sorry, that name has been taken

We suggest you try “ITCHY-POOPZKID23.”  A title suitable for your pet or your band.

hiatus or ciao bella

We at PfRC have only had the chance to take one grand vacation this year—which we’re forever grateful for knowing that most do with a lot less and thankful too that this is an anomaly and not a worrisome trend, but happily we will have the chance to return to the Italian Lake District in a few days and returned from further adventures we will be refreshed and ready for more. In the meantime, you can visit our friends over at the Smörgåsblog or consult our extensive archives. Arrivederci!

palisade-park or load-bearing

This nice little appreciation of the iconic stave church of Borgund in Norway from Twisted Sifter reminded us of our visit there a few years ago. Of course the natural beauty of that country is nonpareil with whatever man-made constructs can frame it. It was truly a wonderful and privileged experience and we are hoping to be back and astounded again one of these days pretty soon.

geoid projection

Via the media maven and Internet Caretaker, Joanne Casey, comes this brilliant little invention to keep in one’s back pocket—a street map printed on a stress ball, which magnifies the area one squeezes. It’s certainly more fun as a memento of one’s travels than some ephemera that one has to carefully fold or winds up tossing away, and interesting to think how the distortions that haunt the globe projected onto a flat surface are harnessed in this reversal of grid on a round surface. Follow the links to purchase one of these Egg Maps, available only for Budapest for now but sure to soon cover a city near you.

5x5

found footage: transform crisp, high-definition videos into 1980s camcorder quality

23 and me: Æon magazine explores the ethics of genetic omniscience

used in a sentence: author composes stories taken from dictionary examples

huitzilopochtli, chutzpah: University of Connecticut fighting Hummingbirds

boondocks: a look at how language and culture define the Hinterland 

sprüdelhof, badehaus

Over the weekend, H and I took a day trip to the northern suburbs of Frankfurt am Main and visited the ensemble of bath houses, an incredible Jungendstil (Art Nouveau) tribute to hydrotherapy, known as the Sprudelhof, for curative techniques developed there—an effervescent, carbonated bath that was used to treat nervous diseases. The compound reminded me of the artists’ enclave Mathildenhöhe in Darmstadt with its dominating Hochzeitsturm (Wedding Tower) and collection of other stunningly beautiful buildings.
As many other spa towns at the turn of the century, Bad Nauheim attracted many celebrities, including those of the scientific community. I had seen that iconic class-photograph of past, present and future laureates previously but had not realised that it was taken during a conference held on these grounds. Another influential luminary that often visited, as a child, was Franklin Delano Roosevelt who was brought there numerous times to take the waters. Not only did these memories later inspire FDR to build his own health spa, he also ordered that Bad Nauheim be spared Allied bombing during the war, despite its proximity to Frankfurt and to one of Hitler’s command centres—called Adlerhorst, the eagle’s eyrie (nest) and often conflated with theKehlsteinhaust near the Austrian border.
The complex is still a temple of wellness but seems to have lost either its exclusive luxury or democratic access—I’m not sure which but very happy the elegant, moderne setting was preserved and there to enjoy. Elvis Presley was also stationed there in the years just after the war—and though not as famous as the crosswalk on Abbey Road, used one of the gates of the town as cover art for his album, Hunk o’ Love.

slaget i hafrsfjord

The intrepid adventurers at Atlas Obscura sends a picture postcard from Stavanger of the monumental commission of Sverd i fjell, which was among some our parting shots from our extended Norwegian vacation a few years back.
The peace declared that united the three warring factions of the western reaches of the kingdom under the leadership of good King Harald the Fair Hair (Harald Hårfagre) is really kind of obscured by the sheer scale and sight of three giant swords plunged into the beach of Madla—though the event is very much celebrated and romanticized in popular culture and stands just as large in the shared imagination. One thousand, one hundred eleven years after the decisive battle, King Olaf V degreed that this Viking victory be immortalised and it was wrought and wielded in 1983 by native sculptor Fritz Røed. One of these days, we’ll make it back to those shores and find those swords half buried regardless of how much time and tide has passed.

rennsteig oder überquerte

Over the weekend, H and I took an albeit short but rejuvenating camping excursion to the Rennsteig—ridge-trekking—National Park in the highland of the forests of Thüringen.
Normally, we’ve blasted past this area on our way towards Leipzig and Saxony, although we’ve taken a few occasions to visit the promontory castle the Wartburg and a few other locations in the region beforehand, tunnelling through the mountains in one of the longest enclosed stretches of Autobahn that goes through the mountains in Germany—whereas only the passes were navigable before this engineering project.

