alles wurst

There have been cults of devotion to the figure of Saint Uncumber (Saint Wilgefortis) for centuries—especially in Bavaria and Austria, but also all over Europe—as the champion and patron saint of women battered, abused and otherwise marginalized by either their husbands or society, but The Local's local edition formulates a clever allusion, that connects the bearded lady to Austria's new Eurovision Song Contest winner.
Tradition holds that the maiden was promised to a pagan king—however Wilgefortis would not deny her Christianity. Her betrothed and her father that hoped to gain prestige through this union would have none of this nonsense. Desperate, Wilgefortis prayed to the Virgin Mary to be unencumbered from such an awful arrangement and to be made so repulsive (here is where the compliment becomes a little backhanded) that the pagan king would no longer want her. Intercession came over night in the form of a full beard. The pagan king was disgusted but so was her father, humiliated and wrathful, and he had her crucified for her disobedience. This harsh punishment, however, lead to her veneration and establishment as a symbol for those in abusive relationships or bumping up against societal ceilings.

italy week: renaissance men

Here are some more images and impression from what we did for our summer vacation (the first installment): though I know intellectually that there is little to no elbow room in the lands of Italy when it comes to historic and cultural significance and the locations of important events and the famous and infamous sons and daughters of the towns and villages have to hail from somewhere, I was pleased and surprised to come to the village of Vinci, a little settlement amongst the groves of ancient silver-leaved olive trees and craggy vineyards where Chianti is produced.
It was here that one of the world's most influential individuals, regarded with the due awe of super-genius, was born in 1452 and baptized (though out of wedlock, his sire was no dead-beat dad) as Leonardo da Vinci. We toured the church and later the birth house (Casa Natale) and the town was regaled with icons of da Vinci's creativity and endless curiosity.
Another leg of our adventures brought us to a nearby village where literary figure Giovanni Boccaccio retired (and also was possibly born) after finishing his seminal work, the Decameron—a story within a story, like 1001 Arabian Nights or the Canterbury Tales, a century earlier in 1353 called Certaldo Alto. The Decameron is a collection of a hundred fables exchanged by ten companions who fled plague-ridden Florence during the height of the Black Death. In this fictional, though semi-autobiographical work, the refugees, waiting for the sickness to pass were holed up in an abandoned villa on the outskirts of the city.
After we settled in at our final campsite in Tuscany, until next time, we discovered that the village of Fiesole, with a breath-taking view of the metropolis of Florence sprawling below, was Boccaccio's setting. A compact but complete conurbation in itself, people have been escaping the city for the hills for centuries—including Frank Lloyd-Wright, Gertrude Stein and Alice B. Toklas and other expatriates, Fiesole enjoyed city-rights and even was a rival to Florence below.
Not having known beforehand, we could speculate on which of the many fine and ancient villas that inspired the author. There was an open field just up the hill from the camp-grounds, known for its unique veins of marble with a bluish-grey hue, and another luminous individual in the person of Leonardo himself visited that field and experimented with his flying machine. Da Vinci, though never discouraged, apparently made wider forays into all disciplines, and though errors were recorded as well as something visionary—he did not bother disclosing his studies that he felt did not further the arts or sciences. I wonder what other connections we stumbled over without even noticing.

ciào bella

PfRC will be taking an extended sabbatical soon for adventures in Ligûria and Toscana.

Here is a composite view of the villages of Cinque Terre, clinging to the shores of the Mediterranean. Did you know that Hemingway’s A Farewell to Arms is considered to have introduced the word ciao to English and subsequently to other language where it was not already common-parlance? The greeting can mean both hello and goodbye—like aloha or saalam or shalom or namaste—and has roots in the Venetian saying “I am your slave,” like the German greeting Servus—I am at your service. There are apparently several other meanings and innuendo that the word can convey and perhaps we will be educated. Please switch the station to our little travel blog for on-going adventures.  Arrivederci!

the privacy act, as amended

To the patient on the other side of the counter, it must look like those at the reception desk are engaging in a quick round of Space Invaders rather than scheduling a follow-up appointment as these systems require a lot of keyboard interaction—scrolling through that eventually comes really rapidly with video-game like reflexes.  Though there is no universal operating system as yet (HIPAA, the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act, legislation after all is not really about protecting privacy or securing medical records but about sharing that information among hospitals and physicians), there is one dominant player that’s delivered under government contract some really robust albeit technically ancient legacy software—the Space Invaders type.

Given the mandate that all practitioners in the US are required to keep electronically accessible medical records (the insurers pushed for this as well) and that the government will again claim imminent domain on individuals’ entire medical history—documented by competent authorities and from non-traditional sources, like social networks, as well—in order to better execute its mission of bio-surveillance, I am sure that the contractor formerly known as the Science Applications International Corporation (SAIC) will see a boon and become the industry standard.  Public health and being able to track the spread of sickness (both for oneself and for the population at large) in time to do something about it is one thing and it would be prudent and in any one’s better interest to do.  I suspect, however, that maybe benignly the government will keep tabs on everyone to ensure that they’re getting regular check-ups and remain healthy, balanced and productive members of society—or rather, nefariously, at the behest of big pharmaceutical companies, peddling their snake-oil and leech-craft for them and ensuring that employers can get more and more from the proletariat.

SAIC is already the perfect candidate to interlace all of this data, having been commissioned in the past to carry out work for the National Security Agency, including technical support for ThinThread and its successor Trailblazer Project that wire-tapped the World Wide Web.  More bizarrely, SAIC was also part of a consortium of research laboratories conducting trials for the Army’s Defense Intelligence Agency’s Stargate Project to study psychic abilities and the viability of paranormal talents for espionage.   The program supposedly was discontinued in the mid-nineties, but who can say, as it was standard protocol for the proctors never to disclose to their telepathic and clairvoyant subjects whether they were right or wrong, as it might influence native aptitudes.  Regardless of the disposition of this data and just because America has already compromised the security and private lives of every human on Earth with its prying, it does not mean that we ought to become complacent about maintaining integrity for our confidences and health and surrender.  Withholding of intent—whether by or for faith-healers, is not good bedside manner and about as off-putting as having the receptionist banging on a keyboard—repeatedly and randomly without explanation.

arbitagé or rub-a-dub

It could be that the US Central Bank never really introduced a tapering-scheme, meant to ween the economy off of its massive subsidy programme and has actually increased its printing of script, each bill redeemable for less and less.
Perhaps those whom try to project rosy futures to keep the whole rigged system on life-support realised that the American dollar was wholly untenable otherwise when they essentially—it seems—laundered some one hundred forty billion in bonds (debt—ungood) to hide their addiction to quantitative-easing (drawing money out of thin air—double-plus-ungood) to the country of Belgium. Belgium cannot live beyond its means as the European Central Bank and the European Union simply does not allow members to spin straw into gold. Whether such maneuvers actually took place are subject to question but it does seem quite plausible if not an eventuality, but certainly that college-try for tapering ought to be the subject of investigation, like with previous manipulation of the London Inter-Bank Offered Rate (LIBOR) exchanges.