Via the always interesting and never boring The Browser, comes an announcement of an Indiana Jones-style hunt for the tomb and (looted treasure) of Alaric I under the waters of the river Busento flowing through the town of Cosenza (an army of mourners apparently dammed and diverted the river in order to give Alaric a proper burial) in southern Italy, where the victorious Alaric suddenly and unexpectedly died.
Saturday 31 October 2015
trial trench and taphonomy
catagories: ๐ฉ๐ช, ๐ฎ๐น, ๐, myth and monsters, travel
pale blue dot
In 1990 after the space probe Voyager 1 had accomplished her primary mission of exploration of the outer planets, famed astronomer and project architect Carl Sagan requested that the emissary turn its lens back once more and capture an image of the Earth in all its humbleness from such a great distance.
It did not matter much that the photograph with two weeks’ delay was not quite as dramatic as Sagan had envisioned as his poetic reflections on this invisible parting-shot managed to inspire multitudes. Seizing on a similar opportunity twenty-three years later, Sagan’s students sought to make his pale blue dot as envisioned a reality by directing the Cassini to take a break from exploring Saturn and focusing back on its place of origin. Still not awash among a field of stars, the Earth’s latest selfie was produced, with the planet’s inhabitants being urged in advance—perhaps without sufficient publicity—to take a moment to appreciate the uniqueness of the world outside as they smiled for the camera. Maybe such a moment was not as well promoted as it could have been, as I hope I wasn’t on the wrong side of the globe or doing something tedious and inside as all of this transpired—paradoxically, I think we were at that moment experimenting with our own aerial photography.
Of course, we were all present for 19. July 2013 when robot
photographed its makers from the orbit of Saturn, awash in the erupting
jets of the Moon Enceladus whose mysterious geysers might be spouting
off the most accessible hints of life elsewhere in the solar system.
It’s an inspiring, sacred look back and more in the spirit of Sagan’s
vision than the original.
catagories: ๐ท, ๐ญ, environment, holidays and observances
Friday 30 October 2015
5x5
genealogy room: via Boing Boing, a service that maps the prevalence and distribution of one’s family name
the plot thickens: a 1919 screenwriters’ resource of ten million photoplay expositional combinations
die roboter: elementary school class in Mainz perform Kraftwerk
your brain on drugs: testing the web-spinning capabilities of spiders under the influence was an abortive forensics ploy for drug-testing
lowered-expectations: due to a profound lack of same-species mates, the coywolf is emerging
catagories: ⚕️, ๐ฉ๐ช, ๐ช️, ๐ฌ, ๐ถ, environment, language, Rheinland-Pfalz
extracurricular or rolling-stock
Thursday 29 October 2015
smรฅl, smol
persistence of vision
The splendiferous Nag on the Lake directs our attention to a lovingly curated gallery of mesmerizing phenakistoscope animations, whose looping effect (and themes, perhaps) are not much different than what’s produced by GIFs (which I have been kind of obsessed with lately).
Debuting in the early 1830s, the invention of Belgian Joseph Plateau but with several other independent animateurs promoting their own spectacles, the phenakistoscope spread quickly across Europe, the engaged audiences viewing a spinning disk through a series of tiny slits to achieve the illusion of motion. Until opticians devised techniques of projection—which saw an explosion in phantasmagoria with similarly prefixed motion picture devices—spectators had the Greek root ฯฮตฮฝฮฑฮบฮนฮถฮตฮนฮฝ, which meant deceptive. I hadn’t thought about it beforehand but the German term for an animated feature is “Trickfilm.”
ulysses or hocus-porcus
By its nature, mythology does not admit to definitive versions, although the fables and folklore of the Greeks, once committed to paper by Homer and Hesiod and countless others took on an air authority that was not a uniting theme in the tradition of story-telling. Although different accounts circulated long afterwards and inheritor traditions continue to build on that unstaid corpus still, lore, variation and invention is sourced to the Heroic Age—those who fought in the Trojan War, and abruptly ended with that diasporic, lost generation afterwards.
