Intrepid explorer Colonel Percy Harrison Fawcett first became enamoured with South America and the allure of the dense, uncharted jungles when as a surveyor was invited to help resolve a border dispute between Brazil and Bolivia. Some twenty years after the initial encounter (with World War I intervening), Fawcett resolved to return, ostensibly, to seek out a mid-eighteenth-century anecdote he’d learned of: a slave-trader who’d come across a mysterious city deep in the jungles. Braving the elements, predation and potentially hostile tribes, Fawcett assembled a small expedition and embarked to find this place he called the Lost City of Z.
Monday 18 May 2015
circe or the call of the wild
catagories: ๐ฌ๐ง, ๐, ๐, myth and monsters, philosophy, religion
dirty-laundry or romeo and oubliette
I wonder what happens—though not exclusively in the sense of data-retention and potential for blackmail and embarrassment, to one’s neglected and moribund dating profiles. Of course, there’s that distracting, distasteful feeling that the internet could be easily induced to vomit up everything—and nosy governments and those capitalising on what we’ve magnanimously shared make this seem like an inevitability—that’s specific to you and you alone, everything shady, exaggerated, secret, plus the occasional stray terror plot.
It’s funny to think of how that fear, which is something coddled like those forgotten avatars and familiars that we’ve no nostalgic feeling for that were once preened and shown for whatever audience, that signals the end of privacy as we understand it was pedigreed in the same fashion. We’ve surrendered, commoditised and compartmentalised every aspect of ourselves little by little, and at first only under our own compulsion and satisfy our own vanities—legitimising the argument that if one does not brand himself or herself, someone else will surely do them the favour. And like those dating or professional matchmaking dossiers, the transitional parts of our characters, habits, predilections are shed and cast away until that picture, even long after we’ve moved away from it, is complete in the enduring sense. What do you think? Do these past identities and identifiers have an unseen, unloved lives of their own (careering onward singlemindedly absent status updates), waiting to be sprung at the worst possible moment?
catagories: ๐ฅธ, ๐ง , lifestyle, networking and blogging
Sunday 17 May 2015
five-by-five
exoplanet: retro, WPA style NASA travel posters
enclava: another aspiring micronation cleaved out of terra nullius
riff-solo: a website that turns one’s typing into drum-beats
century of progress: seven maps that could only be made in the last one hundred years
daytrip: schmalkaden oder good knight, sir ywain
With the promise of nice weather and a reliably immaterial flea-market as passable excuses, we drove a bit north into Thรผringen and took a tour of the town of Schmalkalden—a place we’d seen before but it had been a few years and revisiting these nearby places always makes me appreciate the history that the familiar, the accessible are quick to overshadow.
The medieval Altstadt displays some of the finest examples of Fachwerk (half-timbered) architecture in the region, and the place had a nice penchant for story-telling murals and wall-art that really tied together much of the historical context for us in the end.
The per- sonage of Martin Luther—beside the image of the Landgrave of Hessen, Philip I with a video game-control, was meant to depict the founding of the so-called Schmalkaldic League, a free-association of Protestant princes founded here under the auspices of Luther’s Reformation, first for religious reasons and later for political pretexts, to afford members with an overlord aside from the Holy Roman Empire. In fact, the county of Schmalkalden (presently Landkreis Schmalken-Meiningen) endured as an exclave of Prussian Hessen for over four centuries until WWII. It was the area’s status as a rail-hub that made it a target during the war.
And while I am not sure what the motivation was for the bat, this graffiti reflects another of the town’s celebrated treasures: Arthurian author Hartmann von Aue (a tributary of the Werra flowing near Schmalkalden) chronicled the tales of the Knight Ywain in the early eleventh century, the exploits of this errant-scholar influencing later, continental treatments of the Matter of Britain, including Wolfram von Eschenbach’s Parcival and the later adaptations of Richard Wagner.
Having this legacy associated with the literature and the legend surely is sufficient on its own, but these writings are also illustrated—uniquely and in some of the oldest, surviving secular sgraffito in Germany. The original illustrations were committed, around a century after von Aue’s active career, to the vaulted ceilings of the wine-cellars of the town’s chamber of commerce, since cordoned off from the public for preservation but were faithfully reproduced (for the benefit of the public) beneath the castle that dominates the city.
It’s amazing how concentrated and noddingly near history can manifest itself, and I’d encourage all of you to take a little time and reconsider one’s hometown, old haunts and what’s in the vicinity from the periscope of a curious historian.
catagories: ๐ฉ๐ช, ✝️, ๐งณ, antiques, Hessen, myth and monsters, Thรผringen
Friday 15 May 2015
gold bug or strong room
five-by-five
mincing words: neon gyrating sailor greets Russian submarines entering Swedish waters
not a stay-cation: service links talent abroad with short-term jigs called jobbaticals
please press zero for more options: surly AI being developed for automated customer-service applications
why are we listening to grandma singing: Mulder and Scully cover Neil Young
wingman: fantastic documentary on the life and times of Biggs Darklighter, X-Wing pilot