year in search

Via The Curious Brain, we are directed towards a superlative, year-end compliation that waxes exsistential and exegetical with search-engine queries of why besting what and how illustrated in this emotional video short. Despite the potential for misinformation, baiting outrage and holding up an unflattering mirror for us scrutinise or more often avert our eyes from, the internet and technology are owed a debt of gratitude for helping us muddle through 2020 and remember whom and what we’ve lost, what's irreplacable and what can be brought back better. Keep on seeking, keep on searching.

variola major

With humankind since the beginning, claiming at least half-a-billion lives over the ages, scarring and maiming countless more, and surely the inspiration for all manner of curse and blight and vengeful and contractual god, on this day in 1979—after centuries of observation that a bit of homeopathy was promising innoculation and informing a more potent technique for Edward Jenner in 1796, able to later route the contagion’s last few sanctuaries and hiding places, a group of eminent epidemiologists, later confirmed by global public health agencies, were able to declare the eradication of smallpox. That is no small feat to banish the plague that informed and entangled an incredible portion of what we are as beings.

laches

In an apparently unananmious and delightfully terse decision, the US Supreme Court, despite it being stacked with three justices appointed by Trump himself, rejected mounting efforts to reverse the results of the election outcome in the state of Pennsylvania.

A toady representative built his case on the specious argument that universal mail-in voting (enacted in 2019) defies constitutionality and therefore all ballots not cast in person and on the day of the election ought to be null and void. This decision—based on the title principle from the French legal concept of dilatoriness (laschesses), that is a lack of a lack of diligence in exercising a party’s right to challenge and failing to do so in a timely matter (changing the rules after the election prejudices the defence) is hopefully the last of a series of suites that either sought to throw out millions of votes or allow the state legislature to advance faithless electors to the collegium, which convenes on 14 December to cast their votes. Vigilantibus non dormientibus æquitas subvenit. Equity aids the vigilant, not the indolent.

show dna

Informed earlier by our faithful chronicler and now reprised for the cinematic adaptation of Larry McMurtry’s 1975 novel of the same name going into general release in US cinemas on this day in 1983, James L. Brooks directorial debut film (also writer and producer) has a throughline to the Simpsons. As a thank you gift for securing her and her production team an Academy Award (Terms of Endearment starring Shirley MacClaine, Danny DeVito, Debra Winger, Jeff Daniels, John Lithgow and Jack Nicholson did quite well at the Oscars) assistant Polly Platt had procured for her collaborator an original panel of the comic Life in Hell—a bleak strip about a depressed, neurotic rabbit called Bongo, specifically one from 1982 entitled “The Los Angeles Way of Death”—as imagined and illustrated by Matt Groening. A year later, with a new television project, a variety show with a series of sketches, Brooks reached out to Groening about developing a series of animated interstitial bumpers between segments. Fearing loss of creative control over his original characters, Groening created a wholly new cast based on his own family, giving the world the Simpsons as a regular part of The Tracey Ullmann Show.

third protocol emblem

The global humanitarian movement comprising nearly a million volunteers and staff worldwide, the International Red Cross and Red Crescent, adopted on this day in 2005 the red crystal, officially referred to as the above, as an auxiliary symbol available to use when religious connotations of the previous emblems might be objectionable as an amendment to the Geneva Conventions, known as Protocol III. Neutral and without religious, political or geographic associations, it was meant to make the organisation more inclusive and not a vehicle of hegemony and privileging, allowing more groups to join and deploy this protective banner during times of conflict to render assistance to the wounded.

woke up, fell out of bed

Via Strange Company, we are given a rather insightful, connected glimpse into a day in the life of John Lennon (previously) on what turned out to be his last on this day in 1980. Through these intimate, everyday details, we see the consequence of small, disposable decisions in the gears of what we’d describe as the machinations of the great and the good.

6x6

message in a bottle: researchers tagged plastic waste with electronic trackers to monitor their journey—from the same team that brought us Mister Trash Wheel 

pfizer-biontech: British nonagenarian first to receive the coronavirus vaccine  

wunderpus photogenicus: deep sea diver photographs an incredible infant octopus with a transparent head

toot your own horn: more butt trumpets and other bizarre imagery in manuscript marginalia 

catsa lander mark-1: a gorgeous space-age cat bed—though our feline friends would be more pleased with a shoebox

2014-076a: Hayabusa2 (previously) successfully returns its asteroid sample to Earth

m.a.s.k.

I can vaguely recall this line of action figures from Kenner circa 1985 that tried to carve out a niche between Transformers and G.I. Joe with the special task force Mobile Armoured Strike Kommand under the leadership of Matt Trakker. These characters donned masks to give them super powers and transform their regular vehicles into combat one. I had one toy character with a neon green motorcycle that converted into an attack helicopter. Brad “Chopper” Turner’s mask apparently projected holograms and the power was called “hocus pocus.” I think I mostly remember it because I was playing outside with it and lost it rather quickly—that and the fact that the men were tiny and ill-proportioned for working with other action figures. The M.A.S.K. team was assembled to contain and conquer their nemesis, an international criminal organisation called V.E.N.O.M.—Vicious Evil Network of Mayhem.