Maybe it was because those stories were written down and the winningest narratives became the prevailing ones—competition continued among poets, championing their own character-analyses, morals and retribution and it’s now hard to imagine as the readership that there were opposing legends presented to audiences, amok-time scenarios where Electra and ลdipus had normal families and lost their place in the popular imagination to the racier, received versions. One of the very last myths constructed, a lost epic that seems groundless morose but somewhat reconstituted, by the Greeks is called the Telegony and dealt again with re-deploying veterans and the homecoming of Odysseus, but told from the perspective of the seductress and enchantress Circe. During Odysseus’ captivity on the exile-island of Aeaea—Loลกinj, Croatia—(Circe was banished to this remote location to keep her out of trouble), Circe became pregnant and bore Odysseus a son after his departure, the eponymous Telegonus, whose name meant born far away due to his father’s distant home. Athena urges Circe to reveal to her young adult son—juxtaposed with the massacre and funeral service for opportunist suitors of his wife, Penelope, whose advances she solemnly rebuffed for the two decades’ absence of her husband that open the story—who his father is. Telegonus resolves journey to Ithaca to find Odyssey.
Why Athena, as Odysseus’ constant champion and protector, encouraged this reunion seems impenetrable and without the entire story—that’s just been teased out of a few lines and other myths referencing the Telegony—the goddess’ motivation will remain a mystery, I suppose. Before going on this long and dangerous voyage, Circe asks the blacksmith of the gods to craft her son a supernatural spear with the poison tip of a string-ray to defend himself. Just as Telegonus arrives in the Ionian Sea, he is visited by a terrible storm and disoriented, does not realise that he has already arrived at his destination. Though the trope seems rather predictable to us thanks to the tragedies of Sophocles, Telegonus poached one of his father’s cows and was ambushed by Odysseus and his men. As he deftly defends himself, Telegonus strikes down Odysseus, fulfilling a prophesy that the wily hero who satisfied his charge with burying an oar in a land where they never had heard of the ocean that stated he would meet his demise from the sea, and recognizes, too late, that he is his father. Beside himself with remorse, Telegonus takes Odysseus’ body, widow and half-brother, Telemachus (meaning “far from the battle-field” also unborn when Odysseus went off to war) back to Aeaea in the Adriatic. Circe’s magic was unable to restore Odysseus to life but is able to make the landing party immortal. Telegonus marries his step-mother, Penelope, and Circe, Odysseus’ lover, marries Telemachus. I wish we had the whole story in order to make this outcome seem plausible—the classic myths were hinged together in such a way where one could always suspend ones disbelief and accept that a character was fated to be transformed into a tree or flower or would be forced to experiment with the lesser-evils and impossible choices. I wonder if this outline could be expanded.
Wednesday 28 October 2015
5x5
memory-hole: the estate of George Orwell, ironically, attempts to suppress unsanctioned mention of “1984”
isambard kingdom brunel slept here: a look at the makers of London’s historical markers, the Blue Plaques
monstrous memorabilia: gallery of vintage horror film lobby cards
stellar hosts: an overview of how astronomers went from zero to five thousand plus potential exoplanets in two decades via Kottke’s Quick Links
catagories: ๐ฌ๐ง, ๐ฌ, ๐, ๐บ, ๐ญ, myth and monsters, networking and blogging
rutherfords and risk-assessments
Immediately for me invoking recollections of that endless film franchise Final Destination, wherein some hapless teenagers have premonitions of freak accidents that are perpetuated by some Rube Goldberg chain of events and shoddy craftsmanship, the notion of the micromort, conceived by ethicist and information-scientist Ronald Howard of Stanford University, modestly and eloquently has further reaching meaning in terms of public literacy in probability and statistics, risky undertakings, and deflecting media bias.
Tuesday 27 October 2015
stretch of sands or jack sprat
The dicey encounter between the US and Chinese navies in the rarefied archipelagos of the South China Sea represents of course modern points of contention but the history, the anchorage of the Spratly Islands (known by several other, disputed monikers) reaches into the distant past and under tenser auspices. Though just outside of major shipping-lanes, the disperse islands, some eight hundred shoals and reefs that constitute a mere four square kilometers of land combined, did not garner much attention, regarded as treacherous waters to be avoided—outside of a few micronation claimants—until the end of the nineteenth century, seeing the chance to expand their sphere of influence and control of the channels of commerce, Britain made the first petition.