This time, however, we paused at the head of the trail in a conservatory called Hohe Sonne to take a hike through the so-called Drachenschluct—the dragons’ gorge, a narrow path that winds through the rocky outcroppings that tower above. It was only an infinitesimally small fraction of the trails through the woods that link up with the international path from the Balkans to Santiago de Compostela in Galicia, the pilgrimage route of Saint James (Jakob).
Afterwards, we toured around some of the villages, which were pretty distinctive places, within the park and visited the ruins of a fortress above the Werra valley known as Brandenburg, whose campus represents on the largest keeps in Middle Germany. It was fun to imagine what it might have been like intact.
Slowly we made our way back to the campsite we had found hugging the little lake (See) of Altenburg, just south of Eisenach and the entrance to the park. It was relaxing to finally get settled and sleep out-of-doors, even if it was only for the night and we aren’t exactly roughing it. The next day, we had a late start but we were still able to do a little exploring with the balance of Sunday and drove to Gotha.
This city, birthplace not only of many the royal houses of Europe and the commercial, services-sector boom that followed the Industrial Revelation—spinning straw into gold, as it were, with insurance and finance, was a beautiful but surprisingly quiet place—the sort of quiet that I am sure is not altogether constant or pervasive but tends to go, subdued, with those places whose history needs to be studied and teased out.
Below the patio of Schloss Freidenstein, one of the largest Baroque compounds of Europe and residence for the dukes of Saxe-Gotha, cascading down to the market square and the ancient Rathaus is a water-feature, whose fanciness is testimony to the water supply problems that the city in almost the geographic centre of Germany and the point nemo of any natural sources for plumbing.   A canal was dug of some twenty-five kilometres to form an aqueduct to channel fresh water into the city—surely not a feat to be memorialised by Roman standards but certainly a reminder of how much was lost in terms of the civilising arts when Rome went away—and allowed the city to thrive

wie ein wüstensohn

Happily after the absolutely brilliant regular podcast Futility Closet introduced a few weeks back to a large portion of its listening audience the German and Eastern European phenomenon bound up in the works and personality of the imaginative adventure writer Karl May—and re-introduced to others with the glad occasion to reflect and wonder a little bit how this author was no longer remembered in some of the exotic lands where his stories took place, the topic has become for the team and commentators a sustained and very productive one.
Branching off to a series of tales set in the Middle East, rendered all the more amazing since like his stories that took place in the American Old West came across as convincing and more culturally sympathetic than those who’d actually experienced those places first hand, another iconic character, akin to Old Shatterhand and Winnetou, comes on scene, in the faithful guide Hadschi Halef Omar Ben Hadschi Abul Abbas Ibn Hadschi Dawud al Gossarah. Notwithstanding that fictional character was the only naming-convention in the Muslim tradition studied and committed to memory by committed fans from a European background, the stories were a lens on the casbah and the souq, which all things considered was not a bad introduction for the 1890s. The German disco band Dschinghis (Genghis) Khan, EuroVision Song Contest contender probably most famous for their party hit Moscow, Moscow—celebrated this literary figure with a particularly catchy number in 1980 (or try here, depending on your location). I hope all the characters in this particular universe eventually get their own treatment and profiles.

