zarathustra's roundelay

Via Nag on the Lake's other blog, there is some interesting background on writer Friedrich Nietzsche's typewriter of choice—at least for a time—the very steam-punk and boldly designed Malling-Hansen Writing Ball. The philosopher ordered this model for portability and quietness—sort of a tablet computer for the late Victorian Age, but lack of manuscripts finished on the Writing Ball, which resembles a brain-scanner with its spherical keyboard suspended over a curved parchment, suggest that Nietzsche had difficulty mastering the interface, which is a contemporary problem too. Be sure to check out Nag on the Lake for a wealth of daily curiosities.

yoknaparawpha county-line

There is an interesting project called Placing Literature that aims to map out the correspondence between real and fictional places. The work in progress is a bit top-heavy with contemporary and anglophone works (who wouldn't mark Dresden with Slaughter House Five or Nordhausen with Gravity's Rainbow, unless they have yet to discover it?), but invites anyone's push-pins. What real-make-believe settings would you add? I wonder how a real-world map might figure in a universe, some cannon of works that only reference humanity and human-conventions sparingly.

cognation or parts-of-speech

A discussion with a linguist on the radio about the tendency not just for minority and endangered languages and dialects not only to cannibalise terminology from overpowering and domineering tongues with a colonial-metropolitan status, incorporating more and more elements of English (the lingua franca), but also of the cannibalism of so-called killer languages.

Beyond encroachment and influence and the convergence and separate goings of languages, which is something evolving while grammar and purity play an assertive game of catch-up, the greater threat to idioms and identity (since the conduits of thought are not always easy work for an interpreter or translator and surely differently formed according to one's native speech) was encapsulated by an older term called glottophagie (a French professor Jean-Louis Calvert coined the word in 1974 after anthropophagy, human cannibalism) that describes the death of a language through the loss of allegiance and functional literacy. Pressure in whatever form to abandon part of one's heritage does not, I think, serve to enhance communication or understanding.

sehtest or the bundeswehr is everywhere

Walking through my neighbourhood, I found a quite curious piece of detritus in the street. This white flier with a mysterious black square bears the equally inscrutable but unusually polite proclamation (in English und auf Deutsch) this a training (ranging) leaflet of the Bundeswehr—from a battalion for operational information stationed quite a distance from here. The translation reminds the finder of this piece of paper out of consideration for the environment to please litter (but surely they meant to please don't) and in case of questions, to please contact the competent unit—which begs more questions than clarification of what one is now holding.
I wonder about the glossy black square—does it contain an invisible message, like a camouflaged QR-code or something to calibrate drones or satellites? Or is a paper-bomb, really mean to check “our distance abilities” projected like a paper airplane or dropped by a very obliging and careful pigeon? What it just something tossed accidentally along the way to somewhere else? Does the German army hope that people ask questions or return it?  It's a little strange but nice that there is some transparency and explanation, but I suspect it's not enough to prevent imaginative speculation.