fontana del vino

Miraculously, as fellow enthusiast Nag on the Lake reports, a fountain that flows continuously with red wine free to any weary souls wanting to slake their thirst has just been inaugurated in the village of Caldari di Ortona in Abruzzo along the Adriatic coast. Hospitably, the local vineyard that supplies and is behind this permanent installation insists that it is not a mere publicity stunt nor an invitation to loiter (but perhaps linger) but a wayside retreat for pilgrims travelling between Rome and Ortona going to see the relics of Thomas the Apostle, enshrined at the cathedral there after his mission to India.

verge and verder

An ingenious Canadian farm equipment manufacturer has a tree-spade on offer that can gently up-root grown trees for transplanting. I had no idea that this was even an option and ought to be a mandated part of any new construction project—saddening to think that the pace of sprawl overtook our abilities to mechanise silviculture (except for the felling bit) so quickly and without a glance over our collective shoulder. Go to the link to see a video demonstration of these amazing machines from Dutchman in action.

lingo

Hellenologophobia is a fun word we learned that signifies fear of (and it’s pretty easy to deconstruct in hindsight) Greek terminology—by extension, anything unfamiliar, inscrutable or complex, adverse to jargon. Relatedly, there’s the not so easily prised apart sesquipedalophobia (literally Latin for a “foot and a half long”) and the monstrous and intimidating hippopotomonstrosesquipedaliophobia, both meaning fear of long words, the above length referring to poetic metre.

stök plóma, fljótandi í ilmvatni, borin fram í karimannshatti

In addition to the annual lighting of the Imagine Peace Tower over the last weekend on Viðey Island in Reykjavík bay on the occasion of John Lennon’s birthday, the beams illuminating the skies (and beaming wishes of goodwill all across the universe) for the next two months—to be extinguished on the anniversary of his assassination—with Iceland being originally chosen as host for its ecological thermal energy and general good governance, Yoko Ono has several other concomitant art projects going on in the country. Ono also solicited tributes from local artists, and humourously Ragnar Kjartansson presented her with an elaborate Simpsons’ meta-reference, to Ms Ono’s delight.

subterranean home-sick blues

Rather surprisingly (but not undeservedly) it was announced that activist and song-writer Bob Dylan will be awarded the Nobel prize for literature.
Aside from praise and excitement, this news is inspiring a small measure of disbelief, and perhaps the committee wanted to make some amends to a year so horrendously cruel to the music world, but the selection of laureates has always been an inscrutable process—often refraining from giving out prizes in certain categories when no one was up to muster that particular year and has a history of being rather flexible with the definitions, say by awarding all EU citizens the peace prize or honouring the doubtless worthy and encouraging speeches of Winston Churchill as literature. What do you think? I wonder if Dylan will accept an honour funded with the legacy of violence and destruction—albeit they are trying to make amends for that as well.

7x7

a sweep is as lucky as lucky can be: a look at the brilliant decorative chimneys of Hampton Court

elvis, elvis let me be: a meeting of the minds (and spirits) with Presley and Ann-Margaret, via the fantastic Nag on the Lake

abecedarium: the alphabet for spoiled children, via Kottke’s quick links

point of origin: artists’ palettes transformed into canvases

stowaways: an investigation into how even orderly, ornamental nature can propagate invasive species, raising an interesting counterpoint to extinctions that humans have caused through the speciation and advantage it has imparted for some so called weeds and pests

portable hole: the laws of cartoon physics

atomteller: a line of commemorative porcelain plates of German nuclear reactors either already taken off-line or scheduled to be mothballed soon