5x5

sapience: engineering students at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute may have created a trio of robots that are self-aware, tested with a proverbial riddle adapted for machines

geoponica: fascinating look at underground urban agriculture and its potential for growth

banishment: Atlas Obscura explores historical locations for exiled leaders with contemporary equivalents

bubbler: interesting survey of the history of drinking fountains and what their decline means, via Super Punch

for the queen to use: gorgeous vintage science fiction and space images from the British Library, via the Everlasting Blort

crocodile creek, neverspeak mountain

The ever intrepid team of Atlas Obscura presents an illuminating, nostalgic glimpse at the stellar rise and equally rapid decline of a gargantuan amusement park built in the southern marshes of New York state that opened in June of 1960 and closed after just four seasons, called Freedomland U.S.A. Civil engineer and architect of such ambitious family playgrounds named Cornelius Vanderbilt Wood, recently dismissed from his last project of putting another but more enduring pleasure estate in an orange grove—the successor would again be built in a swamp—and his role ultimately denied and disavowed, designed a huge area in the shape of the continental United States and placed several historical and cultural attractions and rides within those borders.

The park celebrated the cheerier side of manifest destiny, mercantilism and American exceptionalism, including the Great Fire of Chicago, the San Francisco Earthquake, the launch pad and mission-control at Cape Canaveral—plus a New Orleans where it was always Mardi Gras and live music acts for adults to enjoy. In order to attract and retain more, the educational character was quickly supplanted by more conventional rides but its decline was swift—despite the number of guests and a lot of fond memories. Some of the more conspiratorial-minded believe that Freedomland U.S.A. was never meant to be a commercial success but rather an experiment in urban development by real-estate magnates and large landowners in New York and was undertaken to demonstrate that the marshland could safely support large-scale construction projects—and in fact, just after the park was razed, a public housing and a shopping centre went up. I think it is more likely the case that people became much disillusioned with the notion of what their country was becoming with the string of political assassinations of those waning years, not to mention the competition from the nearby venue of the 1964 World’s Fair that was meant to cheer everyone up again. The in depth look at Atlas Obscura furthermore bounces the demise of Freedomland off of the other ruins of theme parks and presents an interesting retrospective on the culture and the times.

daytrip: wetterau

 After being treated to a fun and festive Rhein river cruise courtesy of my employer, the next day H and I traveled a little farther north to a county named after a tributary thereof. It’s a little striking how much of German topography is named for streams and rivers instead of the other way around, like the Fulda or Heufurt closer to home that’s not where the hay, the straw can ford the stream (I would like to see that) but rather where there is an easy crossing on the Heu—and the name doesn’t refer to the weather, unlike the endless skies of this prairie land between the mountain ranges declaimed although feistier weather never materialised.
First we passed the ruins of a fortress on a hill called Münzenburg and stopped to visit. Unlike the name suggested to me, it was not a mint and the castle was built around 1160 by an administrator called Kuno I under contract of Emperor Barbarossa as a display of imperial power. The towers certainly dominated the otherwise flat landscape and was a treat to climb through the long-abandoned, neglected as other instruments of might became available, corridors and explore.
 Next we came to the yet vibrant compound of the Cloister of Arnsburg, just outside of the town of Lich where the popular brand of Licher beer is brewed. The compound embraced by the course of the Wetter, whose mother cloister is in Eberbach, fell into ruin with the dissolution of the monasteries in 1806, but parts have since been restored and re-purposed, including a poignant courtyard that is a sombre resting place for soldiers and victims of the regime of terror of the Third Reich.

Afterwards, we traveled onto the city of Wetzlar (home of Leica photography) and had a fine time walking through the winding cobbled streets of half-timbered houses that dated from a long time ago and reminded me of Frankfurt’s core Altstadt with a Hauptwache and squat cathedral.
I can’t wait until we have the chance to next time make a little more familiar what’s in the range of this backyard (plus from different perspectives) and look forward to exploring much more.

