reklame oder reclamation

Just scant days after the French government legislated an expiry date for consumer electronics in order to combat designed obsolescence, when there’s no longer factory-support, Germany is attempting to take the measure a step further (DE/EN) by directing retail outlets to accept shoppers’ trade-ins—not for cash but as a more important civic-duty.
Larger electronic stores are required to accept customers’ smaller items, like old toasters, electric-toothbrushes and cell phones, in order to dispose of them properly and ensure valuable components are harvested and recycled—plus their bigger items like dishwashers and refrigerators, when buying a new one. This mandate extends to on-line shops as well. It’s perhaps easier to schlep one’s outmoded gadgets on the next shopping-outing rather than venture out to the special trash sort yard or feel guilty about stuffing it into the regular trash or kipping it off on the roadside, and though possibly a logistics horror for the sellers, to harness all the gold in circulation in everyone’s last phone and computer is a pretty nice prospect all around. Maybe, between the two laws, people will consume less just to toss away as the industry creates more items to endure and that can be upgraded rather than turned in. What do you think? Will this scheme be good for the environment as well as for business? I can imagine salvage really taking off.

folk-etymologies or idiom, idem, idem

Via the resplendent rodeo of interesting things the Browser, here is a really fascinating list of English word pairs that are false cognates, seemingly related or organic extensions of the meaning, but are far from it, by Arika Okrent, who often writes for Mental Floss.
All of the entries are pretty surprising, and among my favourites was how shame-faced began as shamefast (like steadfast) as in being shamed into staying in one’s place and how something as innocuous, mildly irritating and apparently straightforward like the term hang-nail, obviously referring to the bits of skin dangling off one’s cuticle, actually has a more complicated etymology, reaching back to the Germanic root ang (as in anger) for something vexing and nightmarish. Though probably going out of my element, however, I do have to take exception with one anecdote: while indeed the phrase has nothing to do with Scotland or the Scots, I believe that to get off scot-free refers to medieval times tax-avoidance, when a subject managed to withhold some otherwise taxable asset (sceot) from his liege.

five-by-five

another brick in the wand: a German teen cover version of the Pink Floyd classic

family-friendly: prudishness protects the bottom-line

märchen: photographer Kilian Schönberger treks across Europe capturing vistas that evoke Grimms’ fairy tales

l'arboricoltura: vertical forest in Turin

beizjagd: Lufthansa to join growing list of air-carriers that allow falcons

troglodyte

Though probably better known in most circles as a subcamp of the concentration camp Buchenwald and for the recent outcry by some when it was proposed that refugees be housed in the former officers’ barracks on that profane ground, Tröglitz (DE) in Saxon Anhalt is now garnering attention once more, because its mayor stepped down, having retreated to factions in village that violently oppose the mayor’s decision to offer shelter to sixty Syrian refugees—or his lack of leadership in blocking the move.
Whilst defending his community, saying that most are inviting and caring individuals, a few hooligans massed on the mayor’s private residence in such a terrorising and unrelenting manner, which local authorities had not the purview or power to stop, the mayor maintains Tröglitz is not a bastion for xenophobia, but fearing for the safety of his family, relinquished the office. Though on the macro-scale, the PEGIDA marches have largely been subdued in the bigger cities by counter-rallies that far out-number those standing with the movement, sparse policy dialogue has come out of the contentious issue. Now it seems that activists can focus in on the smallest subdivisions and the very local sense, these messages still are resounding ones. Public officials of course don’t sacrifice their right to privacy or the security of their families once they take office—and nor can freedom of expression or assembly be curtailed depending on the target, but it does represent something chilling, I think, for homegrown democracy that might so readily cow to the bullying of a few, creating enclaves where no refugees are welcome. What do you think?

dovecote or invasive-species

I wonder if we could enlist pigeons or some other urbanized wildlife to act as a take-down, shock troop to dispatch with swarms of drones, without harming the pigeons or turning them into roving access points, of course—or rather than dog-fighting it out, perhaps equipped with signal jamming devices. I bet house-mice—and the whole domiciled food-chain, would not appreciate others scrounging around in their crawl-space one bit, and I wonder if some evil genius would even need to train them—or would the pigeons and other vermin, seeing their air-space and territory invaded, do this spontaneously on their own accord.

intellectual heirs or non-aggression axiom

At the risk of courting controversy and inviting trollish commentary (I think that those risks are acceptable), I’d like very much like to recommend Dangerous Minds’ toppling treatment of Ayn Rand. The essay, including three “trash-compactor” digests of the film adaptation (conveniently plucked out of forty plus years of “development Hell”) of Atlas Shrugged meant to placate the new generation of Tea-Partiers really resonated with me because I too, as a teenager, was an avid fan of this sort of pseudo-intellectual fervor and it took quite some doing to disabuse me of this allure and get out of that phase.

I am really mortified to own up to that much, but even today I still carry around an onerous reminder of that period in the form of a passkey that’s an obscure reference to Anthem (a plagiarized novella, oh nos, about the assault against science—ostensibly, but really a critique of collectivism and supporting the luddites in the end anyway) that I am made to plug into my (work) computer every time I turn around—lest I forget. I guess that this was a fairly common rite of passage, growing pain, though not defensible like a bad sense of style that takes some time to mature. Screenwriter and comedian John Rogers observed once, “There are two novels that can change a bookish fourteen-year old's life: The Lord of the Rings and Atlas Shrugged. One is a childish fantasy that often engenders a lifelong obsession with its unbelievable heroes, leading to an emotionally stunted, socially crippled adulthood, unable to deal with the real world. The other, of course, involves orcs.” On balance, we all tend to gravitate towards creative, selfless fantasies, I think, but when the impressionable aren’t given to being particularly well-read or well-informed and have a limited library, this sort of sophistry becomes a masterpiece. The idea that prompted Rand to writing Atlas Shrugged, a great lump of a tome, was toying with the idea of declaring herself on strike from her publishers for their difficult demands—I wish she had, rather than creating a dystopian world where all the supposedly talented and ingenious and indispensable people picketed in order to make her ideas and agenda seem legitimate.