adage or open-source

Cunningham’s Law is seemingly one of those pithy, defeatist principles that have been named and carry aloft some sense of proprietorship and savoir, stating that the best way to solicit accurate information (in the Information Age) is by baiting one’s audience with the low-hanging fruit of patently false propositions.
Of course, certain types are better lured by certain honey-pots of howling inaccuracy and I doubt a lot of contentiousness and incivility stem from one wanting to get at an elusive truth and not a sturdy and well-buffeted opinion. Howard Cunningham, however, for whom the law is named is not just some rhetorician but the programmer, computer-scientist and Happy Days father who developed the user-editable platform known as the wiki. This potential for disabusing, edification and promulgation launched thousands of websites including of course Wikipedia, which has proved not only enlightening but also worth protecting. I’m sort of ambivalent about such proverbs—like Murphy’s Law (named for Candice Bergen) or the Sportscasters’ Curse, but I am sure that there’s a grain of truth to be uncovered behind them. Cunningham, at least through his creation that he gave away freely because he could not imagine anybody wanting to pay for something so basic but useful, and his law have become a grand social experiment with plenty of bait and bounty.

j’adoube or game and gambit

After being invented in the India sub-continent, the game of chess in its recognisable and modern was one of those cultural commodities, like language, writing and religion, which was quickly disseminated all over the world and was firmly entrenched by the year one thousand. The game was so popular and universally played that societies were also quick to undertake reimaging their boards and chessmen after their own iconography and values.

The rules of engagement were the same but sculptors and artists were given great license to reflect their own outlook on the world. Chessboards from Islamic countries hosted an army of abstract figures because of the proscription against making things in the likeness of natural beings and had a vizier accompanying the sultan instead of a queen, Asian boards represented their court traditions, pawns all around were simple and anonymous, and these finely crafts objects would have been treasured and handed down as heirlooms. The historical details of the place and period in which these playing pieces were made comes across, as does the makers’ sense of hierarchy and how to mount defenses. Instead of our modern Rook, the Tower, the Viking royals of this set discovered on Scottish Lewis Island under Norse rule are flanked by fearsome berserkers. All the queens of these sets share the same forlorn and distant look, and perhaps because she is frustrated that her movement is limited to one diagonal square at a time. The question of mobility for this sovereign was one of the only major changes to the rules in centuries—though sadly not an attitude adopted by society at large until much, much later: about five hundred years later going from having even less range than a pawn to becoming the most versatile and powerful piece on the chessboard. For a time, this liberation caused the European game to be named “Mad Queen” chess, which sounds like a story for Lewis Carroll.

beaker culture

Looking at this glass without knowing its context and provenance, one might think it’s a beautifully crafted piece of Nordic school Art Déco.

This vessel, one of fourteen known extant pieces, however, is called the Beaker of Saint Hedwig, a Polish duchess from Bavaria with a great reputation for her charitable works, like her niece Elizabeth. It was these glasses, however, commissioned by her husband, Henry Long Beard, Duke of Poland, hundred years ago which really cemented Hedwig’s fame and beatification. After the royal couple had reared twelve children (forming connections to a vast swath of European history) and the Duke had led a life of political intrigue and had some dealings with profiteering during the Crusades (where these fine glasses were almost definitely created, as such craftsmanship was not to be found in medieval Europe), the two turned to a more pious way of existence. Henry accepted most of Hedwig’s quirks and flagellations, but the Duke found it beyond to be too much when his wife gave up wine and only drank water.

Whether it was in fact the bath-water of the nunnery, as some say, the fact remained that the water supply of the day was potentially sickening to drink and wines and spirits were generally much safer and cleaner and so the Duke grew concerned about her health. Presenting her a collection of fine goblets—though the beakers are more vase-shaped and look awkward for actually drinking out of, maybe better suited as a communion cup—the Duke hoped his wife would change her habits but was disappointed when she still poured plain old water into them. Later, however, the Duke saw that when Hedwig raised the glass to her lips to drink, the water was changed miraculously into wine. The pictured glass is from the British Museum but the beakers have been held in the treasuries of abbeys and cathedrals as holy relics for centuries. In fact, I am pretty certain that I passed one more from the set from the same workshop in the very fine museum collection of the Coburg Fortress without realising it. There are quite a few of the Hedwig glasses in Germany, including one in the Cathedral of Minden—and H and I will have to be on the look-out during our travels.

