r/tragedeigh (11. 635)

A conflicted, guilty pleasure has been lately scrolling through the above subreddit, thinking that oh boy—there are some doozies—and while the community is good about disabusing people of names outside of the Anglophone world, there being two sides to the discussion: traditional names with non-traditional spellings and separately trending baby names, there’s yet a sour taste in one’s mouth over the general content, leafing through elementary school students’ year books and calling out names that one disapproves of. Fresh and unranked boys’ names aside—Crockett, Rake, Wilkes, Dossett, Witten, Hallow and Bazley—these decisions, sins of the proud parents get one identified instantly and it behooves one to remember that these are children we are trolling. When I worked in healthcare I recall a particular patient named Atreu, after the alter-ego of the reader of The NeverEnding Story who was portrayed rather prosaically in the movie adaptation as Bastian, whose improving charts always made me happy and one newborn adorably named Voilà—non-conventional spelling if I remember but that’s a tough one. These tragedians should not be forced to be anonymised—nor should their names be underscored with a red squiggle as a misspelling for capitalising on the vagaries of English orthography but some of these attempts to buck convention by the parents have consequences visited on the next generation.

white ford bronco suv (11. 635)

Their murdered bodies discovered shortly after midnight on the thirteenth, OJ Simpson was identified immediately as a person of interest in the stabbings of Simpson’s girlfriend Nicole Brown and her friend Ron Goldman in the courtyards of Brown’s condominium complex in the Brentwood neighbourhood of Los Angeles, in the same community as Simpson’s mansion. Arranged through his attorneys, Simpson had agreed to turn himself into the authorities on this day in 1994 for questioning, but failing to appear as scheduled, Simpson was spotted in the passenger seat of a vehicle traveling the 405 intercity freeway, drove and belonging to a friend and former team-mate. A low-speed police chase ensued, pursuers cautious as reportedly Simpson was threatening to shoot himself, with the spectacle shown live on virtually every television station and tens of thousands of spectators gathering on the shoulders to watch the action. Simpson surrendered from his driveway.

al di meola (11. 634)

From an era when instrumental arrangements not only got music videos, but those performance pieces also received air-play, we quite enjoyed this track from jazz fusion guitarist from New Jersey with Italian root’s 1983 album Scenario, with keyboardist Jan Hammer and drummers Bill Bruford and Phil Collins, which gets exponentially weirder and better as the music progresses. The reoccurring drum sample was later incorporated into Hammer’s theme for the television series Miami Vice.

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 synchronoptica

one year ago: NASCAR Pride (with synchronoptica) plus the exorcism of a werewolf demon (1983)

five years ago: the founding of independent Iceland (1944) plus proposals for a euro supplementary currency

six years ago: a day-trip to Frankfurt plus a pair of mythological prodigies

seven years ago: denizens of the deep, RIP Helmut Kohl plus Trump’s chief council

nine years ago: assorted links to revisit plus social networks in China

then they showed me a world where i could be so dependable, oh, clinical, oh, intellectual, cynical (11. 633)

Rising to number six on the US Billboard Hot 100 on this day in 1979 (the seventh spot in the UK charts), the lead single from Breakfast in America (see previously) was a deeply personal reflection by Supertramp’s singer-songwriter Charles “Roger” Pomfrit Hodgson, honoured with the Ivor Novello prize the following year for best song, both musically and lyrically, about his decade away from home as an adolescent at boarding school and an indictment on the priorities of the educational system for eroding individuality. The critically acclaimed song’s instrumentals feature castanets, saxophone and the tackle sound-effect from a Mattel electronic football game. The version by German techno band Scooter—as Ramp! (The Logical Song)—from 2001 peaked at second place in the United Kingdom, topping the charts in Norway, Ireland and Australia.

