Gotta love all the Smiley Smile Easter eggs in the new Ripley!

It's the 72nd anniversary of Charles Schulz's PEANUTS. Here's a hardly-seen article on Schulz's cartooning from more than two years earlier, from the magazine of Art Instruction, Inc, which was founded by my great grandmother's half brother.

What the hell is an ampersand and why does it look like that?! The first thing you need to know is that "&" used to be the 27th letter of the alphabet... But there are three parts to this story. And the first begins over two thousand years ago in Ancient Rome with a single word: et. It's the Latin for "and". At some point Roman scribes started combining the two letters of et into a single symbol, which was the ancestor of our modern &. The earliest example of the "et" symbol is actually from graffiti in Pompeii. In any case, it did not disappear with the fall of the Roman Empire. Latin survived as the language of the Catholic Church and of scholarship in Medieval Europe. Scribes during the Dark Ages continued to use the & symbol. It evolved down the centuries, in places losing any semblance of the letters e and t whatsoever. The second part of the story is that during the 18th and 19th centuries, as education and the teaching of literacy spread, & was added to the end of the alphabet as a sort of 27th letter. On a related note, although "et cetera" is now usually just abbreviated as etc., for a long time it was instead abbreviated as "&c". The & was for et and the c for cetera. The third and final part of the story is about how the alphabet was taught to children — and how it was read out loud. As this 1822 Glossary of Words and Phrases explains, it had been normal during the Renaissance, when speaking the alphabet, to add "per se" before any letter which could also be a word on its own — "per se" means "by itself" in Latin. Take the letter A, which can also be a word of its own. When reading out the alphabet people would say "A, per se A, B, C, D, E, F, G, H, I, per se I..." and so on. O was also considered a word of its own. Which means, when people got to the end of the alphabet, with & being the 27th letter, they would say: "S, T, U, V, W, X, Y, Z, and per se &." When this old way of reading the alphabet was taught to children in the 18th century and they were reciting it aloud, they would garble "and per se " into what eventually became... ampersand. A Dic­tion­ary of Slang and Col­lo­quial Eng­lish from 1905 relates some of the many other pronunciations school children apparently came up with: "Am­persand. The sign &; am­persand. Vari­ants: Ann Passy Ann; an­pasty; an­dpassy; an­parse; aper­sie; per-se; am­passy; am-passy-ana; am­pene-and; am­pus-and; ampsyand; am­pazad; am­siam; am­pus-end; ap­perse-and; em­per­siand; am­perzed; and zumzy-zan." Well, of all the many pronunciations that might have stuck, it was "ampersand" which came to be accepted and is now the official name for &... rather than zumzy-zan. So, from hurried Roman scribes to unruly school children, that's where "&" came from.

Julie Newmar in the Broadway play "The Marriage-Go-Round," 1958. Kodachromes by Ralph Morse.

Listen to our pre-release track - released digitally for the first time - of Fricsay’s 1949 recording of the overture to Die Fledermaus with the RIAS Symphony Orchestra Berlin. We release the complete edition of his recordings for DG on July 7. 🎧 → dgt.link/fricsay-complete

.@JoeNBC let me help out and save your staff the trouble. It’s plain and simple: Either Donald Trump doesn’t know how to pick personnel, or he’s the worst manager in the history of the American presidency. Here’s Trump’s before and after for, as he said, “the best” staff hires:

In this @wired Big Interview, Microsoft CEO @satyanadella and I go deep on AI, his role in making Google dance, and why he's not worried about the singularity. wired.com/story/microsofts-s…

So you wanna learn how to design for Apple Vision Pro? 👀 We just dropped 3 must-watch #WWDC23 videos that go over it all Principles of spatial design developer.apple.com/wwdc23/1… Design for spatial interfaces developer.apple.com/wwdc23/1… Design for spatial input developer.apple.com/wwdc23/1…

We have clear skies across much of the southern UK this afternoon. This view was captured live at 1:20pm when the @Space_Station passed by. If you look carefully you can see the sun reflecting off solar panel farms across the region. Feb 6, 2023 @cityoflondon

ChatGPT and a new wave of AI tools have set off a consumer craze. But is there substance to the hype? @kenrickcai and I spoke to OpenAI’s Sam Altman and 60 other leaders, from Bill Gates to Fei-Fei Li, to answer how AI will change how you work —and soon. forbes.com/sites/alexkonrad/…

Eno is a 1973 documentary short film directed by Alfons Sinniger. The subject of the film is musician Brian Eno (shortly after his departure from Roxy Music), and features the recording sessions for Eno’s record Here Come the Warm Jets. ubu.com/film/eno_doc.html

#protip: you can benefit from mastodon without actually using it ~ every account auto-generates an rss feed ~ if you don't remember the beauty of rss, you can subscribe to it from any feed reader and always be up-to-date ~ so, if you dont use mastodon, at least sub to feeds

If any other former president (Carter, Bush, Clinton, Obama) had information that could assist in dealing w/a national security breach/threat, they would promptly meet w/executive branch officials & provide that information. Not Donald Trump. Trump knows precisely who he showed

I've been covering bad parts of the internet for long time now. For years, there was one site extremist researchers warned me not to cover because publicizing it would be dangerous. But it's time people know KiwiFarms—and how they're chasing political enemies around the world.

I am the WOMAN and Democrat running against Jim Jordan. Jim Jordan supports Trump over Ohio. Help me beat him! Please retweet, follow me to get us to 93K followers and join our fight to defeat Jim Jordan.

BREAKING: Google has removed ‘Truth Social’ from the Google Play store due to its lack of content moderation, including threats of violence against current and former government officials. @Apple, you’re up.

Carl lost this race that @EliseStefanik got all in on. RT to congratulate @EliseStefanik on losing another race!

Two years ago, I teamed up with fellow astrophotographer and planetary scientist @MatherneConnor to capture the most ridiculously detailed moon image we could. Over the last few months we put our heads together again to come up with something even clearer. Behold: