(Roughly) Daily

Readers will, I know, join your correspondent in deep thanks to reader PL for a pointer to the online literary journal Diagram.  Each issue contains poetry, fiction, and non-fiction eminently worthy of review.  But what sets Diagram apart is each issue’s selection of schematics, charts, and…  yes, diagrams.  Though some seem to have come from The Museum of Jurrasic Technology (as referenced here), they’re all in fact collected from actual (albeit obscure) sources.

And they’re all reminders that, quite apart from the relevance or interest of specific bits of knowledge, the graphics that convey them can fascinate and delight in their own rights– that signs can have a power, a beauty (and often a humor) above and apart from their meaning.  Some examples:

AS SOON AS YOU ARE INSIDE THE HOUSE, YOUR ASSISTANT IMMEDIATELY STANDS UP, PICKING UP THE ROOF AS SHOWN HERE

(9) NOTE: YOU AND THE GIRL MUST PRACTICE THIS MANEUVER UNTIL IT BLENDS INTO ONE FLOWING MOTION. THIS MOVE IS SO DECEPTIVE THAT, IF DONE CORRECTLY, THE AUDIENCE WILL BELIEVE THAT YOU NEVER LEFT THEIR SIGHT.

(Citations, with diagrams in issues 9.1 and 8.6;  other nifty diagrams in those and all of the other issues)

As we sketch it out, and reassure ourselves that we still have six more weeks, we might recall that it was on this date in 1913 that, as a product of the ratification of the 16th Amendment, the Internal Revenue Service first levied and collected income taxes.  (In fact, an income tax had been collected in the U.S. as early as 1861, but was discontinued in 1872, and remained in hiatus until 1913.)

source

Correction: Yesterday’s almanac post incorrectly suggested that Henry VIII sought an annulment of his marriage to Catherine of Aragon because it was childless.  In fact, Catherine bore Henry six children, but only two boys– both of whom died.  Henry’s concern (at a time when there was no precedent for a female monarch) was to have a male heir; to wit his appeal to the Pope.  Ironically, of course, one of Catherine’s daughters, Mary, became England’s queen on Henry’s death, to be followed by her half sister Elizabeth…  your too-casual-and-now-contrite correspondent is grateful to reader KM (more accurately, to her mother) for the catch… and is now returning to his Antonia Frasier…