iconography or graven images

A very interesting set of quite different factors and historical influences came together, I recently learnt, in the fourth century to establish rich artistic traditions that allowed the Buddha, the Christ and the panoply of the Hindu gods to be portrayed in human forms for the first time and in a manner that was cultural diffuse and immediately recognisable. Though these movements took place around the same time, the religions were at different stages of development and acceptance at this point—what with the Brahmin’s gods already enjoying milennia of devotion, Siddhārtha Gautama having achieved enlightenment some eight hundred years prior and the latest incarnation of the Abrahamic faith in its fourth century.  Despite these difference, they all started adopting pictorial representations around the same time.
A maturing network of international trade is of course a contributing factor, as being able to mediate on a shared image of how Jesus and company ought to look rather than relying on more abstract translated texts and interpreted teachings would spread these big religions and ensure their survival, but it is not the whole story. Before we got to the images of the serene Buddha and Jesus Christ in his characteristic poses, the story of these two was communicated through symbolism, teaching aides that represented the bodhi tree, the footprint of Buddha or the Cross, the sign of the fisher of men. And while it does seem natural and an effective step that the adherents of Buddhism would create figures of a limited and iconic variety for the benefit of foreigners being introduced to the philosophy, for Christianity it was a break with ancient traditions and taboos of not depicting God or His manifestations.  The decision to show Jesus as a man may have happened in part because Constantine around this time declared that faith the official one of the empire, and Romans and Greeks, used to having statues of Dionysus, Hercules or Nike decorating their villas with triumphant flair, thought it was acceptable to have even more glorious statues of Jesus on display. As with Buddhism, the move was probably also good for the edification of foreign-speakers. Some three hundred years later, during the first few decades of the faith, Islam restored the proscription again representing the divine by human-hands by issuing currency for the Caliphate that only bore the word of God, instead of coins bearing the image of the head-of-state or other trappings.

Places of worship were becoming somewhat uniform in their delivery but the coin of the land was really the only mass-produced and reliable product of the Middle Ages in the West by any reckoning. Insisting on the rubic of a shared language was a powerful tool, and it is remarkable that this level of organisation developed in just as many decades as centuries it took for other religions—and without pictures. The Hindu gods and their different aspects were almost too innumerable to catalogue, but with the rise of the Gupta dynasty to power on the sub-continent at this same time, there was an ambitious and successful effort to standardise how each avatar looked and deported his- or herself. Because of this promotion and propaganda, one could communicate a certain devotion with a few accepted conceits. The personal nature of the gods and their care and custody would be instantly understood and copied.  A sketch on a napkin being equally holy as any statue in a temple, and the image is understood to be the deity itself, to be treated as a honoured guest.

wunderkammer or department of antiquities

Though I had been hearing the series cited and praised by several sources, I have only just now begun to indulge BBC Radio 4 and the British Museum’s co-production of A History of the World in One Hundred Objects—which is brilliantly and joyously highbrow and erudite listening, though has since expanded to other media and ambitiously invites the audience to tell their own stories through the collected artefacts of affiliated treasuries. The series is really well constructed and does not presume to present an authoritative lesson but rather thoughtfully present a series of items that represent the various aspects that have contributed to our understanding of the human condition: not all curators or visitors would pick the same assortment or think of them in the same ways, necessarily, but all narratives coming out of the galleries eventually cross have story arcs in common.
There are quite a lot of these homages to humility—important when it comes to such an undertaking, for instance in dispelling the idea that museums, either by turns musty old places or serene repositories, are anything but static—artefacts forever revising the stories that they can share, thanks to our enhanced understanding about different historical contexts and thanks to advancing methods for researching and unlocking those secrets. Certainly some lovely old bones or pottery shards were intriguing enough finds at first, but under a new light (of cultural understanding or more precise dating) give up even more and the yield is yet unexhausted. Listen to a few episodes and I am sure you’ll be engaged as well.

