i just want to find eleven-thousand seven hundred and eighty votes

In an extraordinary hour-long phone call over the weekend reminiscent of Trump’s earlier attempt to persuade the Ukrainian government to smear his political opponent with defamatory material discovered or manufactured regarding his son, Trump pressured the Georgian secretary of state to apply a new calculus to their method for tabulating the vote and overturn the narrow but solid and multiple times reconfirmed win for Joe Biden whose ticket carried the state. This behaviour, inappropriate and contemptible, is a low point in American democracy and warrants a second impeachment before Trump sets a new nadir.

it is pitch black—you are likely to be eaten by a grue

Via Waxy, we learn that in homage to the first text-based version of the pioneering computer game Oregon Trail (see also) that began circulating—peer-to-peer—in the winter of 1971, Aaron A. Reed of Substack will be looking back at the past five decades of gaming and its evolution with an in depth retrospective year week for the coming year. Watch that space for new instalments. You have died of dysentery.

it befits the roman pontiff

Since in response to earlier threats from Leo X (previously) and repudiation of forty-one points put forward in his Ninety-Five Theses, Martin Luther burned his copy of the papal bull Exsurge Domine at the Elstertor in Wittenberg, the Pope issued his Decet Romanum Pontificem (the title taken from the first words of the text) on this day in 1521, excommunicating the religious reformer (see previously). The Catholic Church has not rescinded the excommunication, despite urging from Lutherans. 

 

schrifterlaß

On this day in 1941 in a directive circulated by head of the party chancellery and private secretary to Adolf Hitler, Martin Bormann settled the long-standing Fraktur-Antiqua Dispute (see previously) by declaring the former “undesirable” and the latter Latin script influenced by printing and automation to be in align with the ideals of Nazism. Although a typographical debate in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, the blackletter and calligraphic typefaces coexisted. Originally seen as un-German when the Antiqua font came in after the 1806 dissolution of the Holy Roman Empire and scholastically used for parsing Germanic tradition and terminology from foreign influences, supporters and proponents on both sides extolled the virtues of their preferred over the alternative, citing one was better for compact printing, higher legibility—did not contribute to myopia and blindness, more universal, less ornamental, and so on. Eventually these arguments began to carry ideological and political weight, with the Führer denouncing its continued use in 1934 in a speech before the Reichtag: “Your alleged Gothic internalisation does not find a place in this age of iron and steel, glass and concrete—of womanly beauty and manly strength—of headraised high with defiance…” The probable motivation for this edict was for ease in distributing propaganda material to countries being occupied and attacked in a typeface that the besieged were familiar with.

the seditious dozen

A group of Republican senators and senators-elect with the backing of the vice-president have announced plans to reject electors from states that are considered “suspect” for having voted wrongly—unless Congress commits to creating a commission to investigate their baseless claims of voter fraud.

Having failed to achieve any the desired outcome in the court system full of judges appointed by the Trump administration, the incumbents seem to hope that this treasonous band of sycophants can delay, belay the inevitable. In a normally anodyne ceremony, the senate convenes to ratify the ballots of the Electoral College on 6 January. The senate, which voted to acquit Trump of high crimes and misdemeanours after the House impeached him, feels that this dopey cos-play coup will likely fail because of Democrat control of congress and the likelihood of the GOP losing their thin majority of senate seats as well in the Georgia run-off election.

berchtoldstag

The Alemannic holiday celebrated generally on this day in Liechtenstein and certain Swiss cantons and strongly associated with Rauhnächte traditions has contending etymologies and pedigrees including a late twelfth century abbot, a storied hunting expedition undertaken around the same time by a like-named duke or to the alpine pagan protectoress of wild things called Perchta (*Brehtaz, Bertha) and leader of the entourage of the hunting party. This final candidate is the most interesting and compelling, the figure a cultural continuity from pre-Christian influences and was given the role of upholding totem and taboo, reinforcing ritual fasting and the prohibition of working on the holidays, Sabbaths and monitoring the progress of servants and craftspeople to make sure that they were keeping up with the productivity quotas—later transferred to winnowing the naughty from the nice (see also) like her male counterpart Krampus—with the good and upstanding rewarded with a silver coin the next day in a shoe or pail and the recalcitrant would be eviscerated and have their innards and the contents of their bellies replaced with straw, flax and pebbles.

7x7

3 a.m. eternal: the musical stylings of the KLF are finally available for streaming services—via Things Magazine  

paleofutures: the lunar Western Moon Zero Two takes place in 2021  

no show: Trump fails to appear at his Mar-a-Lago New Year’s Eve bash—guests entertained by Rudy Giuliani and Vanilla Ice 

not disappoint: a recommendation for a good polyglotinous language lover to follow, whose byline does rather suggest a crash blossom  

star wars—give me those star wars, nothing but star wars: the saga continues  

alla breve or cut for time: big, brute data analysis may finally resolve the controversy over Beethoven’s metronome and how the composer intended his works to be heard—via Strange Company

klanglandschaft: Swiss artist Zimoun engineers ambient soundscapes with everyday materials

zed-victor-2

Though never crossing over to the American television market as perhaps ahead of its time with its franker portrayal of the consequences of crime and its toll on law enforcement in police procedurals, Z Cars—premiering on BBC1 on this day in 1962—ran for an impressive twelve seasons, clocking just over eight hundred episodes (though sadly fewer than half are believed to have been preserved) and launched a few spin-offs.
Inspired by a childhood convalescence imposed on the script-writer spent monitoring the radio bandwidth reserved for patrols (hence the title) and set in a badly ageing seaport, fictionalised but based on any number of real places in the North, one of the first series with a regional flavour, it starred Stratford Johns as chief inspector with deputies Frank Windsor, Brian Blessed and James Ellis with numerous guest stars joining the cast and notable cameo-appearances. The theme music heard in the opening below is inspired from the traditional Liverpudlian folk song called “Johnny Todd” and was arranged by Bridget Fry and then-husband Fritz Spiegl.