ye butcher, ye baker, ye candlestick-maker

Public Domain Review features a slim, quirky volume that at first glance seems like eighteenth century pulp fiction but is actually a 1908 light-hearted lament over the modern state of everyday occupations (to wit), satirising a host of old professions with ballads that address contemporary and resonant scourges—like over-regulation, quackery, fake news and copyfight, some perhaps landing a bit too close to home.
Click on the image to enlarge plus a word on the anachronistic use of “ye olde:” it should be and was always properly pronounced with the th sound, Early Modern English employing the now obsolete Old English letter thorn (þ), which in handwritten form could look like a y, especially when used in the scribal abbreviation of the article, the e a sort of superscript. Be sure to visit the link up top for more discoveries from the world’s print archives.

then and now

I regret not encountering this sooner—plus anything I might have done to make International Talk like a Pirate Day more significant than taking a moment to acknowledge the hard and ongoing struggles of women to achieve political parity with Suffrage Day, which is observed on 19 September to mark the passage of the Electoral Bill in 1893 granting women franchise.
Women were not eligible to stand for Parliament until 1919 but saw significant advances in the meantime and during the ensuing decades. To commemorate this one-hundred and twenty-fifth anniversary, female members of the nation’s legislature plus the prime minister (New Zealand’s third woman to hold the position) plus her infant daughter posed to recreate a photograph from 1905 to illustrate how democracies can evolve and be a force of enlightenment. Seeing the juxtaposition made me happy and relieved to know that there are still places and constituencies that value and cherish progress and diversity.

tomorrow is coming together

Via Boing Boing, we are acquainted with the brilliant and inspired handiwork of artist Future Punk who has imagined a suite of retro intros, outros and logos for internet companies had they existed in the late 1970s to early 1980s. The undertaking was inspired by the original promotional films produced by computer pioneers which can be found at the link above.

greeks bearing gifts or self-consistency principle

Cassandra, daughter of King Priam and Queen Hecuba, was awarded the gift of prophesy by Apollo but when she ultimately rebuffed his advances, the god cursed her so that no one would believe her portents of doom.
Poor thing even had a twin brother called Helenus that she managed to teach the art of seeing into the future, and like his sister was burdened to always be right—except that people believed Helenus. We can all relate to being the wet blanket sometimes.  We thought we knew the story and understood the frustration until listening to this conversation and series of interviews on Hidden Brain that look a close look at Cassandra’s arch dialogue, spoken in metaphor and abstractions like any good prophet, and come to understand that there was no curse and that people ignored her dire warnings because of the way they were presented. It was not a credibility issue but Cassandra’s omen could not draw the people she warned outside of the frame of reference that they were comfortable and familiar with, and the episode uses Cassandra’s curse as a heuristic tool to explore why we sometimes fail to heed good counsel.