slaget i hafrsfjord

The intrepid adventurers at Atlas Obscura sends a picture postcard from Stavanger of the monumental commission of Sverd i fjell, which was among some our parting shots from our extended Norwegian vacation a few years back.
The peace declared that united the three warring factions of the western reaches of the kingdom under the leadership of good King Harald the Fair Hair (Harald Hårfagre) is really kind of obscured by the sheer scale and sight of three giant swords plunged into the beach of Madla—though the event is very much celebrated and romanticized in popular culture and stands just as large in the shared imagination. One thousand, one hundred eleven years after the decisive battle, King Olaf V degreed that this Viking victory be immortalised and it was wrought and wielded in 1983 by native sculptor Fritz Røed. One of these days, we’ll make it back to those shores and find those swords half buried regardless of how much time and tide has passed.

5x5

kool & the gang: Dr. Teeth and the Electric Mayhem rock out to Jungle Boogie

shill: dreadful social media spoof campaign that perhaps hits too close to home

avtovaz: gorgeous gallery of vintage Soviet automobile advertising

good libations: an animated history of adult beverages

parallax barrier: guide to rigging one’s smart phone to project a holographic image

pokédex or psychomanteum

I suppose both iterations of the popularity of Pokémon came at the wrong phases of life for me since I really never understood the appeal of collecting pocket-monsters but I nonetheless found the fact that this bestiary, via Neatorama, has origins rooted in Japanese mythology and folklore—with sometimes a direct correspondence though the inspiring legendary creatures are far more imaginative and disturbing—really fascinating. Tornadus is basically the Shinto Elder god Fūjin—master of the winds and cultural-transmission of the Greek demi-god Boreas (Septentrio to the Latins).
Whishcash (I love these naming conventions that make me think of the Wizzrobes, Peahats and Octoroks of the Legend of Zelda) is patterned after the observed behavior mortal catfish thrashing about and swimming erratically just prior to a tremor and it was believed that a gigantic cousin, the Onamazu was in turn responsible for causing earthquakes by throwing its weight around. There are several more darker fables and ghost stories to read at the link. Moreover, this fascination with play and acquisition (got to catch ‘em all) is not a recent phenomenon either, but dates back to parlour games hosted in the homes of seventeenth century Japan. This was a very superstitious age for many, correlating with the popularity of séances and spiritual mediums in Victorian England and of course later incarnations—that sort of slumber party game, like light-as-a-feather or looking into the bathroom mirror with the lights off and conjurating Bloody Mary or that new elevator ritual where one runs the risk of being trapped in a parallel ghost dimension, and as night fell men and women came together for the Gathering of One Hundred Supernatural Tales and took turns exchanging nightmares, folktales and general unexplained encounters. After each round, the player retreated into a separate room, a sort of containment field where a wall of one hundred paper lanterns stood opposite a single mirror and extinguished one light. Generally the evening’s entertainment—involving elements of catoptromancy, divination from mirror gazing, which saw new demons and monsters summoned up with each epic session, did not last all one hundred rounds and was customarily called off by ninety-nine out of fear that all those spirits would become uncontrollable and their haunting permanent.

5x5

fine motor skills: Japanese surgeons in training undergo a battery of delicate, microscopic exercises   

ex libris: via Kottke, the Bodleian is making over 100 000 images and manuscripts freely available on-line

gelotology: an overview for the neglected research into how a baby’s laughter could hold profound psychological insights

fun, fun, fun auf der autobahn: Rick Moranis covered Kraftwerk in a 1989 album

skullduggery: ancient peoples may have buried horse skulls under the floors of homes and churches to achieve a sought after acoustic effect

vermicious knids or many mouths to feed

Although my Venus Flytrap seems to be thriving quite well—despite the dietary restrictions I’ve enforced and certainly don’t want it to suffer any malnourishment in the meantime, it is rather presenting me with a moral dilemma.
To begin with, I wonder what my ward might think of me being a vegetarian, not a carnivore—however passively, but a committed planter-eater, ravenous even. The opportunity to sacrifice an annoying indoor housefly, usually a persistent and irritating occurrence but presently the apartment is strangely silence, has not yet presented itself and I am not sure, unable to swap a pest but only shoo it away, if I could avail myself to the task. I admit that it’s probably a silly thing to rend my hands over, but I’m hoping that I might get away with a crime of omission, that the balcony might an adequate environment for insects in transit or find some unfortunate bug dead or dying of natural causes or not wholly splattered and disintegrated on the car’s grille. I don’t know if that would work. I bet the other, more sessile plants are getting a little jealous of this sort of doting and negative attention. What would you do?

