Ruling from the 20° to 24° of Capricorn—corresponding from this day until 15 January, this infernal marquis presents as a lion a gee with the tail of a dread serpent and clutching two snakes in his paws—this presenting this sigil will compel him, like all the other spirits, to appear as a man.
Also contributing to comic books, his flair for the dramatic, style which references celebrities that the readership would recognise and subject matter recall a couple other pulp artists (here and here) we’d had the pleasure of learning more about recently. Much more snakes on trains, violence, wild beasts, natural disasters, omens, crashes (a fighter jet into said locomotive), armed pets and daring rescues at the links above.
Debuting on this day in 1927 at the Ufa-Palast-Zoo cinema in Berlin, the silent, expressionist dystopian drama Metropolis was director Fritz Lang’s vision of the eponymous science-fiction novel by Thea von Harbou. Filmed during the optimistic days of the Weimar Republik and informed by the philosophy of such attendant movements as Bauhaus, the ground-breaking piece forecasts, presciently, a bleak and oppressive future technocracy with a huge chasm separating the classes. With a legacy of immeasurable influence and launching numerous homages, it was inscribed on the UNESCO register of Memory of the World—the first film to receive this honour. The message of the movie, whose allegory is of course not meant as an instruction manual, is summed up in the final intertitle: „Mittler zwischen Hirn und Hรคnden muss das Herz sein“—that is, “The mediator between the Head and Hands must be the Heart.”
Namesake of the Roman lunar goddess (twin sister of Apollo, establishing the naming convention for missions eventually taken up by civilian agencies) carried out by the US Army Signal Corps at a specially built laboratory with a power surplus transmitter array at Fort Monmouth, New Jersey achieved on this day in 1946 one of its initial aims, concomitantly establishing the discipline of radio astronomy, by demonstrating that a radar wave could be bounced off the surface of the satellite, sent and received by a terrestrial source. Previously no one knew for certain whether transmissions through the vacuum of space were possible. This monumentally large step not only accurately furnished the distance from the Earth to the Moon and hinted at mapping the terrain of other worlds, Project Diana in a sense began the Space Age.
Via friends TYWKIWDBI and Nag on the Lake, we find ourselves transported to the monastic complex of the town of Alcobaรงa, a Cistercian community famed for its gastronomical and vinicultural excellence and founded by Portugal’s first king Alfonso Henriques, which features among its Gothic elements a dining hall whose entrance is preceded with the rather abstruse admonishment: Respicte quia peccata Populi comdeitis—that is, Remember you eat the sins of the people.
Otherwise perfectly proportion, the communal area has direct egress to the kitchen, which according to popular legend and rather practically, had a door to discourage gluttony, either measured for self-catering or as a monthly check on one’s girth with the passage two metres high but only thirty-two centimetres wide, a model pants-size for many though the cloth and cowl could be quite concealing in any circumstance. Perhaps we are misinterpreting the whole intent of this narrow doorway and it was rather meant to shame those who were not committed devoradores de pecados. According to current lore, those who could not pass needed to diet until they could sidle and squeeze through.