This territorial extension did not yield a secure title as the newly independent Philippines first needed gentle reminders by their former minder, the USA, that their lands did not extend that far out (though the lesson did not really penetrate with these squabbles extending through the people’s revolution in China, the Republic in exile in Formosa, another try for a micronation utopia, and finally the intentional wrecking of a Filipino submarine on one of the islands and a permanent military detachment around that wreckage) and then was overcome by the outcome of the Sino-French War that erupted over Qing China’s incursions into Tonkin (the northern part of French-Indochina, now Vietnam). Japan occupied most of the archipelago during World War II, with the Republic of China (now confined to Taiwan) re-establishing garrisons after the Japanese surrender. Lending more support to Chiang Kai-shek than to the communist, mainland government, America preferences rather inflamed the dispute and helped foment the notion of a one-China policy—insofar as the stance translates to Western ears. Post-war, the stakes grew with natural resources to exploit and Malaysia and the Sultanate of Brunei joining in.
5x5
a lad insane: a gallery dedicated to iconic David Bowie persona artwork
kit and caboodle: impassioned curators’ collection of miniature folk-art buildings
ewok village: civil engineers design a sustainable city out of bamboo
move along, move along: wookie arrested while escourting Lord Vader to the polls in Ukraine
seeteufel
My furnished workweek apartment has scattered shelves of mostly decorative books lining the room—some visually striking vintage paperbacks, the 1937 definitive edition of a German encyclopedia that’s an interesting snapshot but the selection is mostly of the harlequin and coffee-table (perhaps also the load-bearing) variety.
Dusting the shelves, however, I was surprised to see a title that I hadn’t noticed beforehand, Graf Luckner’s Seeteufel erobert Amerika (the Sea-Devil raids America) published in 1955. A few weeks ago, I first heard of the amazing but mostly forgotten adventures and exploits of gentleman-raider Felix Graf von Luckner. After the wars, the gracious and big-spirited Luckner was reunited was many of his hostages and toured America to great acclaim, recounting his conquests and even ripping telephone books asunder with his bare hands. I will read through the book and suppose that finding a copy just under my nose is testimony to the fame and celebrity that deserves further inspection—happily revived by the curious story-tellers at Futility Closet.
Monday 26 October 2015
paramour or family planning
Jewish traditions were first exposed to the tale of Lilith, the “Night Hag,” during their Babylonian Captivity from ancient Sumerian sources, and conflating demonology (daimลnion) with fairies, which are liminal beings capable of both beneficence (like a fairy godmother) and wickedness (mischievousness mostly) and from a psychological stance infinitely more fascinating, decided to wed her to Adam. Whether also chthonic or baked in fire, Lilith was understood to be also elemental and thus not derivative, unlike Adam’s second wife Eve, and thus not very keen on the idea of being subservient or second-class.
After having had liaisons with multiple archangels, God decreed this strident, toxic woman to be no suitable mate and surgically excised Eve as Lilith’s under-study. Apparently, with sentiments more in line with those of fairyfolk, however, Lilith did pine for Adam and for her squandered chances of having children—being that she had become too venomous to nurse any child, no matter how immortal its parentage, having garnered the reputation of being a succubus, which is an awful sounding name for a seductress but is usually just rendered as paramour with no paranormal connotations. The different biological-clocks and this asynchronicity remains a theme in folklore throughout the ages, with Lilith’s curse representing fussy babies that have difficulty breast-feeding and her minions intent on kidnapping human-children, replacing them with an identical-looking changeling. It was taken as a near impossibility for fairies to breed naturally, they replenished their ranks by substituting a wizened, geriatric fairy for a new soul—and in disguise, generally the human foster-parents would care for and for the retired fairy in its old age, though sometimes the changeling could be tricked into betraying its true nature as an old, experienced soul by confronting the infant in question with baby-talk or something equally nonsensical, whereupon the old fairy would protest or attempt to correct the illogical behaviour. If this enchantment is not drawn out in a timely-fashion, the supernumerary child would later show a penchant for developmental disorders and neurological abnormalities—at least that’s how maladjusted offspring were explained through the nineteenth century. Only when fairies were pushed back into the woodwork, supplanted by medicine and machinery, did they begin to take on a diminutive stature and the diaphanous wings, and not uncannily human, characteristics that most associate with fairies today.
catagories: ⚕️, ๐, myth and monsters, Wikipedia
Sunday 25 October 2015
bolwoningen or apostrophe-s, it shows the things that we possess
In the Brabant capital of ‘s-Hertogenbosch (the Duke’s Forest)—in the suburb of Maaspoort, the Dutch government awarded funds in 1968 to the architectural firm of Dries Kreijkamp to commission a experimental housing project.
