siss boom bah!

Around here, people are really keen on heralding the new year with explosive volleys of private fireworks displays, and H and I are looking forward to doing the same at midnight. It is a wild and lawless moment in the year, but it does not happen completely in a regulatory vacuum as the noisy and colourful celebrations might suggest. Like the officious vestments of the Carnival Kings and Queens, there is an agency that oversees the safe and orderly execution of these neighbourhood rallies, the Bundesanstalt für Materialforschung und prüfung (kurz BAM). Despite the wide and potent variety of Silvester fireworks available at any grocery store, there is still a market for smuggling in even bigger and more powerful (and unsafe) explosives from eastern Europe. The BAM, under its new safety campaign "Kein Boom! ohne BAM!" (No boom without BAM!), has intercepted some particularly dangerous sounding cargo: rockets that shoot up to forty metres in the sky with a battery to power the second stage, which can launch the fireworks another forty metres.

Aside from the risk it could pose at such heights to aircraft, apparently the second-stage ignition is unreliable and as likely to fire off the rocket another forty metres horizontally or straight back into the ground. Though such revelry is tolerated only at New Year’s, maybe the practice ought to be expanded, as a way to keep the middle-distance of the sky free of the coming aerial drone race, when corporations and law-enforcement, encouraged by drone-manufacturers, get in on the patrolling, and there are traffic-control drones, meter-maid drones, news reporter drones, ambulance-chasing drones, etc. I hope such patrols don’t come with the new year,  but maybe the booms, bangs and bams can chase away those bad portents too. In the meantime, we’ll celebrate and have some fun. Happy New Year! PfRC wünscht allen ein besonders frohes neues Jahr und guten Rutsch!

like disco lemonade

This is just a personal reflection, but I thought it was significant, driving home and listening to the radio, that I did not include any accom-plishments in the arts in the PfRC year-end revue. I wanted to remember the talents that have passed on, artists, innovators and visionaries whose departure has left the world poorer--like Amy Winehouse, Steve Jobs, Loriot, Andy Rooney, Elizabeth Taylor and Václav Havel and dozens of others, separately and I did see a bunch of enjoyable movies this past year and heard some contemporary music that was good, funny and clever--although, more often than not, it was the classics, as with the music in the car on the way home from work, a solid block of cult hits from the 80s and 90s between Christmas and New Year’s with some refreshingly choice and nostalgic songs--I had not heard Ryan Paris’ bouncy Dolce Vita in years and years or even Marcy Playground from when I was in college (and I know that reference dates me, as it does for those whom lived through more exciting times). I would not condemn everything modern as forgettable and unoriginal, as some do, but it was strange that nothing registered. It is just maybe indicative of the age that talent is retiring and that many new works are inspired by and derivative of the past, the memorable, resounding and catchy mostly created and polished by a thousand anonymous talents with know-how, heart or a trust.

year end fall-in or out with the old

It's hard to believe that Aught-Twelve is nearly upon us. 2011 was a wild ride globally and 2012 surely is successor to the these upheavals and redefined envelopes of comfort, with a few cushions for the more jarring happenstances, and will undoubtedly have surprising and serendipitous developments of its own.
The archivists and historians are tasked with giving a thoughtful and complete recollection of the year’s file, and here are a few events (by no means complete or exhaustive) that I thought were particularly noteworthy, from the vantage point of the calendar:

January – The revolutionary movement that would become known as the "Arab Spring" began in earnest with escalating civil unrest in Tunisia that lead to the abdication of the country’s long-time ruler. The movement grew and more tyrants were toppled—including Egypt and Libya, like the cavalcade of caricatures from Phil Collins' Land of Confusion music-video, making deposits, regional and elsewhere nervous—on either extreme, either charitable or more prone to crack-down on insurrection, and squarely saddling the freedom fighters with the responsibilities of democratic governance.

February – Suriname becomes the first country to formally recognize the state of Palestine, which is later in the year admitted as a member of UNESCO, causing the US to withhold its dues to the UN fund in protest. The Wikileaks diplomatic cables dump alleged accomplice, Bradley Manning, was found to have been held in solitary confinement for over seven months at the time, without being charged or provided with the opportunity to seek counsel--a development that was roundly criticized. IBM’s artificial intelligence Watson competed on the American quiz show Jeopardy! against some of the game’s top human contestants.

