hiding in plain sight

Not a day goes by—especially now that I am slowly, carefully reintegrating back into office society by coming into work a couple days a week—that I don’t think about this image of Diane Keaton avoiding the paparazzi and find myself reminded when people recognise me around the workplace and broader campus.
How did you see through my disguise, I wonder, before pausing to consider that I, like most others, probably am memorable and make an impression. Has this happened to you? I don’t think I have a signature look but one never knows, and perhaps more often than not, our masquerade is a good alibi for not having to acknowledge an acquaintance.  H and I always appreciated the wait-staff that could recall our usuals at a Greek restaurant despite the infrequency that we patronised the place and while it doesn’t diminish the esteem I have for the waitress, I imagine that together, we’re a little outside the ordinary as well, not considering what a curse it would be to have everyone’s orders indelibly etched in one’s memory.

die 1000 augen des doktor mabuse

Premiering on this day in 1960 at the Gloria-Palast in Stuttgart, The Thousand Eyes of Dr Mabuse was Fritz Lang’s (*1890 – †1976) final directorial effort, reusing a character that appeared in two previous screenplays and whose plot was based on author Jan Fethke’s 1931 Esperanto language novel—also a trilogy—called Mister Tot Buys a Thousand Eyes (Mr. Tot aĉetas mil okulojm).
The only lead to a myster- ious death of a reporter comes from an informer and confidant of the police inspection who is a blind fortune-teller, who had a vision of the murder but not the killer—prompting an ensemble of connected characters to engage in detective work that suggest the return of the long presumed dead titular villain—a Svengali-type figure, combining elements of horror, spy films and dragnet surveillance in a nihilistic milieu with a legacy of sequels, pre-quels and reboots spanning across the ensuing decade, the seventh and final instalment The Vengeance of Dr Mabuse screened in 1970.

san venerio

Venerated on this day as protector of the Gulf of La Spezia and the patron saint of lighthouse keepers (guardiani del faro), hermit and monk Venerius was associated with an isolated religious community in the small island of Tino in the Ligurian Sea for the first three decades of the seventh century.
Little is known about Venerius’ vita et acta other than miraculous accounts of arranging rescue missions for distressed sailors and driving out a sort of dragon fish that was seriously disrupting local commerce. Presently part of an Italian naval station, access to the island is restricted except on Venerius’ feast day, when his statue is carried out to sea with the bishop, blessing all the boats of Cinque Terre and the broader cove beyond.

heathcliff, it’s me—i’m cathy, i’ve come home, i’m so cold

Via the always superb Nag on the Lake we learn that the 1541 stately manor house Ponden Hall in West Yorkshire that inspired both Emily Brontë’s Wuthering Heights (previously) and sister Anne’s The Tenant of Wildfell Hall is on offer and back on the housing market. The Sisters Brontë stayed at this ten-room estate in Stanbury for the first time in September of 1824 while seeking higher ground during the Crow Hill Bog Burst, a flood and mudslide following particularly heavy rainfall, and the siblings often visited throughout their lives.

love of two is one

Via MetaFilter, the 1994 television miniseries adaptation of Stephen King’s The Stand (see previously) is available for your streaming pleasure—all five hours and forty-two minutes of it. The aspect-ratio does need adjusting and there are reportedly moments when the audio cuts out due to since conflicting copyrights, but it’s free and—mostly, in full. Mostly, and with limited commercial-interruption.

spartari radio language

Though I was hoping for this to take a fun and unexpected turn into Polari rhyming slang, Carlos Spartari’s 1930s contribution radiotelephony procedure (also known as on-air protocol, the standard for communication over two-way transmissions to optimise clarity and reception probably best exemplified in NATO call signs and spelling alphabets) strikes at the same time as both overly fussy and demanding and as work of sheer genius in the field of constructed languages.
Meant for international use, Spartari’s proposal required neither listener nor receiver to learn a special grammar or jargon with all messages encoded and decoded in seven musical notes plus an eighth punctuation tone like solfège and even the nineteenth century universal auxiliary language Sol-Re-Sol based on the same scale. Learn more from our faithful antiquarian, J.F. Ptak’s Science bookstore, at the link up top.

ibiza on ice

Six months on, the Guardian profiles the resort town of Ischgl and the clientele it attracts and how its party lifestyle and après ski venues became an incubator for COVID-19 and helped the epidemic turn pandemic. There’s lots of scapegoating and finger-pointing to sort through but the consequent spread and back-tracking seem rather incontrovertible. The bar where most of the contagion is traced, Kitzloch, was shut down on 10 March with the entire town quarantined from three days afterwards until 22 April.

palabra jot

Probably at least a semi-legendary figure though charged with an onerous task nonetheless, court historian, secretary and studious bureaucrat Cangjie (倉頡) was tasked with the job of inventing written language around forty-six centuries ago when the Yellow Emperor expressed his dissatisfaction with the available method of recording information—that is, knots in string.
Though gifted and determined, Cangjie was at a loss until he began to contemplate the tracks and footprints left by animals and humans. Encountering an unfamiliar impress, Cangjie inquired with a hunter what sort of animal could leave such a mark. On learning it was the print of a Pixiu (貔貅, the equivalent of a chimera), Cangjie was inspired to create a set of logograms that would become written Chinese. Traditionally depicted with four eyes, it is said that at his eureka moment, the deities and ghosts wailed and wept as the living could be duped no longer thanks to a written record and the heavens rained down millet and grain. This figure is the namesake of the first Chinese language dictionaries and the method for adapting Chinese for Western keyboards.