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synchronoptica

one year ago: assorted links worth revisiting, Screaming Lord Sutch, chicken orbs plus the exorcism of a werewolf demon (1983)

two years ago: Ziggy Stardust, the monkey puzzle tree plus Bloomsday

three years ago: your daily demon: Bathin, Psycho (1960), more links to enjoy, a summit in Switzerland plus a guide to hurricane name enunciation

four years ago: the sacking of Cambridge (1381), trends in house numbers, renaming US army bases, the first woman in space plus CPT Picard Day

five years ago: microplastics in our bodies, a field of poppies plus graphic designer Otto Aicher

six years ago: purging the Deep State, a visit to Burg Sonnenberg plus black hole solar systems

seven years ago: the Dunning-Kruger effect, IKEA cookery plus experiments in human-dolphin communication

eight years ago: denying a platform to dissenters, Funeral Parade of Roses (1969), coats-of-arms for same-sex couples plus Frankenstein and the year without a summer

8x8 (11. 632)

anabolics: the mainstreaming of casual steroid use  

cover model: the identity of the individual on the iconic Duran Duran album revealed four decades on—via Miss Cellania  

rank and file: a woodland-themed chessboard that rolls up into a log 

the imitation game: researchers claim that GPT-4 has passed the Turing Test—see previously 

london underground: spelunking through the strata of the ancient city  

non-playable character: determinism versus emergence and the question of free will  

ticino: a cache of five-thousand photographs spanning from 1900 to 1930 taken by a poor seed-peddler captures life in a remote, Italian-speaking Swiss canton  

food that makes you gay: stereotypes and gender in what we eat—via Web Curios

roll subsidence mode (11. 631)

Jargony reporting on some scary turbulence and skilled piloting that led to subsequent recovery, a yaw and tumble sustaining a Dutch roll, resulted in some discussion on etymology and more broadly the label with possibly pejorative connotations, as in going Dutch or Dutch treat rooted in the general enmity of the English for the Netherlands dating to the Anglo-Dutch Wars of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries over maritime trade and overseas colonies. Whereas the righting manoeuvre, borrowed from term originally applied to an ice skating move (twentse schoorijders), may have been the optimal correction for the aircraft as well as for the skater, phrases like Dutch courage implies something less than authentic. More at Language Log at the link up top.

synchronoptica

one year ago: a small piece of the US in the UK, assorted links worth revisiting plus Rembrandt’s Danaë

two years ago: potatoe, more on Eadweard Muybridge, a false dandelion plus Sukiyaki

three years ago: another MST3K classic, a mysterious notebook of Outsider Art, a chronology of the New York Times, the Rashomon effect plus the Durgan script

four years ago: the Magna Carta (1215)

five years ago: a pristine Peel Trident plus anatomical maps

holy mackerel (11. 630)

Just prior to the appearance of His Holiness at the G7 summit to express his thoughts on AI—as an ethical authority that world-leaders seemed prepared to listen to, NATO, the climate catastrophe and Ukraine and Gaza, in a rather remarkable feat of scheduling the Pope held an audience, conclave with one hundred international comedians, greeting luminaries like Chris Rock, Julia Louis-Dreyfus, Whoopi Goldberg, Conan O’Brien, Stephen Colbert, Jimmy Fallon and Tig Notaro and the butt of jokes himself, Francis expounded on how laughing at God was not a blasphemous act and encouraged those gifted with transcend humour to continue to lampoon and satirise our dumb world, particularly in the face of such gloomy news.

juuniküüditamine (11. 629)

Commemorated on this day by the Baltic countries as a memorial to mass deportations of tens of thousands of individuals in 1941 from Lithuania, Latvia and Estonia and the western territories of modern-day Moldova, Romania, Ukraine and Belarus, the eviction orders were executed covertly by the USSR Interior People’s Commissariat with the aim of removing “socially foreign elements” and resettling them in the interior of the Soviet Union. Occupied and annexed a year earlier following the Molotov-Ribbetrop Pact which defined Nazi Germany’s and Soviet Red Army’s spheres of influence, targeted nationalities were displaced under pro-Soviet puppet-governments and the colonisation proceeded. The relocation occurring just before the Nazi incursion into Soviet territory, deportees were characterised as counter-revolutionaries but not collaborators and their removal, rather than strengthening their newly expanded front buffered with ethic Russian in-migration, was seen to remove dissidents and create cheap labour in interior gulags. A programme of limited repatriation was begun under Khrushchev as part of De-Stanlinisation reforms but an estimated sixty percent or more had perished during exile and none deemed nationalists or non-white were allowed to return with those who were facing discrimination by the newly aligned majority.