a.i.

Via Waxy, we are treated to another instalment commemorating half a century of text gaming (see previously) with a retrospective look at the first major Alternate Reality play and the community of enthusiast who first embraced it with. The elaborate internet scavenger hunt called the Beast was made to promote the Steven Spielberg production the story of the then recently departed Stanley Kubrick touted as the blockbuster of the summer of 2001 about a sentient machine that wanted to be a real boy.  The curious were encouraged to search for hints by phone, fax and web and engaged with this immersive entertainment experience.

apostles’ creed

Via the New Shelton wet / dry, we are referred to a study from the Annals of Improbable Research (previously, the group also behind the Ig Noble Awards) ranking the popularity of saints to pray to for protection and intercession against COVID. There’s methodology is the survey, though I suspect it might be rather self-selecting since respondents were polled on social media but we nonetheless appreciated the efforts and the occasion to revisit some of our holy helpers, like Saint Roch (number two), Saint Sebastian (number three, here pleading with Jesus for the life of the gravedigger during the Plague of Justinian), and coming in last at a tie, SS Expedit and Corona.

cheeseboard

Via fellow internet caretaker and turophile, Nag on the Lake, we are directed towards this thorough, wholesome and circumspect guide of how to serve and store almost any sort of cheese from an expert cheesemonger.  The pictured painting is called Still Life with Cheeses, Almonds and Pretzels (Stilleven met kazen, amandelen en krakelingen), created by Dutch artist Clara Peeters circa 1615.

7x7

the dance of the proletariat: a cultural revolutionary ballet 

reefer madness: an excerpt from “Cocaine, the Princess of Perdition” (1939)  

beef and dairy network: a 1986 board game called “Grade Up to Elite Cow” 

music to moog by: Melbourne’s Electronic instrument museum  

old growth: an anthology of the most memorable trees in the literary canon  

ambiguate: a notable lacuna, lexical gap for a word that ought to have been formed 

rhythm is a dancer: a comprehensive dance music archive covering the recent past—via Things Magazine

non più andrai

Always appreciative of learning that that the villainized and vilified come down to a matter of apocryphal license, we enjoyed disabusing ourselves of this staple fact of pop-culture (see also) in that there’s no substantiating the feud between Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart and Antonio Salieri and their vying for the position of court composer. The narrative was first introduced in a two-act opera by Nikolai Rimsky-Korsakov with book by Alexander Pushkin in 1897 with the elder dedicated maestro scheming to poison his younger rival, inspiring the 1984 film Amadeus by Miloš Forman.

genesius of arles

Conflated with a contemporary saint of the same name in Rome who was a stand-up comedian and spontaneously converted to Christianity in the middle of a routine satirizing these Jesus-y upstarts (let that be a warning) and with a pooled patronage, Saint Genès as he is known in French was a personal secretary of the magistrate of Gaul and is venerated on this day on the occasion of his martyrdom in 303 under the persecutions of Maximian and Diocletian (see previously) for objecting to a legal writ that would sanction further maltreatment of the religious sect. Together with his Roman counterpart, Genesius is patron and protector of notaries, secretaries, stenographers, clowns and comedians.

羅生門

Premiering in cinemas in Tokyo on this day in 1950, the classic psychological thriller by Akira Kurosawa and Kazuo Miyagawa, Rashōmon (previously), is the recounting of various testimonials about the murder of a samurai, witnesses betraying their ideal self-images through embellishment and omission. The film’s enduring legacy includes its narrative arc of self-serving and contradictory accounts, refuted through a Shinto medium channelling the spirit of the killed victim, and was one of the first Japanese movies to garner international acclaim, subtitled in a host of other languages and honoured at the Venice Film Festival the following year.

spare him his life from this monstrosity

Starting on this day in 1975 and continuing for the next three weeks, Queen recorded their innovative, multi-segmented epic with ballad, guitar solo and mock opera—and notably for the genre, classified as symphonic rock by some, without refrain, Bohemian Rhapsody (previously), at Rockfield studios in the Welsh town of Monmouth. The operatic conceits, the chorus and the braggadocio, were present in some of Freddie Mercury’s earlier compositions, notably “My Fairy King” and bandmates, their individual vocal part drilled over the course of weeks ten to twelve hours per session, laying down successive overdubbed tracks.