yule log

Via the fabulously odd Everlasting Blort comes a cavalcade of holiday—both for Christmas and New Year’s—customs beautifully illustrated by a jewellery designer called Vashi and Marie Muravski. I was surprised to see how many of the traditions pivoted on the fortunes for all the single ladies in the upcoming year.
And while many rituals and trappings of the season seemed quite touching and original—except perhaps the endorsement that a certain favoured purveyor of chicken-product is accorded as a Japanese institution and the contentious hidden gurken in the tree ceremony. Though still culturally reinforced, and it’s nicer to believe that some Civil War soldier received life-saving sustenance from his captures in pickle form on Christmas Eve or it’s an enshrined Old World custom—and these versions don’t seem in any way commensurable—rather than be disabused by being told that the story was a marketing manoeuvre for a retail outlet overstocked with pickle ornaments. What sparked the decision to make so many of such decorations in the first place still strikes me as a bit mysterious and perhaps there is a deeper Christmas miracle behind it still.

5x5

like genghis khan bathed in sherbet: the unlikely mantis shrimp is one of our favourite animals too

en voyage pathologique: a select handful of the throngs of tourists visiting the City of Light come down with the Paris Syndrome when it fails to live up to their expectations

jingle-jangle: mid-eighties Alpine White song was a strong forerunning carol in the assault on Christmas

axial precession: the December solstice falls on the twenty-second this year—plus nine bonus facts

life-savers: the marketing and minting of mints

c.h.u.d. oder down in the underground

Though I think my preoccupation with manhole covers contains a mostly untried yearn for urban exploration that I’ve rarely managed to summon up the courage (probably sensibly) to carry out, I would risk being caught trespassing to see what lies beneath Wiesbaden.
When I was a little kid, I can recall wading through flood canals in Oklahoma teeming with crayfish (crawdads—sort of giant sewer shrimps that one would readily barbecue) and once following a tunnel underneath the old officers’ club in Würzburg (formerly the local Nazi party headquarters) big enough to drive a tank through to it cemented up conclusion. H doubts the veracity of this latter Goonies’ adventure.
 A clever Redditor posted this portal—which I came across by accident—and to the turn of the century infrastructure that lies below. The city’s manhole covers (Kulideckeln) seem rather plain and haven’t really interested me like those that celebrate coats-of-arms and this entrance to the underworld, which I had crossed over without notice many, many times before, even less so. The protagonist, Harry Lime, of The Third Man descended a similarly constituted stairwell.
 Instantly, I knew right where it was—the vaunted brick arches reflecting other utilities of the age, like the landmark Gründerzeit water-tower in Biebrich, on the square adjacent to the Hauptbahnhof but I didn’t go to examine it right away—though it might be a time when others might be checking, as I discovered it’s secret while frantically searching for news on the evacuation of the train station, due to a terror warning that has not yet materialised. Out of an abundance of caution, the Christmas market was also cleared out. Presently, maybe it’s best to leave such spelunking to the professionals, the CHUDs and Morlocks.

403 - forbidden

Gizmodo reports how the supposedly sedate and apolitical group of infrastructure programmers called the Internet Engineering Steering Group have approved a new draft HTTP status code, along with the familiar bunch of bugs and failures that users might encounter—404 Not Found, designated as 451 (as in Ray Bradbury’s Fahrenheit 451) for pages and files suppressed due to pending legal demands—a takedown notice served or government censorship. Disclosing and logging what’s being blacklisted by whatever standards, be it the political views of dissidents or what’s considered blasphemous or people privileged enough to be forgot, does go quite a distance towards, if not reform itself, then at least towards assigning blame rather than hiding behind technical problems.