Monday 22 June 2015
panoply or watermark
Friday 8 May 2015
peacemaker or colt forty-five
The intrepid explorers at Atlas Obscura present a really thorough and intriguing outline of a place called Coltsville, a utopian compound that really encapsulates the sort of nineteenth century industrialist sense of fatherly beneficence that’s in strong contrast to labour laws and the product, fire-arms, that funded the creation of this ideal factory town.
Saturday 2 May 2015
mason-dixon oder deutsch-deutsche grenze
![](https://3.bp.blogspot.com/-wbRZkZlOp7Y/VUTXBY_U7bI/AAAAAAAATH8/nvhelg7BDxA/s1600/mason_city_hall_sm.jpg)
catagories: ๐ฉ๐ช, ๐บ๐ธ, ๐, foreign policy, travel
Thursday 30 April 2015
five-by-five
zeroth law: looking at the ethics of thinking machines through the classic Trolley Problem
wasei-eigo: twelve Japanese takes on terms with English roots
travelogue: an illustrated 1821 journal by a teenager on holiday
if only you knew the power of the dark side: sometimes indulging arrogance or invoking privilege can inspire creativity and turn out altruistic
catagories: ๐ฏ๐ต, environment, lifestyle, philosophy, travel
Tuesday 28 April 2015
taking the waters or four freedoms
While visiting my parents in the state of Georgia, H and I saw Franklin D. Roosevelt’s retreat in Warm Springs, called the Little White House, though not a place for politicking per se and constructed at the beginning of FDR’s political career in 1921 when New York governor Roosevelt was stricken with polio and almost saw his prospects cut-short, whether or not the presidency a decade later was included in his aspirations. Local luminaries and physicians (possibly mistresses as well) gathered at the Little White House but politicians and dignitaries were mostly feted at either Camp David, the big White House or stately Hyde Park. FDR sought out a thermal spa treatment and the clean air of this town, building his private residence and going on the found an institute to try and cure other polio sufferers.
Of course FDR was wheel-chair bound and kept that from public-attention and appropriately, the grounds are handicapped-accessible but I thought it was quite upsetting and telling that there was a fleet of mobility-scooters available that otherwise able-bodied visitors used pretty shamelessly and rather gratuitously. The tour was pretty interesting and engaging but the experience was made even more so by a pair of strange coincidences. First, to the day, our visit fell on the seventieth anniversary of FDR’s death from a stroke suffered while sitting for his official presidential portrait in his study there, which remained unfinished—and that made the experience more poignant.
Second, I happened to be reading the brilliant alternate history novel by Phillip K. Dick set in a present (1960s) where a protracted World War II was won by the Axis Powers.
In this parallel reality, Nazi engineering has continued a pace and there are regular excursions to Venus and Mars and one character took a commercial Lufthansa flight (as we did) that took a mere three-quarters of an hour to fly from Scandinavia to San Francisco in the Pacific States of America and it took more time to collect one’s luggage at the baggage claim, but The Man in the High Castle, named after a reclusive author who’s penned a naturally contraband book that wonders how the world might have turned out if the Allies had been victorious, portrays a nasty and brutish dystopia. The Earth has been divided from east of the Caucasus to the western seaboard of America under the control of the Empire of Japan, Europe and the East Coast under control of the Great Nazi Reich—the Mediterranean was drained for reclamation of agricultural land, the Holy Land under Italian control, and most of Africa depopulated—with lesser races enslaved or eliminated. A nominally independent Finland, Canada and the Midwestern states offer some pockets of resistance and neutrality.
Terrible and inverted as it is, it is affecting how some of the same geopolitical prejudices and sentiments, with a few substitute words, are still common-parlance and the world is still a hostile and polarised place.
Though there was a line or two that identified the point-of-departure, the hinge-event that diverged into the present of the story, I don’t think I would have picked up on it without the visit to Warm Springs. There was a time-line of FDR on one of the displays that mentioned the assassination attempt, just months into his first term, at the hand of one Giuseppe Zangara, who missed and killed the mayor of Miami at a speech. In the novel, the assassin’s aim was truer and as a result, there was no New Deal, no economic recovery from the Great Depression that allowed America to bolster its manufacturing capacity, no Lend-Lease policy that allowed a tenaciously isolationist America to undermine the German and Japanese advance while still begging neutrality. Seeing FDR’s achievements and artefacts really made the contributions he was able to impart and his legacy even more extraordinary and made the wonder of how things might have been (and how things become the same) all the more disquieting.
