shareholder value

Around a year and a half ago, while strolling through Frankfurt’s old warehouse district, I had the chance to see the new headquarters of the European Central Bank under-construction. Just now, regaled with protests to mark the occasion, the fancy and sleek building saw its grand-opening—or rather its christening, baptism with due remonstration since it’s not really an inviting place for the rabble—although I quite liked the old HQ, though I suppose it was too humble and retiring for this flag-ship role. Though the core thrust behind the Occupy and Blockupy movements is unchanged, it’s rather thought-provoking how the message has become more focused, not only targeting monumental disparities in wealth and opportunity but more specifically how this and other institutions have straitening outlays of austerity—which can translate into even greater, generational handicaps.

five-by-five

swag: a gallery of uniquely-crafted cases for one’s cellular phone

exorcist: haunted dolls command top-dollar in on-line auctions

aptitude: prospective employees of Thomas Edison were subjected to a grueling battery of questions

charlie magnetico: Jim Henson created cyborg muppets to lead seminars for Bell Telephone Systems

the dream sequence always rings twice: an unsettling short film where the protagonist is the subject of everyone’s nightmare

mondknoten und nutation

Europe will be treated to a partial solar eclipse on Friday, 20 March, which is also the Spring Equinox—with some lucky souls on Svalbard and the Faroe Islands losing daylight to the Moon’s shadow completely.
Weather permitting, for one in the western part of Germany, the event will start at 09:24 (earlier for those more westerly and later for those more easterly), reaching totality at (some 80% in Germany and France) at 10:32 before going on the wane for the next hour. Researchers in Germany are interested, among other things, in observing the dip in photovoltaic power production. The southern hemisphere will be treated to a similar spectacle in September of this year.

mister linea

I remember this character’s misadventures and continuous strolls watching Pinwheel on Nickelodeon in its earliest days—when the network shared the same channel as A&E (Arts and Entertainment), which would begin broadcasting in the evenings, but I didn’t know the name of the series until I stumbled across this brilliant little tribute from Laughing Squid.

The interstitial stories were told in a single, unbroken line and grew out of an advertising commission for an Italian kitchenware manufacturer. Sort of like with Mister Bean or other universal sketch-programmes, whose dialogue was sparse and relied on physical humour, Mister Linea spoke only gibberish—which was meant to sound like a mock Milano dialect, but I suppose I thought that that was Italian—just like I believed the nonsense the Swedish Chef was the Nordic language—but that was part of the appeal, to believe that one could understand a foreign language. Be sure to check out the link for video resources and more backstory that will bring back memories.

five-by-five

dingoes ate the baby: the fingerprints of koala bears and humans beings can superficially appear identical and have led to forensic confusion

les cahiers: writer André Gide’s rich daily journaling routine offers some very wise and abiding reflections on sincerity and originality

fantascope: collector Richard Balzer, avid accumulator of Magic Lanterns, has a nice show-and-tell about these forerunners to film and video

johnny highwaycone: pioneer of the American transportation system

let me see you shake your tail-feathers: peacocks’ plumage make sub-sonic sounds

high-fructose or beet, beet, sugar beet

Just as I was under the mistaken impression that coffee cultivation and consumption for Europe was a New World discovery, I was sure that the same was true about sugar—thinking of the cane-breaks of Caribbean islands and sprawling plantations.

I knew that the process to extract sugar from the native sugar beet was a later, eighteenth century discovery, patronised by the same Prussian royal family that sponsored the search to make porcelain and silk without relying on China—and assumed it was a another case of corporate raiding to bypass England’s dominance of trans-Atlantic trade. Researchers in Germany discovered that the sucrose of the sugar beet, which did not need tropical conditions to grow but thrived in temperate Germany, was the same substance found in sugar cane and figured out how to isolate and harvest it, though beet sugar was never able to supplant cane for its surplus. Sugar cane originated on the Indian subcontinent and was first described by visiting Persians, and was first cultivated in the Middle East around a millennium after this first documentation. Western Europeans, despite their familiarity with honey as a sweetener, were immediately taken with sugar cane, grown at farmsteads at the port city of Acre (‘Akka), headquarters of the Order of Knights Hopitaller.

The confection’s introduction to Europe, like many other commodities, however, experienced centuries of delay, with not all Western palettes ready to taste this exotic import, along with the range of culinary spices that the Crusaders adopted when they went more or less native. Europeans were altogether repulsed by some of the indulgent habits that generational pilgrims had adopted—like regular bathing, and the public was not sold of sugar, as with coffee, tea, cotton, said-spices and tobacco—until colonialism necessitated markets and consumers needed to be conjured up. As somewhat of a coda to the spice wars of the Far East traders, France was willing to drop its claim to Canada in exchange for keeping its Caribbean cane-growing islands, and the Dutch relinquished their title to Old New York (then Nieue Amsterdam) once it was decided they could retain its plantations in South American Suriname.