smarch und mapril

I like how the trappings of Easter, unlike with other holidays, are compelled to be taken down and stowed away for next year—or replaced by the commercial creep and anticipation of the next batch of observances around the corner, right away. I guess that’s partially owing to the fact that the customs associated with Easter, partially, are a mixed-metaphor, with all notions of promise, renewal and rebirth celebrated and borrowing from one another, and something to be savoured.

Although the coming season it heralds is having a little bit of difficulty with its launch. Nature is nonplussed with the delay, with migration and germination hitting obstacles, and I think people, considering what a tumultuous past month we’ve had—whereas March is generally sanguine: the cold-wave and drought-conditions maybe exacerbating the ongoing recession, the sequestration stand-off in the States, the banking crisis in Cyprus, adulterated meat on the store-shelves, sabre-rattling all around, massive hack-attacks, litigiousness, yet a few good things came about despite all the chaos. I think that’s why the Eierschau remains until Spring and Summer are fully established.

Most decorations are such eggs hanging from willow switches or displayed on a village well, but I also appreciated this last interpretation, which seems a custom in itself, exchanging the Christmas lights for plastic edges on these sculpted hedges. It feels like a weird, inverted interlude, barreling towards Winter rather than Summer. I hope keeping these charms on exhibit do us a better turn.

diorama or microcosmos

Bremen Public Radio features a collection of photographs from local artist Nikolai Keller posing tee-tiny people in the greatly magnified details of everyday surroundings. The article (the link does not seem to work) includes a video segment documenting his technique and patience with these model train scale figures and a link to the gallery of the artist.

predator or hyper-color

British fashions designer Adam Harvey, not to put too fine a point on it, has released a line of over garments to make the statement that the rigours of surveillance is not entirely unavoidable, even through one’s wardrobe. Although I knew otherwise, I thought that drones were mostly extended video games with remote, disconnected but human operators, maybe relying on facial-recognition but not thermal ranging, which these stylized battle-garbs intend to deflect. These hoodies are certainly rough-and-ready armour, meant to be expressive and perhaps intimidating, but maybe one could cobble the same stealth affect with those gold rescue blankets included in standard automobile first aid kits (save those and do not toss them out when your kit expires). What tin-foil pith helmets would you devise for protecting your safety and anonymity?

baader-meinhof or the episode where mister s learns his apartment is haunted

There are loads of gracious old villas in my neighbourhood, all of which, I’m sure, have very colourful histories. I didn’t imagine that my nondescript and rather anonymous building ever saw much excitement, let alone infamy, mostly the temporary dwelling, as in my case, for people working in the city during the week and it seems that rooms are rented for guest-workers in the construction business—which is pretty practical for all involved.

The building’s supervisor, according to my landlords, is a bit nosy and perhaps paranoid about the tenants, and asks for a bit more background and documentation than is customary—and probably tolerable to most Germans. I guess I am another Auslander passing through here, and complied. I learned afterwards that the cause for this prying was rooted in the fact that these apartments, with the same super at the helm, hosted a cell of the Red Army Faction (Rote Armee Fraktion) in the mid-80s. Ideology is always dependent on which side one asks: rebels, freedom-fighters, and merry men are also insurgents and terrorists, but it was certainly a dark chapter for Germany—especially with the latter generation who seemed more poised towards violence.

Specifically, what transpired in this building, where a couple, both members lived, involved a plot to wile an American soldier stationed in the area, whom was killed, once lured back to the apartment, for his ID card. The pass allowed other operatives access to the Rhein-Main Air Base (on the grounds of the Frankfurt Airport) with a car full of explosives to detonate. Captured and convicted years later, the woman who was the honey-trap was also implicated for her part in a failed assassination attempt on the former Bundesbank president who would later oversee the introduction of the euro and was nearly put in charge of the Vatican City bank, Istituto per le Opere di Religione (IOR). Every corner is reeking with it, but that’s a bit more of a story than I was ready for.

lend-lease oder prime-directive

Not to be confused with the Emminger Reforms, an arguably kindred precedent that essentially did away with trial-by-jury for the German justice system, the Emminger Letter (PDF from the investigative memory of the Official Monetary and Financial Institutions Forum) covertly drafted by the then president of the German Bundesbank, Otmar Emminger, to Helmut Schmidt, Chancellor of West Germany, in 1978.

The German banks made the willful decision to breach their rebuilding, reparations agreement to support weaker economies through exchange rate settings (before the common currency), fearful that manipulation would damage the home market through inflation. Haunting and lingering, the resistance was brought to unofficial policy back then over Cyprus, as today, and has been invoked several times during the intervening decades over France and Italy. The truth will out, I suppose. Do you think there are some secret intrigues going on in the European banking community?

odd bird or let’s fake a deal

The peripatetic seekers at the Big Think share an engrossing essay suggesting that demographically American subjects were the worst choices for the whole quiver of standard psychological experiments, and many of the techniques developed and conclusions drawn from this battery of tests are highly idiosyncratic and do not translate well into other cultures.

Everything from the classic Ultimatum Game, also with a variant known as the Monty Hall Game from Let’s Make a Deal, to reflex perceptions could be slanted to American tastes, perhaps roving and proprietary. Acknowledging and respect difference across societies, like hierarchy versus democracy or individualism versus collectivism is of course nothing astonishing and the meters honed and tweaked over generations are not without merit or insight, but it does seem strange to consider that the gauges themselves might be flawed, focusing the lens of study on a narrow and unrepresentative population. Western societies embrace a whole spectrum of strange and wonderful distinctions and albeit that contrast is strongest among exotic cultures, equally strange and wonderful—on the surface, at least, and subtle but appreciable differences in backgrounds and values only magnify with time and patience—and I don’t know that the US is so singularly weird (Western, Educated, Industrialized, Rich and Democratic, an acronym that the author uses) or if other groups are not so dissimilar, as well, and would prefer America remain the jumbled, jangled standard-bearer of normalcy, rather than own up to their own peculiarities.

ice-nine

Patterned off of Norwegian ventures, a German research partnership is embarking on a sea voyage in Asia to seek out a substance called methane clathrate (DE), a natural gas hydrate buried, frozen by extreme pressure, under the ocean floors, cleft to the cliffs of continental shelves. Moving away from nuclear energy resources and dependence on traditional petroleum sources, interest is growing in these newly discovered reservoirs, once thought to only exist on comets, the Moon and such, but spectacularly complicated efforts to staunch the leak during the Deep Water Horizon catastrophe. These deposits, however, represent a huge carbon-sink, exceeding the storage capacity of forests and coral reefs, and perhaps we do not have the skill to neatly exploit these sequestered reserves without causing more run-away effects.