a nod is as good as a wink to a blind horse

Yesterday, my parents gave us a volume of Aubrey Beardsley's collected illustrations, which when I was younger and ostensibly more prudish was rather an embarrassing thing to have around the house.  I knew the artist's short career found him as a contemporary of Oscar Wilde and James Whistler of Whistler's Mother and that he did erotic drawings, however, I did not know the context, especially in his later revivals.  In his song, You're in my Heart (You're in my Soul), Rod Stewart makes a sweet reference to the artist and his rediscovered popularity of the late sixties.  I, however, always thought the lyrics were critical of her fashion sense for paisley prints.  It always nice to be disabused of misheard words to songs, epecially when I realize that I have been humming nonsense for all these years.

squawk box

We don't spend much time watching television, but every once and a while, we're engrossed by a documentary or history program that really piques my interest.  I intend to research the matter later on, like a daisy-chain of Wikipedia articles, topics and stubs, though I usually don't remember until much later or have managed to forget any helpful cues.  Although I am thinking that a writing instrument and something to write on would work just as well (as is usually the case when sloath and laziness and inertia are the mothers of invention), I think it would be nifty if remote controls came equipped with a button, "Remind," that would just dispatch an email with the bare details of the show one is watching, to remember what it was and to remember that one wanted to look into maybe the director's other works, the cast, the location, the symbolism or just more on the subject.

backwards compatible

Our new horseless carriage is really a great hobby.  Today H undertook the challenge of installing a snazzy new car stereo, complete with windscreen antenna, IPod dock, CD and SD card slot.  The original radio was not included, which was probably a good thing since we'd have settled for that one, but negotiating the hydra tangle of coloured cables and wires, H made it work.  The job looked intimidating and I imagine that only members of the bomb-squad (or the mod-squad) would have the patience or endurance to even try replacing a radio without professional help.  A few weeks ago, I changed the battery (which was not meant to be replaced outside of the factory) and felt SWAT-like pressure in doing so.  I am just enamoured with this old car, its unelaborated dash board with three essential dials, and accessible, no-nonsense innards.  I am sure\that we can keep it running and fancy for a very long time.

farce protection or needle-in-a-hay-stack

Oh--God bless America, for finding yet another way to keep us safe using the novelty of the inter-webs.  How on earth does this work to foil the hackers, spammers, scammers and skimmers?  It's like proving that one is not in fact a robot by being able to input a computer-generated verification-code: PX34.  I like how that what passes for the Turing test and thereby affords one all the rights and dignities of being human.  I read today that there were over twenty thousand incidents of ATM fraud in Germany over the past year--where some one has attached a fake console to the card-reader of a machine that gathers one's bank information.  I think that that is rather the technology and risk that the US is exporting.

eclectic kool-aid acid test or unsolicited financial advice for the United and European Union of the Germans

I think it is interesting how the world's stock markets are given loaded animal symbolism but the verbs and adjectives that usually describe their movements, even on more upbeat days, reduce them to small and timid dogs shivering in the shadows. All this attribution feeds, also, the idea that the markets are something independent and other, like the roulette wheel estranged from the casino. As much as I would like to steer underwriters away from the DAX, Hang-Seng, FTSE and support real commodities whose value is measured more than just by change, like the evanescence rectangles of Newton's Calculus, it is a good thing for Merkel to lead the charge against blatant short-selling but one should not throw the baby out with the bathwater, so to speak.

The European economy is fundamentally strong, reinforced by prognosticators who wish to diminish the importance of the Eurozone in the overall hopes for economic recovery or sustainability, but states should not behave jump to curtail the social cushions that make European society what it is. Germany, for instance, could, rather than threatening to raise the retirement age or do away with Kindergeld, pattern a successful campaign from the French, where all workers had a two- or three-year holiday for certain holidays, giving up Whit-Monday as non-paid work day to replenish the coffers of public-funds. Putting people on a voluntary furlough can save a lot of money. Tuition for higher education could be increased, but just by a notch, and experimentally, to see what kind of profits are reaped. There German system of wire-transfers is very sophisticated and makes a lot of sense, but if there were just a slight increase to the tempo of remittances--perhaps disbursing dividends more than once a year, would be a boost to a marketplace that seems to float a lot of payments on trust and energia. The EU may not have had the requisite agility to deflect this first glancing blow, but EU members do not face the peril of internal solvencies. There's no quantitative easing, by definition, for countries using the euro, which is a dangerous and deceptive temptation where inflation and deflation are controlled by printing more money. Making the environment impoverished, warring Koreas, peak oil, or Big Brother are much bigger threats to livelihood, and the dollar and the pound should not be pull along the euro in the wake of tinkering with the monetary supplies.

brave new world (with so many goodly creatures)

It looks like claims regarding the creation of a fully synthetic single-celled organism were a bit exaggerated--such lines of genetic information had been transfigured in this way before. That watermarks (think Getty Images) of this life-form's creators were inserted in the DNA, whereas other DNA considered to be there just along for the ride was culled out by the laboratory. I would have thought that that was Google's latest non-malevolent project--tags and trending for heredity. It's not nice to pwn Mother Nature. I wonder if mankind is coming to a sort of technological rift, that's made a common fate for advancing societies, when man will choose to pursue better living through such Frankenstein methods, tinkering with nature, rather than pursuing research in the other scientific disciplines, like physics. Though I am happy for it, it is a wonder to me that physics in the form of CERN or other big projects garners any support or interest. Physics, at least thus far, does not seem to have much of a profit-motive. Now the space shuttle has been replaced by a robotic spy space plane, and there is bio-engineered food crops, botox injections, microbes to sop up oil spills, and stem cells that can be coaxed and differentiated into bone marrow, cartilage or a fully formed family-friendly franchise restaurant. What opportunities does progress lose out on by investing in ones sort of alchemy rather than the other?

Rindfleischetikettierungsüberwachungsaufgabenübertragungsgesetz

Learning German for me still is presenting a few barriers--there is a lot of sophistication and nuance and double meanings all spun out of a language that employees, for the majority of words at least, only a combination of about twelve prefixes and suffixes: um, an, so, zu, aus, auf, ein, ung, ei, ug.  Though quite the opposite is true, I always thought that German sounded impercise when it came to technical and scientific words or as if one had forgotten the right word: instead of hydrogen, one says, um, you know--das Wasserstoff.  Stoff, I particularly like--as in Kunststoff, art stuff, which is something artifical, a plastic table as opposed to a table made of Massivholz.  A colleague gave me a wonderful little book that is filled with these examples.  I'm a bit proud of myself when I know what an amalgam, a junior jumble really means, aside from the literal dissection--English has a lot of examples too, and it never occurred to me before that Beispiellos could be a near-game-ticket as well as something incomparable.