Due to the calendar reform of 1582, most of Italy, Spain, Portugal, Poland and Lithuania did not have these past few days in that year—the date jumping from the fourth to the fifteenth of October.
Pope Gregory XIII issued his papal bull, Inter gravissimas, in order to correct for the drift in the Julian calendar but certainly did not considered it a name sake or legacy item, and it was only later historians that sought to reconcile earlier dates on civil calendars, prolepsis, applying the new conventions backwards (which also marked the beginning of the new year with different dates, city by city), that came up with the designation. Confusingly, France implemented this change around two months later, leaping from the ninth to the twentieth of December. Great Britain, Tuscany and the Protestant Kingdoms of the Holy Roman Empire waited until the 1700s to make the change. I think all these people had the good sense to stay in bed and wait for tomorrow.
Sunday 11 October 2015
inter gravissimas
Saturday 10 October 2015
laundroid
Japan has premiered, what’s touted as the first of it’s kind but does remind me of those retro-futuristic demonstrations of the push-button home of the past, an automated system that will dispense with the onerous human chore of doing the laundry—from sorting, washing and drying, folding and putting it away.
castaway cay
The Mapuche people of Patagonia have a very extensive and ancient system of myth and legend that includes the inspiration for the Flying Dutchman and ghost-ships in general. Fathomed up during a time of chaos and confusion and culture-shock as a way of reconciling their new and novel experiences with European exploration and conquest—transmitted decades later to that man-of-war from Holland that could never make port and was destined to sail the oceans forever, the Mapuche had a tale of a triple-masted sailing ship, which—however, owing to its sentience—was not seemingly in need of a captain, called the Caleuche.
I learnt of this strange bit of folklore via When On Earth’s rather morbid bucket-list of twenty places one must see after one dies. Check out some of the other destinations, for research-ideas, but certainly not as that undiscovered coountry. The crew consists of drowned sailors rescued by Chilean versions of mermaids and mermen, who can continue their existence as though still living when the ship appears, which is always a bright and racous affair but then disappearing again as suddenly, descending beneath the waves and plying the seas underwater. The festivities of the drowned are occasionally darkened by the party-crasher, the Sorcerer of Chiloรฉ (the name of the island around which the Caleuche is most often sighted) who breaches the hull on a stampede of kelpies (caballo marino—water-horses, locally) with a retinue of enchanted supplemental, relief-crew, fisherman and deck-staff not honourably drowned but rather cursed to do their eternal tasks as part of the ship itself—perhaps part of its collective consciousness.
catagories: ๐, ๐ฌ, myth and monsters
Friday 9 October 2015
upvote, a condรฉ nast publication
catagories: networking and blogging
Thursday 8 October 2015
humbug or the great pumpkin
catagories: ๐ซ, ๐, food and drink, myth and monsters
Wednesday 7 October 2015
5x5
mind the gap: month rental prices for a one-room flat in London superimposed on the Underground map
night gallery: curation of paintings by producer Thomas J. Wright for the macabre anthology
diorama: a dedicated California artist recreates faithful miniatures of New York’s disappearing store-fronts
treuhand: EU high court rules that social media giants may not freely repatriate international user-data as the integrity of it cannot be guaranteed
catagories: ๐ฌ๐ง, ๐บ๐ธ, ๐, ๐บ, ๐บ️, ๐ฅธ, environment, labour, myth and monsters, networking and blogging
boom! bonk, bonk on the head
Vis-ร -vis the mounting refugee situation as hundreds of thousands families and individuals fleeing war-torn Syria and other regions transit through Asia Minor and the Balkans or risk a harrowing trip across the Mediterranean—trafficked or through their own determination—for Germany and to eventually be resettled, the ever brilliant BLDGBLOG presents a sort of alternate and modern historical study with the manner in which the US dealt with its own possibly bidden (Germany’s is considered inviting too) crisis for the care and housing of migrants, especially of unaccompanied minors that surged on the Mexican border from points further South, quickly overwhelmed accommodating institutions.
Cynical as it sounds, finding storage solutions for surplus is pretty dehumanizing and the notion of a generation brought up by ghost-malls and derelict warehouses makes me think of that Star Trek episode where the “onlies,” the children are the only one left in a dilapidated, crumbing world—without the “grups” to take care of them. While searching for a pharmaceutical answer to immortal youth, a plague was inadvertently unleashed that attacked any grown-up, past puberty, and caused them to succumb to the disease within seven days. As childhood spans several centuries, with the pre-teens protecting the younger ones and the whole planet having fallen to wrack and ruin, until Doctor McCoy isolates a cure and Starfleet dispatches teachers and counselors to the planet to help rebuild it. Temporary shelters—hopefully without the potential of becoming a more permanent limbo—are not much better in Germany with up to ten thousand refugees daily entering Germany and corralled in empty sports halls and other locations, quickly over-crowded and with inadequate facilities. No amount of shuffling and hide-and-seek will address the underlying geo-political causes but may result in more dignified housing for both new-comers and established residents, already struggling with exorbitant rents and gentrification.
catagories: ๐ฉ๐ช, ๐บ๐ธ, ๐, ๐, foreign policy
Monday 5 October 2015
vulgate or hashtag hastings
It strikes me as a little paradoxical that the claim to the Divine Right of Kings comes of the newer, reformed protestant tradition with monarchs dual-hatted as heads of state churches, the Church of England, the Church of Norway, et alia rather than from something more seeped in history. This political and religious creed, holds that the kings rules by God’s grace alone is not subject to any earthly estate or institution, including the will of the papacy. In other words, the monarchy was invested with both civic and spiritual powers, bucking ancient divisions of authority, which were nonetheless prone to overlap and currying favour or displeasure and later developments, revolts and the spread of democratic-thinking cut short the tenure of a monarch, but this doctrine. Prior to the Reformation—however, alliances were built and strengthened through military campaigns, persecuted under the papal banner, that continued nearly without interruption up until that schism for Western Christianity in the form of the Crusades, launched against whomever was deemed to be a heretic. The first instance of this type of campaigning on a grand scale had a different character than the retaking of the Holy Land but there are definitely parallels with the Norman Conquest of England in 1066 and the First Crusade that coalesced just three decades later.
catagories: ⛓️๐ฅ, ๐ซ๐ท, ๐ฌ๐ง, ๐ณ๐ด, ๐, foreign policy, language, Middle East, religion, Wikipedia