heurism or green fairy/blue tooth

9 November marks Inventors' Day (Tag der Erfinder) in the German Sprachraum. Perhaps coincidentally--perhaps not, the local's Swiss edition featured an article earlier in the week of Swiss inventions, which in addition to milk chocolate, the Helvetica font, and the Swiss army knife, include Velcro, LSD and absinthe. The occasion, purposed to encourage people to pursue their own ideas and remind people about the forgotten and unsung innovators, is observed on 9 November because of the birthday of Austrian actress and Erfinderin Hedy Lamarr, in recognition of her 1942 discovery of frequency hopping spread spectrum technique that eventually enabled the development of cellular telephony and Bluetooth technologies.

matchbox or go-go-gadget brella

Though it's not at all tempting, given the unpleasant and cramped interior and strange odours, to violate these rules and host a roller derby, there is an unloving notice on the outside wall of the lobby of our post-office stating that food and drink and roller blades are prohibited in that facility. I wonder if people still go skating--sometimes one sees older people with Nordic walking sticks (ski poles) zipping, slaloming along the trails but not so often, and one hardly ever encounters young people biking or skating outside the compulsion of a family outing. It's a little sad--the sign might as well say no hula-hooping and no pogo-balls as well--I think we've not only been kept too safe, with the occasional foray into extreme double-dutch or see-saw record-breaking attempt, coordinated via flash-mobs, but also gotten use to having nothing out of arm's reach and fully-integrated.  I ought to organize an impromptu kazoo evening of chamber music in the mailroom lobby and pogo-stick ballet.

a series of tubes

The presidents of Russia and of Germany, who are both overshadowed by their Premier and Chancellor respectively, symbolically opened the valve on the Nord Stream pipeline close to the community of Lubmin in Mecklenburg-Vorpommern near the Inlet of Griefswald. This installation will bring natural gas from the fields of Siberia directly to German and Western Europe.

Of course no one would tolerate an intrusive bulldozing through the region, but environ-mentalists are concerned that this addition along with other power-houses in the area could upset the delicate ecology of the surrounding Baltic Sea. Lubmin, I see, formerly constituted part of the monastic holdings of Cloister Eldena, whose ruins we visited last summer on our rambling adventures up and down the Ostsee coast. The beauty and history of this region is protected with more vehement sensibilities than those that survey the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge (in Alaska, shortened to “anwar”) or the tar-sands of Canada, but recipients of this energy should not be complacent about the business at the far end of this pipeline, nor ignorant of the need for more and more power that is driving this arrangement. It is a strategic and clean partnership by all appearances that has been well engineered and executed, but both sides should still be mindful of the limits of these resources and the environment’s threshold of forgiveness and look towards new energy and technologies.

little golden book or mihi causas memora

Virgil’s epic the Aeneid, the founding story of the Roman Empire that began with a lieutenant’s escape from burning Troy, carrying his infant son, Ascanius, in his arms and his elderly father, Anchises on his back, as well as a bundle of household gods, wandering journey from Phrygia to Italy, battles with the Latins and eventual status as forbearer of the Roman people, presents a rich allegory, with some powerful, contemporary points of correspondence (for what it’s worth, as the latest tragedies are not, in the grander scheme of adventure and mythological, really all that legendary) with the current Greco-Roman marketplace.

It is remarkable how cultural tenants migrate and are adopted and re-imagined, like gods and heroes both transplanted and devised. The Church and State of the Romans is not just derivative of the culture and learning that the Greeks, nor it is a fair characterization that a Roman exodus realized the more perfect expression of Greek accomplishment. Art, artifice and traditions transmitted certainly do evolve and have become a frenzy of norms and nomos, but are more than just spillage, contagion and viral ideas. Money and trade tend to simplify and compartmentalize matters that have grown beyond all public bounds, yet are smaller and more personable as ever they were. Italy’s burgeoning crisis of confidence is not some impossible Hydra but rather nothing more than a relatively strong (third largest in Europe, compared to Greece, which has the industrial output of the German state of Hessen) economy called stagnant because growth (exports, consumer demand, investment sleight-of-hand) has failed to keep pace with borrowing’s legacy of interest payments. Endless regulation and stimulus (coaxing, invention—if honest) cannot do much for contentedness and thrift. That chimera, a new mythological foe, is something that a lot people the world are coming to face but it is no burden borne over the Aegean.