journée du 10 août

Symbolically, a year to the day after storming of the Tuileries Palace during which the Nation Guard of the Paris commune and confederates from Marseille and Brittany overpowered a detachment of Swiss Guards and took Louis XVI and the royal family into custody, the pivotal event that eventually led to the declaration of a republic, the adjacent Musée du Louvre was officially opened in 1793. Fortified in the late twelfth century to rebuff attacks from on the western side of the city by English Normandy, the name of the palace may be derived from an ancient wolf hunting lodge (lupus, lupara) originally on that site. In 1846, the US Congress charters the Smithsonian Institution (previously), after its benefactor and namesake English mineralogist James Smithson of the Royal Society, dying without an heir, bequeaths an endowment of half a million dollars. By dint of another coincidence, another grand institution of Europe, the Natural History Museum of Vienna (as das k. u. k.—kaiserlich und königlich—Hof-Naturalienkabinette) held its official opening ceremony on this day as well in 1865, sourced from the personally acquisitions of the Double Monarchy, by Emperor Franz Joseph I.

typically tropical

Best remembered for the 1975 Song of the Summer “Barbados,” reaching its pinnacle of popularity on this day those decades hence, the duo comprised of recording engineers Jess Calvert and Max West, the track was covered by the Vengaboys in 1999 as “We’re Going to Ibiza.” Typically Tropical performed the song on Top of the Pops, rounding out an album called Barbados Sky, and three years later received a song writing credit for the Hot Gossip disco number “I Lost My Heart to a Starship Trooper,” inspired by the Star Wars craze. “…Or are you like a droid—devoid of emotion?”

9x9

form follows function: a Bauhaus poster generator—see previosly—via Kottke 

reddy made magic: a gallery of images plus the Walter Lantz theme song for mascot and industry shill, Reddy Kilowatt   

dining car: vintage railway menus (see also) illustrate the evolution of American cuisine—via Nag on the Lake’s Sunday Links  

δ δ δ, can I help ya, help ya, help ya: a guide to joining the right sorority this fall  

jeux de la xxxiiie olympiade: the upcoming Paris games will be sustainable and moderately priced—see also  

attention k-mart shoppers: Americans emerge from the pandemic less patient, less empathetic than before and the service industry culture that fuels the cruel fantasy  

cycles pour animaux: a 1907 patent for a bicycle for horses to amplify their speed and le cheval-vapeur 

divergent association task: help science gauge creative reflexes by thinking up ten words as different as possible (in English only for now)  

betaplex: colourful retro cinema space in Ho Chi Mihn City recalls Saigon’s Art Deco architecture

mst3k s10e13

Airing first on this day in 1999, lampooning the 1968 cinematic adaptation of the long-running Italian comic Diabolik, this episode marked the series finale marked the end of a decade-long experiment subjecting the crew of the Satellite of Love to bad movies. The super villain of the film wreaks havoc along with his girlfriend Eva and sidekick Ginko across Europe for his own amusement and financial gain but also fights wrong-doing with wrong-doing, sadistically punishing criminal activity not aligned with his own. Generally panned outside of Italy as the creators assume familiarity with the characters, the direction of Mario Bava with score by Ennio Morricone later was recognised for its cinematography and became regarded as a cult classic, re-evaluated after the Mystery Science Theater 3000 treatment, a year prior scenes featuring in the Beastie Boys music video for Body Movin’. Over the course of the episode, the satellite is inadvertently deorbited and returned to Earth with the mad scientist and her henchmen in the lair Castle Forrester liquidating assets and lining up new employment.  There is a touching final farewell.  The show was happily rebooted in 2017 though never fully out of production in the interim.

your daily demon: berith

Hebrew for covenant and sometimes associated with the Canaanite deity Ba’al for the devotion shown to him by the keeping of graven images, this twenty-eighth spirit is an infernal duke who presents as a soldier clothed in red and riding a red steed and governs from today through 12 August. His office is to impart the art of divination and alchemy when compelled by his sigil and a magic ring, Bolfry as he is also know controls twenty-six legion and is opposed by the guardian angel Shaahiah.

inosculation

These gemels (from the Latin for pair, like Gemini) marked by foresters to not chop down (there’s some light logging in our woods but done fairly surgically with deference to unusual or aged trees though I wish we could protect them all with apotropaic magic) results from the above natural phenomenon (Anastomose) in which the roots, branches or trunks grow together. Conjoined specimens are colloquially called “husband and wife” or “marriage trees” and were possibly the sites of nuptial ceremonies.

floating capital

The excellent house blog of San Francisco’s storied DNA Lounge, JWZ, asks us to consider the meaning and message of one of the least popular emojis, the so described as man in business suit levitating (🕴)—an enigma but not in the sense of Avicenna’s thought experiment of the Floating Man or Magritte’s Son of Man, but rather what sort of capitalist, privileged elation that this symbol can be used to express. Click through for a selection of literary tropes for which this shorthand for rapture, stock-photo, narcissist or sociopath—whereas the real backstory involving a webdings exclamation mark and a Ska band is equally intriguing if not more circuitous.

dazzle camo

Via the always brilliant Things Magazine, we quite enjoyed this look into this demonstration project with automotive camouflage (see previously, see also) not necessarily meant to conceal but rather confuse and overwhelm the proliferation of prying eyes, perhaps containing a hidden QR code to throw ubiquitous spyware off the trail and send it down the garden path. Prior to the ubiquity of spy technology, the article also contains an interesting aside regarding how auto manufacturers first explored this type of detailing in order to combat corporate espionage when sleuthing photographers tried to capture images of road-testing prototype vehicles before their R&D was ready for market and perhaps steal their design—these concept cars out in the wild published under the caption, catagory Erlkönige (with the less poetic English translation, development mule) after the Johann Wolfgang von Goethe ballad about the Fairy King with the opening line Wer reitet so spat durch Nacht und Wind—Who rides so late through night and wind? to refer to the drivers who thought they were being stealthy when they were just rather conspicuous.