March – Japan's north east is decimated by a strong tsunami, driven by an equally strong and devastating earthquake. Damage and disruptions subsequently led to partial melt-downs of coastal nuclear reactor units. Sympathy and hysteria spread all over the world, and fears of radioactive poisoning and for the security of power-plants in general cause many people to reevaluate their nuclear programmes. Germany, as a result, brought many reactors off-line immediately and will execute a complete moratorium within the next two decades.

April – A monstrous storm system battered extensive parts of the US south and mid-west—all as part of the year that seemingly broke the weather, extensive flooding follows. The American military is deployed to the border with Mexico, partially in response to increased incidents of gang violence seeping into the US. NATO forces aid Libyan rebels in overthrowing Qaddhafi, cornering him and supporters to a few strongholds.

May – A team of US Special Forces locate and kill Osama bin Laden in a compound in Pakistan. The US dollar continues to lose value against global currencies as the repercussions of the burst housing market are still being realized. The EU, amid ongoing financial coming-clean and protests against austerity measures from Spain, Greece and Italy, approved a prophylactic bailout loan for Portugal, to staunch the panic. Drought conditions not seen in two decades cause widespread famine throughout Africa.  Queen Elizabeth II makes the first official visit of the monarchy to the Republic of Ireland since independence was declared. The latest in a series of predicted raptures did not occur.

June – Tension grows stemming from street protests in the UK, Spain and Greece over proposed economic austerity measures, including cuts in social services and raising the retirement age, meant to balance national budgets. Hundreds of extrasolar planets are being discovered, piquing the imagination and broadening scientific horizons. Unemployment and stagnant business growth continue to haunt the United States, as insults are swapped as aspirants are preparing for the presidential election session.

July – NASA and the US government retire the Space Shuttle programme, hoping that, laissez faire, private industry will close the science chasm that has left Russia and ESA scrambling to service. Norway was visited by a horrific domestic terrorist attack. There were bouts of courage and bravery in this tragedy, which was not perpetrated by the usual suspects, religious radicals that fit the profile of our stereotypes, but rather by a lone individual trying to punctuate his conservative and xenophobic ideas. Europe’s lurching towards more socially conservative platforms became a much discussed topic, in response to the earlier best-seller status of a tract assaulting integration by Thilo Sarrazin, the pronouncement by Angela Merkel herself that "multi-culti" has failed, and the killing spree by a band of neo-nazis that went under the radar and all but unnoticed for months among other emerging trends.

October – The UN announced that the world’s population has just surpassed seven billion people. Credit rating agencies continue their reign of terror, nudging markets this way and that with their verdicts on credit-worthiness. Italian Wikipedia shuts down in response to proposed changes in national copyright and fair-use laws that would severely curtail how the site could operate—prescient of a similar maneuver later in the US to denude the internet. The UK is gently sidling away from EU participation over fear-mongering of German overlordship, and this creep will express itself later with more heated exchanges and a repairing towards nationalism and protectionism.

November – Greece and Italy get new leadership over failed stewardship of their economies. Before resigning, Silvio Berlusconi releases a record album of himself crooning love songs. Thousands of students descend on London, angered over tuition hikes. Other Britons shudder over the first steps in privatization of public health care schemes. Police in New York forcibly clear Occupy Wall Street protesters after months of rallies, but the movement has spread to urban-centres world wide. Doctors and engineers develop a 3-D bone scaffold printer to help patients with broken bones in emergency situations.

December – After more than eight years of conflict, spilt blood and squandered treasure to no clear end, America quietly withdrew its last remaining troops (though their presence will be subsumed by a huge, enduring diplomatic corps and army of rent-a-cops) from Iraq, without fanfare or too much arrogance but also without lessons learnt. Under the toxic advisement of figures like Curveball, dissidents to tell the US government what it wanted to hear and Hussein exaggerating his complement of arms to appear tough in a tough neighbourhood, and general designs for empire, the coalition splintered and American spent its borrowed capital, and now is attempting to stare down the Iranians in the same way. Given all the past manipulation that the regimes of Iran have undergone at the hands of American and British interference and that there is no conclusive evidence that the country is on a war-footing, possibly just talk and posteuring, it seems like maybe 2012 will also have some re-runs.

orchestra baobab

We have a venerable old Affenbrot-baumchen (Monkey Bread Tree, Baobab or Adansonia) growing against the window pane for support. Without a prop, the young clones grow sort of crooked and ratty, like another one of my ugly plants, also an old Baobab, gnarled and twisted like a genie forced back into the bottle, growing slowly inside a honey jar.