These so-called bubble (Bolwoningen) units were constructed from the early 1970s through to 1984, and being modular, efficient, easy to transport and requiring little in the way of a foundation were among the first environmentally-friendly mass-produced shelters created. The bubble houses are still occupied today and quite popular among the residents. Check out the link above for more images of the unique, retro-future apartments.
catagories: ๐ณ๐ฑ, ๐, antiques, architecture, environment, lifestyle
kleine wiedervereinigung
catagories: ๐ฉ๐ช, ๐ซ๐ท, ๐, ๐ฑ, foreign policy
not too big to jail
Saturday 24 October 2015
i find your lack of faith disturbing
5x5
brightest london is best reached by underground: glorious, vintage gallery of Tube posters
not your typical disney princess: Leia Organa is a force to be reckoned with
she doesn’t even realise she’s a replicant: Liartown, USA variations on the Voight-Kampff test for humanity, more sophisticated than CAPTCHA
frogmorton: JRR Tolkien’s annotated map of Middle-Earth
sentimental journey
Once Protestantism took hold in large swathes of northern Europe, particularly in England, the pilgrimage undertaken to exotic lands fell out of fashion, people of means needed to articulate another rite of passage that would fulfil this lost outlet. Almost immediately, the notion of the Grand Tour was invented as an authoritative substitute, since one could claim instant superiority in matters of taste and worldliness over one’s neighbours for having seen the masterpieces of the continent first-hand and having even brought back some art as souvenirs.
Friday 23 October 2015
king-biscuit flour-hour
One of my all-time favourite blogs, the always inspiring Nag on the Lake, directs us to an interesting chapter in American history told through the flour-sack dress.
What I found really striking and unexpected was how the manufacturers wanted to extend a sense of dignity to their resourceful models and included instructions for removing the inked on company logos and provisioning information, so one was not an unwilling, walking advertisement. Further, anticipating this need for thrift to remain for the foreseeable future, having spanned from the time of the Great Depression through the rationing of World War II, the manufacturers introduced an array of fabric patterns (at considerable expense, I am sure) that were really dazzling and on-par with the most spectacular store-bought textiles and clothing. That’s pretty keen and it would really be something if modern businesses could be as considerate for their loyal customer-base and if the modern consumer was as driven to make-do.
being there or eaches teaches
In celebration of ninth year of publication, the Maria Popova of the gorgeous and insightful Brain Pickings is marking the occasion by reflecting on nine important lessons learned distilled in her thousands of hours of reading, writing, synthesizing and sharing.
catagories: ๐, lifestyle, philosophy
Thursday 22 October 2015
5x5
pachyderm: Icelandic cliff-face looks like an elephant
hello – you have found my shop of rare and wonderful things: Super Mario style map of Twin Peaks
glyph-list: latest issue of emojis to supplement your vocabulary, via Kottke’s quicklinks
det var helt texas: in Norwegian vernacular, the state’s name signifies being unbalanced
hot or not: Canadian prime-ministers ranked
temporal excursions
Though perhaps not presented in the most rigorous format, Neatoramanaut Rob Manuel does offer a rather compelling and intuitive argument regarding the strictures of time-travel—wherein a back- to-the-future scenario plays out more like being visited by the Ghost of Christmas Past with one being unable to interact or change history in any way.
catagories: ๐, philosophy, Wikipedia
5x5: halloween edition
monster parade: ghoulish GIFs for thirty-one days of horror
psychopomp: high-fidelity hardware that aided mediums during sรฉances
a costume, not a culture: just because one can append the word sexy does not mean it’s a good idea for dress-up
revue: from Atlas Obscura’s crypt, an archived celebration of the season
catagories: ๐, ๐, ๐ง , antiques, myth and monsters
Wednesday 21 October 2015
the hunting of the snark
First sighted and described through second- or third-hand accounts in the third century BC, the unicorn—or monoceros was for centuries embellished with the rich lore of mythology, though this legendary creature had no truck with myths and heroes as it was believed to be very much part of the animal kingdom, though cryptic and elusive. The creature even figured, in its classic form, in the ancient iconography of India, whence the original came. Being unable to observe the shy creature in its natural habitat and unable to produce a specimen, big-fish stories circulated of the fierce and violent steed, who might only be tamed in the presence of a virgin—apparently also a a rare beast that couldn’t just be left in some forest as bait, what with dragons to be appeased.
bug bounty
Boing Boing, via Ars Technicia, has an interesting primer for the zero-day market, which the industry and regime-appointed czars are reluctant to address or even acknowledge.