panorama or bread and butter

With this news item and its repercussions overshadowed by the visit of the Queen and then understandably wide-spread panic over the financial viability of Greece and the coordinated terrorist attacks that targeted tourists, it took me some time to realise that there is truly a landmark decision—pun very much intended, on the docket for the EU parliament. Standardising the so-called Panoramafreiheit, named after the German concept that images either framed or incidentally with art installations and works of architecture that are on display to the general public can be shared openly without fear of reprisal or accusations of commercial infringement, has suddenly become a priority. And while some are championing the German model be taken up in other lands where legal entanglements can make publicising a picture, especially of modern buildings whose likeness is controlled by some individual or brain-trust, difficult, others fear that the interpretation and enforcement of commercial-use could swing the other way in favour of the lien-holders. Tacky souvenir-shops seem to have gotten away with selling kitsch for years, whether copyrighted or not—Paris owns the right to the picture (and reminiscences thereof apparently) of the Eiffel Tower illuminated at night—and while I don’t think it’s necessarily right for some fly-by-night opportunist to profit at the expense of the labour of some genius architect and the outlays of a municipality by 3D-printing charm bracelets of some newly built sports stadium named after an on-line loan company—supposing there’s a market for such trinkets, no one should need to get permission and pay royalties for making their own personal postcards and sharing them.
The fact, however, that the venues where such things are shared are mostly unabashedly commercial ventures, the legal wranglings, suits and disappeared images would be soon to follow. Given that they are the bread and butter of the industry of sharing and of the gadgets that make this level of snapshots and selfies possible such candid postcards prompted this discussion—and probably gave someone a whiff of money to be made, it strikes me as ironic and necessary that there might be a degree of cooperation between those prying giants of the internet and their usual antagonists, the libertine Wikipedia and your friendly neighbourhood Pirate Party. It is strange to think of them being potentially on the same side.  I imagine that the social media networks would wither on the vine should the environment become as restrictive about broadcasting one’s whereabouts (with pictures) as bootleg has become.  Should the lawyers get their way, what is to stop it from progressing to even natural monuments, claimed as trade-mark by states unable to glean any tax-revenue off of those same internet giants that get off scot-free (which really does mean duty-free, hors taxes) though profiting greatly with local operations? Be sure to let people know how you feel about this and photograph everything as that’s the new graffiti.

panoply or watermark

The member states of the European Union hold diverse opinions on how to interpret and respect the right of panorama, that is, the ability to freely capture and use street photography, what’s in the public space, the commons, without fear of reprisal should those images have caught a spare glimpse of some building or piece of outdoors art that is under copyright. The creators of said installations that might be crowding up the skyline that a visitor is trying to frame are afforded a proprietary ownership of how the likeness of their creations are distributed, especially for profit, and ought to be allowed to gain off their works—notwithstanding their oft photographed location. Some have been found to be baiting the system—hence German legislators codified Panoramafreiheit to avoid legal snarls and keep public-spaces public and not subtle billboards. German EU representatives are urging all countries to enshrine such protections, which would surely leave a lot of attractions impoverished for the view. Other factions, however, want there to be uniformity of enforcement, siding with the clearinghouses. Given that people are quick to deputize themselves when it comes to enforcement in unclear situations, I hope that the matter is resolved definitively and in favour of the infringers.

5x5

rook to queen’s gherkin: the skyline of London in chess pieces

ossuary: sojourn around the world to reveal how the dead are kept among the living

blue harvest (dead link): Chinese theatres screen Star Wars saga for the first time nearly four decades after its release

consider yourself part of the furniture: aspirational lamp aims to earns its keep, like a character in Pee-Wee’s Playhouse

border-control: colourful gallery of world’s passports

sunday drive: gemünden am main

Driving back for the work-week—the weekends are always too short but the intervening time does not drag on too awfully—I decided to take the scenic route which we’d just traced the day before, exploring Lohr and that narrow projection of Bavaria that extends into Hessian territory all the way to Aschaffenburg.
 It certainly was a more pleasant experience than rumbling along the Autobahn and I took the chance to stop in the town of Gemünden am Main—so named because it is where the tributaries of the Sinn and Frankish Saale empty (the streams’ mouths) into the River Main. Naturally this confluence was a strategically important spot and sometime in the early thirteenth century the Count of Rieneck erected this castle and keep as a toll-station to control traffic and trade along the waterways.
Only ruins of Schloβ Schreneburg remain but the view is an impressive one and is now a venue for open-air concerts and a home for bats. Competing claims on the land by the dioceses of Würzburg and Fulda, especially after the line of the family Rieneck went extinct, even saw the construction of successively higher castles on the rolling hills above Scherenburg, since levelled, to dominate the Main below. The waterways are still important components of the transportation infrastructure for the region, and the rail-links that run parallel supplement the connections. I think I’ll start taking this route more often in fair weather and get a better taste of what’s here for us to discover.

