welcome to the coolest summer of the rest of your lives (13. 584)

A heat wave in the British Isles, drought conditions and extreme temperatures extended through a period lasting from the end of June until the end of August, reached its climax on this day in 1976 with a then record peak of 35,9°C (97°F) registered in Cheltenham in the Cotswolds. Leading towards water rationing, impacts on wildlife and agriculture, mortality displacement (excess deaths) and a twelve-percent increase in food prices caused by crop failure, that summer was considered a reference point for stiflingly hot weather in the UK and Ireland, with temperatures just shy of the height over most of England for fifteen consecutive days, a plague of ladybirds and unprecedented forest fires, since rivalled by 2003, 2006, 2014, 2022 and the present season, amplified by anthropogenic greenhouse gas emissions resulting in self-reenforcing feedback loops.

synchronoptica 

one year ago: Jargeau and St Denis de l’Hôtel (with synchronoptica)

two years ago: the ancient quarter of Maccagno

three years ago: superlative drone photography, Ziggy Stardust retires, assorted links to revisit plus composer György Ligeti

four years ago: Dog Days of Summer, Double Indemnity (1944), more links to enjoy plus early AI image generation

five years ago: the Phaistos Disk (1908), US report on Unidentified Aerial Phenomena plus the offspring of Hermes and Aphrodite

six years ago: EXP TV, Mount Rushmore plus US support for the mujahideen in Afghanistan 

from vanity to insanity (13. 582)

The preliminary findings of a Democrat-led House subcommittee have been published in a report that the Trump administration staged a hostile takeover of America’s semiquincentennary celebration to promote political ideology, self-enriching pet projects, the harvesting voter data and white Christian nationalism through a shadow corporation embedded within the Nation Parks Foundation, which hijacked the agenda from the independent, non-partisan and non-profit commission established by congress in 2016 to plan and execute the event. Charted as a wholly owned subsidiary under the parks foundation charity for public remove, Trump’s Freedom 250 sustained a relentless pressure campaign against America250 to hijack the anniversary for personal enrichment through transparent fraud and dissimilitude and selling access to the president, his Praetorian guard given a bonus in lieu of overtime with crypto-coins issued by the family crime syndicate and the same firm that organised the January Sixth rally being awarded contracts for July Fourth related events. Meanwhile, after the supreme court affirmed birthright citizenship, the acting attorney general directed prosecutors and law enforcement officers to monitor pregnant non-citizens and to try to prevent them from giving birth on US soil and whilst attending the opening of the Teddy Roosevelt presidential library (skipping Obama’s) quizzed the AI-generated hologram of Old Rough and Ready about the Panama Canal and lied to the press, whom had just witnessed the exchange, about how it went.

a syntopicon (13. 581)

Coined especially for the two volume with the Neo-Latin term meaning a collection of topics, the two volume register of one hundred two great ideas of the Western canon, was compiled and catalogued by philosopher and professor Mortimer J Adler, published by Encyclopaedia Brittanica Press in 1954 as an index to accompany the fifty-four library of Great Books of the Western World, covering literature and though from Homer to Freud. I can recall seeing these books near the circulation desk at my alma mater as well as the shelves of the volumes in was made to guide at home, though I don’t think I was tempted to consult it to investigate how the individual works corresponded and overlapped, which is a bit of travesty considering the amount of effort and hours of reading it took to synthesise the writing of some seventy authors and something I will have to peruse. Like a Wikipedia gloss, it is a footnote and a hyperlink, and not just a cross-reference of themes or concordance but rather an instrument of liberal education itself for discovery and research and finding the unity in ideas that sometimes can be muddled and masked by language, examining each entry from multiple different angles, breaking each into several sub-topics. Afterwards, Adler edited the single volume Propædia or “Outline of Knowledge” as an appendix for the venerable encyclopaedia marshalling human knowledge into a logical frame work from 1974 to 2010, when the last print edition was issued.

synchronoptica

one year ago: unblogged Breton (with synchronoptica)

two years ago: Lago Delio 

three years ago: assorted links to revisit plus a registry of Americana

four years ago: more links to enjoy

five years ago: your daily demon, Mario theme inspiration, the year’s midpoint, a banger from Tracy Chapman plus a visit to Oberwaldbehrungen

six years ago: even more links, Airplane! (1980) plus the US Civil Rights Act (1964)

day one-hundred twenty-two (13. 580)