jupiter vi

Via the Presurfer comes a study about the unique niche that type of deep-ocean shrimp have occupied, whose symbiosis with extremophile bacteria may point us towards extraterrestrial corollaries, which may be discovered in environments like on the Moon of Europa.
One can also find out more about the research and the mysterious satellite thanks to this splendid video presentation curated by BoingBoing. The existence and lifestyle of these shrimp that float in the narrow, tolerable range between the frigid depths and the boiling, churning thermal vents makes me think of the strange and secretive race of Outsiders as imagined in Larry Niven’s Known Space franchise. The ancient creatures evolved on a frozen world, as evinced by the fact that they later lease one of the moons of Neptune from the Humans as a local base of operation, and eked out a bit of a vital spark from the difference in temperature between unfiltered solar radiation and the subzero surface of their planet. Examples found in terrestrial biology so far only show a population established in the more Goldie Locks places of the world specialised and moving into an exclusive environment—which is amazing enough in itself—but signs that life sprung up organically in such places remain elusive.

fricative or win, lose or drawl

Surely those early scribes and grammarians had a tough slog in figuring out how to adapt the Latin alphabet to English as she is spoken. After all, there were quite a number of foreign sounds to try to capture with the familiar letters at their disposal, and the committee of monks had to make some arbitrary decisions in spelling in order to apply the alphabet phonetically. Quite a few terminal j-sounds were found in Old English—like edge, bridge and judge, and the development of this sound was something separate from the shift in the romance languages that took place at the beginnings of words, like Iohan and Iupiter, so the monks did not want to represent the sound with an i (the letter j not invented unitl much later) but instead choose ʤ—being derived from the hard g-sound. 

Though the Romans had had their encounters with the Goths and other Germanic tribes, new utterances had come into being, like th-, sh- and ch-, and vowel sounds were slipping away from anything that the monks had heard before. Not that English is a direct descendant of modern German, but one wonders why we go from Brücke to bridge, Eck to edge, Schiff to ship or Freund to friend. These kinds of transformations happen among all languages and dialects, but all these shifts occur in the name of economy. I have noticed that I am sometimes quite lazy in my pronunciation of German and if I am doing it half right, my face aches a little. These changes are the mouth's attempt to align phonemes and reduce movement from the front to the back of the mouth. Not that continental Germanic languages are all harsh and breathy like Klingon, there was a tendency to cut back on the back and forth and eliminate throaty consonants paired with soft vowels. Though a lot of original forms are preserved for old time's sake—like win from won, buy from bought, feet from foot where the old, more awkward style is preserved in the less common past or plural forms—English does seem to have a particular penchant for slurring words. Although probably more due to the lack of an authoritative body to govern spelling and pronunciation among the Germanic-speakers unlike the institutions of the Roman Empire, some linguist believe this indolence and inertia is owing to the circumstances wherein the invaders took the island. Abandoned by Rome, the Anglo-Saxons found themselves in a place where there was not much to do other than plunder and drink, cultivating sloppy enunciation.

flash-mobbing

We have a regional radio station that’s called Radio Charivari and plays a mix of German pop from the 1950s and Schlager songs, the standards that usually accompany Volksfest. 
I thought the name was one of those German redoublings, like Schickimicki or Stylo-Milo—which indicate something posh or extra-fancy, but charivari actually is a French-derived term for rough-music, encompassing a whole hatful of customs and traditions whereby community members serenade newlyweds and to signal their displeasure if the union strayed too far from social norms. These impromptu gatherings, banging pots and pans and making a general ruckus to celebrate an act that was too long in coming, could also be a form of censuring if the nuptials came prematurely or age-discrepancies too great, shaming would-be couples into respecting accepted standards.  This mob-mentality, happily, disbanded and communal harassment was by turns outlawed as something cruel and infringement on the real moral authorities—a similar form of vigilante justice turned even more extreme was called ran-tanning or tin-kettling in Britain and conversely gives us the term for the containment tactics of crowd-control. It’s a bit of a strange choice for a station’s call-sign but I don’t think there’s an element of roughness or re-education, social coercion to be found in it. There are a lot of impenetrable customs associated with weddings and I think certain, maybe less judgmental aspects of charivari survive and are indulged and kept sacred.

czy wiesz?