presumptions or tabloid press

Explorer, missionary (of dubious efficacy since he achieved not a single lasting conversion) and abolitionist (also dubious as the slave-trade continued and arguably his heroic exploits inspired European colonialism and the scramble for Africa) Doctor David Livingstone was elevated to his mythic and sometimes saintly status by an American newspaper conglomerate, who harboured fiercely anti-British and anti-European sentiments (shared by much of the US public and manipulated readership at the time in the aftermath of their civil war, which portrayed Europe as either meddling or coldly indifferent), wanting to create the human-interest story, a departure from the hard-reporting and muckraking that was the daily digest. When the eminent adventurer had gone “missing” and was feared dead, the newspaper’s editorial board elected to bank-roll an expedition across the dark heart of Africa to find and rescue Livingstone, whether he wanted it or not, since the British government was doing little in the meantime to save their own national treasure.
Wagering that copy sold to follow such a harrowing mission would far outstrip any costs incurred with funding the venture—whether the search-party ever discovered Livingstone or not, the editors approached a Welsh immigrant, free-lancer and perhaps soldier-of-fortune, first fighting for an Arkansan regiment of the Confederate Army (ironically whose stance on manumission and the ethics of exploitation fueled the business of slavers in Africa and was the chief motivation for Livingstone to go there in the first place) and then for the Union after his capture, called Henry Morton Stanley. Stanley was untested when it came to safari but that didn’t seem to matter much—and given an unlimited budget, and as to how the expedition was to draw on these funds also did not seem to matter much to the newspaper, they embarked in 1871 on a journey of over a thousand kilometers through central Africa from Zanzibar to a village on the shores of Lake Tanganyika (soon to become German East Africa and today Tanzania) where some old white man was rumoured to be. Not much was heard from the correspondent during the actual trek that lasted over a year, which elicited some ire from the investors, and probably caused a lot of embellishments to be added to the later account, but it was brutal, punishing and nearly fatal to all involved. Contemporaries attest that Stanley was very callous to the slaves that were employed as porters, some two hundred souls initially, to execute his mission, shooting some deserters who left when matters got very desperate and Stanley himself suffered many bouts of malaria, which made his leadership questionable. Finally the expedition arrived with much fanfare and a bearer marching ahead with an American flag at the village where they hoped to find the object of their quest, and reportedly summoning up all his native British reserve and protocol for such occasions, asked of a wizened and baffled (what was all the fuss about?) old white man, “Dr. Livingstone, I presume?” Through thrust back into the lime-light, Livingstone declined to be rescued and brought back to civilisation until his work was complete and continued to search for the source of the Nile. Circulation exploded for the newspaper that sponsored this journey and Stanley went on to work with European powers to establish colonial outposts in savage wilds.

es war einmal oder forms of transmission

H and I decided to revisit the town of Lohr am Main to take a moment to properly appreciate the castle’s denizens’ role for inspiring a fairy tale, which rather uniquely as far as we know stands out among the folk-stories collected and studied by the Brothers Grimm as some thing based in fact—that is, as far as we know. Before visiting what is known as das Schneewittchen Schloß (Snow White’s Castle), however, and wondering how the oral-tradition of story-telling from generation to generation embellished historical happenings, we first crossed a field that dealt with communication in a thoroughly modern fashion.
Along the way, just outside of the town of Hammelburg by a German army installation was a giant array of satellite dishes. This ground station (Erdfunkstelle) beams data and other telemetry to the constellation of orbiting satellites, space probes and the International Space Station, plus probably for other applications besides civilian. It is quite an impressive and unexpected site in rural Frankonia. Next, we strolled through the storybook cobble-stone streets of the old part of Lohr and made our Snow White’s Castle—the tale being loosely based on an actual personage and event (though license was given and taken) in this town once known for its manufacture of mirrors.
At the neck ditch (Halsgraben, a dry moat that does not go all the way around) of the castle, there was another surprise of contemporary grammar, which often becomes inseparable from one’s locus and trajectory, a geo-data reference point, fixed coordinates employed to calibrate positioning systems and correct for drift. The juxtaposition was pretty thought-provoking and we were given to wonder how course-correction and detours into the fairy tale archetypes are both guiding factors.

