she has a built in ability to take everything she sees (10. 893)

On this day in 1986, the lead single from the eponymous thirteenth studio album (also including “Tonight, Tonight” and “The Land of Confusion”) from Genesis topped the charts in the US with former band member Peter Gabriel’s Sledgehammer at number two. The lead singer’s decision to leave for a solo career a decade prior caused Phil Collins, drummer, to take over the role.

synchronoptica

one year ago: a ferry from Amsterdam to England, the 1980 Summer Games plus crossing into Scotland

two years ago: the island of Vindön

three years ago: the Upping of the Swans plus a drive through the Rhön

four years ago: the 1981 G7 summit, aria infuriate plus a new adaptation of Cats

five years ago: assorted links worth revisiting

which almost always means an arrest and indictment (10. 892)

Donald Trump announced in a post (and fund-raising appeal) on his platform Truth Social that special counsel Jack Smith informed him that he was the subject of the investigation, uncorroborated, though if true according to the former US president’s characterisation it would represent the third charge rising to the threshold of criminal offences and perhaps the most consequential after falsifying business records to cover up hush money and mishandling classified documents with the suggestion he is the ‘target’ of the January 6th grand jury investigation. Though not confirmed by the prosecution—having repeatedly cited Trump for public comment regarding ongoing matters, a range of recommended filings emerged this past December including conspiracy in support of false statements, aiding and abetting an insurrection, obstruction of official business and attempts to defraud United States—the latter two specifically in attempts to overturn election results with frivolous, costly and disproven demands for recounts which have exhausted party coffers in several polities.

synchronoptica 

two years ago: your daily demon: Naberus, Castle Läckö plus a gallery of pets through the looking-glass

three years ago: Trump and paramilitary organisations, “Obloquy to most men is more painful than death,” plus more on corporate sing-a-longs

four years ago: les Horrible Cernettes, the first image on the world-wide-web, West Germany’s film rating scale (1949) plus the unrelenting assaults on rights and decency from Trump

five years ago: “they are an aggressive people” plus the sophisti-pop genre

tête de pont (10. 891)

Within hours of the announcement that a deal brokered by Türkiye that would allow vital Ukrainian grain shipments would be allowed to resume from Black Sea ports, forces attacked (sabotaged for the second time) the bridge linking the Russian mainland to the peninsula illegally annexed by Russian in 2014, prompting the Kremlin to call off the deal and continue its naval blockade. The overland corridor across the Kerch straits which allows would-be vacation-goers to bypass most of the war zone is also, according to Ukrainian military intelligence, a logistics hub for moving men and materiel deeper into Ukrainian territory and the multi-billion dollar, nineteen kilometres long bridge was considered a prestige project. The EU and UN accuse Russia of weaponising food staples as the embargo will only exacerbate shortage and inflation in developing nations dependent on these exports.

photos of the anthropocene (10. 890)

We found this gallery of images of the permanent scars that human activity has been inflicting on the planet since the early 1950s curated in response to the retroactive inauguration of the new, dread geological epoch. All the photographs in the project portfolio are unbelievable and terrible to contemplate but we were especially taken with this view of potash-extracting operations in the Urals, mining for this vital fertiliser ingredient underground causes this spiralling pattern that resembles a trilobite fossil.

synchronoptica 

one year ago: Handel’s Water Music (1717) plus a visit to Amersfoort, downriver from Amsterdam

two years ago: Emoji Day plus the shores of Lake Vänern, Sweden

three years ago: the Feast of the Romanovs and their Domestics, a working couple’s cookbook plus Banksy’s lockdown tags

four years ago: more on Emoji Day plus forward basing of nuclear arsenals

five years ago: Yellow Submarine (1968), a living, incognito Pride flag, more on Trump and Putin, anti-car-sickness glasses plus the British royal family adopts the surname Windsor (1917)

batter my heart, three-person’d god (10. 889)

