dispositive motion

Language Logs directs us to an interesting and precise bit of legal terminology encountered and highlighted in the court opinion rejecting the Trump campaign’s baseless challenge to the state of Pennsylvania’s election tally: upon information and belief. Identifying a claim or accusation made not from firsthand knowledge or observation but rather via hearsay that the petitioner believes to be true, it is invoked chiefly in dealing with contempt of court and perjury under oath, protecting the maker of the statement from outright lying in the process of bringing frivolous or nuisance cases to trial. The patience of the law has its limits, however.

8x8

regolith: British R&D company working on process to extract oxygen from lunar soil and using the by-product to three-dimensionally print a moon base—via the New Shelton wet/dry  

gentle giant: David Prowse, the British weight-lifter and character actor who played Darth Vader, has passed away 

person, woman, man, camera, tv: Sarah Andersen’s funny take on our future senility  

kung-fu grip: new research suggests that Neanderthals did not use their hands and thumbs in the same way as Homo sapiens 

 handkerchief flirting codes for post-humans: Janelle Shane (previously) trains a neural network on late Victorian courtship etiquette 

wilmarsdonk: the remains of a village in the middle of the Port of Antwerp, mostly vacated for the busy shipping hub’s expansion  

social harmony: queuing guests practise distancing on a length of music notation, producing a movement from Gymnopédie  

pareidolia, apophenia: brain neurons juxtaposed with galactic clusters connected by filaments of dark matter

b♮

The 1956 sponsored projector-reel short having fallen into obscurity until lambasted as an MST3K episode (previously) interstitial, airing first on this date in 1991 was meant to be shown during class assemblies to encourage budding musicians and was commission by the C.G. Conn company that manufactured and marketed a range of brass instruments.

The eponymous title character is short of an androgynous pixie that embodies the sense of fun in music with an additional biography in their 1957 circular Baton that was issued to American public school music programme teachers—“Mister B Natural is the spirit of music in everyone… a sort of LepreCONN who is always no more than an inch anyway from the fingertips of anyone. Mister B has a code, however, that prohibits him from showing himself for anyone unless he reaches out and calls for the spirit of music.” A withdrawn and reticent pre-teen named Buzz summons Mister B, whom through a range of magic, music and dance convinces him to take up the trumpet. Bruce “Buzz” Podewell (his own nickname, also appearing on Watch Mister Wizard and would have perhaps been familiar to the target audience) went on to become a professor of theatre and dance and taught for four decades at Tulane University in New Orleans. Mister B Natural was the last role of long time (“Knew your father I did”) Broadway and television personality Betty Luster.

зáумь

Invented in 1913 by radical futurist Aleksei Yeliseyevick Kruchyonykh (*1886 – †1968) with literati contemporaries including David Burliuk and Vladimir Mayakovsky (see previously), the non-referential linguistic experiment zaum was to be a demonstration that language is indefinite and indeterminate, spontaneous and non-codified—something that the listener or interlocutor would give form to and thus revealing something about the universal undercurrents of communication. Though transrational in nature, the Russian prefix and noun are meant to convey “beyondsense” and adherents are referred to as zaumiks. Listen to examples recited at Weird Universe at the link above, including Kruchyonykh’s poem here pictured—Дыр бул щыл, transliterated as Dyr bul shchyl, which the author claimed was more patriotic and nationally insightful than the entire canon of Alexander Pushkin.

ping-pong

Originally created by programmer Allan Alcorn as a training exercise assignment from Atari co-founder Nolan Bushnell (also the businessman responsible for Chuck E. Cheese restaurants—establishing a venue and a franchise for arcade games), Pong—the table tennis themed video game, was released on this day in 1972, having been prototyped at a local bar in Sunnyvale, California since August of that year.

Patrons visited Andy Capp’s tavern just to play the game, at a quarter per play with each unit projected to generate forty dollars a day, quadruple the revenue of other coin operated entertainments like jukeboxes and pinball machines. Among the first commercially successful ventures in the field, Pong was instrumental in establishing the industry of gaming and drove emulation and competition.

saturnin

Identified as one of the seventy-two disciples at the Last Supper—the image of the head table is the one we are most familiar with—Greek bishop and martyr dispatched by Pope Fabian, himself famously elected to office after a pigeon alighted on his head during the conclave, to Toulouse as one of the apostles to the Gauls to re-establish Christian communities after Emperor Decius ordered their dissolution, is venerated on this day on the occasion of his death in 257. Attributing the silence of their pagan oracles to the constant presence of this meddlesome priest—their altars at the capitol (le Capitole de Toulouse) passed by congregants daily on their way to the Christian church, they seized Saturninus, who refusing to sacrifice to their gods, tied him to a raging bull and to be dragged through the streets until the rope broke. A similar fate befell one of Saturnin’s pupils, Saint Fermin, who died in Pamplona. Symbolically this martyrdom is an inversion of the mysteries of the cult of Mithras, involving the ritual slaughtering of a bull. Called tauroctony, and this tautology thereof is enshrined in many of the names of streets, squares and churches of Toulouse.

taxi nach leipzig

This evening, fifty years ago marked the first broadcast of the long running German crime serial Tatort (“crime scene”—see previously), a ninety-minute stand-alone case investigated by a familiar case of characters, on Sundays following the evening news at eight on channel NDR, Norddeutsch Rundfunk.

The premier episode revolved around the unidentified body of an adolescent discovered at a rest stop near Leipzig, and the East German authorities call on their Western counterparts for help when it is determined that the victim is wearing Western articles of clothing. The request for assistance is abruptly called off, prompting on of the West German detectives to launch his own investigation when it is learned that the bringing this death to light may scandalise a prominent chemist. Even if there is a language barrier or you do not really care for police procedurals, the appreciation for this suspenseful, funky opening sequence by Klaus Doldinger still in use today by is universal.

hello frens

Born on this day in 1752 (†1819) to Quaker settlers in the colony of Rhode Island and Providence Plantations as Jemima Wilkinson after succumbing to severe illness—probably a bad case of typhus—died and was reborn as a genderless evangelic to be henceforth known as the Public Universal Friend. Preaching beliefs fairly in line with Quaker heterodoxy, the Friend eschewed her former identity and rejected gendered pronouns and generally referred to themselves as PUF. Rejecting the notions of predestination and the elected, the Friend believed that revelation could come to anyone and the congregation, the Society of Universal Friends, included enslaved people and Native Americans and was an early advocate for emancipation and equal rights.