commemorative edition

It is pretty effortless to order up apparel with any print or slogan that one sees fit nowadays, or even to print a three-dimensional rendering as a keepsake of anything that has transpired. In the past, people have said some pretty obtuse things, which I thought ought to be embroidered on a throw pillow or stitched on a sampler, if I had that talent.

Showing that figurines were not only sentimental subjects in eras gone by, I think that this excellent interview with an accomplished collector of some of the more sensational and gruesome pieces of Staffordshire pottery from Collectors' Weekly, show that people even back then wanted to have conversation pieces—even if it was not always material fit for polite conversation, the tabloid scandals of the day, maulings, murder, emancipation, and discriminatory marriage laws. It's amazing how these unusual figurines, especially the Ersatz hunting dogs, sort of totems for the unlanded gentry who were not allowed by law to keep real dogs, tell a story and capture an elements of the times that would otherwise be lost.

kevin bacon number or seven-league boots

Though it is a challenge to find a non-moribund version that complements the original science project—and it's sad to think how precariously curated some brilliant things were handled just a few scant years ago, aping at this strange sort of premature immortality only to be displaced and neglected, looking back from an age just a few years later with the threat that most mundane and uninteresting things will ever be forgot—a clever student basically downloaded the growing database of Wikipedia and developed a route to allow users to enter queries on two desperate and random topics through his server and find the distance (the Kevin Bacon number, the connections, steps it takes to bridge both items) between them in the Wikipedia universe. Six Degrees of Wikipedia, it was called and was introduced in 2007, although it appears there has been no one to maintain the programme. Surely still educational and serendipitous, one sees latter day incarnations as a game with a certain frame work, which I think makes the search more of a trivial pursuit. Research, triangulation and abstraction, however, cannot be replaced by any amount of brute force or compendious collection, nor a sense of anticipation or urgency that spoils the surprise.
I wonder how the project's inventor thinks about browsers and engines, without stint or bias, almost without fail direct questions that have no resale value toward their Wikipedia articles. Since the first speech broadcast to those within ear-shot, the speed of communications has been dangerously out-stripping the speed of comprehension. One writer for Der Spiegel's Eines Tages lost-and-found bureau, invites readers on a monthly adventure with a daisy-chain of nodes and relays from the universal encyclopedia to bring together two topics in seven, possibly specious but always interesting, steps. The latest installment (liediglich nur auf Deustch) by Danny Kringiel links the history and development of rail-transport in Japan with the current state of affairs and exposure with the spying apparatuses of the United States. I am sure such a thesis accepts tangents as well.

seven against thebes

Recently, the unsurpassable Twisted-Sifter featured as its picture of the day the ceiling fresco of St. Paulinus' Church in Trier, photographed with care by a professional who carefully stitched together several separate images to capture the entire canvas of the nave (far superior to my snap-shot from a visit a few years ago) by Rococo artist Christoph Thomas Scheffler. The church, a Basilica minor, itself was designed by the son of another superstar of the time, prolific architect Balthasar Neumann, and is dedicated to the local bishop who became a saint after his body was repatriated to this church after dying in exile, banished by the emperor a certain rivals for holding a view on the nature of the Trinity not en vogue at the time.

The amazing fresco depicts the martyrdom of the Theban Legion, a Roman garrison in Egypt,who were converted and condemned en masse under the leadership of St. Moritz, patron of many places in Germany and beyond—other members are venerated as well, including San Fedele (Saint Felix) who ended up in Como, when dispatched to the French-Swiss border to quell an (im)pious uprising and refused to do so.

fiat geld or straw into gold

In response to the growing interest and esteem of the Bitcoin, Der Spiegel reports, the German

Finance Ministry has gone so far as describing the “private-money,” while not on equal footing with legal-tender, as a unit of account—a measure of market value, which economists hold as one of the three essential mechanisms of exchange along with a being surrogate for the commerce of goods and services and a store of value. It seems like a small concession and possibly bestowed ahead of move for regulation and taxation, but I think that the declaration, though not the first instance of government scrutiny of this virtual currency, also acknowledges that the credence that any form of money enjoys is based solely on the faith of believers and is subject to the ebb and flow of crazes (although there is a powerful contingency interested in maintaining confidence), just like passing fads and fashions, more quickly displaced, and their artefacts.