out on the wiley, windy moors

Initially inspired to create her rhapsodic tone poem at age eighteen after viewing a decade old made-for-television adaptation of the author Emily Brontë’s sole novel and then compelled to refine her vision for the song and choreography after reading Wuthering Heights and learning that she, Kate Bush (see previously), and Brontë shared the same birthday (today 1818/1958), the eponymous song about the requited but unconsummated love affair between Catherine Earnshaw and the tortured Heathcliff, whom Earnshaw returns to haunt in the second part of the novel was recorded in the summer of 1977 but it release was delayed until the end of January 1978. Despite this postponement and calculated competition, however, it rose quickly in the charts (Bush was the first female performer in the UK to reach this ranking with a self-written piece) and became an instant—though sometimes divisive—cult classic. A subsequent music video has inspired fans to hold annually “The Most Wuthering Heights Day Ever” events (usually held in mid-July) across the globe with crowds cos-playing as Bush the artist in a gauzy red dress and perform the dance moves from the video in unison. 

minitel

Debuting in Saint-Malo on this day in 1980—ceremoniously decommissioned on the anniversary of its going on-line in 2012, the French videotext service called Médium interactif par numérisation d’information téléphonique was the most successful (see also here, here and here) prior to the introduction of the World Wide Web that eventually displaced it. Nation-wide by 1982, users could search telephone directories, chat, send and receive email, consult maps, conduct stock research, check bank accounts and make train and airline reservations—and naturally access pornography. At its apex around 1999, there were over twenty-five million users out of a population of sixty million with over nine million terminals (note the AZERTY keyboard layout) in circulation.

whistle-stop or i am the operator with my pocket calculator

Via these chiptune renditions of arrival and departing flourishes and leitmotifs used in Japanese railway stations (see also) we learn about train music (発車メロディ), composed in such a way as to prime the senses and move passengers, whether daily commuters or reunited families. Probably the first instance of such a jingle and musical cue and accompaniment dates back to the mid-nineteenth-century with Charles-Valentin Alkan’s Le chemin de fer, an étude that gave the same signals.

o-double-good

File under justice deferred—I suppose—and perhaps voter disenfranchisement made right but the South Korean branch of a cereal giant is releasing a green onion (쪽파 ) flavoured version of one of its signature brands in response to the results of an online “election” held back in 2004 in which breakfast fans held a run-off ballot between duelling candidates Chekkie and Chaka—with the former pledging to bring more chocolate to the cereal and the later added scallion.
Sixteen years ago, Chaka, according to exit-polls, pulled into an early and decisive lead, leading the cereal company, rather nonplussed with the prospect to purge over forty-thousand votes from the results, citing security reasons. The company (see previously) had committed similar election tampering in its Japanese market too by again siding with chocolate even though wasabi was the people’s choice by a landslide. Advance taste-testers of the limited edition that will be available in supermarkets from 1 July laud this small victory for democracy and a good idea (I wish we could annul this orange drink and I know where my partisan affiliations lie) but find that the cereal lacks the distinctive savouriness, umami (감칠맛) that the real article conveys

dynamic web pages

Via Mx. van Hoorn’s Cabinet of Hypertext Curiosities (see previously) we are not only treated to a nice oddity in this vignette called OMFG Dogs! set to this splendid chiptune soundtrack, quite reminiscent of Hamster Dance, we also learn that the inspiration is Carola Häggkvist’s 1991 Eurovision Song Contest (see also) winner Fångad av en stormvind—Captured by a Love Storm, appropriate for both this horde of puppies and the Ms. Häggkvist’s energetic, besuited backup dancers.
These are linkages web artefacts well worth checking out for something out of the ordinary and waxing nostalgic for the old, weird interwebs, a disappearing legacy and something worth conserving and treasuring (as much what is given a pedastool on any given platform) rather than consigning to oblivion, supplanted by the polished, pedigreed and present.

think different

On this day in 2007, coinciding all those years ago when Steve Wozniak tested the first prototype of the Apple I computer in 1975, the iPhone made its public debut (previously) in the United States. Retronymically dubbed the iPhone 2G to differentiate from the twelve generations and accompanying operating systems that have followed, Steve Jobs (*1955 – †2011) had been experimenting on the technical and user-experience viability of introducing a fully touch interface two years prior to release under the code name Project Purple 2, as the company worked covertly in collaboration with cellular service providers to ensure that networks could handle the demand.

l-imnarja

Fêted on this day on the occasion either of their martyrdom or on the translation of the relics, the Feast of Saints Peter and Paul is widely observed across Christendom though only has the status of a public holiday in Rome—for their dual patronage, certain cantons in Switzerland, Peru and Malta, where it is known as the above—the small island country celebrating the most holidays (though the abundance does not apply in every jurisdiction and grant workers a day off) of any in Europe. In Malta, February is known as Saint Paul’s Month—ix-xahar ta’ San Pawl—with the tenth commemorating the patron and protector’s shipwreck there en route to Rome to stand trial for his crimes, exercising his right to “appeal unto Caesar” rather than face the court in Jerusalem.

via appia

Looking over the presenters’ line up for an upcoming seminar, the lecture Quo Vadis Traditional Methodologies? struck me for its arch and arcane character (I am hardly one to criticise such classical affectations as, like a caricature from Brideshead Revisited, will at least think Quis? Who [wants this]?)—which translates as where are you going is a good, I suppose, a way of questioning trends. I hadn’t realised that the phrase also carries a liturgical meaning, sourced to the apocryphal Acts of Peter, wherein our apostle has fled the scene after the crucifixion and encounters the resurrected Jesus outside the gates. Putting the question to Jesus, Peter receives the reply “Romam eo iterum crucifigi”—that is, I am going to Rome to be crucified again. This meeting gave Peter the courage to turn around and face his accusers and accept punishment, with the request he take be put to death upside-down out of deference. That certainly seems like a significant, leading nuance on something trending.