Later this month, a monument (EN/DE) will be dedicated in Poland to the collaborative philosophy behind the online lexicon Wikipedia. The sculpture will be unveiled in Słubice on a university campus, and was commissioned after a suggestion by one of the professors. It is fitting that the first tribute to the pervasive and unfettered resource be raised up here, as the city borders Germany, just across the Oder River from Frankfurt, and these two populations are among the most avid and active contributors to Wikipedia in Europe.

ecumene

Vox features a collection of several maps to illustrate the rise and fall of the Roman Empire, on the anniversary of the death of Caesar Augustus, our Octavian. It seemed like a fitting and timely supplement to plot the development of conquest and eventual decline, including facets of its equally important legacies that shape the ways of the world today. Ecumene is a geographical term adopted from the Greek οἰκουμένη referring to the known universe, and the origin of the word ecumenical.

change-registry oder encyclopedia brown

I remember when, in some date-stamped recollections, when a school assignment required research in actual books and was a tethered affair. Once I was asked to produce a sort of newspaper—not an annual review or compilation of events but an an actual daily covering some chosen date from the Middle Ages. I found the gaps absolutely immense, without a more liberal deadline for creating this anachronism, which I was probably making tougher than it was supposed to be, not content to focus on a single coronation or day on the battlefield. The copy and the images came from a vintage edition of encyclopedias, I remember, with a lot of manual cutting and pasting, aligning images with copy.
I wonder if such tasks were more original, if viewed from above, or resulted in the same degree of copypasta as might such homework deliver today. Books in the Reference Section were those that did not leave the Library. Wikipedia is a very fine thing but there is something to be said for the ability to thumb through a tome whose relevance is arranged according to the editors' plans. Later, we had a contemporary edition of Funk & Wagnall's that somewhat supplanted the older set and I knew classmates had an embarrassment of variety from various publishers and encyclopedists. A 1937 edition of a fine German sits on the shelf of furnished apartment, mostly as decoration I suppose, which I look through from time to time. I never thought of an encyclopedia as propaganda or as a snap-shot in time, even though I always relied on vintage editions myself.
The altas volume had some particular interesting insights concerning the direction of the German Reich, including the migration of the Germans, immigrant saturation and new naming-conventions. Though such compositions exist as chronologies and as the snap-shot I struggled to create, I wonder what it means in terms of research and originality that there's an easy footnote and method to cull a periodical.

croatia week: linguistic landmark

Brothers Saint Cyril and Saint Methodius are probably best known for the Cyrillic alphabet and orthography named after them, but the missionaries to the Slavs were also diplomats to the Muslim world and tried to improve relations between the Caliphate and Byzantium and philosophy professors at the university of Constantinople, before undertaking Great Moravia. There, they devised the so-called Glagolitic script, which the Cyrillic script is derived from, in order to give the people a system of writing, derived—like Cyrillic—from their native Greek alphabet but suited to the character of the Slavic language. I am not sure how exactly a way of writing is matching how a language is composed, especially when invented, but you can download the font here.  There are many manuscripts and inscriptions, ancient and retro-revival, all over Croatia, where the system was developed.

The written word, however, did not succeed in standising the Croatian language. Today, a Latin system of writing is employed, devised by Ljudevit Gaj who based his script off of the special letter forms and diacritical marks invented for Czech and Polish, and the language has, bolstered by national and literary identity, taken on a lexical standard, though much mutual-intelligibility is retained among neighbouring languages and dialects. I tried to learn a little bit and I think it accorded us some special attention for the effort, and would like to pick up some more for a return visit. Aside from the usually pleasantries and politely saying I want something, I remember the fun word for waterfall—Slap—and the term for feedback (Fragenbogen)—Upitnik, which sounds like something one would not want to solicit, being all up in another’s business.

croatia week: pula

Pula, the administrative anchor and biggest city of Istria since ancient times, has a very long and storied heritage. In addition to archaeological finds that date back twelve thousand years (not to mention fossilised human remains upwards of a million years), Pula was also were Jason and the Argonauts sought refuge while fleeing from the Colchians after he stole their golden fleece (whose legend probably comes from the tradition of “panning” for gold in the fast flowing rivers of Central Europe with a sheep skin as a sieve).
 The city features one of the best-preserved Roman amphitheatres in the world, as well as a forum converted into the main town square, in addition to being the reluctant donor of many treasures and antiquities to the Empire of Venice—though there are on-going archeological digs with finds yet to discover—and was employed as the launching base for the dreadnoughts of the Austro-Hungarian Empire during World War I.
Lately, Pula has seen a revival as an industrial power-house as well as a tourist-attraction—though much more than a curious palimpsest of civilisations.

