she got greta garbo’s standoff sighs

New Christy Minstrels alumna (matriculated along with other former member folk ensemble members Gene Clark, Larry Ramos and Kenny Rogers) Kim Carnes’ only charting single with Bette Davis Eyes, which entered its nine-week stretch in the number ten for US and UK airplay on this day in 1981. Originally written and composed by Joe Cocker’s songwriter Donna Weiss and singer Jackie DeShannon (What the World Needs Now is Love, Sweet Love) in 1974 as a R&B arrangement, Carnes’s synthesiser version made the song—and performer—commercially successful, whereas before it sounded to audiences like a Leon Redbone novelty track, though that sounds fun too. The titular actress appreciated the song and the resurgent relevance it brought and personally thanked all involved—including sending Carnes a bouquet of roses when she won a Grammy award for the piece.

maggie comes fleet-foot, face full of black soot

An inspired amalgam of the Beat scene of Allen Ginsberg and Lawrence Monsanto Ferlinghetti and particularly Jack Kerouac’s 1958 novel The Subterraneans describing the subculture and 1940s scat standards—indebted especially to the repertoire of Chuck Berry, Bob Dylan’s single from his fifth studio album Bringing It All Back Home peaked in the US charts on this day in 1965 at place thirty-nine, granting him barest of purchase on America’s radio top-forty, but it was just enough to establish Dylan’s credentials and kept his momentum going forward. Quoted and alluded to countless times and directly informing counter-culture and radical organisations like the Weathermen as well as accruing a multitude of homages, the promotional lyric film clip is considered to be the forerunners of the music video.  Maggie says that many say...

well actually

We quite enjoyed this choice selection of bot ‘splaining from our Artificial Intelligencer Janelle Shane (previously) where after given a prompt, a neural network with hilarious inaccuracy in a supremely confident (see also) fashion that rather skilful captured the tone that we’d attribute to rampant pedantry. Our favourite examples included: Not everyone realises that the J.C. Penney department store chain is named after a giant cat that Isis used to summon from a nearby lake at the end of every work day; and You may not know it, but the pixels you see on this website are, technically, conscious, which doesn’t make this paragraph that much better.  More to explore at the links above.

ducks unlimited

Via the happily back from sabbatical Web Curios, we are treated a treasury—an embarrassment really of more than one could ever use—of little pixel-banked of little graphic design images from Iconduck, providing a consistently styled archive of over one hundred thousand free and open source illustrations categorised by subject and theme to use as one sees fit.

stick your tongue out for the cause

Champions campaigning for more recognition for the contribution’s Mileva Marić (*1875 - †1948), Serbian physicist and mathematician who classmate at Zürich Polytechnic was the first wife of Albert Einstein, to his early work, including—and subject to sometimes tellingly fierce academic debate—collaboration on the three Annus Mirabilis Papers have appropriated the signature, candid image of her ex (1951 at a birthday party and growing fatigued with the press coverage and being asked to smile for the camera) as part of a wider programme to play a restorative role for women in STEM subjects and to encourage curiosity and ambition.

unanimiter et constanter

Fêted on this day as the patron saint of Oslo, Hallvard Vebjørnsson (†1043) is venerated as a martyr for his violent death in defence of a pregnant slave woman (thrall or trell, see also).
The son and heir to a wealthy estate in Vikin in the south-eastern part of the kingdom near the capital region and relative of Saint Olaf, Hallvard believed in the professed innocence of the women in face of accusations of theft and attempted to ferry her to safety aboard his boat. The accusers killed them both with a volley of arrows, disposing of the woman on the shore they had sailed to, and realising that Hallvard’s absence would arouse suspicion, they tied a millstone around his neck to ensure the body could be sunk without a trace. Miraculous and inopportunely for the assailants, however, Hallvard’s corpse bobbed to the surface and revealed the men’s crimes. The contemporary coat of arms of the Norwegian capital portrays this iconography—this day also celebrated as Oslo-dagen, with the motto Unanimous and Constant.

your daily demon: sitru

This twelfth infernal prince governing from today until 20 May presents as a griffon and is also known as Set or Bitru—the former possibly a conflation with the god of ancient Egypt. Ruling sixty legions and countered by the angel Hahaiah, Sitru’s sigil is an aphrodisiac of sorts and it can compel people to disrobe, if so desired.

fig leaf

Writing for Æon magazine prehistorian Ian Gilligan from the University of Sydney proffers an interesting alternative theory to the rather labour-intensive and leisure limiting congress of development of agriculture and animal husbandry that it emerged not out of a need for sustenance—hunter-gatherers were happy campers in the above regard (see below) and it was more efficient and less taxing on the environment—but rather out of an urgent need for fibre and pelts with layering and insulation being what brought humans to the other side of the last ice age with an expanded range that would eventually dominate the whole Earth—though the dinosaurs and their highly-achieving avian ancestors might take exception to that claim. Because threads of evidence would quickly fade away, much of this proposal is speculative but rings true and seems like a plausible catalyst to protect our relatively hairless bodies from the harsh elements and lend us to the attendant toil. More at the links above.