keep moving from this mountain

This coming Monday—for the first time in nearly five decades since the civil rights reformer’s assassination, the city of Biloxi, Mississippi will officially observe Martin Luther King, Jr. Day under the name it goes by across the United States rather than “Great Americans Day,” as Sarah Holder reports for Citylab. I wonder if the addition or omission of a plural apostrophe carries a significance—like with Presidents’ Day.
The choice of name was a compromise and a way to distance the holiday from conflating it with Confederate General Robert E Lee—as other neighbouring municipalities had done—and illustrates how fraught with controversy that the occasion has been since declared a federal holiday in 1986 with universal adoption being a slow and contentious battle. The spectre of the Confederacy and the attitudes and values it enshrined still haunting the present and frustration those dreams and visions that we fight for and uphold, it seems counter to the adage that history is something inscribed by the winners—lest we concede all is lost to the forces of hate and regression—but perhaps now because at least all places across that country (it’s also celebrated internationally in Toronto, Hiroshima and the Hague) can share the same celebration, we will have the strength to fight another day.

mot-clic francophone

Not only do we learn that rather than surrender to the hegemon of the English language, the French speaking world ought to meditate on their mobile multifonction rather than their smart phone and have a critical eye open for so called infox or faux info (fake news), we find that to varying public reception and adoption that the Journal Officiel has added to its register several pernicious tech terms that French has found preferred substitute for. A hacker, for instance, would be un fouineur, crowdfunding and derivatives become financement participatif, and an emoji is more properly une frimousse, a sweet little face.

peanuts

Though Trump’s belief that his predecessor sold the Mayfair prime real estate that was former home of the US diplomatic mission to the United Kingdom for a mere pittance and therefore in protest of this mismanaged transaction will not be cutting the ribbon when the new facility opens for business is rather misleading as this backwater Borg Cube was planned under the Bush II administration as part of plans to modernise America’s presence abroad once it was determined that the ageing building in its central location could not be retrofitted to security standards, he did manage to get kind of close on one detail: the United States never owned the compound in the posh London neighbourhood but rather rented it from the Marquess of Westminster, for which America paid a symbolic annual fee of a peppercorn.

mcmlxviii

On the occasion of his fiftieth birthday, The Atlantic’s senior editor Alan Taylor regales his readers with the gift of retrospective covering the events and attitudes of the year of his birth.
If anything, a survey of 1968 lends perspective and insight on the times that we’re living through presently with violent protests erupting in France, Germany, Czecho- slovakia, Mexico and the United States, the Vietnam war, the absence of civil rights and social justice, disruptive technologies, assassinations and the Moon landing—all told in powerful images, in chronological order.

7x7

coming attractions: Bob Canada’s box office predictions for the winter and spring

reforestation: the UK plans to repopulate the sparsely wooded area of northern England and create a coast-to-coast band of trees, from Hull to Liverpool

la dame aux chats: director Jean Cocteau’s affinity for felines

sundvik: IKEA advertisement for a bassinet is also a pregnancy-test

a mosquito, my libido: switched from a minor to major key, Nirvana’s Smells Like Teen Spirit becomes a upbeat pop song

split-flap: an internet-enabled mechanical message board harks back to a bygone era

marble run: patient artist DoodleChaos, who previously synchronised Edvard Grieg’s In the Hall of the Mountain King, now assays Pyotr Ilych Tchaikovsky’s “Waltz of the Flowers”
 

universal constant or halt and catch fire

Researchers in Bilbao and Salamanca proffer a rather radical theory that tidily dispenses with the need—surely not without controversy—for invoking dark energy to explain our Cosmos and the accelerated rate of expansion of the Universe.
The speeding up of the motion or retreat is only apparent and it’s that time itself is slowly, slowly winding down. The accelerated expansion is illusionary as we’re not further away from our galactic neighbours but light is taking longer to reach us as time drags on. Not being able to get my head around the idea, I am not sure how it stands up to scrutiny but we’ve gone to great lengths before for the sake of keeping up appearances. I wonder how this idea might be independently verified. The clock started with the Big Bang but as that burst becomes more diffuse, time over æons is degrading into a physical dimension (like the three were familiar with) and the Universe will freeze and coalesce into a dimensionless point, presumably ready to start the cycle all over again.

dance for me, tartar woman

Previously we’ve learned that Spaghetti Westerns were often filmed in exotic, far-flung locations and now, via Super Punch, we discover that the desert of Utah has at least once been a stand-in for the steppe of Mongolia in the 1956 Howard Hughes production, The Conqueror, starring John Wayne as Temujin (nom de guerre, Genghis Khan), Susan Hayward as his first wife, Börte Üjin, and Agnes Moorehead as his mother, Hunlun.
The film was critically panned and a financial flop (Hughes’ last cinematic venture) and never attained a cult following due to a weak plot and what was recognised as gross miscasting (plus general unavailability—more to follow), but there’s a dark and unexpected footnote in the movie’s production, which spanned three years and leaves a greater legacy of questions. Weeks were spent on location shooting outdoors and establishing scenes and once the cast was ready to return to the studio, Howard Hughes shipped sixty tonnes of native dirt back to Hollywood in order to make sure that the terrain’s appearance matched and ensure continuity. Cast, filmmakers and residents knew that the filming site (and imported soil) was directly downwind from the Nevada proving grounds where the military had tested eleven surface nuclear bombs and munitions a couple of years previously but any concerns that they had were placated by assurances from the government that there was no risk to public health. Nearly half of the two hundred member crew, however, developed cancer, which a quarter succumbed to. Wayne and Moorehead both died of cancer in the 1970s and were heavy smokers (Wayne’s habit was six packs a day) but the actual cause remains a mystery. In the aftermath, anguishing over his decision to shoot in a dangerous and radioactive site, Hughes bought every copy of the film and kept it out of circulation for several years—until the studio re-acquired it from Hughes’ estate after his death. Reportedly, it was one movie that Hughes watched endlessly during his final years.

worshipful company of stationers and newspaper makers

Thanks to the latest instalment of the wonderful and engrossing History of English podcast, we learn why cut paper—and in general writing materials—is referred to as stationery.
From the thirteenth century on, booksellers who set up shop in a fixed spot, as opposed to itinerant peddlers and chapmen who frequented markets and had pop-up stalls but not a permanent location, were called stationers. In exchange for upholding pledges not to gouge students on required text books, universities allowed stationers a virtual monopoly on copyrights, and in the era before the printing press would loan students original manuscripts for use in exchange for producing a faithful duplicate that the stationer could later resell. Their wares and the tools that produced them were referred to a stationery.