A “zero-day” is a software vulnerability, identified by hackers but not publicly disclosed nor yet exploited, which is sold to the highest bidder—which is often a competitor but increasing includes zealous or repressive governments hoping to shore up a munitions’ dump that’s basically a kill-switch (or back-door) for the internet—on the tenuous promise that the discoverers won’t reveal the security weakness or act on it for their own benefit, and hence the name because communications platforms and companies that manage the underlying architecture of the internet would have no time to react or patch the fault, the bugs once it comes to light. This brisk, underground market represents a huge, welling threat with more than speculation becoming a commodity but the actual means of offense and defense. In their naรฏvety, governments are fueling this trafficking by hoping to preserve a systemic integrity but end up diluting everything in the process.
catagories: ๐ฅธ, networking and blogging
Tuesday 20 October 2015
mathmagicland or word-problem
Could the oral tradition of story-telling and the development of maths be related expressions of one and the same human need? Stories of course can be formulaic and numbers can be characters in an archetypal tale themselves, but I wonder if the divergence and convergence is something more fundamental.
catagories: ๐, ๐ง , ๐งฎ, language, philosophy
Monday 19 October 2015
guerre civil
Indulging the counter-factual (supposing an alternate history) risks belittling suffering as it happened and building up for oneself a grasping sort of fantasy world, but in that split one also calls to account the calculated omissions and permissions of other powers. The Spanish Civil War that simmered to its critical point in 1936 is something incomprehensible, with long chains of causation reaching back generations and projected forward four decades and more with only drives attributed to make sense of the terrible and theatrical violence. I cannot claim to understand what each faction represented, but to the victor goes the spoils, like Qaddafi, who only reigned a slightly shorter period of time.
The unlearnt lessons of this war that was not contained to a domestic dispute are cemented with Picasso’s mural Guernica that distil the horrors of war that appears at the entrance to the United Nations’ Security Council chambers—at least, that is, from 1985 to 2009 with a notable veiling in 2003 during the Iraq War (when the American defence minister Colin Powell did not want to speak with backdrop of a mutilated horse’s ass) and afterwards the tapestry was sent on tour pending renovations. One is invited to imagine viscerally what befell the victims of this one arbitrary episode among many, but I think too that one is remembered as to how this conflict was also what we’d now call a proxy-war (though certainly not the first, nor the last). The struggle to take region, town by town, did not remain an internal affair for long, with Hitler and Mussolini almost immediately siding with the Nationalists, sending materiel that included the planes that bombed the quiet village of Guernica. British Gibraltar, through the UN’s predecessor that was supposed to prevent such escalations among members, placed an embargo, but with anti-Communist sentiments, did little to quell hostilities. Mexico and the USSR supported the Republicans but garnered a paucity of outside support. Whether the members of the future Axis Powers acted only out of ideology or wanted to destabilise the UK and France is unclear, but it seems as if other stances were assumed, with less entanglement and partisanship, the future might have played out very differently.
catagories: ๐ช๐ธ, ๐, foreign policy, revolution, Wikipedia
5x5
poll of inaccessibility: eschewing the big cities and iconic sites, photographer Gert Verbelen travels to the geographic-centre of eighteen euro-zone countries
stencil: animal cut-outs with stunning, natural backdrops
tater-tot: vintage Russian potato toy ideas
yodel-ay-ee-oooo: ladies and gentlemen, the Chicken Yodeling of Mister Takeo Ishii
Sunday 18 October 2015
pocket full of posey
I was under the macabre but rather straightforward assumption that the Renaissance and subsequent Enlightenment movement came as a direct result of Italian merchants introducing the Plague, the Black Death to Europe (with some eighty percent morality for its first iterations but later waning before consuming itself). Easing a populace that was struggling to sustain itself, massive depopulation created opportunities not normally afforded to the peasant class and people suddenly became creative and inventive. Never mind the trauma and the reduced labour force—but there you go. The chain of causation, of course, is not that linear—if anything more than tenuous at all. As the pestilence raged, irrespective of rank, most countries in Europe (notably, the Low Countries did not impose such controls to their wages and really excelled for it in terms of trade and exploration) immediately began to impose economic safeguards in order to preserve the status of the aristocracy as the farm and field fell to neglect as whole villages died off.
