Being a committed and rather incurable flรขneur myself, learning about the playful praxis that combines elements of anarchy and the surreal in urban exploration and understanding how built environments and pathways influence residents and guests struck me as engrossing and endearing for its vagaries of association and membership.
greatest hits: resonant echoes and forgotten curiosities from another internet caretaker of this past year
every who down in whoville was sick of the rules—all the masks, sanitisers and closures of schools: how the Grinch stalled whovid
dj earworm: five decades of pop music
the great conjunction: a keen-eyed photographer captures the International Space Station moving between Saturn and Jupiter (previously)
you’ll have to speak up—i’m wearing a towel: decoding the catalogue of Simpsons’ gags and one-liners that might have sailed over some viewers
crimes of the art: casing the most stolen painting ensemble, the Ghent Altarpiece (see previously), through history
2020: the musical: Miss Cellania’s annual assortment of lists recapping the year
Perhaps best known for her debut hit song that despite being sung in entirely French circumvented the language barrier and charted across Europe Voyage, voyage, the performer Claudie Fritsch-Mentrop was born this day in Paris in 1952. Plus loin que la nuit et le jour (voyage, voyage).
Adapted for television and first broadcast as a Christmas ghost story back in 1972, the eponymous play directed by Peter Sasdy and written by Thomas Nigel Kneale innovatively tempered horror with elements of scientific plausibility by a research and development team of an electronics firm that have occupied a recently renovated a reportedly haunted Victorian mansion as their new facility and begin collaborating on a new project in computer programming and finding a new format for recording digital media.
Once mysterious events begin happening including the death of one colleague, they conduct some research and interview locals to discover that an unsuccessful exorcism had taken place in the house in 1890. The chief researcher theorises that the apparition that frightened his colleague to death was not a ghost in the traditional sense but that the room, the exposed stone walls somehow psychically recorded that botched casting out spirits and tries to tease out the secret of triggering the playback mechanism and harness it for data storage, only to realise that successive tragedies record over one another. Since the broadcast, the hypothesis of residual hauntings and the “stone tape theory” have been adopted by parapsychological investigators.
Occurring in Paris on this day—the third of Nivรดse IX (otherwise Christmas Eve, 1800)—the royalist plot of thee rue Saint-Nicaise to kill le Consulat of the Republic narrowly failed with Napoleon Bonaparte and his wife Josephine just barely escaping with their lives. 
In the late afternoon, the plotters had positioned their machine infernale and loaded it with gunpowder and ammunition as Napoleon proceeded to the opera to attend an oratorio by Joseph Haydn, whom reportedly slumbered during the ride and slept through the attempt on his life, whilst one unwitting co-conspirator and five by-standers were killed, afterwards insisting on attending the performance. This account later led Sigmund Freud to the conclusion as part of his psychological profile that the man was a sound-sleeper and dreamt of past battles, underminings that he had survived, thus cementing the idea that dreams—in the main—echo, correlate with wake-up calls in popular culture.
Observed in some Jewish communities dating back as far as the late seventeen-hundreds with scholastic reinforcement in the following century, the Yiddish term (ื ืืื ื ืַืื) for Christmas Eve likely comes from natalis but may also refer to the hanged one, nitleh, an epithet for Jesus during the Middle Ages. 
In medieval Europe, non-observers were often forbidden from being seen in public—with Yuletide often signalling the beginning of attacks on Jewish neighbours by Christians—so this was a good excuse to staying in and specifically not studying the Torah and abstaining from enjoyment so as not to give any glory to the day, though for some, reading the Sefer Toledot Yeshu (an alternate hagiography that portrays Jesus as a womanising charlatan though possibly accounts themselves are exaggerated as another excuse to label people as blasphemers—that is, megadef) as an acceptable activity to engage in. Chess and card games became a tradition, in lieu of other pastimes, and children were apprehensive about being snatched away on this night by demon Jesus.