Thursday 9 April 2015
two left feet but oh so sweet
H and I will be detouring in America very soon and are very excited to visit my family in Georgia. It’s been far too long, and it is going to be a real treat and surely some culture-shock for the both of us too. PfRC will be on hiatus but please visit our friends over at the Smรถrgรฅsblog and stay-tuned to our little travel blog for further adventures. Georgia named her, Georgia claimed her.
Tuesday 7 April 2015
cat-burglar or level-boss
Though often subtly alluded to and perhaps the inspiration for Sherlock Holmes arch-nemesis, Professor Moriarty, nineteenth century gentleman burglar turned international criminal syndicate mastermind, Adam Worth, is virtually unknown. Celebrated in his day—albeit no one knew his true identity as he hob-knobbed with Europe’s elite and discreetly ran a network of underlings who committed the actual robberies, and always without violence—the cardinal code of his organisation being never to use firearms, Worth managed to elude capture by Scotland Yard and other national police forces, as well as the sleuths of Pinkerton’s Detective Agency. Some one ought to make a movie about this original gangster.
Worth operated at a time when associates referred to “baby-face,” gums, sister, lumpy—or by some other physical attribute in case of any eavesdroppers, and though while based in Paris, Worth was faced with none of those stakes that fostered a criminal underworld in America with Prohibition, Worth did open and run the first Bar Americain in the city, which held on its upper-storey an illicit gambling hall that could be transformed in an instant into a sedate salon peopled by figures lounging and reading newspapers through some ingenious pneumatic works that hid the gaming tables when trouble approached. There was also a sense of respect above this honour among thieves displayed by Worth’s own arch-nemesis in the personage of Allen Pinkerton, who had spearheaded the hunt for Worth for decades in the US (where he regularly chanced to visit his parents, who knew nothing about his exploits), London, Paris, Greece and Constantinople, who was relentless like Inspector Javert’s relentless chase for fugitive Jean Valjean but ultimately held the outlaw in high esteem.
Friday 27 March 2015
local colour or instaham
The ever excellent Quartz magazine has an interesting piece of reporting for holiday-goers, that has some destinations affecting an accent and cultivating a culture in order to deliver to tourists the experience that they are expecting. Notwithstanding Bavarian taxi cab drivers and waiters really hamming it up, it seems to me that this programme is more than a marketing campaign and could transform into something positive.
Instead of souvenirs and native crafts that are really only sustained by visiting throngs—though one cannot generalise any experience or attraction whether established or on the rise—a step towards insincerity leads maybe to a stronger hold in the long run on genuine customs and outlooks that were suppressed to extinction either by the forces of hegemony or the encroachment of domineering globalisation. I know I am forever the guilty anthropologists for wanting to hear sheep-counting in Gaeltacht, but maybe that is not wholly condemning. Maybe the sightseer, even for the expectations of clichรฉ, have help to revive a moribund language—which I think is certainly worth a dose of dissimulation. What do you think? Are these enclaves and tours on offer a charade or a chance for visitor and local alike to discover something new on journey’s end?
five-by-five
de consumo popular: brilliant, hard-boiled galleries of Mexican pulp art
seeing-eye: “service dog fraud” is a burgeoning phenomenon
nocebo: a study behind the psychology of medical break-through hype
cardinal points: destinations mapped out through the lenses of contemporary art and design
Saturday 21 March 2015
there ain’t no harm in that
The Reeperbahn, a strip in the Hanseatic City of Hamburg is sort of like that Island of the Donkey Boys where Pinocchio goes to carouse and behave badly but it looks rather cleansed and tamed on cold, bright mornings.
