fjord explorer

PfRC will be taking a bit of a sabbatical for the next few days for continuing adventures on the road—this time to Norway and back. Please stay tuned to our little travel blog, in the meantime, for holiday dispatches and postcards from the great northern reaches.

no quarter or crowded house

Here’s a pessimistic thought: the same mob-mentality that fomented the same froth of bubbles that burst with the real estate market is likewise the authoritative voice on what constitutes a secure harbour, a safe-haven investment to berth one’s wealth and is kettling (purposefully or otherwise) to the same supposed shelters.

Not finding the proposition of holding fiat currency liable to fluctuation at interest rates that are not keeping pace with inflation and an uncertain stock market, people sought shelter in fundamental instruments that were lauded to retain the value that by all rights they should’ve: homes and real property. This trend, however, attached more takers than the market could honestly sustain and some trickery and greed kept up the enticement far too long. Though they have economic trifles of their own to address, bigger markets like the US and Germany are able for the time being to absorb the rush and act as a relatively secure harbor, but brokers are redirecting interest and channeling fear to a clutch of smaller economies to their acute displeasure. I don’t think a Switzerland, a Norway or an Iceland on the mends particularly like being dubbed a safe-bet as the influx of phantom money, held in trust but not benefitting the local marketplace, that they cannot accommodate and is proving ruinous for trade as it over-values their domestic currencies. Consequently, like with the housing sector, or anything else over-sold and amateurish, one seriously risks inflating so-called safe-havens and worse denigrating the commodity that is one’s home—maison, zu Hause, Huset, Húsið, and making it worth less through attribution.

don’t let it rest on the president’s desk

Tumblr artist Meg Jannott has a new project, aiming to cast each of the forty-four US com-manders-in-chief as their own clever and sleek corporate brand. I really like the look she has developed so far, and it’s interesting to peruse historical memory and the epithets that these office-holders earned—especially as election-season in the States has reached such a pitch when reputations are reduced to barbs and snap-shots. As the collection grows, it is definitely worth a gander, along with the opportunity to discover some of her other works. What other subjects, series of incumbents deserve to be likewise branded—English monarchs, the some 265 Peter-Plus-One Popes of the Catholic church? Those would be fun and involved undertakings.

petrichor or köppen climate declassification

I wonder if back through the ages when continuous forests covered the continents whether there was less rain fall, water sequestered in living trees, and kept out of circulation. I wonder if the loss the Urwälder, the ancient forests, due to the steady advance of human settlement accounts for more flow than—say, the melting of glaciers. In any case, Germany and much of central Europe is being battered by waves of rain, veiled by constant drizzle and cloud that even the strong gales can’t push away.

Thunderstorms, I remember, being a rare occurrence not so long ago but now much more commonplace and terribly tornados, which seem to have no place in European myth or folklore, have recently routed parts of Poland and Germany. In the UK too, forecasters portend an usual sogginess to threaten the festivities and the whole summer seems called due to rainy weather. Meanwhile, the Aquarian imbalance is becoming more pronounced, compared to the States that, in the lee of the rain, is experiencing a severe and sustained drought, which is threatening food supplies. That distinctive earthy smell, as opposed to the ozone cut by lightning bolts, is called petrichor, after the ectoplasm coursing in the veins of the immortals—ichor and stone, and is caused by essential oils produced by some types of vegetation, in response to dry spells, being washed into the soil and absorbed (producing the scent). After successive rainy days, all the oil rinsed away and there is no more fresh, relieved smell but the first notes are one of chemical communication from parent plants to their offspring, research has found, telling them to wait on sprouting, so long as there is the runoff, until they will be sufficiently watered. How is this subtle yet convincing message garbled, I wonder, by artificial irrigation and shifting climates and might such cues also ultimately affect the weather?