Having found it abandoned in a vacated office, I am not sure how old the less-manicured plant is--the bits of leaves, however, that fall off of that one when they become too unbalanced have produced some mighty sprouts that have become plants in their own right. The tree in the window, we noticed, is beginning to blossom, an occurrence that's never happened with this one before and does not, apparently, happen until the plant is at least eight to ten years old. In India and Madagascar, there are groves of the trees that are over five-thousand years old. Next comes bread-fruit (Gongalis) but I am not sure just when that crop comes.

There are a lot of traditional uses for the plant's seeds and produce, but the fruit apparently has an acquired taste and even local lore has it that the gods were so revolted by the taste that they cursed the tree to grow topsy-turvy, crooked and ratty.

six geese a-laying

Der Speigel (auf Deutsch) is reporting how the island nation of Samoa is realigning its time-zones, straddling the international date-line, to no longer be the land where the sun sets last, but to be among those where it rises first, in order to strengthen economic ties with relatively nearby China, Australia and New Zealand. The meridians of the high Pacific are a bit of a jig-saw anyway, cutting this way or that to keep island groups synchronized and not bulldozed again by European geographical standards. The Samoan government is executing a divisive transition, not slowly winding the clocks back or introducing the operating hours by phases, but rather they are just striking a day from the calendar: for no one on the islands--businesses, birthday boys and girls, St Felix, sixth day of Christmas—will on 30 December 2011 occur. Thursday will slide into Saturday, the last day of the year. No one is wrestling the down sun but I am sure there are those in Samoa who are not sure about the idea of leaving off a day, the archivists, the calendar makers, those wont to worship and keep the sabbath on a certain day of the week, and the New Year’s revelers who are, I guess, now planning for different kinds of celebrations.

oh tidings of comfort and joy

Seasons greetings to all, with health and happiness for the coming year, and many thanks for visiting. I was thinking the other day that although we have a lot of Christmas decorations, we don’t have a crèche. A few days ago, Neatorama featured a clever collection of Nativity scenes comprised of action figures.

I thought I could pull off a similar diorama, with Bib Fortuna and the Bounty Hunters 4-LOM and Zuckuss representing the Three Wise Men, the Rancor Keeper and a Sand Person the shepherds of ewoks and droids. We have more traditional figures and could have managed something more festive, of course--with Marian statues, saints, angels and über-dimensional sheeps and goats, but nothing that might make a whole joyful gathering with matching proportions. Have a holly, jolly Christmas. Frohe Weihnachten!

cool yule or psychopomp

Just in time for the passing of Yule, the Winter Solstice, a package arrived from my parents in the States with a lot of Christmas goodies we’ll be unwrapping in a few days besides, with this resplendent and very Bavarian woven table runner (Tischläufer), which I think is a modern depiction of the mythological motif of the Wilde Jagd (the Wild Hunt), associated with Yuletide and the superimposition of Christmas traditions.

Like Ghost Riders in the Sky, the Wild Hunt is a tapestry of ethereal huntsmen under the leadership of Nordic gods or sometimes Krampus (Santa's bizarro-world opposite who punishes the naughty) and was foreboding of different things: a psychopomp is such a parade of spirit guides, like astral reindeer.

In any case, the passing of Yule, where ever we might try to find meaning, symbolism or reconstruct traditions, means that the nights retreat a little bit and the sunset and the dawn creeps in earlier and earlier each day.  We'll certainly have a place to display this gift on the sideboard.

taxiway

The American airline industry and various echelons of the US government are complaining bitterly about new European Union emission levies to go into effect with the coming of the new year. The EU efforts to single-handedly maintain the spirit of the Kyoto Accords to reduce negative environmental impact by imposing a carbon-tax on all flights taking off and landing in European airports are being decried as Europe slouching towards more of an isolationist policy, not integrating (I suppose) with the flagrant push for commerce and tourism at any and all costs with the rest of the world. Such vocal complaints and taunts are recent developments, however, and may be reflecting the pressure and shame that is being directed towards the EU for the way it is handling its economic affairs, as these arrangements have been known (and opposed) for over three years. The EU, upheld by Curia in Luxembourg and other legal observers, won’t fold on this project, despite the resistance of others. The US would find itself exempt from any surcharge, which surely would be passed along to the flying public in any case, if they had their own scheme and regulations in place to reckon and curtail pollution.