baltic avenue or gravity's rainbow

H and I have just returned from a camping--though not actually roughing it, holiday, spanning as H points out the entire length of the former German Democratic Republic, from Thuringia to the lighthouse at Kap Arkona at the northern tip of the Island of Rügen. 

Lazily making the transition from one, beautiful, clean and uncrowded beach to the next, we saw many remarkable things and took in a lot of history, including Werner von Braun's rocket facility at Peenemunde, which saw the first launch into outer space, ancient fishing villages, buildings bleached white and authentic and justified martitime decor, outstanding natural beauty, the chalky cliff face at the Jasmunder Bodden,

to the endless coastlines of Usedom, to our final campsite and headquarters at the Kraft durch Freude (KdF) seafront resort ruin of Prora, built to accomodate some twenty-thousand holiday-makers and some 4.5 kilometers long but never used used for that purpose.

It was absolutely outstanding to be nomadic and take away so many impressions, even more than I can list here, while sustaining the relaxation that should come with the standard--or non-standard two-weeks' vacation, and cannot wait for the next adventure.

 

im urlaub

H and I are touring the exquisite Baltic coast, and PfRC is on sabbatical too.  Please check out Our Little Travel blog for further adventures.

mucke

As H and I prepare for our next flying carpet adventure to the Baltic coast, I have been thinking a bit about the lowly mosquito, girded to be made a little mad.  Apparently, and I think later in the vacation season, the shores turn into a stew of exhausted ladybugs, but I don't know what the tiny wildlife has in store besides this spectacle.  Mosquitos have a brief and dreary existence, mostly in the form of nymphs in stagnant water.  In there adult stage, and here's a fun fact: only the females bite but only the males buzz, so I guess one need not worry about swatting when there is the microscopic bleating of an insect, only when there's not.  Further, the female mosquito only sucks blood not for herself but to nourish her eggs.  As adults, mosquitos do not even have proper digestive systems, only having emerged from the swamps to reproduce.  Considering malaria and all the other ills visited on humans by flying pests, it seems like a lot of unnecessary sound and fury.  And though the peddlers of insecticides would argue, I'm sure, it seems that the geraniums on our balcony make a pretty effective chemical barrier against unwanted carousing.

(UNCLASSIFIED)

With news of a successful bust of a Russian espionage ring by the FBI, using technology of all things but probably not James Bond Q gadgetry, still reverberating, I recall a very matter-of-fact expose on the corporate spy situation in Germany.  Though the actual particpants seem right now to be fairly pedestrian, the whole idea of pervasive spying, escalation of operatives sounds very romantic, to have a secret existence just beneath the surface, Mati Hari and swinging sixties and Spy versus Spy.  I wonder about the neighbors in the Little Odessa compound across the street and what trade secrets they could be trafficking out of Bad Karma.  The US bust probably was wanting for better timing since Obama had just shared his Bush-Putin moment with Dmitry Medvedev in a DC burger joint, and apparently the Russian spies employed such dastardly techniques as invisible ink and the US post office.  Sometimes, though this is an awful thing to let one's mind wander about during a classic movie, I imagine how short, brutish and uninteresting vintage mysteries would be cellular phones or *69.  Mystery solved, oh that was exhausting, what's next?  Maybe the Russians kept ahead of US intelligence for all these years because no one who stoop so low to cobble shredded documents back together or deem anything not electronic worthy of serious investigation.  I remember writing secret messages with lemon juice and then magically revealing it by holding the paper over a toaster.  Maybe spying will return to martinis and Aston-Martins after all.

renfield or minotard

I wonder if the Centaur will be the new Vampire.  Or Satyrs.  Or Wood Sprites?  It is very telling, I am sure but not of what, these great waves of facination with ghouls and the Undead.  In the past, it seemed as if these crazes had their crests, came and went--vampires were enduring and were never quite replaced by werewolves in the eighties, despite best efforts by Michael Jackson and Michael J Fox--though I can recall being Teen Wolf one Halloween.  But now, the occurance of vampires is rare or localized, even if the fear or the superstition never was--its as if we've turned into a worldwide population of medieval Slav peasants and malingerers.  Now zombies and their ilk are whole demographics, an underclass, prone to to stereotypes and this strange, new-fangled type of eugenics and confusing theology.  Years ago, I had a colleague who was a tightly bound bundle of peculiarities--she was harmless though, except for her rather bullish demeanor, which was not doting like Hera's, but more like the Minotaur and some obtuse and stubborn things that she did usually invited those secret comments.  I felt bad but I called her a Minotard once and that unfortuneately stuck with the poor girl.  I wonder how she is doing these days and whether she's a vicarious mythological beast or a creature of the night.

prismatic

There is a singular shrub in own garden, really the focal point of the tiny patch of yard that we share, whose leaves are a very dark green, almost black upon maturity.  I wonder what alternative routes to photosynthesis that the non-green leaved plants took.  By being another color do they absorb more or different parts of the spectrum, even into non-visible light?  I will need to read up on this.  And if not cultivated, would whole fantastic, other worldly crayon box regions of forest pop up.  Except in the darkest jungle, I imagine that the sun shines pretty uniformly everywhere, and even cactuses are camouflaged the same as oaks.  The strange thing about color, especially when one thinks of it terms of powering plant metabolism, is that that green leaf is really every color in the world but green, and human eyes only detect it as so because the particular shade of green is reflected back. 

three-part harmony

The bees have slowly been making a come-back.  In the meantime, I was getting worried about their bee radar and their bee fandango.  What if they were all lost somewhere: they were going to London to see the Queen but all ended up in Toronto for the G7+ Summit.  Perhaps they were disoriented by the drone of the vuvuzela.  Speaking of which--the G20, that is, Congress' timing for palavering over the Dodd/Frank bill is absolutely stellar--so the US can encourage the world to back financial regulations that even the drafters are not fully aware of and completely unsure of how they will work.  A lot I understand was lost to compromise, but still the intent is their to curtail risky investments by institutions, stop bailouts, less autonomy for the Federal Reserve and regular audits.  I don't pretend to grasp any of it myself but still felt pretty uneasy when banks were jubulient over its accord and they latitude was not under the government's thumb as much as they feared.

bric-a-brac-a firecracker

With all the talk of American soccer-moms, I wonder why the US does not hang on every play of the FIFA match.  What would it take to catch on there?  Why would the States outgrow this game, which is pretty watchable, and not all others, whose strategies and excitement are lamed by commercial breaks and reassessment of the rules?