regnum, benfacta, carcer

Public Domain Review showcases another visually stunning and alluring work with the 1825 publication The Astrologer of the Nineteenth Century: Or, The Master Key of Futurirty, Being a Complete System of Astrology, Geomancy & Occult Science. Volumes such as these both informed and were reflections of a revival in the supernatural which had lost currency and credibility and been in decline since the Era of Enlightenment and was for the most part a repackaged anthology of previously serialised works, journals and a success almanac of ephemeridies, Latin for diaries—daily charts of the position of the planets in the sky consulted by navigators and astrologers alike.
Though the book includes sections on diverse magic practises including divination, prophecy and communing with the dead, the author places greater stock and confidence in celestial omens and warns his readers of the dangers of not heeding one’s horoscope. Discover a gallery of select illustrations and peruse the whole book at the link up top.

frolic & detour

Following the court case of a disgruntled employee who collected personal data of staff and released it to the public in order to embarrass and humiliate his former employer, we were introduced to an interesting concept of tort law and the limits of vicarious liability (respondeat superior) on the part of an employer for the acts of persons in its employ.
Derived from the 1834 case of Joel v Morison (no relation to the present defendant) that involved a pedestrian struck by a horse-drawn cart, to which the cart’s owner begged off due to the fact that the driver had taken a different route than the one he was assigned to visit an acquaintance and because of that deviation, was responsible for the accident. The court, however, ruled, “if servants, being on their master’s business, took a detour to call upon a friend, the master will be responsible… but if he was going on a frolic of his own, the master will not be held liable” and thus the driver was still covered for the negligent act while in the “course of employment” and the cart’s owner had to pay for damages. The company in the present day case is appealing the decision, arguing it cannot be held responsible for the data breach because the employee was acting maliciously and outside of his scope of practise.

6x6

connect-the-dots: the distant constellations discovered by NASA’s Fermi Gamma-ray Space Telescope include the TARDIS and Godzilla

᚛ᚑᚌᚐᚋ᚜: an introduction to the Ogham script through the challenge of encoding an alphabet without spaces

teslaquila: a look at the other probable intent-to-use trademark applications from Elon Musk

frigate shoals: rather than being erased by sea level rise, a powerful storm obliterated an ecological significant Hawaiian archipelago over the weekend, via Super Punch

cloak & dagger: former Central Intelligence Agency’s Chief of Disguise reveals how field agents go undercover

geo-stationary: Chengdu announced plans to launch its own, fully adjustable artificial moon to replace street lighting

positive reinforcement

Wanting a routine and ritual to better her own practise, tinkerer and engineer Simone Giertz (designer of some hilariously unhelpful robots that are just glad that they can participate) is prototyping, we learn from Swiss Miss, a perpetual calendar with responsive buttons that light up like a golden star.
There are a lot of twee and coddling gimmicks lying in wait to ambush one’s attention but I certainly would not count this idea and method (you can use actual gold stars and a calendar too) among them. Sometimes by being too adult we are also too arrogant to understand how encouragement and motivation can nurture and enrich. Just as a recent episode of Hidden Brain masterfully exposited, many seasoned professionals might believe that their experience and expertise is insulted by consulting something as pedestrian and rudimentary as a check-list, much of the world—from rocket-science to brain-surgery—is run off simple protocols. None of us are above earning our gold stars either.

bellwether

Ten years ago today, world stock exchanges underwent their sharpest decline in modern history—causing some ten percent of global wealth to sublimate in a single day’s worth of trading, despite emergency measures. “Bloody Friday,” which precipitated a period characterised as the Great Recession, occurred on the same day of the month as “Black Tuesday” of 1929, bringing down Wall Street following the crash in London markets in September and set off the Great Depression that affected all Western industrial economies.

the funk of forty-thousand years

I can’t exactly pin-point the appeal of this vintage audio grimoire—released by Capitol Records in 1969 as a double eight-track tape—except to say that people respond to stories and can’t exactly vouch for the accuracy of the history and witch culture presented, but this recording from Vincent Price, “Witchcraft-Magic: An Adventure in Demonology” is incredibly soothing and somehow enchanting.  With interstitials by the witches’ chorus from Hamlet, Price masterfully delivers anecdotes and instructional lessons of how to summon the unseen, as well as the antithetical, graphic explanation for witch-hunts over the fragility of the male ego and challenging the hierarchy.

persons of exceptional prominence

The US National Archives in St Louis, Missouri, an independent agency of the government charged with curating the country’s historical records and transmitting the votes of the Electoral College to Congress, has a special collection of official military personnel files of war heroes, politicians and celebrities available for public inspection. There one can see the service records of notable people like Bea Arthur, Desi Arnaz, Joey Bishop, Frank Capra, Humphrey Bogart, Lucius Clay, Allen Funt, Theodore Geisel, Frank Herbert, Grace Hopper, the Kennedys, the Roosevelts and many others.

a slap in the face of public taste

Though the pronouncement from the Russian Minister of Culture that the first rapper was Soviet poet, graphic designer, playwright and actor Vladimir Mayakovsky (*1893 - †1930) struck me at first a little bit like Chancellor Gorkon saying “You have not experienced Shakespeare until you have read him in the original Klingon,” but just as I was pleased to see the ministry warming to the music genre as a legitimate art form, I appreciated the introduction to Mayakovsky’s works and could see the assertion as an arguably valid one.
Authoring pieces with titles like the eponymous, Backbone Flute, A Cloud in Trousers (excerpt below), So this is How I Turned into a Dog and A Flying Proletarian, one of the original framers signatories to the Furturist Manifesto and accomplished propagandist (though his relation with the state was never fully reconciled or rehabilitated after censorship), Mayakovsky was at the very least what could be characterised as an early influencer, cultivating a brand for himself and one could easily adapt his verse to a beat.

Of grandfatherly gentleness I am devoid,
There’s not a single grey hair in my soul!
Thundering the world with the might of my voice,
By I go—handsome,
Twenty-two-year-old.