Via r/Obscure Media, we are directed to the 1958 McGraw Hill educational short The Snob about pushing away friends and working on oneself with a bunch of cavorting middle-aged teens. Sarah’s just too high-hat, but it’s hard to frame these personality types in a contemporary, intergenerational milieu—who’s the model adolescent, and what was perceived as snobbery is internalised as social anxiety. “All the kids who get by on apple-polishing will be there too and I don’t like them!”
One year on from the violent murder of George Floyd, we are reacquainted with the award-winning cover for de Volksrant newspaper’s Saturday Supplement from Noma Bar utilising negative space to illustrate people rallying in the streets over this injustice and inhumanity. Indisputably a harsh and discomforting reality that many are made to cope with on a daily basis but a sobering and eye-opening experience for all. Thanks to Duck Soup for the timeline of events that occurred in the aftermath of Floyd’s death and their enduring impact.
Released on this this day in cinemas in 1995, the Keanu Reeves and Dolph Lundgren dystopian science-fiction adaptation of the eponymous William Ford Gibson cyberpunk novel, the film takes place in 2021 with global population deeply and irretrievably engaged with an augmented reality internet which has a debilitating long-term effect called “nervous attenuation syndrome” (NAS) and transfer and transmission of data is closely controlled by mega-corporations who enforce their hegemony through the mafia.
Reeves’ character is a mnemonic courier discreetly transports data, avoiding traffic on the worldwide web, with an implant in his brain, and is entrusted with the safekeeping and eventually uploading into the public domain documents that reveal the corporations’ connections with organised crime and the computer virus that will return power and autonomy to the people, teaming up with the Lo-Teks under the leadership of J-Bone, played by Ice-T, a mysterious female projection of an omnipresent digital assistant and a genetically enhanced dolphin with abilities to break any encryption.
Ruling from this day until the final day of May, the fifth through the ninth degrees of Gemini, this fourteenth spirit and infernal marquis presents as a gallant archer (see also) dressed in green. Instigator of fights, Leraje has the power to cause wounds to turn gangrenous and to disperse mobs and governs a legion of thirty demons. According to the Ars Goetia and other sources, Leraje is countered with angel Mehahel.
religious allegory and iconography of Hieronymus Bosch’s Garden of Earthly Delights (see previously here and here) with a more secular and contemporary vernacular, the collage exploring modern vanities and consumerism. Much more at the links above and the short video on the exhibition below. Check out all three panels compared with the original and let us know your favourite emoji substitutions.
Through the lens of some of the artefacts of the transitional era when the railways began not only to collapse space but time as well and the attendant need for standardisation and synchronisation 99% Invisible (which one can read or listen to as a podcast) takes us on a tour of some of the remnants and malingerers of that period when the world suddenly grew a lot smaller and more interconnected. Especially notable is the introductory clock of the Corn Exchange in Bristol that made an early concession to locomotion by adding a second minute hand to its face to mark London time, with local time, lagging (see also here and here) by around ten minutes according to the reckoning of high noon. Much more to explore at the links above.
Premiering at the Opera Comique of London in Westminster on this day in 1878, the two-act musical theatre piece with musical arrangement by Arthur Sullivan and libretto by W.S. Gilbert, H.M.S. Pinafore was their fourth collaboration (see also here and here) but first to earn international acclaim, with an initial run of five hundred seventy performances. Retroactively referred to as the Savoy Operas, Gilbert and Sullivan’s works are considered foundational to musical theatre and are still staged and enjoyed to this day with numerous references and homages (too many to list) in popular culture.
Originally typesetters’ lingo for interlinear citations for a letter with a five-and-a-half point (about a pica) height—the US using a standard called agate which is also in newsprint the smallest legible text, the title refers to mark-up notations or glosses that appear above or to the side of logographic glyphs to aid in or clarify pronunciation—and sometimes as a means to communicate puns or entendre. In Japanese, the phonetic courtesy characters are called furigana and in Mandarin, Bopomofo—from the first four letters of the system: ใ , ใ, ใ and ใ.
