oh boy!

Conceived and produced by Jack Good (*1931 - †2017) for ITV and first airing on this day in 1958, this weekly programme was the premier teenage all-music and dance show. Each episode featured an artist in resident with a number of special guests, including repeat appearances by Cliff Richard, Tommy Steele, Marty Wilde, Billy Fury and the Dallas Boys, many performers whom Good also managed. After a two year-run, Good experimented with the format and made Shindig!—which directly influenced Ready Steady Go and other similar shows.

5x5

life finds a way: samples from Perseverance suggest Martian surface was wet for a long time  

yan, tan, tethra: finger counting conventions across various cultures—via Nag on the Lake’s Sunday Links

well-tempered clavier: the mathematical magic of JS Bach  

annals of improbable research: laureates of this year’s Ig Noble prizes announced—see previously  

uchuu: cosmologist create a detailed simulated pocket Universe—downloadable to the public, a hundred terabytes worth of data

your daily demon: marchosias

Governing from today through 17 September, our thirty-fifth spirit is infernal grand marquis presents in the likeness of a she-wolf with the wings of a griffon and the tail of a serpent. A good ally to a conjurer and willing to aid in any fight, Marchosias formerly belonged to the angelic rank of Dominions with control of thirty legion and hopes in vain to be restored to Heaven and the Seventh Throne after twelve hundred years. Marchosias is opposed by the guardian angel Kaveqiah.

bergruine hutsburg

Having lost the trail a couple weeks ago trying to hike up to the ruined donjon, isolated and nearly forgotten though once one of the most imposing fortifications in the area due to its location on the former border between East and West Germany, whilst trying to approach it from the Bavarian side, we ventured up the Hutsburg to see the eponymous fortress from the thüringischer side.

First passing through the ghostly remnants of villages deemed a liability owing to their nearness to the border (previously here and here), we slowly climbed up the mountain and at the wooded summit encountered the tall of the shield wall and foundations, with the sun shining through the otherwise dark forest through the ancient portal.

Though far older than its first documented reference in the early twelfth century (possibly from the four hundreds in some form of fort), I suspect that these runes were a more recent graffito. It was a strategic possession of the counts of Henneberg and degenerated over the years as the power of the family waned to little more than an outpost for slum lords—Raubritter, literal robber barons in the sense of unscrupulous feudal landowners who imposed higher taxes without the approval of a higher authority and expropriation, culminating with the intervention of the king in the fabled execution of a gang of such bandits after a a siege lasting weeks (the subject of a German nursery rhyme:

Ernst war sie eine stoles Feste / doch heute sieht man our noch Reste. Mit Nürnberge Schraubenzeug ward sie gebrochen / Und zweiundviersig Räuber kamen hervorgekrochen. Noch erhobenen Hauptes und voller Stolz, / kürtze man sie gleich um selbiges, was Solls.

Basically, Once a proud Fort, but today only rubble remains / Battered with catapults / forty-two robbers emerged / Hoisted by their own petard) and was passed through the lordship of Tann and Kere.

The bulwark was not to meet its final fate and fall into ruin and disrepair until the Peasants’ Revolt of 1525 (die Bauernkrieg, see also) when the rebellion successfully stormed and took the castle, the Hutsburg being one of the few castles of the Rhön active at the time of its taking, most empty and irrelevant at this point in history and under the administration of a bailiff. Though the victory was not strategically significant, it was important symbolically as overthrowing the trapping and tool of oppression and serfdom.

shower-thoughts or super criticality

Though precedents in chemical chain-reactions that could lead to explosions were well understood and the mechanism of nuclear fission had yet to be fully articulated, scientist Leó Szilárd (previously) first hypothesised the possibility of an atomic chain-reaction whilst waiting on a stop light on Southhampton Row at the crossing of Russell Square in Bloomsbury. This flash of insight on the part of the exiled Hungarian physicist, realising that an atom could be split with the recently discovered neutron, cascading with the release of more neutrons plus massive amounts of energy would be self-perpetuating, self-amplifying, would lead to nuclear applications in warfare and power production.

from marathon to waterloo in order categorical

Though probably two separate epic long-distance races are being conflated, most scholars date the Battle of Marathon, a pivotal moment for Western civilisation in which the coalition of Greek armies defeated Persia and rebuffed their attempts at invasion, to this day in 490 BCE with the event preserved in the popular imagination by its feat of athletic endurance.
An Athenian scout called Pheidippides is dispatched from the city-state to Sparta to rally support for the battle—covering a distance on foot of over two-hundred-twenty-five kilometres in the span of a day, and then when the Greeks prevailed ran from the battlefield back to Athens to announce nenikēkamen, νενικήκαμεν, Joy to you—we’ve won and promptly dying of exhaustion before the city’s magistrates is probably a bit of romanticising and capitalising on the story for the reboot of the modern Olympics in 1896 that included such a long-distance run that matched the track from Marathon. Assailable as it was without a melodramatic death, the event was to become a staple for the games and controversially in 1908 London Games with the United Kingdom adding some three-hundred yards to the race in order to place the finish-line at Windsor Castle from the originating stadium. By the time of the 1924 Paris Olympics, the committee had declared this distance canon.

kuba komet

Only associating Wolfenbüttel with the digestif Jägermeister, we were grateful for friend of the blog Nag on the Lake for letting us also know about the town’s console furniture (Tonmöbel) factory that specialised in housing and cabinets for radio, record players and televisions. In operation from 1948 to 1972, the pieces often integrated into one luxury home entertainment unit, founded by inventor and entrepreneur Gerhard Kubetschek (*1909 - †1976), like the pictured model, a true status-symbol and epitome of Mid-Century Modern. More to explore at the links above.

the dead internet theory

On this anniversary which has propounded two Forever Wars (one of which capitalised on the 9/11 terror attacks to as a pretext to invade Iraq with the media mostly obliging, a misdirection that prised open for some a credibility chasm), the panopticon of the surveillance state, xenophobia, sectarianism, intolerance, violence, bloodshed all at a very dear price with the most treacherous legacy perhaps being the exportable cult of conspiracy theorists that first emerged as Truthers, then morphed into Birthers, Pizzagate, QAnon and whatever atrocity is next in the line of succession, we are presented a new one positing that the world wide web, acknowledging that the majority of traffic is bot driven, did die the death approximately five years ago and what remains is not all an elaborate hoax but rather a platform almost entirely dominated by artificial intelligence. Weighted interaction, with human engagement or robotic attention-seeking seems to matter little ultimately in a world of detached rankings and recursive references, but what if since 2016, the web and its various walled-gardens was depopulated and replaced with neural network propagandists, influencers and marketers? It’s patently ridiculous and like most “independent research” lurches to the territory of unhinged and offensive but the veiled unreality of it all makes it intriguing and a challenge to disprove, and with no prevailing mainstream narrative to counter the arc of conservation, evidence, it is garnering traction. There’s more than a kernel of truth to the manipulative, unrestrained and inhumanly automated nature of social media and shadow profiles created to supplement the personalities of those who don’t participate sufficiently. Not that the metaverse was ever particularly welcoming, it certainly seems uninviting if made by and for people-pleasing machines.