don’t you remember the fifth of november

Enshrined the following year as a commemoration of thanksgiving for the failure of the Gunpowder Plot to blow up the House of Lords and reinstate a Catholic monarchy and exported to America as Election Day, the once rabidly puritanical celebration and partisan scapegoating (previously) has evolved into a festival recognising the role of the subversive underdog and donning the mask of Guy Fawkes, the chief co-conspirator has become a symbol of protest and rebellion for any number of causes.
The preamble for the parliamentary act set forth that “many malignant and devilish Papists, Jesuits and Seminary Priests, much envying and fear, conspired most horribly, when the King’s most excellent Majesty, the Queen, the Prince, and he Lords Spiritual and Temporal, and Commons, should have been assembled in the Upper House of Parliament upon the Fifth Day of November in the Year of our Lord One thousand six hundred and five, suddenly to have blown up the said whole House with Gunpowder: An Invention so inhuman, barbarous and cruel, as the like was never before heard of.” Though no penalties were prescribed or meted out for failure to participate, the associated legislation directs church ministers to hold a special service on this anniversary and read the text to the parishioners. This requirement was annulled with the repealing of the Act in 1859, a decade after the Universalis Ecclesiæ was issued by the Vatican, restoring episcopal hierarchy in the country and recognising the legitimacy of the royal family. Though like Guy Fawkes Day the parade and associated events (Operation Vendetta) has transcended its founders’ and organisers’ original mission: at first meant to protest the secrecy and censorship of the Church of Scientology, marchers now rally for social justice.

ψηφος

From the Greek for the study of pebbles (used for ballots in ancient Athens—the English word itself having Italic origins, ballotta, a little ball and hence the phrase “blackballing”), psephology is a sub-branch of political science that tries to account for election outcomes in language of socio-historic studies through research and reporting on voting registries, franchisement, polling and the influence of lobbies and special interest groups in politics.
Coined for the nonce in the late 1940s, the word term was introduced by Scottish classicist WFR Hardie when fellow academic and member of JRR Tolkein’s roundtable (the Inklings) Ronald Buchanan McCallum called on him for a word to denote the study of referenda. Poltical correspondents, analysts, demographers, policy wonks and pundits could all be called psephologtist—that is, pebble-counters.

positive externalities

Though we are familiar with the concept of sin-taxes and the notion of factoring in social cost into the price regime of consumption by means of a carbon-tax which has a diverse cast of proponents (and conversely incentives to make the more expensive choices for the sake of greater society), we had never heard of a Pigovian subsidy broadly applied as the name of this corrective measure.
Conceived nearly a century ago by Cambridge economics professor Arthur Cecil Pigou (*1877 – †1959), its first incarnation was a proposal to reveal and offset the hidden costs of alcohol on civil societies by levying taxes that would help fund law enforcement, first responders and insurance underwriters who have had to foot the extra bill of accident and absenteeism from intoxication. People then and now are reluctant to find correlation outside of their immediate horizons, and Pigou tried couching the argument in more concrete terms, social benefits and ills being notoriously hard to measure in a field that lobbies in numbers, citing unregulated industry for creating the deadly smog that beset London with direct costs built-in for inaction in terms of health and sustainability. Do give the entire podcast a listen and learn more about a real-world experiment whose time has finally come around.

wende ohne wenn und aber

On this day in East Berlin’s Alexanderplatz (previously) in 1989, up to a million demonstrators peaceably assembled for the largest rally registered and tolerated by the authorities.
Riding on the momentum of the Montagsdemos and shocked by the police violence committed against those who had demonstrated during the celebrations of the DDR’s fortieth anniversary a month beforehand, members of East Berlin’s theatre industry sought and were surprisingly granted permission to organise the event—hoping that official sanction would refuse the potential for injury.
The party was also invited to send speakers to address the crowd and deliver a defence for the status quo, the aims were to bring about democratic reforms in East Germany and enforce those provisions in the constitution that enshrined freedom of speech and assembly in theory but were lacking in practise and nothing so grand as opening the border or reuniting the divided nation. Party officers withered before the jeering masses. Parade marshals were dispatched to work the throngs with bright yellow sashes calling for “Keine Gewalt”—No Violence—and attendees were encouraged to bring signs, whose slogans included Bürgerrechte nicht nur auf Papier (Civil rights not only on paper) and Change – No Ifs, Ands or Buts.

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Coder Neal Agarwal, whose mission is to help restore the web to its bold weirdness of days gone by, invites us to socialise, commune and channel with the greater world around us by exploring those lesser known platforms below the fold of the top-tier social media buttons. Check out more of Agarwal’s other projects—including taking in perspective the size of space and a call for submissions on drawing corporate logos (see also) from memory.

card catalogue

Via another peripatetic friend, Things Magazine, we are introduced to the cautionary stacks of Awful Library Books and reminded of the importance of culling for the sake of circulation and that “hoarding is not collection development.”
Among recent submissions that have thus far eluded the curatorial eyes of professional bibliothecopgraphers we really enjoyed discovering that God loves Mimes through Susie Kelly Toomey’s 1986 instruction book on silent but potentially equally obnoxious evangelism, The Psychotherapy Maze (1991): A Consumers’ Guide to Getting In and Out of Therapy, the volumes on crafting for niche audiences, obsolete technology, fad diets and beauty treatments are to be uncovered in the site’s extensive archives maintained by a consortium of librarians.  A lot of the jackets and covers could be from today’s self-published marketplace. I think I’ll be returning for more exploration and to check for regular updates real soon.

when i woke

This 1994 hit single from the worldbeat band Rusted Root enjoyed a huge cultural moment in 1996, featuring as the soundtrack for the television series Party of Five and in no fewer than three feature films including Pie in the Sky, Race the Sky and Matilda. Later part of the playlists (excused for that flourish that’s a rather poor imitation of Ladysmith Black Mambazo and imbued with that special status of elusive earworm that one knows but may be struggles to place) of the movies Ice Age, Mr. & Mrs. Smith, a long-running car-rental advertising campaign, and the wake-up music for the Opportunity Rover on at least one occasion, the upbeat song has proved to be an enduring one.