Amidst the chaos, specie was devalued and although some rural labourers and sailors did find more coin in their purses, it’s purchasing-power had been rolled-back to below levels experienced under a recession. Upward-mobility was discouraged and the peasants did not have the wherewithal to stage a rebellion for generations—and there was a baby-boom following each visitation. Religious art and expression flourished in the aftermath, but with a focus specifically to remember the dead. Aside from funerary adornments, the university of Cambridge and innumerable foundations and charity hospitals were founded—parallel to the social safety-net that the Church was providing, and these institutions remain to this day—to honour the departed. These enduring memorials represent a wedge of sorts that cleaves the Plague years away from the way the ages of history unfolds later. The notion that dread disease might have an original other than volcanic gasses in Hyperborea, comets, eclipses was not revealed for nearly eight centuries later, and whatever leechcraft or superstition that the successful physicians applied were very much against the received wisdom from the Ancients. Smugly, these practitioners dismissed the writings of Galen and Hypocrates for being ill-prepared to handle an epidemic, and ushered in another age of charm and scepticism, diametrically opposed to the hallmarks of the Renaissance which sought to thoroughly inspect and embrace the Classics. Although proximity in time may not be a sufficient cause, the Renaissance began in earnest in Florence, most agree with the ancient texts and lost sources being brought by Greek refugees fleeing from the Ottoman conflict, not far from where the Plague first made land-fall.
Saturday 17 October 2015
up periscope or dead men tell no tales
Regardless how the US refrains from using assassination (targeted killings) in the same way it refuses to “negotiate” with terrorists, the drone-wars have exhausted—unintentionally but with the lulling effect of new technologies and the easier path—whatever intelligence capital and standing that America had in the world. Not only does the incomplete picture obtained by intercepting communications (SIGINT) yield grave inaccuracies including a lot of collateral deaths (though they’re never referred to as by-standers), these tenuous links can no longer be explored or exploited once the person of interest has been obliterated.
giraffe, erdmรคnnchen & co.
Parallel to the much celebrated and intensely competitive Wildlife Photograph of the Year run through the auspices of the BBC and the London Natural History museum, nature-photographer Paul Joynson-Hicks had the idea to capture the more candid side of the business with his “Comedy Wildlife Photography Awards.” Spiegel features a funny slide-show of some of the best entries, and the contenders are sure to ratchet it up for next year’s competition.
catagories: ๐ท, ๐ฆ, environment
Friday 16 October 2015
hinweisgeber
catagories: ๐ฉ๐ช, ๐ฌ๐ง, ๐ฑ, ๐ฅธ, foreign policy
5x5
twilight of the gods: Nina Hagen, Grace Jones and others feature in a Biblical Rock Opera, Gutterdรคmmerung, who strive to return the Earth to a state of vice
marylebone: BLDGBlog ponders the supposed funerary teleportation grid of Greater-London
scrumptious: venerable art foundation raises funds for galleries and museums with edible masterpieces, via the splendid Nag on the Lake
babel: a few odd, nuanced (but expeditious) terms found in EU English
catagories: ๐ฌ๐ง, ๐, ๐ถ, ๐, ๐ญ, food and drink, language, transportation
Thursday 15 October 2015
long-distance
catagories: ๐ง , lifestyle, networking and blogging
chancel, chancellery
The predominant theme of German news and discussion panels has been refugees and immigration for weeks now and is demanding an increased sense of urgency due to its unrelenting stream of asylum-seekers and families fleeing war and institutional poverty and the change in weather that assuredly guaranteeing no happy-campers, sheltered in to a large part in tent-cities or cavernous warehouses. The rational that buoys compassion is that Germany’s ageing population needs an injection of young, able-bodied adults to supplement their workforce (and retirement scheme) in order to maintain the competitive economic edge that they’ve enjoyed for the past couple of generations.
