pluralia tantum

Existing only in the plural form, the term bibliobibuli was coined in 1957 by H. L. Mencken from the Latinate roots biblio and bibulous to call the set that read too much: “I know some who are constantly drunk on books, as other men are drunk on whiskey or religion. They wander through this most diverting and simulation of worlds in a haze, seeing nothing and hearing nothing.” This harsh indictment applies it seems to those who with a slate of podcast subscriptions requiring listening to and catching up on. Now I feel personnally attacked.

style #5253

Dubbed the “Christmas Pattern” by factory workers as production demands for the affordable, utilitarian linoleum flooring of textured, interlocking bricks touted as the perfect choice for small kitchens (see also) guaranteed holiday bonuses during the Great Depression when most others were desperate for work, the enduring pattern with an older vintage than one expects with those harvest palettes of a later time owes its decades-spanning success to residential interior designer Hazel Dell Brown, who helped impart personal expression, ingenuity and improvisation with respect to space and budget in her innovative directions that she took the industry re-calibrated to fulfil the needs of a growing middle class. Learn more from 99% Invisible at the link above.

hanna montana

Only identified by name in apoccryphal books of the Bible and Qur’an and generally only identified as the wife of Imran / Joachim, Saint Anne (along with her husband) are venerated on this day in the Catholic Church, though the maternal grandmother of Jesus is revered in many spiritual traditions and is regarded as intercessor and patroness of grandparents, Britany, Canada, Sri Lanka and Detroit, lace makers, second-hand clothes dealers, seamsters, teachers, sterility (due to her miraculous birth of Mary at an advanced age and thought barren) and cabinet-makers.

alternative work site

In a rollicking, wide-ranging look at the precedents for the creator economy in correspondence course—notably of our scribe stenographer Sir Isaac Pitman—and the move that originally tethered us to office space, sourced to in the Uffizi in Florence, where bureaucracy and administration were centralised in 1560 as a cadet branch of the Renaissance and Enlightenment, now a world-class gallery gifted to the city after the Medici line died out.

Afforded the opportunity to work remotely and knowing arguments for compelling staff to return are specious at best—synergy and presence packaged as the benefits we are missing out on away from colleagues I think are the opaque justifications for accountability and the passkeys of those supervisors who like to play house at the office because they’re denied it at home, the informing past is an interesting and advisable lens to re-evaluate custom and workplace culture as crisis and contingency hopefully begin to ebb. Technological advance can be regressive in its demands and requirements to fill the time. Much more to explore and contemplate at Tedium at the link up top.

queenhithe

The Gentle Author of Spitalfield’s Life directs our attention to a new, epic mosaic along the Thames path that illustrates two millennia and more of human history with the estuary’s natural course at the inlet named ‘the Queen’s Harbour’ after Matilda granted around 1104 the establishment of a dock there and the excise of duties on goods delivered. Learn more at the link above, including a treasury of panels from the procession, pictorial chronicle of the ages.

de imitatione christi

Theologian and best known for his devotional collection, The Imitation of Christ (see also), Thomas à Kempis (*1380) is venerated as a founder of modern spiritualism on this the anniversary of his death in 1471, beatified and contributions made church canon but not formally canonised yet. His maxims, including, “For man proposes but God disposes” and “Everywhere for peace I sought but I have found it only in books and nooks”—in angello cum libello, are considered essential study and quite lucid.

i feel the earth move

On this day in 1976 at the Avignon Festival—title taken from the post-apocalyptic novel about the aftermath of global thermonuclear war—the Philip Glass Ensemble premiered the four act opera Einstein on the Beach—see previously here and here—a trilogy of portraits of personal vision and transformational thinking that spurred revelation through ideas rather than brute force and might. This two-hour excerpt from 1979 faithful recreates the staging from the five-hour debut.

never an after-thirst with squirt

First broadcast on this day in 1967 during a commercial break from the WWII drama television series, the network aired a minute-long advertisement for the citrus-flavour soft drink called Squirt—which for ten-seconds appeared as muted but in living colour, even for the vast majority of households at the time who owned black-and-white TV sets.

With no general forewarning, I suspect a good number of viewers thought that they were losing their minds—or at least sense of sight and were hallucinating the flashes of colour. Those bursts were in fact the result of clever and carefully calibrated optical illusions developed by inventor James F. Butterfield the year prior, having found that working with optometrists and visual neuroscientists that the brain could be coaxed into processing colours that were not there by modulating the pulses of white light and could encode for a set of basic colours filtering a black-and-white camera field with a rotating device.

Butterfield called this outcome subjective colour. Because of the mechanical and physiological limitations—it was not a universal experience and the range of colours were limited and not very vibrant—and actual colour models were being introduced and becoming more affordable just as this technology was emerging, nothing more unfortunately came from this innovation and line of invesigation.