gypsy rose or pharmacological merits

AlterNet’s health and wellness desk sends well-timed reminder of how it’s not nice to fool Mother Nature—at any time, but the discussion of insecticides and repellents comes just as the mosquito and tick season is starting.  Tragically, many regions have suffered from mosquito-borne diseases for generations, and as humans encroach further into the last untouched patches of the wilds and more and more goods and people are shuffled around, a bug bite is feared as something more than an annoyance and tropical ailments are infiltrating populations once sheltered.
While the chemical cauldron may offer initial relief, there are a host of undesirable side-effects, among those that are known, for those who douse themselves with repellant—plus the balance of their internal-flora—and the ecology when manufactures run with the hint of nominal efficacy straight towards expanding into pesticides for crops, and waning returns.  The article explores the different mechanisms that make us appear attractive, lumbering targets to bites and stings and how a selection of natural products—like a suspension of lemon and eucalyptus essence, have a far greater and enduring success rate, without the dangers of pests building up immunity.  Lavender, despite claims that is is something emasculating for pre-pubescent boys, is a perfect substitute for deodorisers and air and fabric refreshers described as works of sorcery—though lavender, used as a condiment in powdered form until tomatoes and ketsup were discovered, and complementary aromas have positive psychotropic benefits, melaleuca (tea tree oil) is a much more effective antiseptic as a antimicrobial agent that is not a barn-burner, and essential oils seem better at prompting the body to metabolise what it needs than artificial cues, which are always more than a subtle hint. Growing acceptance of traditional and alternative medicines makes me wonder how the chemical business (as distinct from the science of chemistry) got a foothold in the first place—not that we ought to be faulted for trying to harness qualities found in Nature, but rather it just seems that what we make, that is—at least what’s going to interact with our bodies or environment eventually, or try to deliver is so fundamentally flawed and no matter how ingratiating or convincing, is ultimately barred from mingling with its biological counterpart.

ad confluentes

We had the chance recently to visit the city of Koblenz, where the Moselle joins the Rhein, and survey the colossal monument to Prussian Emperor Wilhelm I, designed by the architect Bruno Schmitz who collaborated with other artists to build other gigantic monuments in the area, from high above on the cliff-top campus of Festung Ehrenbreitstein (Fort Honoured-Broad-Stone). This ruler wanted more than cooperation, strategic partnerships and petty tyrants but unity among the peoples of Germany.
Wilhelm never realised this goal during his reign and more democratic institutions were responsible for that, as for the Weimar Republic that followed soon afterwards, but the monument was erected originally to commemorate the decisive Battle of Sedan. Successive governments then used the monument as a call for unity.
It was the figure that is evoked in the patriotic song Die Wacht am Rhein and during the 1980s, an image of the sculpture was used in West Germany as a rallying point for unity, with the iconic symbol of the Deutsches Eck being the standard sign-off signal for television stations at the end of the broadcasting day (before the advent of 24 hour, continuous programming) shown, from this vantage point with the national anthem. Herman Melville, along with other contemporary writers, makes mention of the fortress above in Moby Dick, “this pulpit, I see, is a self-containing stronghold—a lofty Ehrenbreitstein,” and the massive installation is a venue for exhibits on art and history.
Though the fort was never taken in battle, the statue below was heavily damaged in 1945, less than fifty years after its dedication, by an American bomb-run and the French administration of the Trizone forwarded a proposal to demolish the giant completely and put a peace memorial in its place. Those plans were never realised and the decision to restore and rededicate the monumental statue at the head-waters was announced in 1990, just after Reunification.

alles wurst

There have been cults of devotion to the figure of Saint Uncumber (Saint Wilgefortis) for centuries—especially in Bavaria and Austria, but also all over Europe—as the champion and patron saint of women battered, abused and otherwise marginalized by either their husbands or society, but The Local's local edition formulates a clever allusion, that connects the bearded lady to Austria's new Eurovision Song Contest winner.
Tradition holds that the maiden was promised to a pagan king—however Wilgefortis would not deny her Christianity. Her betrothed and her father that hoped to gain prestige through this union would have none of this nonsense. Desperate, Wilgefortis prayed to the Virgin Mary to be unencumbered from such an awful arrangement and to be made so repulsive (here is where the compliment becomes a little backhanded) that the pagan king would no longer want her. Intercession came over night in the form of a full beard. The pagan king was disgusted but so was her father, humiliated and wrathful, and he had her crucified for her disobedience. This harsh punishment, however, lead to her veneration and establishment as a symbol for those in abusive relationships or bumping up against societal ceilings.