The neighbourhood is named for the rope-weavers, surely an important component of the shipping-business who traditionally lived in this quarter. I didn’t notice until afterwards, sorting through pictures, that the motto of the polished and modern Keese hotel and casino, visible through the middling tree is honi soit qui mal y pense, old French for shame on him who thinks ill of it and the motto of the venerable and chivalrous Order of the Garter. It’s a badge that bears repeating in heraldic contexts all over and was quite delighted to find it hidden there too.
Friday 20 March 2015
five-by-five
pรญratar: Iceland’s dominant Pirate Party may extend shelter and citizenship to the Fugitive
kinematografii: a collection of vintage Czechoslovakian film posters
3 quarks for muster mark: some of the invented words of author James Joyce
birds’ eye: an eagle presents Dubai as he descends to his trainer below
be mine: camera embedded in a ring box captures marriage proposals from a face-forward perspective
Saturday 7 March 2015
mos eisley or in popular culture
While there are far more serious and bedeviled threats to cultural heritage in the region with the purging of ancient Persian and Assyrian archaeological sites by ISIL and civil wars, and none need convincing of how the world will be the poorer for their loss for the undiscovered, under-appreciated and the suffering of the people under this marauding terror, maybe there is trivially a new hope in a dedicated, cult fan-base.
Thursday 5 March 2015
nave and apse
five-by-five
pantheon: murals of Greek gods superimposed against chaotic graffiti
sharper image: due to popular demand, Sky Mall catalogs are returning
these kids today and their y2k: classic countdown to Armageddon
the flower of battle: a beautifully illustrated fifteenth century guide to marshal arts
Saturday 21 February 2015
vanity-plates
Ages ago, the private motor vehicles of Americas affiliated with the military stationed in Germany were plated with distinctive licenses, as if the major of American cars weren’t already conspicuous enough—with either the prefix HK for bumpers that took the short, standard US tags or AD for bumpers that could accommodate the longer, German style license plates.
These codes, which apparently did not stand for anything, were assigned since no county or city had claimed these particular combinations, e.g. KT for Landkriese Kitizen, M for Munich, S for Stuttgart, HD for Heidelberg, etc. Later, in the name of force-protection, vehicles followed the same naming-convention as their local hosts. With the devolution of the licensing and registration laws in Germany and districting reforms, a whole new slew of possibilities opened up, including the disused HK, that is now reserved for automobiles from County Heide (Landkriese Heidekrise) in Lower Saxony. We noticed this on our way back from Hamburg. The county seat of this area on the Lรผneburg Heath is a town by the name of Bad Fallingbostel. The town is incidentally host to a garrison of the British Army—at least through this year, as the Ministry of Defense (MOD) plans to withdraw, as the Americans are drawing-down, all their soldiers from Germany by 2020.
Tuesday 17 February 2015
able i was, ere i saw elbe
![](https://lh4.googleusercontent.com/-BO3tOFhqIqw/VODUCRSiGRI/AAAAAAAAR18/FTNIlBSiHBA/s200/blogger-image-1839143513.jpg)
![](https://lh5.googleusercontent.com/-LVtIRFL26Ds/VODTtbVj73I/AAAAAAAAR1U/oYIyAUf83xk/s200/blogger-image--1419143586.jpg)
Here are a few parting-impression of our little trip to Hanseatic Hamburg, one of three of Germany’s city-states but unique in many ways. Though our exposure was limited to the usual tourist-experience, it struck me as quite livable, more so than other metropolitan areas—though there were distinct signs of gentrification and I had the feeling that denizens were cleft if not to their class but to the demographics of their boroughs, a truth about gentrification that was probably peppered by the voting Sunday and campaigning in the air.
