s-style tale of magical realism with contemporary late 1970s aesthetics and even animated sequences begins with a commission to paint a large mural in the eponymous nightclub of the Nine Muses of Ancient Greek mythology—which invokes the spirits of the Olympian patronesses, one of whom remains, Kira—or rather Terpsichore (Newton-John, Τερψιχόρη—delight in dancing), behind to help the new club become a success, with some help from her sisters.