mario day

Chosen for the date’s similar appearance to the video game character’s name (see also) when formatted Mar. 10, the celebration has been officially observed by Nintendo since 2016 with tournaments and other Super Mario Brothers related events drawing from the expansive canon and fandom of the Mushroom Kingdom (キノコ王国, Kinoko Ōkoku) franchise. 

 

lph-8

Occupying a liminal space between 2001: A Space Odyssey and the juncture that went with cosmic opera in one direction and dread aliens in the other, the environmental-themed, weakly-endorsing techno-utopia Silent Running by Douglas Trumbull—released on this date in 1972—does resound with our times and the bleak climate catastrophes we are facing, nearly fifty years on. The film follows a resident botanist (Bruce Dern) on board a greenhouse just beyond the orbit of Saturn, maintaining specimens of Earth’s plant life for its eventual reseeding the planet after all native trees and crops went extinct. Disobeying an order from the corporate headquarters that sponsored the space ark project to jettison their living cargo and return to commercial services, the botanist with his three service robots try to save the last biosphere.

won’t you take me to comfort town?

Nag on the Lake’s Picture of the Day transports us to housing estate completed in 2019, first conceived in the aftermath of the 2008 Financial Crisis built on the campus of a moribund rubber factory on Kyiv’s industrial Left Bank, perplexingly to the right of the Dnieper river. Painted and clad in a fashion to suggest children’s wooden building block architecture, the affordable low-rise apartment blocks are a colourful contrast to the landscape of older so-called krushchevki, the housing scheme promoted under Soviet rule whose necessary up-keep did not always carry over when ownership transferred into individual stakeholders.

vostok-3ka no. 1

Also known by the designation Sputnik 9 (see previously), the Soviet spacecraft launched on this day in 1961 carried a complement and crew of mice, guinea pig, a dog called Chemushka (“Blackie”) and a realistic human dummy, mannequin called Ivan Ivanovich (the equivalent of Joe Doe or Max Mustermann) that was so distressing uncanny thus prompting technicians to affix a label to his visor lest someone finding Ivan after a mission might not mistake him for an incapacitated cosmonaut or extra-terrestrial. Ivan was auctioned off after the dissolution of the Soviet Union and purchased by Ross Perot, who subsequently donated him to the Smithsonian Air and Space Museum. The mission only consisting of a single trip around the world, it was deorbited shortly

show me the way to the next whiskey bar

Premiering on this day in 1930 at the Neues Theatre in Leipzig, the sartorial opera by Kurt Weill and Bertolt Brecht (previously) Aufstieg und Fall der Stadt Mahagonny, set in the fictive city in America and recounting its rise and fall, it is seen as a critique of the Weimar Republic through the allegorical lampooning of the US mediated through the German perspective. The complex orchestral scoring references jazz, ragtime and a repertoire of counterpoint, particularly in “The Alabama Song,” covered decades later by the Doors and David Bowie. Though the two-and-one-half hour long show in three acts did go on, the performance was disrupted by Nazi party members in the auditorium and was banned outright from 1933 onward with no performances restaged until the 1960s.

sancta francesca romana

Made patron of automobile drivers (see also) in 1925 by Pope Pius XI due to anecdote that her guardian angel lit her path before her while she travelled, Saint Frances of Rome (*1384) was a caregiver and mystic who excelled as an organiser of charitable services and founded a community of oblates, a mendicant order who lives with the general population and not cloistered, uniquely without religious vows and is venerated on this day, on the occasion of her death in 1440. Living at the time of the Western Schism and wars between rival popes and anti-popes, Francis felt it incumbent on her to use her station and wealth to provide succour and aid to the suffering amidst the collapse of a social safety net and sought to recruit the company of like-minded individuals.

санитарный поезд

Via Messy Nessy Chic, we are exposed to the impressive portfolio of photographer Emile Ducke through his series on medical trains that service the vast reaches of Siberia with annual whistle-stops at each station to perform diagnostic exams and prescribe medicine to remote communities who otherwise go without regular health car. The locomotive Saint Lukas (Luke of Antioch, patron of surgeons and physicians) has for its caboose a chapel wagon. More to explore at the links above.

l’hirondelle noire

Celebrated in his adoptive home of France but not so well known in his native America, flying ace, boxer and jazz musician Eugene Bullard (*1895 - †1961) grew up in Columbus, Georgia and gaining an appreciation for the effects of systemic racism decided to stowaway on a ship to Aberdeen and eventually made it to Paris, via Glasgow and London, becoming one of the first in a cadre of Black combat pilots to serve in World War I. Also fluent in German, Bullard became involved in espionage and military intelligence, monitoring the Germans who patronised his nightclub in the run-up to World War II. Eventual repatriation was a culture-shock, still experiencing the same prejudice and inequality from thirty-three years prior, taking a series of odd jobs in Manhattan, one of which was elevator operator at Rockefeller Center. One anchor noticed his impressive array of medals he wore on his attendant uniform (see also) and intrigued interviewed the “Black Swallow” on the Today Show.