![](https://lh5.googleusercontent.com/-COwuc-4WsrU/VODT-6BxttI/AAAAAAAAR10/MAyzvR_zDCQ/s200/blogger-image-386860774.jpg)
![](https://lh6.googleusercontent.com/-JJPrWyqjXZI/VODTzw-iS0I/AAAAAAAAR1k/oouZm_d6D7c/s200/blogger-image--917668325.jpg)
![](https://lh6.googleusercontent.com/-fDO7s7mo0_A/VODUTWuseOI/AAAAAAAAR2M/GZsvAWEsAPE/s200/blogger-image-219067017.jpg)
![](https://lh5.googleusercontent.com/-6xSSWEK7geM/VODTwqIuAKI/AAAAAAAAR1c/d50kuXDz5F0/s200/blogger-image-478115478.jpg)
![](https://lh6.googleusercontent.com/-SMslOw8Lj6o/VODUQDv1h4I/AAAAAAAAR2E/goGjYkKS_tk/s200/blogger-image-1314728608.jpg)
The bureaucracy has created a unique skyline, as has the corporate headquarters and the prestige-projects, like the newly added Elbe-Philharmonic, that are terriors of the shipping business that remains as big and prominent as ever. With some two-thousand four-hundred bridges, Hamburg has the most crossings of any city on Earth and has more canals than both Amsterdam and Venice combined. I am not sure if that figures in number or volume, as Venice did seem to be unsurpassed in the quirkiness of its waterways.
![](https://lh5.googleusercontent.com/-2IQsH0YGgVw/VODT3QtnjhI/AAAAAAAAR1s/3QTenBg5GdQ/s200/blogger-image--906911253.jpg)
Tuesday 10 February 2015
hindsight bias or temporal paradox
Back in late 2000, a man calling himself John Titor, claiming to be a time-traveler from the year 2036, began appearing in chat-rooms and on-line forums, presenting the world with a litany of the terrible things to come—which certainly seems to violate the popular understanding about causality but sometimes the timeline and canon is disdained for lesser things. Though we are living in a sort of post-skeptical world where most agree that perpetuating future-fraud would be quickly smacked down and the internet is not a hiding-place, I still feel a little cheated for not knowing about this fantastically fun and possibly didactic anecdote. Though Titor’s stop in the year 2000 was just a detour, an authorized-delay, after accomplishing his main mission of retrieving a piece of legacy hardware from a quarter of a century earlier, which was reportedly had the needed fix to inoculate computer systems of his time against a fatal programming bug that had ravaged the contemporary technological landscape, he did make a nostalgic appearance online to entertain questions and issue some dire warnings—one being that one ought to avoid eating beef since, owing to the decades’ long incubation period, mad-cow disease would not present in the human population until Titor’s day and age.
Another, more timely announcement—which most have seemed dismissibly distant back then but probably inversely interesting since the internet was new and fresh and we were innocent and curious about what it might mean to have the world shrink through the sharing of ideas and experiences rather than finding that that shrinkage can also lead to things like compartmentalization and ennui that there’s less unique about us than we’d like to admit (Titor, if there’s even an internet for humans in the future, could have been prescient about that too I suppose)—was that there would be an atomic exchange between the US and Russia in the year 2015 that would be known as World War III. These pronouncements are quite different than the predictions of Nostradamus, not vague by design but maybe a little evasive, and not just because they claim the authority of experience but also in that if anything does not unfold as Titor said (like the civil wars that were to occur in 2006 and 2012 that was to split the United States up into five separate countries), it still cannot be refuted as wrong, since his time-travel affected the future, as planned. The engagement ended abruptly after four months, and though there has not, I think, been a continual following—bits and pieces of this strange story resurface now and again and spark a resurgence that’s not only in the dismantling and maybe the desire to find resolution, since those interrupted mysteries are the ones that haunt.
catagories: ๐, ๐ก️, philosophy, technology and innovation, travel, ⓦ
Monday 9 February 2015
worth one-thousand
The Daily Beast has a very interesting profile of awarding-winning photographer Alec Soth and his team who are taking an epic road-trips and documenting Americana, sharing his dispatches with all and sundry that really draws in the reader, as the artist’s eye does.
Wednesday 28 January 2015
toponym or afternoon map
![](https://lh5.googleusercontent.com/-zBV3BydA6lQ/VMjVzem3BsI/AAAAAAAARqs/Ulk9lWohQCQ/s320/blogger-image--1527140823.jpg)
catagories: ๐ท๐บ, ๐, ๐, ๐, ๐บ️, foreign policy, revolution, travel
Wednesday 21 January 2015
resolution of dream and reality
![](https://lh4.googleusercontent.com/-NqWC-utoW0k/VL9aroKG1lI/AAAAAAAARg4/eJFGUEXeoiM/s200/blogger-image-474471382.jpg)