landshuter hochzeit

Recreated every four years by the city of Landshut in celebration of one of the largest historical processions and pageants of medieval times, the so-called Landshut Wedding between Duke George of Bavaria (Herzog Georg, called the Rich) and Princess Hedwig (Jagwiga) Jagiellon, daughter of King Casimir IV of Poland, the lavish, sumptuous ceremony and feast, took place on this day in 1475. Though the couple continued in happy for over a quarter of a century until George’s death, because all male heirs pre-deceased their father and Salic laws at the time in the kingdom prevented their capable and savvy daughters Elisabeth or Margaret from inheritance and the power-vacuum and counter-claims led to a succession crisis that split the duchy into four.

inner oort cloud

Co-discovered on this day in 2003 by astronomical teams in Caltech, Yale and the Gemini Observatory, the planetoid, trans-Neptunian object (previously) provisionally nicknamed the Flying Dutchman because of its slow (eleven-thousand plus years) and solitary journey around the Sun that made researchers almost miss it for a fixed star, it was welcomely given the official designation 90377 Sedna in honour of the Inuit sea goddess who dwells at the bottom of the frigid Arctic Ocean, and establishing that future objects found in the same orbital region should be named after polar mythologies.

The astronomical monogram, which matches the ones of ancient astrology quite well, is a combination of the Eastern Canadian Inuktitut characters ᓴᓐᓇ, Sanna—the modern version of the name and suggests a leaping seal. Because of the extreme eccentricity of its perihelion—too great to have been caused by the gravitational influence of the known worlds, Sedna’s existence lends credence to either interstellar interlopers or a so called Planet Nine, ten-times the size of Earth but hidden as a cosmic counter-balance.

savage intruder

Later re-released as Hollywood Horror House, we were delighted by this thoroughgoing, scene-by-scene review of the 1970 Donald Wolfe horror flick starring Miriam Hopkins, John David Garfield, Gale Sondergaard, Virginia Wing and Florence Lake from Poseidon’s Underworld (previously) that relates the story of an ageing actress living in a Tinsel Town mansion (in the spirit of Sunset Boulevard and What Ever Happened to Baby Jane? with a bit of Rosemary’s Baby thrown in for good measure) attended by a retinue of domestics, who engages a new personal assistant—in the midst of a mysterious killing spree terrorising the area—who quickly comes to dominate the estate and household management. Here’s the feature in full below but honestly I got a bigger kick out of the screen-captures, trivia and commentary at the link above.

8x8

uap: an interview with former US DoD head of the Advanced Aerospace Threat Identification Programme says that “Tic-Tac” craft have been observed by the navy for decades  

dutch angle: dramatic tilt in cinematography  

comrade kiev: an exquisitely curated collection of posters from Soviet times  

p68/dulcimer: a prototype of the iPod—which celebrated its twentieth birthday last month—via Twisted Sifter  

subjective distance: more on the ordering of adjectives and the unwritten rules of language—see previously 

quesos y besos: a soft goat cheese from Spain beat out many contenders to be awarded the top prize for the annual World Cheese Awards  

shoulder-surfing: a patent to discourage lookie-loos with a screen blur for those without the proper headgear and glasses—via Slashdot 

discopter: Alexander Weygers patented the design for the first UFO flying vehicle decades before the craze in sightings and visitations

nebelig

 

warp and weave

With a significant portion of global power devoted to air-conditioning, the search for ways to shift the burden of keeping cool, passively, has garnered quite a sense of urgency. Researchers in Nanjing and Stanford, harnessing and enhancing the natural properties of silk and sericulture, learn from the New Shelton wet / dry, which deflects most of the radiant energy falling on it rather than absorbing it like other fabrics embedded fibres with nanoparticles to reflect the portion of the spectrum not already covered, thereby creating a sort of high SPF, super-conducting cloth that blocks fully ninety-five percent of heat, remaining cooler than ambient air temperatures by three-and-a-half degrees Celsius and a whopping twelve degrees difference for the skin’s surface, reducing the risk for heat-exhaustion and dehydration.

santa claus isn’t coming to town

With an extreme shortage of Santa’s Helpers available and unwilling to work and risk life and limb with a resurgent pandemic expected to get worse before it gets better (many of the usual candidates in character being older and larger individuals considered more vulnerable), many malls—worldwide—are turning towards a new Yuletide tradition and installing the red-light, green-light killer robot from Squid Games (previously). Adults queuing up at a shopping centre in Manchester even were served dalgona—the fragile sugar cookie-cutter candy from one of the challenges—whilst they waited patiently to have their picture taken with the giant doll.  Not to fret, however, since unlike one’s typical Mall Santas, the actual Father Christmas is immune and designated as an essential worker.

monstropolis

Courtesy of Laughing Squid, we are directed towards Pixar Studio’s celebration of the twentieth anniversary of Monsters, Inc. with a four-minute tribute in the form of an old-timey animated short, filmed in scare-o-scope and complete with intertitles and rag-time accompaniment (original music by Randy Newman), leading to a rather heartwarming conclusion.