Sunday 1 May 2016

liiketoimintaryhmรคt

Going postal has a quite different meaning for the letter-carriers in Finland, where for the traditionally low-volume summer months—and fearing their jobs might be in danger of redundancy with fewer people bothering with mail-service—Posti, for a modest fee, will offer to mow the lawns of customers on their beat.
Utilizing existing knowledge and a neighbourly familiarity hard to reproduce, the Finnish government has more pilot projects for the postal-service in community outreach, including detailing mail men and women to check on the elderly and to conduct security patrols. I think that this is fantastic, and an example for other struggling postal networks—which generally only partner with their commercial-competitors, and starkly opposed to the endangered rural outposts in America that can no longer even provide basic financial services where there’s a need and a banking vacuum because of the influence of predatory lending agencies.

punti morti dei telefoni cellulari

As the internet infrastructure of Italy turns thirty, some wonder if it is robust and wide-spread as it should be, but the coverage gaps don’t seem to bother the some four hundred, mostly elderly residents of the small commune of Civitacampomarano in the Molise region, who’ve made due with more traditional outlets and have been outfitted by artist Biancoshock (previously featured) to illustrative the virtues of the non-virtual. All the installations are pretty clever but I especially liked the old village gossip and storyteller standing before her shingle labeled Wikipedia.

anti-marder

Earlier this week the triumphant powering-up of CERN’s Large Hadron Collider after a lengthy but deserved sabbatical was cut short when, reported, a small weasel-like animal (a marten oder Marder ou fouine) sabotaged the whole operation. These creatures are infamous for sneaking under the hoods of cars and gnawing on wires, but this poor luddite apparently not in favour of Man unlocking the secrets of the Universe did not survive, zapped out of existence and is now an anti-Marder.

on top of spaghetti

Via the ever-intrepid Atlas Obscura, we find out that American stockpiles of cheese and other dairy-products are at the highest level in three decades, thanks to a coalition of factors that have glutted the market with European imports to the detriment of domestic products.
I don’t feel that this is an imbalance something like the dreaded TTIP would solve to either party’s satisfaction, as you cannot punish an exporter for making (and we’re partial) a superior product, from cows whose welfare is better looked after. Perhaps the US Dairy Council just needs to get more aggressive in their campaigning and make Wisconsin Colby the new bacon, a flavour touted almost as a condiment for all those years, or craft-beers or the backlash against the anti-gluten leagues.

redrum

Via Kottke’s Quick Links, we discover a wondrous homage to all things appertaining to Stanley Kubrick’s masterpiece of modern horror The Shining from the caretaker of the Overlook Hotel. The driven snows from Hoth, we know already were recycled from the neighbouring film set, but who knew that much of Blade Runner’s aerial footage was also courtesy of the Torrence family as well?