helige mathilde von sachen

Patroness of, among other things, disappointing children, Saint Matilda of Ringelheim (see previously) is venerated on this day on the occasion of her death in Quedlinburg in 968 (*892), acclaimed for her charitable acts and strong sense of justice. Despite her status as a king-maker and raising ostensibly, widow of Henry the Fowler, Duke of Saxony, regnant and politically savvy in her own right, her eldest son Otto I who restored the Holy Roman Empire, Bruno, Archbishop of Köln, Gerberga Queen of France through marriage to Louis IV, Hedwig, mother of Hugh Capet and perhaps tellingly Henry, Jr. made Duke of Bavaria and called the quarrelsome, matters soon descended into petty squabbles over land, inheritance and alliances. Accused of mismanagement and sent into exile with Emperor Otto staking claim to his mother’s possessions, Matilda (from Old High German, incidentally, for the Mightiest in Battle) and it remains a point of contention the exact nature of these feuds and whether the family was ever reconciled. Despite or rather because of this administrative embargo, Matilda focused her efforts on establishing more monastic communities for women on her estates, sought and granted ecclesiastical immediacy and papal privileges for all convents in East Francia.

mir eo-18

Becoming one of the founding mission specialists that would establish the space shuttle programme in 1979 and subsequently flying four missions on board Challenger, Atlantis and Discovery, NASA astronaut Norman Earl Thagard became on this day in 1995 the first US citizen to reach Earth orbit in a Russian craft (see also), traveling with the crew of the Soyuz TM-21 launched from the Baikonur Cosmodrome, effectively the first American cosmonaut for his fifth and last spaceflight. As researcher, Thagard spent six months aboard the space station Mir conducting a battery of experiments and presently teaches engineering and acts as a technical advisor for filmmakers producing space-based movies.

virtus, unita, fortior

Though the tiny condominium of the Principality of Andorra had existed for centuries under the current shared rule between the head of state of France and the Bishop of Urgell as co-princes (chartered in 1278 but created in the ninth century by Charlemagne as a buffer march from Islamic Iberia), its constitution (la Constitució d’Andorra) was not formally codified and adopted until February 1993 and accepted by popular assent on this day, celebrated thereafter on its anniversary—though the document did not carry legal weight until its promulgation when it was published and the register was made available to all citizens, around sixty-four thousand at the time.

waiting for the train that goes home, sweet mary

Entering the US singles charts on this day in 1971 and peaking at number ten, the Brewer & Shipley song featured Jerry Garcia of the Grateful Dead on steel guitar. The song was successful despite widespread ban by radio stations for its drug references. For their part, the band insisted that toke was short for token as in a ticket—thus the line “waiting downtown at the railway station,” though later Mike Brewer related while they were touring as the opening act for Melanie everyone got very stoned on marijuana one evening with Brewer having to retire early having smoked too much and he was “one toke over the line” and developed a song around it. Despite vice president Spiro Agnew pressuring the federal communications commission (FCC) to ban this “blatant drug culture propaganda that threatens to sap our national strength” within a few weeks Lawrence Welk was lauding the song as a “modern spiritual” and had regulars Dick Dale and Gail Farrell perform a cover version on his musical variety show.

dewdrop

Last year it was a little too warm for snowdrops (Galanthus, Schneeglöckchen) but this spring we had quite a profusion including a few fine examples of the related but rarer leucojum (below center, from the Greek for white violet, Knotenblumen for the green or yellow knotted tips to their outer petals).

Both snowflakes as all related genera are known are part of the Amaryllis family of bulbous perennials and are also sometimes called Saint Agnes’ flower, as they usually begin to appear around the feast day of Agnes of Bohemia on 2 March, springing up in shadier, wetter spots and tend to be pretty hardy and resilient garden plants despite their seemingly delicate and ephemeral nature.  Summer snowflakes also grow in late spring.

8x8

zaouli: a traditional dance of the of the Guro people of central Côte d’Ivoire 

line-dry only: experimental living apparel sequesters carbon dioxide from the atmosphere and produces oxygen  

everydays—the first five-thousand days: the digital artist better known as Beeple sold an artwork as a non-fungible token (previously) for nearly seventy million dollars at auction, more here  

⏯: Lou Ottens, the inventor of the cassette, passes away, aged ninety-four 

 upward mobility: theory that Flintstones and Jetsons take place simultaneously with an elite technocracy and a post-apocalyptic underclass—see also  

ikebana: a vintage guide to the art of Japanese flower arranging, previously  

life finds a way: using parallel processing and stochastic algorithms, one programmer generates Mona Lisa from John Horton Conway’s game  

personæ: short documentary Beyond Noh filters through thousands of colourful and evocative ceremonial masks from cultures around the world

yes, this is dog

Via Mel Magazine, we are directed towards a curator of so-called ancient memes, circa 2007 to 2013, who showcases archetypal artefacts of a bygone era that can seem as escaping remote and unrecognisable because of its relative proximity (and directly proportional cringeworthiness in conflict with the toxicity of nostalgia) as any reference to fossilised culture. What is your werewolf name?

isogloss

Via Language Hat, we are referred to a cartographic website called mapologies that specialise in linguistic, dialectical demarcation (see also here and here), like the Apfel-Appel line. It was not only engrossing to see the shifting sentiment, etymologies and root languages (like this toasting map of Europe) but also the distribution of use for a certain item or animal, like the multiple Spanish words for popcorn across the language’s Sprachraum, as attested by the saying “No two popcorns are called the same,” unsurprising as maize is native to the Americas but nonetheless the variety is striking.