The Qatari foreign ministry reports positive progress related to the Islamabad MOU, despite the fact Tehran might not be participating and rejects US assertion regarding IAEA inspectors to all nuclear research facilities and rejecting Trump’s condition on unfrozen assets being used to exclusively buy American agricultural products. Through traffic continues to flow through the Hormuz, shippers say the Strait is still like a war-zone. Moscow conducts a deadly air raid over Kiev with multiple drone and missile strikes.  US declines to renew Trump’s version of the NAFTA trade deal struck with Canada and Mexico in January 2020.

bodega cat (13. 579)

Enjoying the correspondence between these two disparate posts, we couldn’t resist combining them as a celebration of our feline companions first with this project by Marcel Heijnen to document the gradual disappearance of “shop cats” in Shanghai as traditional stores are replaced through gentrification with modern, hermetically sealed retail spaces twinned with the early 1980s phenomenon of the Nameneko cats of photographer Saturo Tsuda. Hugely popular at the time, these cats were dressed and set in dioramas depicting high school gangsters—banchō (番長, male delinquents) and sukeban (スケ番, female delinquents) who rebelled against authority, smoking in the boys’ room and with subversive tailoring of their school uniforms. Hang in there baby. Much more at the links above.

o canada! (13. 578)

In what one can hope to be a prerequisite of joining the European Union, the European Broadcasting Union (EBU) announces, on the country’s national holiday, that its newest member, CBC / Radio-Canada will participate in the Eurovision Song Contest next year for its seventy-first iteration to be hosted by this year’s winner Bulgaria. This inclusion marks the first expansion outside of the continent since Australia joined in 2015. Céline Dion, representing Switzerland, won the 1988 Eurovision with the power ballad “Ne partez pas sans moi” (which was included in the Song-Along for the fiftieth anniversary held in Copenhagen covered Estonia soprano Elina Netšajeva and Conchita Wurst) in Dublin. We’ve given the spectacle a soft boycott the past several years, as have other countries—perhaps motivating the enlargement—but watching Canada might be an excuse to tune in.

qanoon-e-islam (13. 577)

Among the first attempts by the British to give an ethnographic account of the customs and observations of the denizens of Colonial India, particularly the the Muslim population of the southern portion of the subcontinent and reminiscent of the I-Ching and other auspicious augury, the supposed translation (the original lost to time) published by East India Company surgeon Gerhard Herklots, a hefty and encyclopaedic volume covering all aspects of life in Madras, food, language, clothing, superstition and folklore, contains only a small appendix on setting the optimal itinerary for a journey, direction, date of departure. This guide to propitious days for embarking on trade and travel, however superficially appropriated or re-approrriated (see above), gains a purchase on the thought and tradition underlying it, informed by astronomy, astrology and currying divine protection and intercession. Much more from Public Domain Review at the link above.

synchonoptica

one year ago: the commune of Belz (with synchronoptica) plus the city of Vannes

two years ago: the castles of Bellinzona plus the US supreme court grants presidents blanket immunity for official acts

three years ago: more venerable publications going out of print 

four years ago: and then they came for me (1937) plus Scottish devolution (1999)

five years ago: Julie Moon (1970), children’s author Dodie Smith, assorted links to revisit, a banger from Grandmaster Flash (1982) plus being well-read in Antiquity

six years ago: slavery abolished in the Netherlands and its colonies (1863), police crackdown in Hong Kong, America’s entitled class, US Homeland Security tasked with protecting statues plus the licence plates of Palau

day one-hundred twenty-one (13. 576)

The Qatari foreign ministry confirms that no high-level meeting between US and Iranian officials is scheduled to take place in Doha over the coming days despite the arrival of envoys Kushner and Witkoff, Tehran saying it is currently not negotiating with Washington in any capacity and will not resume talks until violence ends in Lebanon. Concerned over increased executions has prompted French lawmakers to sponsor individual death-row political prisoners, whilst German intelligence services find that Iran is spying on opposition activists domestically.