undecimber

To help correct the drift of manmade calendars away from cycles, mundane and celestial, time-keeping systems have adopted a series of complex intercalary or epagomenal units of time to compensate.  In ancient times—and yet today for countries like India and China that maintain lunisolar timetables, there were leap months added to the year to keep observances in their seasons.  The year cannot be divided equally among our measures in any case, but cherishing regularity and symmetry, the Romans (with many inheritors) counted three-hundred sixty days to the year, with some uncountable days.

In the Chinese tradition, the extra month went unnamed, but in Rome there is evidence that this thirteenth month Undecimber (really eleven or rather December plus one, as originally the fifty-seven dreary days of Winter were not considered worthy of reckoning (lousy Smarch weather) until the reforms of King Numa, where the months included at the beginning of the year were named after gods or rituals to make a twelve or thirteen month annual cycle.  The Gregorian calendar mostly eliminated the need for inserting a whole month to realign the date and by many schedules there is only the one embolismic day in February, once every four years—with restrictions, ninety-seven in the span of four-hundred years.  However, in the West at least and with the bankers’ hours it shares with the rest of the commercial world, there is one other formal, larger unit of time that can straddle (or just fall short of) the conventional year: the International Office of Standards (ISO) counts a the first Thursday of the year as the first week of the year—sort of an overlay for the daily calendar and this is parsed into three-hundred sixty-four or three-hundred seventy-one days—to speak in terms of full work-weeks to a year for payroll purposes and financial  records.  The Roman system was contrived originally of course to keep important commemorations (and practices) from sliding away but the tweaks were also instituted to ensure that taxes and tribute could be collected in a timely manner, which due on the first day of the month, named Kalends (Latin for “those called” and derived from the name for the ledgers of accountants, kalendaria).

hyponym or litotes

The American Scholar presents its list—with no special or commemorative reason or fan-fanfare, of its come-by-honestly best sentences in English literature.
It, the list, seems thoroughly modern and familiar yet the choices are far from pedestrian and quite resounding and evocative. The selection certainly has reciprocated a lot of good feedback and other nominees to explore. What would you include? Do you find the choices to be heavily orientated towards bulwer-litany, purple-prose? There is a lot to be said for pithiness, as well as the edifying and complete. However—I am happy to be reminded that there are people yet as passionate and cuckolded by words.

in the groove or playing life in hard mode

Hungarian psychology professor Csíkszentmihályi Mihály is a renowned teacher and researcher in the field of positive psychology, having to do with the creative drives and happiness as well as the stamina behind those motivations that are enduring and genuine.
Csíks- zentmihályi, holding that the only true rewards can be found in self-imposed discipline—rather than repression, whether indoctrinated or at the whip of slave-drivers', was the chief landscaper behind the concept of flow, the equilibrium of high levels of both skill and challenge that are ultimately most sustaining and intrinsic awards. Entertainers, it seems, most often are presented such demands but I suspect that we are all taken to task in one way or another, when concentration is most intense and distractions are not admitted. At the opposite corner of this flow-chart, one is met with apathy, understood as a demand that is not engaging or easily unseated. Here is a blank template for this graphic—in case you want to understand in ones own terms and might want to name specific states of mind. I would never suggest that certain practised assignments ever become the stuff of apathy, but it would do one good to question and assess what's truly in the flow.

timeliness, objectivity, narrative

We all would instantly recognize the iconic and candid images of photojournalist Alfred Eisenstaedt, and know them just by a caption of a few words, limning in the rest—but before Kottke shared this spontaneously happy picture, I did not realise who it was on the other side of the shutter, much less appreciate that the litany of celebrated pictures were courtesy of the same individual. Eisenstaedt had a definite excelling talent for finding himself in the right place at the right time, as well for framing a subject, and captured such unforgettable subjects for Life magazine as the couple kissing in Times Square for Victory over Japan Day, Albert Einstein, Sophia Loren, Marilyn Monroe, Ernest Hemingway, Joseph Goebbels at the League of Nations (as we know them) and the ice-skating waiters of St. Moritz.