The first demonstration resulting from the Manhattan Project, a race to harness the destructive power of a nuclear weapon—the allied US and Great Britain urged to master the technology before fascist powers, Trinity, occurred on this day in 1945, the test carried out in the Jornada del Muerto desert in New Mexico, using the only pre-existing structures in the area as a laboratory to study the effects of “the Gadget,” the McDonald family ranch requisitioned by the American government and also where bomb components were assembled. J Robert Oppenheimer recalls that the project’s code name was inspired by the poetry of John Donne and of witnessing the dread blast with a retinue of some four-hundred fifty scientists and military observers that a parallel verse from the Bhagavad Gita also came to mind, knowing the world would not be the same and narrating the feelings of the awe-struck, the hysterical and inconsolable, thought of Vishnu’s attempt to persuade Prince Arjuna to perform his duty and overcome his moral dilemmas in a state of war and appeared before him in the aspect of his universal form, announcing, “Now I am become Death, destroyer of worlds.” A near copy of the bomb was detonated in August over Nagasaki.

tc-497 or long things which are long (10. 888)

Via Things magazine, we are directed towards the experimental overland train that the earthmoving company LeTourneau developed for the US army as a supply-chain solution to quickly dispatch equipment and materiel to remote locations without roads or tracks. Each carriage was equipped with its own electro-diesel motor to contribute in tandem to the locomotion and also benefitted from regenerative breaking, short configuration pictured but any number trailers could be inserted between cab and caboose. Under the code name Project OTTER (Overland Train Terrain Evaluation Research) in 1961, the TC-497 was prototyped and trialled in hopes of establishing the DEW (Distant Early Warning) Line, a series of radar substations stretched over Alaska and Canada to detect incoming Soviet bombers during the Cold War and was suggested that instead of traditional (hybrid) internal combustion engines, the convoys would be nuclear-powered. Ultimately, the project lost out to ever larger cargo planes and helicopters. Learn more at the links above.

esprit d’corps (10. 887)

While problematically exclusively white and male with militaristic overtones, we enjoyed looking through this workwear catalogue in a classic instalment of the Daily Heller from the George Master Garment Corporation dated 1951—reflective of the post-war ideal of reintegrating soldiers into the civilian workforce. Whilst perhaps not as finely tailored and mass-produced, many trades in Germany still keep to a professional uniform (not to say it hasn’t become more relaxed and informal here too) provided by the company or guild, especially for manufacturing and construction, usually in the form of a monogrammed jumpsuit.  More from Print magazine at the link above.

synchronoptica

one year ago: the flag of Estonia plus assorted links worth revisiting

two years ago: Askersund, Sweden and adventures in Värmland

three years ago: Disney’s pandemic reopening plus more links to revisit 

four years ago: a celebration of usual holidays, the Space Race was meant to be a call for international cooperation plus farewell to an iconic sign

five years ago:  Breakthrough Starshot, Trump and Putin meet plus the TV advertisements of David Lynch

la pierre de rosette (10. 886)

An earlier iteration of Egyptomania gripped the public in Europe following Napoleon’s 1798 campaign in the Ottoman Levant to secure the empire’s trading interests and advance “scientific enterprise,” drawing many scholars, a corps of savants that accompanied the expeditionary army to the newly occupied territories and established égyptologie as a distinct branch of archaeology and philological discipline, and whose presence aided the recognition of the importance of the slab bearing inscriptions spotted by Lieutenant Pierre François Bouchard destined for building material to fortify Fort Julien (an old Mameluk outpost), a few kilometres north of the port city of Rosetta—rediscovered on this day in 1799. The stele bears a bi-lingual decree issued in the first century BC on behalf of Ptolemy V Epiphanes (a council of priests confirming his royal cult) and the Ancient Greek text enabled researchers to understand the profane Demotic script and decipher the heretofore mysterious hieroglyphics (Greek for sacred writing). Fellow officer Nicolas-Jacques Conté, inventor of the modern, lead-graphite pencil just a few years prior, devised a way to use the slab itself as a printing block and helped make the text of the Rosetta Stone accessible to world-wide scholarship.