Germany’s young breeders apparently are not working hard enough to replenish the labour-pool. Employment-models suggest that the influx of refugees (many of who purportedly will not stay in Germany but be resettled elsewhere in Europe) has not yet reached that threshold of sustainment and whatever money and resources spent are a good investment, but I wonder if that welcoming reception might change once the requirement is met—or when the demographers realise that their constructions and projections are not valid gauges of future job-markets, what with robots threatening to take-over vast parts of certain jobs-sectors. Aside from worries over the effect on housing-market (and the question of adequate, affordable accommodations), there are significant challenges ahead with integration and assimilation that are only just now being broached—although wholly unaddressed by one particular group, those migrants—not necessarily from those same regions but grouped together as such I’m sure. I wonder what this silence means—whether or not the more established immigrant population is reaching out to newcomers and being forthcoming with assistance and sponsorship, or whether there’s a widen rift, agonising whether these late arrivals might upset whatever social-acceptance that they’ve gained, feeling their benefits under-threat. Maybe that’s an aspect just not being reported but I don’t know. This image, first discovered by the fabulous Nag on the Lake some time ago, is a public-service announcement from the Scarfolk Council, which is unfortunately caught in a Doctor Who-style time-loop and forever condemned to relive the decade of the 1970s and importantly makes us confront our own selective humanity.
catagories: ๐ฉ๐ช, ๐, ๐, foreign policy, labour
Wednesday 14 October 2015
fliegerhorst wasserkuppe
Over the weekend, H and I took a little stroll on the leveled summit of the highest peak of Hessen—the Wasserkuppe outside of Gersfeld and just in the Rhรถn mountain range over the state border.
The first sustained, hang-gliding sessions happened here, about two decades after the first mechanical fixed-wing flight—as the properties of aerodynamics were not very well understood until this feat. Interest in the air-sail grew considerably with the end of World War I, whose conditions of surrender forbade German research or use into powered flight, and competitions in glider design were launched centred around the Wasserkuppe and in a few years, test-flights of all sorts of flying-machines, including the Messerschmitt and early rocket-jets, were conducted there. After the war, elements of the American and the French air forces occupied the summit, especially prized for its commanding view into the Iron Curtain, and the radom in the background is a remnant of those days. The recreational use of the mountain, however, was not restricted for too many years.
5x5
miss cellany: eccentric, vintage beauty titles
high-tension: creative engineers turn Iceland’s pylons into colossal works of art
letterbox format: French museum displays tiny, detailed recreations of movie sets
blue-light special: retail sound-track circa 1989-1993 preserved for posterity
Tuesday 13 October 2015
fun fact
Though in its original meaning, the trivia signified the foundational triad of the liberal arts—that being grammar, rhetoric and logic, needed to be mastered before graduating to the more stimulating disciplines of music, geometry, arithmetic and astronomy, its Latin adjectival form (triviฤlis, a word which has surely been claimed by some pharmaceutical or disputed game-show outcome arbitrage service by now) already denoted something akin to the English form trivial—trifling and fit for the street corner, being where three paths met. One ought to be proud of one’s accumulated knowledge and share it magnanimously and without stint, but this etymology and association makes me think of some pusher standing at an intersection bellowing to passers-by, “The mad professor intoning ‘Science!’ in She Blinded me with Science is show-master Magnus Pyke, cousin of Geoffrey Pyke eccentric, well-meaning boffin who proposed building aircraft carriers out of ice and saw-dust during World War II. The first one’s free! Spermology is the study of trivia!” This literal deconstruction makes me also think of how pornography means, innocently, the writing of prostitutes: “Dear Diary, What a day – but it’s better than waitressing…”
acculturation and ascendency
Just recently I learnt that there is a yet unfolding what to frame the inquiry as to why—given that the Chinese invented the most uncontestably useful and revolutionary innovations in world history, the compass, the stirrup, weirs and dams and locks to allow for inland navigation, porcelain, the spinning wheel, the printed word and gunpowder—China did not continue on the same trajectory in scientific and technological achievement and was overtaken culturally and demographically (by most estimates) by Western Europe with their Age of Exploration, Enlightenment and Industrial Revolution, fueled in large part by the introduction of such ancient Chinese secrets to the West. The so called “Needham Question” was posed first in the early 1950s by biochemist and China-scholar Noel Joseph Terence Montgomery Needham and sought answers to this conundrum at a time when many Westerners believed the above modern hallmarks were Western inventions, and whose extensive research into the question is yet being unpacked. Given that I was under the impression that China was only interested in gunpowder for dazzling pyrotechnic displays and religious ceremonies (something facetious to believe really, like saying after inventing democracy, philosophy and the fine arts, the Greeks decided to call it a day) and it was Europeans who weaponised it, I suppose it would be wise to explore how such misconceptions come about and perhaps why such advances were not entirely seismic—at least seen through the lens of the occident and the focal point of centuries on.
