porozumienia sierpniowe

Today celebrates the August Agreement—otherwise known as the Gdańsk Social Accords—reached on the last day of August in 1980 between striking dockworkers on the Baltic and the Polish government over untenable demands, poor working conditions and continual shortages of essentials. The labour strikes had the immediate effect of changing the country’s leadership and revealed endemic corruption and mismanagement that had culminated in the dysfunctional economy and legislature and further led to reforms in the market, freedom of expression, civil rights and launched the Solidarity Movement.

roll for perception

Though we are a bit deflated to realise that holiday creep is one of the few things immune to COVID-19, we were delighted nonetheless to not only be reminded, via Super Punch, of the 1983-1985 run of the CBS animated series Dungeons & Dragons and pleased also to learn that there’s a Dungeon Master Halloween costume, which is appropriate for the home office and chairing, officiating remote role-playing adventures.
I can remember very much looking forward to this cartoon—almost to the exclusion of all others—on Saturday morning, identifying mainly with Presto the Magician, though in retrospect to find that he was a diligent but ineffectual try-hard, sort of like Schmendrick, was a bit of a blow, and only might be lured onto a roller coaster ride with the prospect that I might be transported to another realm. Bobby the Barbarian and his pet unicorn were dumb.  Victim of the moral panic that gripped the US at the time over the game and the dark arts (plus that Tom Hanks movie—Rona Jaffe’s Mazes & Monsters), only three seasons were produced with the concluding episodes scripted but animated.

truly, madly, deeply

Via Things Magazine, we very much enjoyed this bit of lockdown spelunking into the fantasy worlds that people are creating in their basements and for what it lacks for in photographs of the interlocutors’ sub-levels and rumpus-rooms, I consider it more than making amends by recalling us to the fact that Barbara Streisand has a whole town in her cellar with boutique stores to display her wardrobe. Do you have a little nook of your own to escape to or project on? Much more to explore at the links above.

red telephone

Despite its conception in the popular imagination the Washington-Moscow Direct Communications Link or hotline, which first went into operation on this day in 1963, was a text-only emergency channel as spoken communication was considered too prone to misunderstanding.
Engineers first recognised the need for an expedient exchange between the leaders of the polarised world in the midst of the Cuban Missile Crisis of the previous summer when it took US diplomatic and military staff nearly twelve hours to receive and decrypt the initial settlement message from Nikta Khrushchev and deliver it to John F. Kennedy, with a nod to the direct link as portrayed in Red Alert, the 1958 novel that Doctor Strangelove (1964) is based on. The superpowers could initially send teletypes to one another—the equipment tested hourly by exchanging passages from William Shakespeare and Mark Twain (with selective quotations from the former and A. A. Milne as they were considered Soviet cultural property) for excerpts from Anton Chekhov and other literary figures, with messages of greetings and congratulations sent instead on New Year’s and on 30 August, the anniversary of the hotline’s launch. In 1986, the system was upgraded to facsimile machines and finally in 2008 to an extra secure form of email.

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.