contrastive analysis

Coinciding with the Feast of Saint Jerome, considered the patron of the profession for his version of the Bible in Latin with commentary from the original Hebrew and Aramaic texts, the Vulgate around 382 CE, the United Nations has designated today as International Translation Day to honour interpreters and their role in connecting the world.  Colloquially known as such not for using common (vulgar) Latin as there were few native speakers left as the Empire fell and Romance languages developed, but rather because the gospel was formerly promulgated in Vetus Latina—that is the disglossic (previously here and here) Old Latin texts derived from fourth century Greek sources that were superceded by wide-spread adoption of Jerome’s work over the centuries and becoming the versio vulgata.  Renowned for his scholarship, the priest and confessor—also known as Eusebius Sophronius Hieronymus, has an extended patronage including archaeologists and librarians.

truth and reconciliation

Held annually in communities around Canada since 2013, Orange Shirt Day/Jour du chandail orange was created to educate and raise awareness of the nation’s policy of the residential school system—sadly inspired by the model employed by its neighbours to the south—to absorb and assimilate the diversity of aboriginal cultures native to North America and form a new indoctrinated identity aligned with the beliefs, language and culture of the settlers.

Primarily run by the church, native children would be separated from their parents and extended families to live in dormitories. The practise was officially discontinued in 1996 but the trauma of course remains and the impact of the cultural undermining impoverishes us all. The event is held in honour of residential school survivor and organiser was stripped of a beautiful orange shirt, symbolic of the systemic dismantling of students’ identity. Our thanks to friend of the blog Nag on the Lake for introducing us to the important multicultural moment and attempt to make amends for the past and do better going forward. Be sure to visit for more information and a selection of short films that recount the history of destroyed heritage.

9x9

patim, patam, patum: font specimens of Patufet, a typeface inspired by the Catalonian Tom Thumb 

ace of cups: Summer of Love all-female band that played the Avalon Ballroom and appeared with Jefferson Airplane, Jimi Hendrix and the Grateful Dead release a new double-album 

leaf-peeping: Swiss fall foliage map 

franking privileges: Finnish studio mints climate change stamps with heat-reactive ink 

backyard safari: highly detailed journal documenting encounters with wildlife—via Nag on the Lake 

space 1999: scenes from the sets of the iconic British scifi series that ran from 1975 to 1977—via Messy Nessy Chic 

pacomobile: a modified VW snail camper—via Things magazine  

sălaj county: a brilliant assortment of flag redesigns for Romania’s forty-two regions to celebrate the country’s diversity 

 cannonball aderley: jazz record sleeves from Reagan Ray (see previously) feature the typography of the artists’ names—via Kottke

unprocessed cartoons

PRINT magazine contributor Steven Heller has a nice retrospective appearance and remembrance for an underground political cartoonist often overshadowed by his contemporary R. Crumb in R. Cobb. While many might more readily recognise the Cheap Thrills that duly excoriated our modesties of the former, we might not be as familiar with the latter, who recently departed (*1937) after a long bout of dealing with dementia, whose extensively syndicated illustrations laid bare how the governments—most pointedly the US establishment—was eroding civil rights, liberties and the environment.

Cobb turned his talents to raising awareness and championing social justice causes after being dismissed as redundant by Disney studios in 1957 once the animation of Sleeping Beauty was complete—notably the last film to use hand-inked cels. There are an embarrassment of panels from the late-1960s that are very resounding and correspond, appearing in the Freep plus more mainstream outlets, with what we face at present (see a whole gallery at the source up top), but we are choosing to highlight the ecology symbol Cobb created—combining e (environment) and o (organism) into a θ-like glyph that gifted into the public domain and was adopted by the conservation movement. After his career as a cartoonist, Ron Cobb designed conceptual art for science-fiction films such as Star Wars, Alien, Alejandro Jodorowsky’s unfinished Dune, The Abyss and Total Recall.

1q or the feast of the archangels

Venerating Saint Michael and companions, Gabriel, Raphael and Uriel in honour of their victory of Lucifer and the rebel angels in the angelomachy, Michaelmas (previously) is observed on the penultimate day of September—in some traditions, the feast extending into the next day—and has also come to one of the four quarter dates of the financial year, kept since at least medieval times to mark when school and court terms were to commence and the accounting was due to ensure that debts and unresolved cases didn’t linger (see also) into the next season.

Though the customary hiring fairs and local elections do not necessarily adhere (the tradition is retained for the election of London’s lord mayor, just as peasants during the Middle Ages would appoint a reeve from among their peers to represent their interests to the manor) to the same calendars, this time of year—still referred to as the Michaelmas term for matriculating students in England, Scotland and Ireland and for the US Supreme Court’s and the English bar’s Inns of the Court’s fall sessions and of course it marks the end and beginning of the fiscal year for budget purposes. Asters or the Michaelmas daisy are one of the few flowering plants left at the beginning of autumn, and thus inspiring the rhyme and invocation: “Michaelmas daisies among dead weeds, bloom for Saint Michael’s valorous deeds.”

king of rods

Brilliantly a clever graphic designer and Trek fan took advantage of the correspondence between the classic Thoth tarot deck used for divination—the twenty-two card Major Arcana (Greater Secrets) plus the fifty-six suite Minor Arcana (Lesser Secrets) –and the seventy-eight episodes of the Original Series creating a custom deck with a fortune-revealing homage to some of the franchise’s most memorable, founding characters. What’s in the stars for you? Much more to explore at the links above.

$750

Whilst specifically reporting that Trump’s tax-filings did not reveal any insights into previously unknown connections to Russia, the leaked documents to the New York Times do reveal how broken the US tax code is in allowing the wealthy and powerful to engage in tax avoidance and the industry that that activity has created plus perhaps most importantly that the fake billionaire and impeached phoney president has hundreds of millions of loans coming due in the coming years—what could potentially be during his second-term in the White House.

Much of this credit was extended to Trump by a particular bursar at Deutsche Bank (see previously here and here). Sadly even if the characterisation of Trump’s desire for re-election as an unpleasantry to be stomached for the sake of turning country into a theocracy that upholds the status quo and undermines any real or perceived threat to it is only a cover for Trump to continue his career as grifter-in-chief and support welfare programmes and executive socialism that benefit his himself and his cronies with rugged, unforgiving capitalism for the rest is shown to be the sham it’s been all along, it won’t matter to his persecuted throngs of supporters nor change any minds, so long as their demagogue hates and punishes the same people that they have been emboldened to hate and punish.

john paul i

Though only reigning for a brief thirty-three days, dying on this day in 1978 (*1935)—touching off the first year of three popes since 1605, the pontiff with the birth name Albino Luciani was responsible for quite a number of firsts and lasts. No pope before him had been born in the twentieth century and his passing marked the end of a series of Italian-born popes that extended back to Clement VII’s election in 1523.

Refusing a coronation, John Paul was the first pope to be inaugurated, in an effort to humanise the office, and only accepted the pallium accorded to Rome’s bishop and put to an end the practises of using the sedia gestatoria—the ceremonial throne used for processions and carried on the shoulders of twelve men, replaced later by the popemobile—and referring to himself in the third person, the royal we, though traditionalists in the curia often edited it back into his speeches. The first to take a double-name, in honour of his two immediate predecessors, John Paul was also the first to use the ordinal number Primo. Pope Francis also has a unique papal name but does not use a numeral. Aside from this trivia, the bridge-builder also reached out to the Islamic communities of Rome and Venice and helped them secure the right to build mosques. John Paul II of course took the name as success in memory of his short reign and sudden death upon his election by the conclave on 14 October.