Monday 12 October 2015
5x5
tiki-chic: fascinating story of Harry’s Habour Bazaar of Hamburg, floating curio-cabinet packed full with idols, voodoo dolls, fetishes and shrunken-heads
post-script: gallery documenting America’s disappearing rural post-offices
last starfighter: awkward, kind of lame platform from UK government to identify and train cyber-security savants
thrones and dominions: John Paul II nominated Saint Isidore, a seventh century monk who tried to capture the whole of human knowledge, as the patron of the internet—with an invocation against trolls
china syndrome: incredible photographic essay of Fukushima almost five years after the disaster and its local and global legacy, via Messy Nessy Chic
pronoun, dative-singular
catagories: lifestyle, networking and blogging
Sunday 11 October 2015
tail-pipe oder abgazskandale
I think that the manufactured mock rage over one iconic German auto maker has lost its traction but is failing to be brought out of the public-eye. During the past weeks, a normally interesting and academic program block of documentaries has sunk to sensationalism, with titles like “Krank dank VW” (Sick thanks to VW, about smog and urban pollution) and it seems that members of the American House of Representatives are calling for these “unsafe” vehicles to removed immediately from the road.
catagories: ๐ฉ๐ช, ๐, ๐, environment
inter gravissimas
Due to the calendar reform of 1582, most of Italy, Spain, Portugal, Poland and Lithuania did not have these past few days in that year—the date jumping from the fourth to the fifteenth of October.
Pope Gregory XIII issued his papal bull, Inter gravissimas, in order to correct for the drift in the Julian calendar but certainly did not considered it a name sake or legacy item, and it was only later historians that sought to reconcile earlier dates on civil calendars, prolepsis, applying the new conventions backwards (which also marked the beginning of the new year with different dates, city by city), that came up with the designation. Confusingly, France implemented this change around two months later, leaping from the ninth to the twentieth of December. Great Britain, Tuscany and the Protestant Kingdoms of the Holy Roman Empire waited until the 1700s to make the change. I think all these people had the good sense to stay in bed and wait for tomorrow.
Saturday 10 October 2015
laundroid
Japan has premiered, what’s touted as the first of it’s kind but does remind me of those retro-futuristic demonstrations of the push-button home of the past, an automated system that will dispense with the onerous human chore of doing the laundry—from sorting, washing and drying, folding and putting it away.
castaway cay
The Mapuche people of Patagonia have a very extensive and ancient system of myth and legend that includes the inspiration for the Flying Dutchman and ghost-ships in general. Fathomed up during a time of chaos and confusion and culture-shock as a way of reconciling their new and novel experiences with European exploration and conquest—transmitted decades later to that man-of-war from Holland that could never make port and was destined to sail the oceans forever, the Mapuche had a tale of a triple-masted sailing ship, which—however, owing to its sentience—was not seemingly in need of a captain, called the Caleuche.
I learnt of this strange bit of folklore via When On Earth’s rather morbid bucket-list of twenty places one must see after one dies. Check out some of the other destinations, for research-ideas, but certainly not as that undiscovered coountry. The crew consists of drowned sailors rescued by Chilean versions of mermaids and mermen, who can continue their existence as though still living when the ship appears, which is always a bright and racous affair but then disappearing again as suddenly, descending beneath the waves and plying the seas underwater. The festivities of the drowned are occasionally darkened by the party-crasher, the Sorcerer of Chiloรฉ (the name of the island around which the Caleuche is most often sighted) who breaches the hull on a stampede of kelpies (caballo marino—water-horses, locally) with a retinue of enchanted supplemental, relief-crew, fisherman and deck-staff not honourably drowned but rather cursed to do their eternal tasks as part of the ship itself—perhaps part of its collective consciousness.
catagories: ๐, ๐ฌ, myth and monsters