© and so say we all

Featured on the ever-excellent Boing Boing, writer Glenn Fleishman explores the fascinating and unexpected struggle over copyrights, ownership and lapsed licenses through the lens of the infamous and unnaturally long-lived legal wrangling of the Sisters Hill and the Happy Birthday song.
Perpetuated by the descendants in hopes of securing royalties for each instance that the song appears in television or film—for which it’s conspicuously absent and usually replaced with a rousing and somewhat incongruous chorus of “For he’s a jolly good fellow,” the unsettled lawsuits have really overshadowed the professional lives and scholarship of the pioneering Patty and Mildred Hill, who were respectively, at a time when most women did not have vocations, an early childhood educational theorist and an ethnomusicologist. Patty even worked with German pedagogue Friedrich Fröbel, whose wooden unit blocks (Fröbelgaben) we all know, and helped to introduce the concept of these educational toys to the States. For a white girl, Mildred really had some soul and championed so called black music as a national treasure to be cherished. Later the sisters collaborated on musical compositions for school children, eventually producing the celebratory tune. No one is trying to rob their children and grandchildren of a birthright but this singular case (another type of block or brick, Lego, is maybe something comparable) illustrates a lot of the tricks behind creative-controls and the integrity of invention.

5x5

ration card: the wartime UK version of Monopoly had to make concessions to the fighting effort

cosmopolitan: beautiful overhead views of world cities

pet sounds: Cornell University digitised their huge library of animal calls and bird-song

sakoku or ttp: nineteenth century Japanese woodcuts of exotic, visiting Americans after America insisted on diplomatic ties

isobar: Stockholm airport invites passengers to experience the weather at their destination before departing

pequod

Via the Everlasting Blort comes a really keen vignette from the archives of Brain Pickings on an almost two year project undertaken by artist Matt Kish to illustrate, page by page, the entirety of Herman Melville’s Moby-Dick; or, The Whale using mixed media and found canvases in the form of discarded paperbacks. Melville himself labored almost to the day the same amount of time to author his great work. There’s an evocative gallery of artwork to peruse that really stirs the observer to reflect on all the complex themes and motifs aloft in that story—the action of the drama contrasted with the poetic mediation that defies the usual literary architecture.

5x5

warp factor: speed ratings of the fastest space ships in the galaxy

a gossip of mermaids: a delightful compilation of supernatural, ghoulish collective nouns, via the Wunderkammer that is Nag on the Lake

bling: uncompromisingly luxurious wrist watch that has an iWatch on the underside

plastic arts: prototype demonstration of a motorized sculpting glove

ennuigi: arcade game betrays Mario’s brother’s existential woes, world-weariness