home box office or prestige television

Though the origin story that one of the co-founders conceived of the idea of a movie-by-mail service over his anger at being charged forty dollars in late fees by Blockbuster Video on a rental of Apollo 13 turned out to be apocryphal and when the concern first started losing money they offered to merge with the same brick-and-mortar network looking to them to supply logistics, Netflix—recently attaining a market valuation larger than the oil companies during the global lock-down and quarantines—was founded on this day in 1997, seeing a niche in the recently introduced media format, the DVD, bandwidth and streaming-speed limitation not yet providing the infrastructure for cinema on demand.
To realise the on-line delivery model that Netflix had hoped to provide from the beginning, they initially developed a dedicated “box” that would download movies overnight during off-hours so that they’d be available to watch the next day in 2005, but with recognising the compelling popularity of Youtube and the willingness to entertain relatively low-resolution content, the company abandoned their device and went for a lower quality streaming service deployed by 2007 and backed by an algorithm that eagerly suggested what to watch next, outpacing the previous recommendation routine Cinematch. The company transformed how people watch television and intake media and has spurred many competitors for our attention and time.

blessed are the cheese-makers

Having previously used the term turophile (see also here, here and here) to describe our devoted fans, we were delighted for another encounter with the root word in an albeit different though possibly less fringe context and community with artotyrite (ἀρτότυρος, from the Greek for bread and cheese)—used to name the members of a second century Galatian gnostic Christian sect who celebrated the eucharist with this additional ingredient.
Considered heretical also for allowing women to perform baptisms and hold religious office and for preferring to observe Easter according to the Hebrew calendar in mid-Nisan regardless of the day of the week and hence their other epithet Quatrodeciman—the Fourteeners—but mostly for the cheese, these outcasts who based their practise on the idea of offering first fruits not only of the field but also their flocks to the Divine, presumably also included wine in the sacrament of communion.

ieee

Born on this day in 1920 in Dallas, Texas, Otis Frank Boykin (†1982) was an accomplished electrical engineer with over two dozen patents to his name and credited with the invention several products and processes that led to improved resistors that Boykin applied to tamper-proof cash boxes, computers, cardiac pacemakers and missile guidance systems.  The inventor’s birthday also coincided with the first demonstration of the principle of electromagnetic induction by Michael Faraday (see previously) in 1831, whose successful series of public experiments led to the formulation of Faraday’s Law that predicts and describes how a magnetic field will interact with a circuit, the underlying concept for electrical motors, generators and inductors.

schwebebahn

With unreserved enthusiasm, Dan Schindel of Hyperallergic recommends us to indulge in this admittedly outstanding restored footage from 1902, another superlative highlight from MoMA’s Film Vault Summer Camp, of Wuppertal’s flying, suspension train (mentioned previously but have yet to make that trip plus see also) shortly after going into service. This clip is two-minutes in length and the entire circuit through the city, which one can still take today, lasts around half-an-hour, calling at ten stops.  Much more to explore at the link up top.

the secret teachings of all ages

Having joined that Great Beyond on this day in 1990 (*1901) and perhaps finding out the accuracy of what he taught, Canadian-American mystic and prolific lecturer Manly Palmer Hall was best remembered for the eponymous ambitious and comprehensive survey and fusion of wisdom literature.
An encyclopaedic outline compiled and ultimately published in 1928—volumes sold per subscription prior to publication (which strikes one as exceedingly modern though such funding methods, cash-on-delivery, have a long past) and recruited top talent in all departments, including printers, the eminent illustrator J. Augustus Knapp and book designers once employed by the Vatican and great universities—as a concise and accessible digest of metaphysics that challenged one to examine symbols, convention and ritual though the lens not of a received religion but rather as a heuristic tool for probing universal truths. Travelling from his native Los Angeles to Europe and Asia, Hall acquired many rare books and manuscripts on esoterica as original sources and due to the success of his publication of The Secret Teachings of All Ages and some generous patrons (also not a new scheme) and in 1934 founded public trust called the Philosophical Research Society—still in operation, to further his studies, curate collections and host events and seminars on the occult and mythology.

the death of emmett till

On this day in 1955, fourteen-year-old Emmet Till (see previously) was murdered in a brutal fashion by two vigilantes after for his alleged offense of a white woman at her family’s grocery store in Money, Mississippi.
His violent death and the subsequent acquittal of his killers focused attention to the persecution and injustice of American apartheid and galvanised the burgeoning civil rights movement. Two years later on the anniversary of the killing, segregationist senator Strom Thurmond representing the state of South Carolina dishonoured Till’s memory by staging his twenty-four long filibuster to prevent the passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1957. The stunt only forestalled the vote until September when it was signed into law. On the same day in 1963, organisers held the March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom with Martin Luther King Jr delivering his “I Have a Dream” address from the Lincoln Memorial, this non-violent rally and calls to end systemic racism formative in the ways the US and the world view equality and the catalyst for the adoption of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Voter Rights Act of the following year.

album amicorum

Long before the more modern manifestation of social media, there were friend books (see previously here and here) and as the Guardian reports one of history’s finest exemplars Das Große Stammbuch of Philipp Hainhofer has been acquired for the library of Wolfenbüttel (also home of Jägermeister) nearly four centuries after the institution tried to purchase the celebrated and celebrity-filled volume.
The seventeenth century equivalent of an influencer found in Augsburger merchant and diplomat had acquired many followers whose signatures were illuminated with an elaborate artistic commission, and include autographs from the Holy Roman Emperor, the pope, the Medicis, various kings and many other contemporary luminaries. The duke for whom the library owes its patronage tried to purchase it from the estate of Hainhofer after his death but it was at the time fame and followers were out of his price range.

an act to prevent pernicious political activities

Passed in August of 1939 and amended most recently in 2012, the US federal law prohibits all government employees of the executive branch—with the exception of the president and vice president—from engaging in most forms of political activity and advocacy, the Hatch Act (see previously), named for the bill’s sponsor Democrat senator representing the state of New Mexico Carl Hatch (*1889 – †1963), was instigated by accusations by Republican members that the opposition party—Hatch’s own—were utilising employees of the Works Progress Administration (WPA, a New Deal recovery project to employ millions in public works and conservation activities to lift the US out of the Great Depression that followed World War I) as a political machine to influence elections, especially in swing-states like Tennessee and Kentucky. The main thrust of the law is to prevent intimidation or bribery of voters by office holder, the uniformed military and other authority figures and establish ethical norms—moreover precluding federal employees in general from aligning with extremist groups on the far left or the far right that advocates the overthrow of the government, specifically to discourage membership in the Communist Party and the German-American Bund.