sunday-drive: bel étage oder free-parking

Taking advantage of the fine weather, on my way back to my workweek apartment, I took a slight detour and saw a bit more of Hanau. Taking refuge at the first open and non-challenging parking space, which turned out—happily—very out of the way and had me trudging from one end of the city to the other and back again, I found myself across from the Frankfurter Tor and admired a collection of ancient headstones that were preserved in the front lawn of the municipal justice building.
The original cemetery grounds had been claimed by the Industrial Revolution when the city saw exponential growth but had had a life-span from the early 1600s to 1840, and it was curious that my next destination (I’d done a little research but didn’t exactly have an itinerary) was a modern graveyard built atop an even more ancient site: the foundations of a Roman bath whose schema illustrated how hot-water was harnessed and circulated—a feature of the plumbing of antiquity that the occident took a long time to rediscover. Coming to where the river Kinzig empties into the Main, I toured the grounds of splendid summer residence of the House of Hanau in the district of Kesselstadt.
The corps de logis is done in a Renaissance revival style and overlooks a huge, undulating garden.
Returning to my car afterwards, I realised that I had parked (rather inadvertently) just on the western perimeter of Hanau’s Altstadt—or what remained after the bombing during WWII, and took a look around the Marktplatz as well. Before one of the few restored structures, the “new” Rathaus, is a fine sculpture celebrating two of the city’s native sons, the Brothers Grimm—although a lot of other places claim this famous pair as well. Most of the rest of the city was laid out in a practical manner, utilitarian, with space allocated for housing and building new in the rubble, as opposed to curating what was lost.
I always feel keenly self-conscious when confronted with an urban environment whose past has been levelled and washed away and wonder if the juxtaposition of a few showcases (as opposed to the sentiment of an entirely restored look and feel) is enough to jar the memory and whether history can be encapsulated in any sort of ensemble. I wonder what the Grimms would have made of such enchanted remnants. I am glad that I had the long stroll and gallery of impressions to think on.

brototyp, archetype

I spied this corner bakery the other day with the clever yet not immediate (to my mind at least) tag line of “Brotagonist,” meaning like with
a protagonist, bread is the focal-point of this little Brotzeit (afternoon snack) narrative. The anti-hero or underdog in me did not go for the obvious pun, however, and I wondered why a bakery would want to antigonise its customers, perhaps with the villainy of gluten.

pay-wall or fantastic voyage

Via Kottle comes a bitter pill to swallow with an clearinghouse company who hopes to ratchet up security and verifiability by persuading clients to ingest a tablet that serves as one’s user and password as more and more vulnerabilities are revealed with traditional methods and zealous use of biometrics have led to many compromises.
It seems unlikely that injectables and ingestables might become the new universal identifier in short order, but it is a slippery slope and there’s been incredible progress and voluntary adoption in the form of wearables, cashless cachets and passkeys, even absent any mandate. It seems convenience is a better driver than compulsion and laziness makes us myopic in the long term. What do you think? Would this be something you’d be willing to test?

peacemaker or colt forty-five

The intrepid explorers at Atlas Obscura present a really thorough and intriguing outline of a place called Coltsville, a utopian compound that really encapsulates the sort of nineteenth century industrialist sense of fatherly beneficence that’s in strong contrast to labour laws and the product, fire-arms, that funded the creation of this ideal factory town.

Nestled in Hartford, Connecticut, Coltsville included dormitories to house workers and their families, a church, company stores and even a masterfully recreated alpine village with an authentic beer hall to attract and retain German craftsmen. Perhaps like Alfred Nobel, whose fortunes were also made off of dynamite and armaments, the household of Samuel and Elizabeth Colt wanted to leave a legacy that did not only involve death and suffering and the estate and its amenities became charitable institutions. Much of the complex is in disrepair after decades of neglect, but the recent and long debated decision to designate Coltsville as a national landmark, controversial as some see it to celebrate gun culture, may help save this historic spot and cause visitors to reflect on our anachronisms—through what seems to be out of place. Be sure to tag along for more adventures with the crew from Atlas Obscura.

the irreconcilables or action-at-a-distance

Having recently finished Philip K. Dick’s engrossing The Man in the High Castle and the air of remembrance, marred to an extent by current tensions seven decades on, I found this artefact shared by the respected antiquarian John Ptak of Georgetown to be pretty intriguing. This monograph captures the isolationist sentiment that was predominant in American in 1939 and 1940 regarding its being drawn into a European war. The “irreconcilables” refers to that cabal of US senators who crafted the country’s policy of neutrality and no foreign entanglement from the 1930s until the attack on Pearl Harbor. I knew the US public had little will for this engagement going into it but the imbalance was far greater than I imagined, even when polled against specific scenarios and hypothetical outcomes. Be sure to check out more interesting articles and peruse the emporium at the website.

a penny saved is twopence dear

I learnt of a gem of non-canonical, being that it’s not part of his main body of writing—like Poor Richard’s Almanack of proverbs and other achievements, both genuine and attributed, wisdom discovered in the correspondence of statesman Benjamin Franklin, writing to a friend from his diplomatic post in Paris. In his golden years, Franklin recalled a fundamental episode from his early youth. The story Franklin tells and the aphorism it lends itself to—paying too much for one’s whistle (in reference to an impulse-buy that ended up bringing more post-shopping regret than pleasure)—is as memorable and astute as any. One can read the letter in its entirety here with Franklin’s inventory of poor souls whose vanities have cost them dearly. I do suppose, too, it is easier to recognise such folly of others rather than to confront it in ourselves.

five-by-five

autochrome: beautiful gallery of some of the earliest colour photography

fungus among us: newly discovered poisonous humanoid mushrooms

g-money: roots of the Masonic/Illuminati conspiracy theories

may the fourth be with you: fun miniature parade on the streets of New Orleans for Star Wars Day

lol: Time magazine once featured as its cover-story how cats were the next big thing