nutbush city limit

The settlement believed to be founded in the sixth century by a Bavarian nobleman called Focko with its first documented mention in 1070 as part of the lordship of Adalpertus de Fucinging with the name evolving over the centuries from Vuxxhingen, Fukching, Fugkhing and finally to Fucking (see also) in the seventeen hundreds, the village of just over a hundred residents in Upper Austria has agreed as on the New Year to change its toponym, accordingly with some gleichnamiger localities to Fugging in an attempt to better reflect native pronunciation.  Despite the realised potential for using the name as an intensifier for any number of causes, villagers have grown weary of stolen signage and windshield-tourists. The villages of Petting, Kissing, Wanking as well as the affiliated hamlets of Ober- und Unterfucking have not yet indicated any plans to change names.

nulla dies sine linea

Via the always amazing Everlasting Blört, we are directed to artist Edward Carey’s ongoing pandemic project who has been committed to sketching a portrait a day since rushing home to Austin, Texas from London in March and has recently surpassed the two-hundred-fiftieth mark. Some of the illustrations are pulled from the headlines, acknowledging historic birthdays, helpful reminders that the past can be precedent or whatever takes him at the moment and hopes to continue until the crisis is over.

6x6

surrogate: Trump issues pardon to former national security advisor Michael Flynn, who pled guilty twice to making false statements to the FBI involving his Russian connections 

thermochromic: windows go from transparent to tinted while generating electricity  

l’atlas: an intriguing new approach to mapping France’s natural glory—via Things Magazine 

 ♚: reimagining the Queen’s Gambit as a MS DOS PC game 

fry guys: one intrepid connoisseur revives a long lost recipe  

stonks: only pausing to take credit for and praise the teetering high of the Dow Jones, Trump presents a very abbreviated brief

¡no lupita!

Released on this date in 1959 in Mexico (in October of the following year internationally, in America markets  under the same title though sometimes distinguished as Santa Claus versus the Devil), this René Cardona and Adolfo Torres Portillo collaboration premises that Santa has a workshop in outer space and defeats a demon called Pitch who was dispatched to Earth by Lucifer to spoil Christmas by killing its spirit and cause all of humanity to do Satan’s despondent and joyless, and by defacto  evil, bidding. The movie received the Mystery Science Theatre 3000 (see previously) on Christmas Eve 1993 and one can watch the lampoon in its entirety below.

dantooine is too remote to make an effective demonstration

Conservationists and connoisseurs of Brutalist architecture have found allies in Star Wars fandom—whether or not the iconic outline of the Hôtel du Lac of Tunis directly informed the sandcrawler of the Jawas on Tatooine (some sources disagree, saying that Ralph McQuarrie had come up with the mobile fortress well before location scouting) to help preserve the historic structure from perhaps imminent destruction. Scenes of the first instalment of the saga were in any case filmed in the deserts of Tunisia, the name and ancillary building style of the moisture farm after the governorate of Tatouine, Tiṭṭawin, ⵜⵉⵟⵟⴰⵡⵉⵏ. The presently abandoned (closed to guests since the early 2000s) and in a severe state of disrepair structure was built in the early 1970s and designed by Italian architect and painter Raffaele Contigiani (*1920 – †2008) as an inverted ziggurat and those room windows have their blinds strategically drawn to spell out Non à la demolition (لا للهدم) in Arabic.

tycho magnetic anomaly

The recent buzz about the discovery of a mysterious yet most likely of mundane origins of a metal monolith in the desert of Utah that channels in a sense the cinematic titan of 2001 made me think about this smaller though also puzzling concrete post I encountered during a walk in the woods last week. 

It’s in a clearing where some trees were recently felled for lumber. Though just off a logging trail, there’s nothing else nearby and no other signs of construction. The blue bit embedded seems to be the pontil marked base of a cobalt glass bottle. I wonder what it could be for or why it was placed there—I’ll have to keep an eye on this one. 

 

the mousetrap

The murder mystery stage play by Agatha Christie debuted on this day in 1952 in London’s West End and ran continually until 16 March 2020, temporarily sidelined due to the COVID-19 pandemic, the work first presented as a radio drama as a birthday present for Queen Mary in 1947 under the title Three Blind Mice. The author had requested, due to its twist ending that theatre audiences are asked not to divulge—that the short story not be published, nor adapted as a film, until it was off the West End, a wish that has been respected all these years.

barn-burners

Horrifically on this day in 1864, a group of southern operatives that infiltrated union territory by way of Canada, calling themselves the Confederate Army of Manhattan, with a plan to burn down New York City, by simultaneously starting fires in nineteen prominent hotels in all boroughs, a theatre and P.T. Barnum’s American Museum (presently Wall Street). The arsonists hoped that the number and distribution of the fires would overwhelm emergency services and chose the date for its symbolic significance, it being remembered as Evacuation Day when British troops had left the city in 1783 and General George Washington advanced with the Continental Army to reclaim Manhattan (with some legendary license and myth-making of course), having surrendered it to British forces in November 1776. Fortunately, over-confident with their plan and underestimating New York, all the fires failed to spread or were summarily contained and the operatives fled, all but one escaping prosecution for this dangerous and incendiary behaviour.