the simpsons sing the blues

The first cartoon ensemble to reach the top spot on the singles charts since the Archies’ fabricated band’s performance of “Sugar, Sugar” back in 1969, on this day in 1991 the song “Do the Bartman” from the titular album grabbed and held the number one position. Never officially released as a single in the US despite air-play, the song written and produced by Michael Jackson earned critical acclaim including a nomination for the year’s MTV Video Music Awards. Track listings included several remixes including a cappella and a So So Krispy version by artist Diplo.

ultimate shōgi

Via the always serendipitous Futility Closet we are introduced to traditional Japanese chessplay through the rediscovery of a sixteenth-century variant gambolled on a thirty-six by thirty-square board—populated by over eight hundred pieces—for a pitched-battled of several sessions of many hours. Likely a bespoke set created for a monastery and not widely played, the rules of engagement are unclear but generally pieces move according to their axises (+ or ×), promotable and achieving checkmate with one’s opponents multiple kings and princes was the objective. Playable characters (yes—do tag yourself) include Queen or Free Dream-Eater (奔王), Earth Dragon (地龍), Treacherous Fox (隠狐), Free Bear (奔熊), Running Pup (走狗), Fragrant Elephant (象王) and Vertical Tiger (竪虎) just to name a few. Much more at the link above.

♅ v

Discovered on this day in 1948 by Dutch astronomer Gerard Kuiper (namesake of the circumstellar disc, the Kuiper Belt) at the McDonald Observatory in western Texas, the smallest, innermost icy moon of Uranus was named for Prospero’s daughter Miranda from Shakespeare’s The Tempest following the naming conventions for the other satellites. Orbiting the Sun on its side like its host world, it is prone to extreme and its mantle has one of the most varied and fantastical terrains known with one feature, called Verona Rupes (after the Italian village and setting for a pair of plays and the Latin for cliff), the highest escarpment in the Solar System at twenty kilometers. Due to Miranda’s weak gravity and off-kilter stance, it would take nearly a quarter of an hour to fall from this height to the surface.

xmodem

Emerging from the disruption and necessary respite, downtime afforded by the Great Blizzard of 1978 that blanketed much of the US Midwest, computer hobbyists Ward Christensen and Randy Suess of Chicago created the programme and platform to host the world’s first Computerised Bulletin Board System (see also) on this day of the same year, inventing much of the accepted protocol and terminology for messages, threads and forums.

>>>

Though antecedents exist especially with opening captioning on the BBC and PBS for episodes of The French Chef, closed-captioning technology that would become commercially available by the end of the decade was first demonstrated on this day in 1972 to students a Gallaudet College (the day before the anniversary of the prestigious school for the deaf and hard-of-hearing’s founding in 1864 in Washington, DC). A unit separate from the television set interpreted and displayed the embedded code for an episode of the ABC police procedural drama The Mod Squad.

6x6

taxon: vintage animal family cards  

property values: Trump family accounting firm drops them as a client, disavows the validity of a decade’s worth of business assessments  

able baker: a collection of US museum ships—via Things Magazine  

daily constitutional: map out one’s lunch-hour ambulations 

wobo: Heineken breweries in the early 1960s produced brick-like bottles that could double as construction material, via Messy Nessy Chic  

metamates: Facebook staff receive a new official monicker aligned with corporate branding

billet-doux

Via Merriam-Webster’s Word of the Day, we are introduced to the French for literally a “sweet note” that has been adopted in the common-parlance since the seventeenth century as an alternative for a romantic missive.  Pronounced Billy-DOO, the plural form is billets-doux. 

separated by a common language

Brought to our attention by Memo of the Air, we rather enjoyed this impromptu survey of American versus British English terms conducted by longtime UK expatriate living in the US, Tom Coates. Having lived outside of the English Sprachraum for some time but listening to the BBC quite a bit, I had at least a passing notion of what all of the words denoted—it’s another level beyond calling an elevator a lift or a roast a joint—and the only ones that struck me as puzzling presented in the line-up, though no having never encountered them in the wild before, were quango—a devolved crown entity, a quasi-NGO that receives public funding and sometimes subject to criticism for not being held accountable—and pelmet, a valance made of fabric meant to conceal curtain fixtures. It was interesting to note that among the unfamiliar US words, there were more than a couple over-the-counter drugs (that you should ask your GP about), and given the current trans-Atlantic exposure, one has to wonder how many might recall furlough, Brexit, Marmite, purdah or prorogation in a few years.