Despite yesterday’s indefinite postponement and Iran closing the Strait of Hormuz over deadly strikes in Lebanon (American forces in the region dispute this claim saying ship traffic continues to flow), diplomatic delegations scrambled to reach Lucerne to begin formal talks. Trump publically admits that the US is is four-weeks away from an even more debilitating oil shock. The US team consisting of the same ineffectual members, Vance, Witkoff and Kushner, dispatched in a succession of negotiations that quickly spiralled into war is in attendance. Israel announced it refuses to withdraw from its security zone south of Beirut, neither side directly represented in the talks. Discussions are expected to carry on for days with side sessions addressing maritime security, but the main focus is on the sticking points of deescalation and Iran’s nuclear programme—the proposal presently being to not allow inspectors and to dilute the existing stockpile to well below weapon-grade. Fuel sales are suspended in Crimea after a wave of attacks by Ukraine on the illegally annexed territory.
Via Marco McClean’s Memo of the Air, we enjoyed finding this vintage vinyl abridgement of the profoundly strange Disney feature The Black Hole as an audio LP. I remember such adaptations were popular and a way to tide one over with a teaser when a rewatch was something not so easily summoned up and an extra vehicle to showcase dialogue and sound effect through a radio drama that relied more on imagination than memory. The voice actors who played V.I.N.CENT. LF-396 (Vital Information Necessary Centralised Labour Force) and Old BO.B. LF-28 (Bio-sanitation Battalion), however, respectively Roddy McDowall and Slim Pickens, respectively, went uncredited in all versions. Sigourney Weaver was initially considered for the role of Dr Kate McCrea, the expedition’s ESP-sensitive scientist, but the casting director found her name too unusual going instead with actor Jennifer O’Neill, despite her reluctance to cut her hair for the zero-gravity scenes Eventually relenting after the studio agreed that O’Neill could bring own hairdresser on set, Vidal Sassoon, she allowed her hair to be cropped short, easing the trauma by consuming several glasses of wine, resulting in a drink-driving accident after the first day of filming. O’Neill was removed from the project and replaced with understudy Yvette Mimieux as the ship’ psychic.
The heretofore unverified but practically applied in cartography conjecture that no more than four colours are needed to distinguish bordering regions on a map was announced as proven on this day in 1976 after more than century since it was first proposed by two mathematicians at the the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign campus. Not feasible to perform the brute calculation by hand, this topology problem (see previously) was solved with the aid of a supercomputer, the first instance of a technical assist for a math problem, the claim rejected by some peers at the time because they couldn’t check the work.
synchronoptica
one year ago: arriving in Morbihan (with synchronoptica)
Courtesy of Miss Cellania, we are directed to this delightful and a bit exhausting collaboration between Postmodern Jukebox (previously—now that’s a name I’ve not heard in a long time—a long time) and choreographer, burlesque artist and tap-dancer, Demi Remick performing to a jazzy, swing medley of sci-fi theme songs. Not their first dance, Remick also was featured on a assortment of arcade music, including the Zelda and Mario franchises. You’ll be sure to recognise them all from TV and film.
As our faithful chronicler informs, the neo-noir classic directed by Roman Polanski and starring Faye Dunaway, Jack Nicohson, John Huston, Diane Ladd and Burt Young was released on this day in 1974 to critical acclaim. Over the milieu of the California water wars, a series of political conflicts over water rights at the turn of the last century with the expansion of Los Angeles and the construction of aqueducts to divert resources from Owens Valley and Mono Lake used by ranchers and farmers, a woman, calling herself Evelyn Mulwray, engages a private detective to keep on whom she says is her husband, a civil engineer with the California public utility department. The investigator photographs the subject with another woman, exposing their apparent affair, but then is confronted by the engineer’s real wife, concluding that the impostor set up her husband in order to discredit him and prevent the discovery of a complex conspiracy to hoard water whilst the city is experiencing a drought. Parallel to Dunaway’s scripted revelation “My sister! My daughter!”—the film could be read as a retelling of Oedipus Rex, a plague exploited to gain power ultimately reflecting the endemic corruption of society, misidentification, and a maimed protagonist who realises the truth too late to affect the outcome—genealogists working for Time magazine informed Nicholson after the making Chinatown that his sister was, in real life, was actually his mother, raised by his grandparents as their own son when the actor was born out of wedlock to showgirl June Frances Nicholson. On learning this fact at age thirty-seven, he acknowledged it was a “pretty dramatic event but it wasn’t what I’d call traumatising…I was pretty well psychologically formed.”
Underwriter Lloyd’s of London intelligencer branch that tracks maritime shipping data reports that Tehran’s and Muscat’s newly created Persian Gulf Strait Authority are mandating that vessels transiting the Hormuz take out special coverage through government approved providers. This insurance requirement is regarded as a prelude to tolls, which is probably the least worst thing to come out of the stultifyingly bad grand deal of Trump’s—
a nominal fee factored into the cost of doing business that would be passed along to the consumer but a tax we think anyone would happily pay in exchange that Trump and his minions don’t embark on more empire-building adventures with the tolerance, forethought and follow-through worse than a package tourist. Despite the ceasefire announced yesterday between Hezbollah and the IDF, strikes continue with dozens more dead in southern Beirut, pressuring Iran to take action and respond to what hardliners are calling a blatant violation of the MOU with Washington unable to reign in Israel, whose minister of national security declared that “all of Lebanon must burn.” Direct negotiations stalled with the US, Pakistani interior minister Mohsin Naqvi returns to Tehran for meetings with high level officials.
