lost horizon

Not only a surpassing financial failure like the first attempt to adapt the story by James Hilton for the big screen just as Frank Capra’s 1937 try, the 1973 fantasy musical edition by Charles Jarrott and Bruce Bacharach was nearly career-ending for all involved.  Released for general audiences on this day and initially panned, excoriated by critics, it has not improved with age nor attained the status of a cult classic. The 1933 novel by the same author of Goodbye, Mister Chips was propelled in the cultural consciousness not by the adaptations but in part by dint of the media format its publishing house, Simon & Schuster, issued it in—printed as Pocket Book #1 and of course gave the language Shangri-La, which was the original name of the presidential retreat in Maryland, later designated Camp David.

myrrhbearers

Patron of funeral directors, morticians and undertakers, Joseph of Arimathea was fêted on this day according to the traditional Martyrologium Romanum but is now celebrated on 31 August along with his fellow secret disciple Nicodemus who helped prepare the body of Jesus for burial. Not much more is related about these wealthy (Joseph was appointed Nobilis Decurio, Minister of the Mines), covert followers in the Gospels who sought permission from Pontius Pilate to care for and prepare the corpse with spices that Nicodemus purchased after crucifixion and see to his entombment. The title refers to collective term given these two men and the Three Marys when they return to find the tomb empty. Further embellishment subsequently connects Joseph with the Arthurian cycle and the Matter of Britain, placing the saint among the first missionaries on the Isles (reportedly teaching the Cornish how to excavate tin) and of course guardian of the Holy Grail.

typhoon class

Though the working-outcome of the navy going into receivership with Pepsi was more improbable than the suggestion to retrofit a fleet of Soviet nuclear submarines as tanker ships to transport oil and natural gas was probably the less technical tenable, advisable alternative to generate capital after the nation’s dissolution. Back in 1995, at the suggestion of the governor of Arkhangelsk oblast, the location of the Russian submarine yards, one experiment was with underwater cargo shipping was undertaken—albeit with a non-strategic vessel and a manifest of foodstuffs—but not explored further due to cost-overruns and lack of funding. The logistics pitch, however, to fill-up directly from off-shore rigs and to travel the globe swiftly and virtually unimpeded (also without burning said fuel) was worth considering. Learn more at Weird Universe at the link above.

h-hour

Selected as a target due to its status as a regional transportation hub and medieval town centre that made it especially vulnerable to fire-bombing and with relative destruction surpassing the raid on Dresden a month prior, commenced by the same Royal Airforce Bomber bomber group, the city of Würzburg (previously, see also) was on this day in 1945 in the course of twenty minutes destroyed, with only a little more than a tenth of the historic buildings remaining. Over five-thousand individuals perished. After the war and the city’s occupation by American forces (which continued until 2008), in the ensuing decades, Würzburg was rebuilt as true to the original as possible.

black monday ii

With fiscal stimulus packages, interest rate cuts and quantitative easing announced the previous weekend unable to effectively stop the decline in global stock markets or restore confidence in future economic recovery, indices continued to repel to a new nadir on this day in 2020, triggering circuit breakers in place to suspend trading and control the crash and make for a less damaging landing. Worldwide, considering the amount of inherent precarity in terms of job security and the precipitous drop in consumption, travel and leisure activities it seems rather light, stock shares fell by a third, losing a percentile of value per day since the last week of February.

your daily demon: andromalius

Our final spirit in the calendar of demonology is the seventy-second infernal earl that presents as a man bearing a great serpent. When called upon by the exorcist, Andromalius enlists his thirty-six legions to bring back any thief and his plunder and generally mete out punishment for dishonest brokers and revealing hidden treasure. Classed as a Watcher, Andromalius spies on enemy activity and reports directly to Azazel and is countered by the angel Mumiah. The cycle of the Magical Calendar—in long form as the fifteenth century wall-chart suitable for framing printed by Freiherr Johann Baptist Großschedl ab Aicha in Frankfurt and laying claim to two astrological, astronomical charts by Tycho Brahe, a pharmacopia and the various sigils and signs iste Magnum Grimorium sive Calendarium Naturale Magicum Perpetuum Profundissimam Rerum Secretissimarum Cotemplationem Totiusque Philosophiæ Cognitionem Complectens—continues.

snapshot

Via their excellencies Nag on the Lake and Everlasting Blört, we are directed to a profound and touching curation and salvage operation a decade on launched by local photographer Munemasa Takahashi in the Lost & Found project, wherein volunteers gathered and conserved photographs scattered among the destruction caused by the earthquake, tsunami and nuclear plant disaster that struck Japan on 11 March 2011. Ranging from candid snapshots, vacation photos, wedding portraits and class pictures, over seventy hundred and fifty thousand pictures have been preserved and digitised with almost half-a-million reunited with those who lost them along with everything else in the catastrophe. Prints and framed photos are of course fragile things exposed but the damage that they sustained and personal connections they represent in whatever form speak to how this disaster upended lives.

6x6

antikythera mechanism: researchers rebuild a model of the ancient orrery, analogue computer using the latest cutting-edge technology  

uncertain times: learning from pastoral professionals to cope with volatility 

syncopated rhythm: turn your typing to piano jazz—via Swiss Miss 

long ambients: Brian Eno (previously) explains the origins of the genre with the teaching aid of William Basinski’s Disintegration Loops  

cargo cults: blockchain’s open ledger threatens to undermine efforts to reduce our reliance on fossil fuels—see also  

cleopatra’s needles: the strange obsession with Western powers taking trophy Egyptian obelisks and the transportation challenges involved