daytrip: dreieich

After work yesterday, I took a trip to the nearby village of Dreieich. I had the chief aim of strolling a bit in the countryside and locating the elusive Stangen- pyramide, an outdoor installation of hundreds of graduated wood cylinders that supposedly nicely frame the Frankfurt skyline in the distance—failing that however (though long-wandering through the wheat fields and I will return this time with precise GPS coordinates), I thought to look in town, feeling a bit sorry for the place since I assumed that no one ever visited a place community that’s right off the airport.

I think I might have been mistaken and was pleasantly surprised to find a half-timbered (Fachweck) jewel of a town centre, dominated by the ruins of a fortress. Dreieich has much older Roman roots but the medieval resettlement of the area was owing to a royal hunting-grounds (Wildbann) tended there. Many of the bedroom communities outside of Frankfurt and along the Main originated in the same way—this whole area between Frankfurt and Aschaffenburg having once been a continuous wood, and is reflected in the town’s name and crest—three oaks. Burg Hayn was the stronghold for the bailiff of this estate and a sort of warehouse and armoury.
Dreieich claims to have been Emperor Charlemagne’s favourite stalk and the general layout of the fortification and village that grew up around it were copied throughout the region. Walking through the walled town was also quite nice, with much of the old character preserved, and the residents seem quite house-proud—one could even purchase the town’s half-timbered ensemble in miniature from a shop. I did seem as if it did get its fair share of visitors, bucking my assumptions, and I will return myself to locate that pyramid.

present and perdurant

Though modern Greek has adopted a more straightforward term to convey happiness, ευτυχία—just suggesting good works—the classical term Eudæmonia is fortunately still around with all its mysterious and internecine intrigues.
The greatest minds are unable to come to a consensus on what constitutes happiness (or whether that’s even a question worthy of pursuit), but I have to wonder if even the first interlocutors really knew what was meant by Eudæmonia. Semantics are of course important considerations and flourishing or thriving might be a better word than our emotionally-laden happiness—the Romans rendered it as felicitas, who was also sometimes deified, but I don’t believe that any translation could capture the sense of being a role-model compounded with a guardian angel or fairy godmother figure like the original Greek. One achieves happiness, it’s argued, by emulating the example of that demon—dæmons just being spirits, familiars or lesser deities and not diabolical ones. The nature of those qualities and whether there’s some universal imperative are hopeless elusive, though that does not mean we shouldn’t bother. Furthermore, one’s level of bliss can be impacted retroactively should one’s present deportment cause him or her to earn a bad reputation after death.
Thinking about these rarefied ideas in general and particularly the last bit that invokes the directionality of time makes me turn back to the novel I am currently enjoying, Jo Walton’s absolutely amazing Just City—wherein the goddess Athena gathers the prescribed youth from all ages in order to experimentally create the utopia of Plato’s Republic overseen by those who’ve prayed for wisdom. I wonder if one’s eudæmon isn’t more of a conflicted personality, like shoulder angels. The cover of the Walton’s book, incidentally, focusses in on a particular section of this larger famous fresco by Raphael—showing students engaged on the steps of the Academy below. The different elements and possible perspectives in this work of art makes me think about another of Raphael’s masterpieces, the Sistine Madonna, who’s two puti reflecting upward has become a better known detail. H and I got to see it in its entirety in Dresden once. The aforementioned fresco, however, is out of public view in the papal apartments but I recalled the style and how the tableaux extended beyond the frame, preceding into the background, as the image that was on our ticket stubs from the Vatican Museum—the ephemera buried behind too many layers of our bulletin board to excavate, just now. I don’t believe I am any closer to the being able to articulate what happiness is but do feel I’ve gone on a little trip in time just now myself.