how does it feel when you got no food?

Released mid-September as a single from their debut studio album, The Youth of Today, the song from the British-Jamaican reggae band topped the UK charts this week in 1982 with their bowdlerised cover of The Mighty Diamonds’ 1981 tune “Pass the Kutchie,” a slang term for a cannabis pipe from the patois for Dutch oven, which excised and substituted all drug references for poverty, launching the song’s popularity outside of the Caribbean community. The original line “How does it feel when you got no herb?” became the above but with dutchie itself becoming synonymous with a marijuana joint. Give me the music—make me jump and prance.

net promoter score

Incredulously and with much the same hubris and spirit that the American baseball commission calls its big annual play-off the World Series (it’s not) or organisers an international beauty pageant Miss Universe (she’s not), we learn thanks to the always authentic and as-advertised Miss Cellania that unsurprisingly there’s not only no US airline placing in the top ten globally, because America can’t rise to the challenge to compete on the world-wide stage, there’s a separate ranking for North American airlines. The US doesn’t even manage to sweep this category with Air Canada placing third.

stunaep

Reprising an Austin Kleon post from last year for this anniversary of the first time Charles Schultz’ Charlie Brown and friends first appeared in print in 1950 (see previously), we have these cut-ups of Peanuts strips re-mixed to consider and mediate on—which I think only enhances the characters’ philosophic outlook in the same daily dose. Much more at the link up top including multiple anthologies of zines composed of the same material.

this ain’t no sunday school picnic

Having garnered quite a bit of experience and reputation in the Pittsburg market making television commercials, industrials and educational shorts with their production company The Latent Image, George A. Romero (previously) and John Russo resolved to make a full-length feature responding to audience interest in the genre of horror, realising their ambitions on this day in 1968—as our faithful chronicler informs, with the premier of the classic featuring a growing horde of the cannibalistic undead surrounding a group barricaded in a farmhouse in Pennsylvania. Though establishing the rules and conventions for future films of this type, zombies are never mentioned, and like all good monster movies allegorically tracks and critiques contemporary social mores including Cold War paranoia, Western hegemony and domestic apartheid.

born to the purple

Via Strange Company’s Weekend Link Dump, we very much enjoyed learning about young aspiring chemist William Henry Perkin’s accidental discovery of one of the first synthetic dyes whilst trying to extract quinine, the sole treatment for malaria known to Victorian London, from coal tar—a considered a waste by-product of burning coke and coal but in reality quite useful. Purple was still very much en vogue—signalling that wearers were otherwise porphyrogenita though to harvest the mollusks that were its natural source, the Murex snail, was exceedingly hard to come (as the species was nearly driven to extinction by dint of the royal colour) by and substitutes were quick to fade and wash-out. The substance that Perkin’s experiments yielded stained fabric and appeared to be colourfast, and capitalising on tradition, originally deemed it Tyrian purple, later naming the product, the first to be marketed commercially and leading to an revolution in chemical research, to mauveine after the French term for the mallow (Malva sylvestris) wildflower.

computerised axial tomography

On this day in 1971, the first CAT scan (nowadays usually referred to as a CT scan) was conducted at Wimbledon on an unidentified patient on a diagnostic machine developed by engineer Godfrey Hounsfield and physicist Allan MacLeod Cormack. The duo were recipients of the 1979 Nobel prize for their collaboration and the former is the namesake for the quantitative gauge of radiopacity—that is the ability of electromagnetic radiation to penetrate a media with air at -1000 HU (Housfield Units), water at the baseline of zero and bone set at +1000 at the other end of the spectrum, with identifiable values for various fats, tissues and ligaments.

highly irregular

Via the always engrossing 99% Invisible, we are introduced to the poem “The Chaos” penned by Dutch teacher and travel writer Gerard Nolst Trenité under the the pseudonym Charivarius (see also) in 1920 as a part of a broader commiseration and discussion on the mongrel nature of the English language and the challenges that poses for new learners. An excerpt of the rather epic length work begins:

Dearest creature in Creation,
Studying English pronunciation,
I will teach you in my verse
Sounds like corpse, corps, horse and worse.

Ending thus with the emblematic, problematic words italicised:

Finally: which rhymes with “enough,”
Though, through, plough, cough, hough, or tough?
Hiccough has the sound of “cup”…
My advice is—give it up!

7x7

cultured: beautiful Petri dish art (see also) from Dasha Plesen  

tax centinels: protesting college students conspired to create “penny famines” across the US in the late 1930s 

rediffusion: the Thames Television archives—via Things magazine  

fat bear bracket: follow the celebration of survival and success with Katmai’s nature preserve ursine residents—via Hyperalleric’s Required Reading 

the thing on the fourble board: a 1948 episode of the radio programme Quiet, Please! is considered to be one of the scariest broadcasts ever 

bisection: the spiralling figural sculpture of Isabel Miramontes  

frustule: the rich diversity of diatoms illustrated in an 1890 volume