twilight zone (10. 900)

Via Boing Boing, after going up on his space elevator, Neal Agarwal invites us to scroll down from the ocean’s surface through the pelagic zone through the midnight zone to the dismal seabed and explore with the denizens of the deep, like the cosmopolitan sixgill shark that spend their days at depths of seventeen hundred meters and their nights in swallower waters and the so called headless chicken fish that’s a sea cucumber with wing-like fins that propel them through the dark at nearly three thousand meters below or plunge to the ultra-abyssal hadal zone (the adjectival form of Hades), inaccessible places in the deepest trenches that have had fewer visitors than have been on the Moon.

perhaps booze would alleviate this situation (10. 899)

Preceded by the educational short A Date with Your Family promoting good etiquette at the dinner table, the 1952 Alfred E Green Cold War drama set in a desultory Manhattan bar peopled by a demographic cross-section of Americans was given the Mystery Science Theater treatment on this day in 1994. Drinking brandy from a conspicuously large snifter, a mysterious pollster, gadfly assesses the attitudes of various patrons including a news presenter, an industrialist, rancher, socialite and congress member regarding international relations and foreign policy, whom to a person express their weariness of bad news from abroad and although treasure their safety and security, appear to have little will to be engaged participants. On cue the expository news channel reports that the US has been invaded by a foreign power (unnamed but ostensibly the USSR) and the situation quickly escalates into a nuclear conflict—mostly with incongruous stock footage of combat training. The guests rush to return to their lives with a more patriotic posture and do what they can for the war effort. As strikes continue unabated, the cadre suddenly find themselves back in the bar, the brandy-drinker having freed them from his hypnotic trance with a changed outlook, which ironically is to suborn their individual concerns for the good of the collective. Composer and music director Albert Glasser also scored The Saga of the Viking Women and their Voyage to the Waters of the Great Sea Serpent, Teenage Caveman and a number of other MST3K classics and the film was a critical and commercial success, one of the few 1950s movies to gross a box-office of over a million dollars.

synchronoptica

one year ago: some hidden places in Scotland plus Highlands moorlands

two years ago:  your daily demon: Glasya Labolas, a Roman holiday plus Telstar I (1962)

three years ago: assorted links worth revisiting 

four years ago: abstract drone photography,  a near universal paper format plus a large format camera

five years ago: a visit to the Playmobil factory plus Alexander Gerst aboard the ISS

the magdalene (10. 898)

Fêted on this day as the patron protector of converts, glovers, milliners, perfumeries, apothecaries, penitent sinners and sexual temptation, Mary of Magdala, which gives us the name Madeleine, travelled with Jesus and the apostles and was regarded as the only disciple that truly understood Jesus’ message, garnering the jealousy of Peter and the others—and according to some persistent extra-canonical traditions, the bride of Christ, having journeyed to Gaul to start a family. Her depiction as a reformed prostitution began in the late sixth century with a sermon by Pope Gregory I that conflated an unnamed “Sinful Woman,” later identified as Mary of Bethany, who is deigned to anoint the feet of Jesus, which the Catholic Church didn’t officially dispel until thirteen hundred years later with Pope Paul VI’s calendar reform but has proven another persistent association. Elaborated and romanced during the medieval period through modern times, Mary Magdalen was upheld as a example of redemption, though her popular cult was ignored by authoritative theologians, and it was said that seven demons were exorcised from her which became embodiments of the contemporary idea of the Seven Deadly Sins, and from the late Middle Ages to the Renaissance is often depicted as rather hirsute by dent of her newly acquired modesty, iconographically publicly nude (vulgaris meretrix) but not obscured with a fig-leaf or Daryl Hanna Mermaid-style with strategically placed plaits but rather lycanthropically in full body hair (like this painting in Gdańsk or Tilman Riemenschneider’s altar ensemble in Münnerstadt), like the so called ‘feather tights’ affect given to angelic figures, a costume of scales aligned with the fashion and sensibilities of the time. Elevated from a memorial feast to a liturgical one in 2016 by Pope Francis directed Mary Magdalene be hailed as apostolorum apostola, the “Apostle of the apostles.”