rennsteig oder überquerte

Over the weekend, H and I took an albeit short but rejuvenating camping excursion to the Rennsteig—ridge-trekking—National Park in the highland of the forests of Thüringen.
Normally, we’ve blasted past this area on our way towards Leipzig and Saxony, although we’ve taken a few occasions to visit the promontory castle the Wartburg and a few other locations in the region beforehand, tunnelling through the mountains in one of the longest enclosed stretches of Autobahn that goes through the mountains in Germany—whereas only the passes were navigable before this engineering project.

This time, however, we paused at the head of the trail in a conservatory called Hohe Sonne to take a hike through the so-called Drachenschluct—the dragons’ gorge, a narrow path that winds through the rocky outcroppings that tower above. It was only an infinitesimally small fraction of the trails through the woods that link up with the international path from the Balkans to Santiago de Compostela in Galicia, the pilgrimage route of Saint James (Jakob).
Afterwards, we toured around some of the villages, which were pretty distinctive places, within the park and visited the ruins of a fortress above the Werra valley known as Brandenburg, whose campus represents on the largest keeps in Middle Germany. It was fun to imagine what it might have been like intact.
Slowly we made our way back to the campsite we had found hugging the little lake (See) of Altenburg, just south of Eisenach and the entrance to the park. It was relaxing to finally get settled and sleep out-of-doors, even if it was only for the night and we aren’t exactly roughing it. The next day, we had a late start but we were still able to do a little exploring with the balance of Sunday and drove to Gotha.
This city, birthplace not only of many the royal houses of Europe and the commercial, services-sector boom that followed the Industrial Revelation—spinning straw into gold, as it were, with insurance and finance, was a beautiful but surprisingly quiet place—the sort of quiet that I am sure is not altogether constant or pervasive but tends to go, subdued, with those places whose history needs to be studied and teased out.
Below the patio of Schloss Freidenstein, one of the largest Baroque compounds of Europe and residence for the dukes of Saxe-Gotha, cascading down to the market square and the ancient Rathaus is a water-feature, whose fanciness is testimony to the water supply problems that the city in almost the geographic centre of Germany and the point nemo of any natural sources for plumbing.   A canal was dug of some twenty-five kilometres to form an aqueduct to channel fresh water into the city—surely not a feat to be memorialised by Roman standards but certainly a reminder of how much was lost in terms of the civilising arts when Rome went away—and allowed the city to thrive

utc or the living daylights

Via the splendiferous and venerable Presurfer comes an interesting survey of the time zone deviants of the world—those who rejected the original international accords that established Greenwich Mean Time to coordinate a smaller, industrialised planet and those who later came to make being out of sync into a political expression.
The article leads with the complex, bureaucratic chronometer of the Russian Federation, which has undergone numerous changes, tweaks and adaptations that usually go under-reported to the world at large—but surely these alterations and alternations are not insular matters. Though Day-Light Savings Time was famously decreed in 2011 to last all year, and multifarious adjustments took place regionally in the meanwhile, no one seemed to pay it much mind until the IOC asked Russia to go back to Winter Time during the Solchi Winter Olympics for the convenience of the Western European audience. Perhaps another overlooked casualty in the Crimean conflict were the two native Ukrainian time zones who saw their coverage much reduced and re-aligned with Russian Time. This piece made me think of another depiction I came across last year of how much the twenty-four time zone deviate from real time of day, according to the Sun. There are quite a few stories of loitering and malingering to explore and reflect on our convention and what reach change (planes, trains, markets and computers plus for whom it’s tolerable and for whom it’s intolerable and out of the question—as it does seem unthinkable and inviolable for some and no grave matter for others) can have.