the gospel according to matthew

Venerated in the Eastern Church on this day according to the Julian calendar (21 September in Western Christianity), the tax collector (among his patronage—including also accountants, bankers and broadly civil servants) turned evangelist would have been universally despised as a collaborator with the Roman occupation and garnered criticism for Jesus for associating with such a person. Although the Biblical accounts are anonymous and only attributed to the titular superscription, Saint Matthew is attested to collecting oracles—that is, sayings—of Christ, with some crediting the Apostle with the authorship of the Q Source—from the German Quell or Source Source, a hypothetical canonical rubric of quotations, ghost-written by an angel, that would account for similarities among the first books of the New Testament.

nec temere, nec timide

With the above motto meaning “Neither rather nor timidly,” the Free City of Danzig / Wolne Miasto Gdańsk was established on this day in 1920 under the terms of the Treaty of Versailles following the peace of World War I. Created as separate from the post-war German republic (populated with the overwhelming number of residence and sandwiched in between Königsburg, Kaliningrad) and the Republic of Poland as a League of Nations protectorate—with limited self-autonomy and bound with Polish customs, the city council was infiltrated by 1936 with representatives pushing to rejoin Germany, having been granted independence once under Napoleon Bonaparte and recaptured by Prussia after the Battle of Leipzig in 1814—the most recent declaration of self-determination being a compromise between territory was annexed as Reichsgau Danzig-Westpreußen, mirroring status quo ante bellum, to exist as a contested land until the end of conflict.

1. e4 e5

Via ibīdem, we are directed towards an exquisite narrative told through a game of guided-chess based on a famous round played between New Orleans native Paul Charles Morphy (*1837 - †1884, a prodigy and called the pride and sorrow of the game for having announced his retirement while still in his prime) and simultaneous exhibition, blindfolded against Karl II, Duke of Brunswick and Comte Isouard de Vauvenarguesat the Italian Opera House of Paris, a parallel playbill as it were for the night’s performance of Vincenzo Bellini’s Norma.

meanwhile back at the manse

Via two of our absolutely favourite fellow internet caretakers Nag on the Lake and Things Magazine, we are directed latest to the latest annual from McMansion Hell Yearbook (previously) with this 1981 fever-dream of a property in DuPage County, in the state of Illinois, US of A—aptly introduced as “dentist office meets cult compound meets late-stage Frank Lloyd Wright (Wedding-Cake era).” Much more to explore at the links above.

landshuter hochzeit

Recreated every four years by the city of Landshut in celebration of one of the largest historical processions and pageants of medieval times, the so-called Landshut Wedding between Duke George of Bavaria (Herzog Georg, called the Rich) and Princess Hedwig (Jagwiga) Jagiellon, daughter of King Casimir IV of Poland, the lavish, sumptuous ceremony and feast, took place on this day in 1475. Though the couple continued in happy for over a quarter of a century until George’s death, because all male heirs pre-deceased their father and Salic laws at the time in the kingdom prevented their capable and savvy daughters Elisabeth or Margaret from inheritance and the power-vacuum and counter-claims led to a succession crisis that split the duchy into four.

inner oort cloud

Co-discovered on this day in 2003 by astronomical teams in Caltech, Yale and the Gemini Observatory, the planetoid, trans-Neptunian object (previously) provisionally nicknamed the Flying Dutchman because of its slow (eleven-thousand plus years) and solitary journey around the Sun that made researchers almost miss it for a fixed star, it was welcomely given the official designation 90377 Sedna in honour of the Inuit sea goddess who dwells at the bottom of the frigid Arctic Ocean, and establishing that future objects found in the same orbital region should be named after polar mythologies.

The astronomical monogram, which matches the ones of ancient astrology quite well, is a combination of the Eastern Canadian Inuktitut characters ᓴᓐᓇ, Sanna—the modern version of the name and suggests a leaping seal. Because of the extreme eccentricity of its perihelion—too great to have been caused by the gravitational influence of the known worlds, Sedna’s existence lends credence to either interstellar interlopers or a so called Planet Nine, ten-times the size of Earth but hidden as a cosmic counter-balance.

savage intruder

Later re-released as Hollywood Horror House, we were delighted by this thoroughgoing, scene-by-scene review of the 1970 Donald Wolfe horror flick starring Miriam Hopkins, John David Garfield, Gale Sondergaard, Virginia Wing and Florence Lake from Poseidon’s Underworld (previously) that relates the story of an ageing actress living in a Tinsel Town mansion (in the spirit of Sunset Boulevard and What Ever Happened to Baby Jane? with a bit of Rosemary’s Baby thrown in for good measure) attended by a retinue of domestics, who engages a new personal assistant—in the midst of a mysterious killing spree terrorising the area—who quickly comes to dominate the estate and household management. Here’s the feature in full below but honestly I got a bigger kick out of the screen-captures, trivia and commentary at the link above.

8x8

uap: an interview with former US DoD head of the Advanced Aerospace Threat Identification Programme says that “Tic-Tac” craft have been observed by the navy for decades  

dutch angle: dramatic tilt in cinematography  

comrade kiev: an exquisitely curated collection of posters from Soviet times  

p68/dulcimer: a prototype of the iPod—which celebrated its twentieth birthday last month—via Twisted Sifter  

subjective distance: more on the ordering of adjectives and the unwritten rules of language—see previously 

quesos y besos: a soft goat cheese from Spain beat out many contenders to be awarded the top prize for the annual World Cheese Awards  

shoulder-surfing: a patent to discourage lookie-loos with a screen blur for those without the proper headgear and glasses—via Slashdot 

discopter: Alexander Weygers patented the design for the first UFO flying vehicle decades before the craze in sightings and visitations