synchronoptica 

one year ago: more adventures through the Scottish Highlands, a hit from Take That (1991) plus driving along the North Coast 500

two years ago: Plan 9 from Outer Space (1959) 

three years ago: the origins of the depiction of Jesus as a white European

four years ago: and whitey’s on the Moon plus assorted links to revisit

five years ago: the search for Dark Matter, assorted links worth revisiting, on eggccorns and oronyms plus the smell of rain

7x7 (10. 897)

equity: UK’s actors’ union in solidarity with American counterparts in protest

spatula city—where your thirteenth spatula is free: the Weird Al Yankovic (previously) tribute to public-access television premiered this day in 1989—via our faithful chronicler 

litli-hrútur: Icelandic volcano watch  

magical mystery tour: revisiting the ‘lost’ Ashram of the Beatles in the Himalayan foothills

american songbook: Tony Bennett, crooner, Nazi hunter, civil rights champion, RIP—via Super Punch

barbie once commanded the stage with the rockers—now, the last thing she wanted to do was talk: channelling Ernest Hemingway on his birthday to narrate modern happenings  

watership down: disturbing film adaptation given a PG rating after forty-five years of indelible nightmares

  synchronoptica 

one year ago: a concert to commemorate the Fall of the Berlin Wall plus more adventures in Scotland

two years ago: the experimental nuclear cruise ship NS Savanna, the Scopes Monkey Trial plus Sweden’s Bohus Fortress

three years ago: more on The Seven Wonders of the Ancient World plus some scream therapy in Iceland

four years ago: Japan’s broadcast daily constitutional

hrólfr (10. 896)

Following his uncertain defeat on this day in 911 in the Siege of Chartres, the Viking leader Rollo entered into negotiations with Frankish king Charles III, called the Simple (Carolus Simplex) and despite his loss in battle, as a result of the Treaty of Saint-Clair-sur-Epte, discussed in person between the two figures was granted the Duchy of Normandy, having rejected the offer of Flanders as uncultivable, and the king’s daughter Princess Gisela in exchange for Rollo’s oath of fealty and conversion to Christianity—plus protection from general Viking brigandry as well as agreeing to halt his own raids—see also. As the first duke of the realm, his immediate heirs, William Longsword (Guillaume Longue-Épée) and Richard I, Sans-Peur established Normandy as a formidable principality and his great-great-great grandson, one William the Conquerer, went on to found the Angevin and Plantagenet dynasties.

synchronoptica  

one year ago: a special cocktail to celebrate the lunar landing plus visiting Aberdeenshire

two years ago: more adventures in Sweden

three years ago: St Wilgefortis

four years ago: the abstract art of Fritz Glarner, Viking I on Mars (1976),  Operation Valkyrie (1944) plus the Apollo landing (1969)

five years ago: more on the American gun cult, Radio Free Europe, a poorly executed extinction bell that’s somehow apt, a remixed School House Rock! for turbulent times plus on in-fixes and tmesis

6x6 (10. 895)

tijuana brass: Herb Alpert and Lani Hall cover “Maniac” from Flashdance for the Oscars (1984)  

choose your own adventure: the rise and fall of type-in narrative games, an addendum to Fifty Years of Text Games (previously)—via Waxy 

collective nouns: a group of butterflies is properly a kaleidoscope, whilst a swarm of caterpillars is an army—see more 

tayme that crabbe: a medieval guide to food presentation 

the blobs are happy in their new, hand-build wizzinator and that’s all that’s important to me right now: experimenting with a fun physics sandbox—see also  

jennyanydots: a favourite Mountain Goats’ character returns

walkflatter, wheel glutter, whim driver (10. 894)

Far removed from butcher, baker, candlestick-maker and seeming like a list that could have generated by an AI, we enjoyed perusing this register of job titles declared in the Census of 1881, the a snapshot of every household in the United Kingdom on the night of Sunday, 3 April of that year, the fifth decennial but the first to include details (mostly without context) on members of homes, compiled a few years later in The Companion to the Almanac; or Year-Book of General Information for 1885, sub-chapter The Occupations of the English People. Some of the more unusual professional entries are Sad-iron maker, Butt Woman, Peas Maker, Off-Beater, Dirt Refiner, Blabber and All-Rounder. Respondents of note include Karl Marx, Charles Darwin, Winston Churchill and one William Neal without portfolio as he was considered “too idle.”

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