watershed moment

On this day in 1969, the Cuyahoga River, downstream from the industrial cities of Akron, Kent and Cleveland Ohio, caught on fire—the latest in a series of at least a dozen major conflagrations of the polluted tributary of Lake Erie—captured the attention of reporters at TIME magazine and the issue made the cover of the June edition. The public outrage that followed helped endorse a tranche of pollution-control measures and eventually led to the creation of a federal and state Environmental Protection Agency by early December of the following year.

zsebnaptár

Our friendly stationer Present /&/ Correct shares its discovery of a trove of vintage Hungarian pocket calendars, joyfully illustrated. MėH (Miniszterelnöki Hivatal) is the country’s energy authority. Much more to explore at the link above.

små grodorna

the local’s Swedish edition has a fine run-down of the rituals associated with the June solstice, the longest day of the year in the northern hemisphere with the kingdom enjoying from eighteen to twenty four hours of sunshine—otherwise known as Midsommar, officially observed on the Saturday nearest in the week but the eve is the de facto public holiday.
We’re acquainted with the tradition of att maja (maying—but probably not a German import)—that is, decorating with flowers and greenery and the standard Little Frogs, whose melody is taken from a French marching song from the Napoleonic Wars and a British (compare God Save the Queen and My Country ‘Tis of Thee, though the French original was not meant to be a serious one) mocking version that orders “Au pas, grenouilles.” In step, small frogs. There’s a performative dance that illustrates the lyrics, which you can watch at the link above. No one is sure how the custom got started.

munker-white illusion

Though these spheres seem to come in three colourful varieties, David Novick created this optical illusion by exploiting a neurobiological factor known as lateral or antagonistic inhibition—the ability of a stimulated neuron to calm its neighbours so as not to overload the sensory system. Objectively, all the spheres are shaded identically and are a uniform brassy colour. The whole trick, impossible to unsee otherwise and probably not advisable to try, is broken down layer-by-layer with some philosophical musings and more examples at Bad Astronomy at the link above.

i've got two chickens to paralyse

Although the typographical inconsistencies would have personally driven me to distraction before I could manage to encode anything, we admit that were impressed with the counter-measures that a song lyrics repository employed to catch cheats who might copy their stenography work and publish it as their own.  Subtly (or not so subtly to those sensitive to such things) naturally scattered through the verses, the transcript alternated between a typographic, curly style (’) and a typewriter style (') according to a protocol that resulted in, converted to the dots and dashes of Morse Code, the message “Red Handed.” This method of copywriter protection is in keeping with the cleverest trap streets and mountweazels but no party is can really claim legal rights as librettists and brings into question what service that they were providing in the first place.

abkürzungsfimmel

The German speakers have penchant to create vocalised acronyms rather than the tendency in English to use initialism (apronym) and turn those into something pronounceable—like scuba, radar, NATO or the USA PATRIOT Act —as in GroKo (Große Koalition, Grand Coalition) or Abi for Abitur, school graduation or more familiarly Flak for Fliegerabwehrkannone, anti-aircraft guns and Gestapo for die Geheime Staatspolizei.
Once the practise becomes too pervasive and trivialising and needs to be dialled back a bit, one might call another out for carrying on with the title term, the strange mania, habit of shortening words, itself abbreviated Aküfi. One mostly encounters Abkürzungsfimmel in technical or industry jargon—as in AküFiBw (Abkürzungsfimmel Bundeswehr, soldier talk).

logophilia

Via the always excellent Kottke, we are delighted to be introduced to the Allusionist podcast with their milestone one hundredth podcast and the hosts taking a moment to reflect on a hundred fun facts about the (mostly) English language they’ve acquired whilst doing the show.
We’ve run into mountweazels, mondegreens,  polari and nominative determinism beforehand and we were equally gobsmacked to learn that the CARE in care package was an acronym like scuba or radar but there are plenty of gems to discover, like the analgesic properties of swears, the French society of constrained writers or the origin of bankruptcy, from the Italian banca rotta, “broken bench.” Check out all hundred of them—the short hundred, that is—five score as opposed to the long or Norse hundred of six score, which was called twelfty, at the links up top and consider subscribing.