studio 8h

For the decade leading up to the show’s debut on this evening in 1975, NBC had ran reruns under the title Best of Carson of the Tonight Show on the weekends to round out the evening’s programming until host Johnny Carson told network executives that he would prefer being taken out of the Saturday or Sunday schedule and save the curated segments for during the week to afford himself time off.

In order to fill the time slot, producers approached Lorne Michaels and developed the idea of a variety show featuring comedy sketches, political satire and musical and celebrity guests. Jane Curtin, Garrett Morris, Gilda Radner, John Belushi, Dan Aykroyd, Laraine Newman, Michael Coe, Chevy Chase and Michael O’Donoghue were the premier comedy troupe of the show originally billed as NBC’s Saturday Night as rival network ABC aired a short-lived, awkward Saturday Night Live with sports-caster Howard Cosell—very much out of his element with this concept—and co-starring Bill Murray, who’d later join the cast of NBC’s revue to replace Chase after he left the show. The initial concept was to have a rotation of permanent hosts in Lily Tomlin, Richard Pryor and George Carlin but soon changed the model to guest hosts once Pryor’s act was censored. The pilot episode also established the Weekend Update news segment and the first of the show’s recurring characters—Killer Bees.

gummarus of lier

Cousin to Pepin the Short, Carolingian king of the Franks, and entrusted with responsibility over several offices of the royal court, the saint hailing from a town outside of Antwerp is venerated on this day, on the occasion of his peaceful death in 774 (*717).

Regrettably Pepin had arranged the marriage of Gummarus to a noble woman called Guinmarie, whose relationship was not the happiest and to make amends, Pepin allowed Gummarus to accompany the king and his retinue on several military campaigns. Looking forward to a quiet retirement, Gummarus built a hermitage in the woods at Nivesdunc, now consecrated as a chapel to Saint Peter with the city having grown around the site. Beatified after a number of miracles were attributed to his intercession, Gummarus was given the patronage over difficult marriages, courtiers, separated couples, lumberjacks and invoked against bone fractures (having been associated with miraculous mending a damaged tree) and with no explanation—glove makers (gantiers) and hernia sufferers.

facial action coding system

Originally conceived by anatomist Carl-Herman Hjortsjö in his 1969 study Människans ansikte och mimiska språket (in English) as a system to qualify and quantify expression and movements, FACS as it was later adopted by multidisciplinary teams proved extremely valuable to psychologists in reading unconscious tells and signals, physicians assessing pain, and to animators in rendering true-to-life characters.  Of course, marketers soliciting feedback have also found this vein of research invaluable.

The underlying protocols articulated over the decades have become an algorithmic procedural to extract, isolate and understand human reaction and encode presentation accordingly—see also here and here for notable exceptions. The derivative Emotional Facial Action Coding System (EMFACS) and the Facial Action Coding System Affect Interpretation Dictionary (FACSAID), considering the grammar of musculature, give us among other things that it takes more energy to frown than to smile, indexing units and descriptors that characterise the range of reactions progressing from slight to maximum in terms of intensity.

sm;)e

Navigating the countercultural and often contradictory notation and expression of graphic designer Harvey Ball’s (*1921 – 🙂2001) enduring and pervasive icon, with precedents and antecedents—never trademarked and it earning Ball a commission of forty-five dollars—the smiley has enjoyed a duplicitous career as no other symbol and is certainly a subject ripe for exploration as it was enlisted, never exclusively, for the commercial and corporate as well as for the subversive and sublime. Via Colossal, this history with relevant touchstones and points of departure are the subject of an upcoming coffee table volume from DJ DB Burkeman and Rich Browd. Much more to discover at the links above.

coin-op

This curated reflection and speculation from Things Magazine on how an ex-urban (de-centralised), post-pandemic economic model may mainstream the niche and marginal mechanical vending machine is well worth considering from all angles as this may become our new anchor for commerce and culture going forward. Celebrated and cherished as indispensable in some places,  we all might be adopting the posture of the Japanese towards these retail outposts and conveniences in the future.  Reading the articles also made me remember the classic Mold-A-Rama and how advances in three-dimensional printing could really be conscripted to help rehabilitate the economy and build it back better.

squalene

Rotten and selfish to the core—not to mention our ocean alpha-predators being a personal target of America’s impeached, superspreader idiot-in-chief who was not even willing to join a global coalition to develop a vaccine pooling resources and trying to go forward with production as responsibly as possible—humans will be, if left to their own devices, reliant on a compound harvested from the livers of sharks. It was not bad enough it was formerly an ingredient used in cosmetics, the filler ingredient used to cut inoculations so a little of it goes a longer way it triggering an immune response, there are alternative solvents available—such as olive oil. The irreplaceable species already under threat from human activity could be driven to extinction if we were to cull hundreds of thousands more to jockey for cure, throwing the rest of the oceans’ ecosystem towards turmoil.

♆

Discovered by brewer by trade and amateur astronomer by passion William Lassell just weeks after the confirmation of the new planet Neptune at the advice of his friend polymath John Herschel to search for moons, the largest and what was considered until 1949 to be the lone satellite came to be named after Triton. 

The son of sea god Poseidon and Amphitrite—was half man and half fish his name was broadly used as term for merfolk generally in classical scholarship.  Triton’s relatively substantial size, as big as the Earth’s moon, and uniquely retrograde orbit suggest Triton was a dwarf planet, like Pluto, captured by the gas giant. Composed primarily of water ice and frozen nitrogen with a rocky core, it is one of the few known satellites to be geologically active and has cryovolcanic activity and ice geysers that give the moon uniform but ridged terrain described as akin to the surface of a cantaloupe.

rosinenbomber

Born this day in 1920 in Salt Lake City, Utah, Gail Seymour “Hal” Halvorsen, fighter and freight pilot for the United States Airforce during the Berlin Airlift (Berliner Luftbrücke—otherwise known as Operation Vittles) is best known for his goodwill missions as the Candy Bomber, pooling the rations of his flight crew and dropping them from the air, landing gently thanks to tiny improvised parachutes, as they passed over the divided city during the Soviet blockade of West Berlin. With each run, more and more children gathered at the drop-zone and word soon reached Halvorsen’s superiors that supported and expanded operation Little Vittles. Since his retirement in 1974, Halvorsen has continued his humanitarian work, fostering a spirit of charity and home to warzones around the world.  Hearty birthday wishes and congratulations on this new milestone—Alles Gute zum Geburtstag!