general election

sunday best

To celebrate a centenary of public ownership, the BBC reports, the English Heritage Trust—the charitable organization that manages over four hundred historic properties, included in its portfolio manor houses, Roman fortifications, Tintagel Castle and oversight in the Blue Plaques programme of London, solicited from visitors family snapshots of Stonehenge.  Included in the contributions that numbered over a thousand was this circa 1932 outing amongst the stones and one image capturing a family picnic from the summer of 1875. The gallery showcases not only changing fashion and access to the monoliths but also how people’s relationship to the camera has evolved—how they mug and pose and what constitutes keeping—all against a backdrop that’s remained ageless.

epicenity

In recognition of the relatively new and accepted practise of declaring one’s pronouns—though they and derivatives like theirs and themselves have been employed in the English language in the singular context (see also) since the 1500s, Merriam-Webster named they as their 2019 Word of the Year, reflecting the volume of lookups on its website. Significantly, current parlance rather than referencing an unknown or unspecified antecedent instead is a term that normalises gender-neutrality or non-conformity along with gendered personal pronouns. Honourable-mentions from this past year’s lingual landscape can also be explored at the link above.

unman, wittering and zigo

Released under the title Compañeros del Crimen to theatre audiences in Uruguay in 1972 the cinematic adaptation of the 1958 radio drama by Giles Cooper portrays a newly arrived substitute teacher hired on to complete the semester at a boys’ finishing school who comes to suspect that his predecessor was murdered by the students—though his fears are dismissed as paranoia initially. Often portrayed as a stage piece in public schools in the UK, it is also part of the curriculum for English standard coursework for one’s GCSEs. The resonant quotation from the venerable headmaster goes, “Authority is a necessary evil and every bit as evil as it is necessary.”

article i, section 2, clause 5

It is somewhat ironic—though we leave it to the adults in the room to recognise the separate natures of both pieces of legislation and as much as we’d rather shirk the duty and onus, recognise that we’re adults as well—that essentially in the same breath as the Democrats of the House of Representatives carefully and assiduously proceeded with introducing articles of impeachment against Trump, only happening three times before in US history with Andrew Jackson and Bill Clinton acquitted by the Senate trial and Richard Nixon resigning in lieu of being fired, Congress also approved one of the Trump’s campaign promises—overhauling the North American Free Trade Agreement. Seen as unfavourable to American industry by some creatures of his court, the newly negotiated NAFTA is couched in language of work standards which will probably prove beneficial to all parties. While the issues are distinct, the passage of the arrangement denies Trump his counter-programming (limited to an impromptu meeting with the Russian foreign secretary and reportedly warning Russia off about election meddling—that and superimposing his head on the body of Thanos, the comic book super-villain who eradicated half of all life in the Cosmos, that half apparently being the sixty-two percent of the electorate who didn’t vote for him) and tethered to the limited scope and scale of the charges, obstruction of Congress and rank hypocrisy in dealing with Ukraine, perhaps will mean he is the first to be removed from office through the process, delicately diffused and with solemn respect for the democratic process, knowing that failure to censure Trump would further erode norms and the checks-and-balances on executive power.

iso-8601 or fifty-two weeks make a year

Kottke once again rings in the season of superlatives with this thoughtful week-by-week catalogue of new things learned in this past year by Tom Whitwell (previously). Aside from being acquainted with the origins of getting one’s steps in, most of these interesting facts and figures were new to us and bare reflection and expanding into posts of their own.
We found especially enlightening and discouraging that the act of finding a clean and safe place to use the restroom for the world’s females takes no less a workforce equivalent equal to the size of Germany’s economy per year and the discovery that some visually impaired individuals can process speech many times faster than sighted people can, suggesting that the visual cortex can be remapped and repurposed. Do give the whole annotated list a look and let us know what you’ve learned that’s really shocking or resonant. What new fact you’ve learned (or remembered) from this past year would you add to the register?

wkrp

Dangerous Minds showcases an authentically rare and obscure sampling of recordings from Cincinnati’s musical—punk, ska, rockabilly—underground, vintage 1975-1982. Like anything on the internet of course it’s a point of departure for further research and exploration and the featured tracks are barely scratching the surface, but we did quite like the references to Debbie Harry throughout.