msaxl

Viennese artist and educator, Marianne Saxl-Deutsch, born on this day in 1885 (†1942, murdered at the Treblinka death camp) produced some of the iconic posters used in the original push for women’s suffrage (and revived when society goes retrograde). Still under copyright during the Women’s Liberation Movement of the 1970s (entering public domain in 2013), her work was often used without attribution—her signature MSAXL cut out and leading to her not being remembered as she should have been.

a proper miniature car

On this day in 1959, the British Motor Corporation (BMC) launched its iconic, signature Mini, conceived by Greco-British automotive designer Sir Alec Issigonis (*1906 – †1988), commissioned to produce a domestic “proper miniature car” in response to the import of German and Italian bubble cars.
Aggressively marketed with celebrity-endorsement and some two-thousand exemplars exported to a hundred countries to coincide with the premiere of the Mark I—meant to satisfy demand for a stylish car responsive to the need for fuel economy set off by the Suez Crisis a few years earlier, the original model and later iterations acquired dozens of monikers and pet names including the Morris Mini Minor, the Wolsesey Hornet, the Riley Elf, the Innocenti Mini and the Austin Panther.

le chameau

On this day in 1969, coincidently on the same day as the shipwreck of the French naval vessel The Camel occurred two hundred forty-four years before in passage from La Rochelle to the colony of New France in North America, the high court of Canada awarded the recovered cache of gold and silver coins to the wreck’s finders, a trio of treasure-hunters, after being tied up in litigation for years regarding the venture partnership’s liabilities to one another. The specie (then valued at seven hundred thousand Canadian dollars was meant to pay workers and the ship’s manifest of some three-hundred passengers included the replacement Intendant, governor-general, for Nouvelle-France. Some of the coins and the rest of the maritime artefacts are on display at a museum in Halifax.

follow the fellow who follows a dream

As with all enduring productions of Old Hollywood, the Victor Fleming’s The Wizard of Oz (there had been previously two earlier adaptations of L Frank Baum’s children’s fantasy, first as a silent film and then as a Canadian animated feature), which was first released nationwide (having debuted in Grauman’s Chinese Theatre in Hollywood ten days before) on this day in 1939, there has been exhaustive studies made of the Technicolor fantasy musical but it’s nonetheless worth reflecting on a cultural icon and the fullness of its lore and legacy. I’ll admit that I didn’t quite get the Kansas scenes probably quite as well as I ought to have at first—I think not quite making that connection that most of the characters, including the farm hands also appeared in Oz but that it was quite revelatory once I did realise it. I did not know, however, that Dorothy’s touching line to Scarecrow—“I think I’ll miss you most of all”—was a artefact of a concluding scene that was later cut.
Never filmed unlike the other rejected sequence “The Jitterbug” where Dorothy enters a song competition to convince an otherwise philistine princess that classical music isn’t the only form of expression to appeal to young adult audiences, there was to be a bit of a coda of resolution back in Kansas after the farmstead is rebuilt and they’ve recovered from the tornado damage, the farm hand Hunk (Ray Bolger, also playing the Scarecrow though originally cast as the Tinwoods Man) would take his leave for agricultural college but not before extracting a promise from Dorothy that she would write, implying a budding romance. Good for Hunk (his alter ego already declared the wisest in Oz, and was so all along) for pursuing higher education and not be overly particularly about vo-tech. Perhaps that was too adult and not in keeping with the rest of the story. What are some of your memories or misconceptions about the iconic film? We’d like to hear them.

apotropaic magic

An excavation in Pompeii, a Roman city along with Herculaneum frozen in time on 24 August in year 79 AD when with the violent eruption of Mount Vesuvius it became buried under tonnes of pumice and hot ashfall, has uncovered a trove of charms and amulets believed to have been the repertoire, arsenal of a sorceress and also serves as a repository of very intimate personal items that fleeing residents might leave in the custody of the sorceress for safekeeping and retrieval upon return.
Each of the items collected in a wooden box that had all but decayed away represents not only its peculiar wish-fulfilment but by extension narratives too intriguing not to limn complete, not to mention what each talisman and totem might signify or hold power over. Included among the evil-eyes (the virtue of keeping away like with like), phalluses, skulls and scarabs were figures of Harpocrates—a Greek syncretisation of the Egyptian Child Horus who represented the new dawn and hope to conquer the day, who matured to adult form by twilight and represented the resilience to come back again as well as discretion and confidence-keeping.

Δ9

The local farmers have really done an outstanding job with creating refuges for bees and other pollinators, going above and beyond the usual fallow fields of crop rotation and cultivating verges of sunflowers and wild flowers—re-wilded to include anything that will take root among which somewhat incongruously is industry-grade hemp. I am told on good authority that because they’re male plants, they would not elicit the most enjoyable experience, though they make a novel sight to behold nonetheless.

magnum opus

Via the always captivating Miss Cellania, we are treated to a bit of chamber music from Grant Woolard’s latest edition of his Classical Music Mashup—which is a nice ensemble of melodic transitions that takes us on a tour of the great composers in a collection of seventy familiar musical vignettes. Find other iterations of Woolard’s work at the link above.

pizolgletscher

Following a recent memorial service for a departed glacier in Iceland, a Swiss environmental group in the canton of Sankt Gallen is planning on holding a similar funeral for the small cirque glacier (formed in a bowl-shaped mountain depression) at the foot of the Pizol.
Effectively dead with no longer the ability, albeit at a geologically slow pace, to impact the landscape as it crosses the range and is now regarded as a patch of dirty ice and a massively popular hiking trail through five alpine lakes and moraines is much diminished by the loss of one of its attractions. Learn how you can pay your respects and stop further glacial melting away at the link above.