your experiment today is called pod people. it has nothing to do with pods, it has nothing to do with people. it has everything to do with hurting.

First airing on this day in 1991, the third episode of the third season of Mystery Science Theater 3000 (see previously) lampoons the 1983 Franco-Spanish sci-fi movie with the original title Los nuevos extraterrestres, which was originally meant to be a horror film with a murderous alien rampage in the tradition of Beowulf but changed course during shooting to capitalise on the success of E.T. (changed to avoid confusion) with a bond forming between one of the aliens and a human kid. The MST3K cast especially enjoy mishearing the performance of “Burning Rubber Tyres”—singing “hear the engines roar now” as “idiot control now.” 

index librorum prohibitorum

Though with the twentieth and last printed edition published in 1948 and Pope Paul’s December 1965 Motu Proprio (see also) reorganising the curia failing to renew or reinstate it as a part of canon law, an official notitiæ from the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith effectively abolished the Catholic Church’s list of prohibited books. In circulation and updated since 1571, the Church realised that their censorship and denunciations often carried the opposite effect than the one intended and chose instead to emphasise the moral and persuasive force of the banned books index rather than focus on punitive controls. Among those authors blacklisted include Voltaire, Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Baruch Spinoza, Immanuel Kant, Francis Bacon, Nicolaus Copernicus, Galileo Galilei, Blaise Pascal and John Milton.

7x7

dit-dot: via Web Curios (a lot more to see at this latest instalment), we’re invited to learn the basics of Morse code (previously) with this well designed, gamifying tutorial 

passeggiando: be a virtual flâneur in these composite Italian cities 

broadcast energy transmitter: delivering renewable energy from where it is plentiful to where it’s need via submarine transnational supergrids 

flock together: a TED Ed presentation on the evolution of feathers  

pyramid power: Duns Scotus and the esoteric history of the dunce cap—via Boing Boing  

essential reading: The Atlantic’s Ed Yong won a Pulitzer Prize for his COVID reporting  

ää: a collection of essays from the Times Literary Supplement on defence of endangered, indigenous languages

the incredibly strange creatures who stopped living and became mixed-up zombies

Airing for the first time on this day in 1997, Mystery Science Theater 3000 lampooned what was billed as the first “monster musical” and universally panned by critics and audiences as one of the worst films ever made. Released in 1964 in “hallucinogenic hypnovision,” three friends visit a seaside fun fair and encounter a group of occultists and mutilated monsters. Under threat of lawsuit by Columbia Pictures due to the title’s passing similarity with Dr Strangelove, it is the second longest-titled horror movie to Roger Corman’s Saga of the Viking Women and their Voyage to the Waters of the Great Sea Serpent.

roadside attractions and where to find them

Via friend of the blog Nag on the Lake’s Sunday Links (lots more to discover there), we are directed to a dual-posting from Maps Mania that features interactive charts of two very prolific travellers and photographers whose documentary work we’ve explored before in the US Library of Congress’ story map of the Roadside America as captured through the trips of John Margolies (see previously). From another perspective perhaps but with equal energy and enthusiasm and from overlapping eras, philanthropist and banker Albert Kahn in his Les Archives de la Planète project (1909 – 1931) dispatched dozens photographers to points all across the globe to record historical heritage that war and progress threatened to overcome—now classified and curated as pin-drops on a map that spans over fifty countries on five continents, featuring this 1924 image of the imperial castle of Cochem. Much more to explore at the links above.

antonio di padua

Priest and Franciscan friar and Doctor of the Church, Anthony of Lisbon (*1195 - †1231 in the commune west of Venice) is one of the most popular and quickly canonised among the cult of the saints and was acclaimed in his lifetime for giving powerful and persuasive sermons, even keeping a school of fish in rapt attention once and reputation for care for the poor and sick. Invoked in the name of lost things—credited first with the restoration of his own psalter full of notes when Anthony feared it was gone forever—his extensive patronage (see previously) includes things prone to going missing like mail, mariners, shipwrecks, travellers and lost souls, though not all who wander… Anthony in the extended sense is also the protector of the elderly, fisherfolk, amputees, Native Americans, harvests, watermen, horses, travel hosts and counter-revolutionaries.

mostly ghostley

Despite this first failed attempt to adapt this James Hilton novel (previously) about a veteran member of the British diplomatic corps accidentally discovery a utopian community hidden high in the Himalayas who must then choose between remaining or returning to the flawed civilisation he knows not being able to thwart future tries or reprises, the musical version from Albert Marre and Donald Saddler with ensemble cast including Jack Cassidy, Alice Ghostley and Shirley Yamaguchi opened on Broadway on this day in 1956. Running for only twenty-one performances (later produced as a Hallmark Hall of Fame television spectacular and somewhat derivative of The King and I), numbers included “Om Mani Padme Hum,” “The World Outside,” “What Every Old Girl Should Know” and the titular “Shangri-La.”

g7 action figures - limited edition