fungus among us

Inspired by the diversity of toadstools and mushrooms we came across recently on our walk in the woods, I was drawn to a special exhibit at Wiesbaden’s museum (previously here and here and probably in more spots) on the nutritive, toxic and social history aspects of fungi.
From classification and identification to application and preservation, the displays were engrossing and enlightening as they ranged from the culinary, pharmaceutical and their oversized role as pigments for dyes and warrior cosmetics and I especially liked the artistry of the dioramas with a section dedicated to the workshop that created these diverse, liminal (neither animal nor vegetable)  mushroom mannequins.
Actual specimens, like creatures of the deep, wouldn’t survive public scrutiny and many could potential offer hazard and models were made and placed in their native environments to illustrate their role in the ecologies of various biomes. The exhibits on the usage of fungi were supplemented by local anecdotal enterprises, like a crafty woman who coloured wool in many shades with mushroom sourced pigments and another who was a successful farmer and we’re thinking of cultivating our own in our root cellar and have embarked on a course of study to those ends.
It is strange to think how these elaborate and embellished fungal fruiting bodies are just vehicles, ultimately, to spread spores and propagate the species but I suppose that the same is true for ourselves, however we might consider ourselves the refined heirs of a long line of succession. 

gaudeamus igitur

Though possibly too late for this year’s matriculating class of freshmen, we enjoyed coming across this McSweeney’s index of honest Latin mottoes for the over-rated alma mater—especially deserving for those schools whose elite status is only by dint of exorbitant tuition and not academic excellence. Per aspera ad malam occupationem (though adversity to a bad job) does look sufficiently pithy to be an actual maxim but the whole list is funny—sort of like the faux binary nomenclature of Road-Runner and Wile E Coyote. As much pomp and circumstance that is accorded to the title hymn (So Let Us Rejoice), the composition gently pokes fun at the sacred cows of university life and has been a beer-drinking song from at least the early eighteenth century on.

an offer you can’t refuse

The data breach at a clearing-house agency that adjudicates the creditworthiness of individuals and corporations world-wide represents an incredible half of the population of the United States and potentially three-quarters of the UK but is still only about a tenth of the information that the company has aggregated on some eight hundred million entities of all shapes and sizes.
Not only did the company delay disclosing the loss of consumers’ data until executives could divest their portfolios of what would surely be a hefty financial liability, it’s also seeking (as one does, I suppose) to capitalise off this crisis those scope cannot be fully appreciated by demanding that those whom they’ve wronged (and we’re all guessing here since despite counter-claims apparently one cannot get confirmation that one’s personal and financial records have been compromised or are secure until one submits to the terms and conditions of their credit monitoring service) enrol in their credit integrity programme. The initial period is free to the consumer but the following years come with a cost unless they disenrol—which might not even be an option going forward. Even if a sizable majority remembers that their trial period is about to expire and opts out and the fee is a nominal one, the potential for profits are still huge—recalling it is half the population of America that’s affected and probably untold others. Who operates like this? We have to look out for each other.  The even bigger snare in joining this phoney consumer protection plan is that in the fine-print, by accepting this handout, one agrees to army of arbiters’ negotiations on settlement and will not engage in any grievance against the company (I imagine that this is legal boilerplate nowadays for most transactions of any type) in the future—essentially signing away the ability to sue the company for damages outside of a framework that’s constructed to be more sympathetic to big business.

sunday drive: kallstadt

On a lark and taking advantage of the late summer sun, I drove towards Mannheim and visited the village of Kallstadt.
Though ancient and punctuated with moments reaching back into prehistoric times through the Roman Empire and the Frankish kings and the wine and tourist industry are quite robust, the settlement has garnered some unwelcome attention for being the ancestral home of Dear Leader.
Friedrich Trump, considered to have too delicate of a constitution to work in viticulture with his siblings, was appreciated to a barber at age fourteen but soon realised that his hometown didn’t have enough of a population in need of a scalping to earn a living. Approaching age of conscription for the Imperial German Army, Trump’s mother urged him to immigrate to America.

Arriving in Battery Park in 1885, Trump indicated on his immigration papers the fact he had no profession and lived with relatives in the Lower East Side.
After five years, Dear Leader’s grand- father left Man- hattan and followed the Gold Rush to San Francisco and the Pacific Northwest and made a fortune operating boarding houses and bordellos. When the boom began to go bust, Trump decided to return to Kallstadt in 1901 and married but eventually attracted the attention of Bavarian authorities that stripped Trump of his citizenship and right of abode due to having left the country to avoid military service and the family moved back to New York.
Kallstadt’s residents certainly don’t want their nice little town to become a pilgrimage destination for Dear Leader’s fanatics (there are much nicer houses than this last one and they’re more fond of their other son, father of condiment purveyor Henry John Heinz) and we’re certainly no enthusiasts, but maybe seeing the village and sampling the local wine might unlock and dispense some chthonic sympathetic magic and improve the prospects for future immigrants.

frontispiece

While I was not exactly expecting ancient aliens or magical rites and happy that scholarship has prevailed and that concern for women’s well-being was a matter taken seriously (though purportedly a bit gimmicky and patronising) in the 1400s, it was a little bit of a let-down to learn that the mystery of Voynich manuscript, released to the domain of citizen-science recently, has been deciphered.
The bizarrely illustrated treatise (especially when taken without context) rediscovered on the antiquarian circuit in 1912 had an unknown provenance with text that defied decoding captioning strange rituals and unrecognisable flowers and herbs. Created just on the cusps of the introduction of the printing-press in Europe and probably for a patron’s personal use and reference, the manuscript represented one of the last vanity publications of the times and was riddled with abbreviations, ligatures and shorthand that would be known to contemporary medical students but not necessarily to linguists and cryptographers. While we are sure other academics will want to weigh in and there is probably a useful tip or two contained in the volume, in hindsight given the Roman penchant to regard bathing as a panacea and the general paucity of writing on women’s health, it seems rather amazing that it went misunderstood for such a long time. At least we are left with the intentionally coy and evasive Codex Seraphinianus to ponder over the meaning of—though its author is just as unlikely to confirm or deny our interpretations.