salient factor

A little while ago, we had the chance to visit the spa town with ancient roots known as Bad Salzungen on the Werra river and not far from Wartburg. The settlement, which was founded originally over two millennia hence by Celtic tribes grew around a salty marsh, which contained the prized substance in high enough concentrations to yield commercial amounts through simple evaporation in shallow pools, salterns and saltpans, which at the time of its discover were mostly relegated to far off lands, like the coastal estuaries of Bordeaux or the northern reaches of Germany, die Salzmannstraße was a trade route from here to Erfurt and Halle (named not for a hall but rather the Latin term for salt) and on a wider scale connected Frankfurt am Main with Leipzig and beyond.
Throughout medieval times, this proved a huge boon to local royalty and led to the building of many structures and offices (also halophiles) who sought to tax the exchange, but there was not quite a bust once salt became a less valuable commodity and more of a condiment to be given away freely. In the modern era, the place quickly reinvented itself as a wellness destination with a lavish resort and galleries of graduation lanes (degrees of salinity in the air, Gradierwerke, where one can stroll and breath it in) whose inland theatres look like they're based on locales on the sea.

marathon or hurtigurti

Kottke has a brilliant article, including links to the video broadcasts in their unedited entirety, of the Norwegian revival of the phenomena of slow-television—like the advent of the station-managers to broadcast a burning Yule Log over the holidays so staff did not need to work on Christmas or interstitial filler of city scenes accompanying temperatures and weather forecasts from around the world.
Norwegian productions have included a hearty fire in the hearth of course, hours of salmon swimming upstream, and most famously an epic and majestic journey, lasting some five and a half days in full, of a cruise through the fjords. The live broadcast was wildly popular and was not only viewed at least for some length by more than half the population of Norway, but many residents also went out to greet and even follow the ship as it passed to be part of the show. What do you think it means that such continuous shots receive such high ratings? What patient activity, from start to finish, would you recommend for the slow-tv treatment?

aerial archaeology

The infinitely engrossing Colossal shares an amazing gallery of photographs that require a trained eye to appreciate, and not just the vantage and altitude of a Cessna, which the artist Klaus Leidorf pilots over diverse landscapes of Germany. Looking down, and not just as an eye in the sky, one begins to appreciate how humans have fashioned and transformed the environment, often without realising how large these tracts are, for their use. Though the smallest details and sharp focus ought to be receding, its this macroscopic attention are in the foreground and really seem to lend perspective and other-worldliness to the pictures.

tunnel vision

Journalist and photographer from Bremen Johannes Ginter interlaced the feed of six tiny video cameras, carefully mounted at opposing angles to create this footage of what seems to be a man peddling about on a tiny planet. Cobbling together this perspective is a pretty brilliant and disorientating way to project space-time and have the whole warped into the footprint of a roving spotlight.

francophone

The French tend to be perceived as lingual purists and practise a healthy disdain for outside influences that threaten to dilute their language and heritage into some sort of pidgin, especially when there are already perfectly good native words, without the need for borrowing from other sources.
The guardians of the lingua franca, however, are entertaining submissions for candidates to be incorporated into the lexicon. The Local's French edition features some of these entries, which are unquestionably authentic in character and could already pass for common-parlance: some of the best include equivader—a French approximation of the concept of procrastination (for which there is no exactly equivalent), combining the words for chatting and avoidance to describe those easy distractions, se mémériser (from the term mémé for grandmother) means to dress like a granny, and oubliophobie to describe that sinking feeling of loss or dread that we have forgotten something when that experience comes too often as to seem like a malady.

zapadnik

Artist and social-commentator Nastya Nudnik from Kyiv presents an very circumspect gallery in her collection entitled “Emoji Nation,” which illustrates our relationship with technology, modus of communication and basically our peripheral-lifestyle by laying such transparencies (memes) over classical, devotional works of art. It's odd and interesting to see what an evocative penchant such juxtapositions can ring and how a group of singular conventions can creep into all culture at such a galloping pace.