gruen transfer oder ghost malls

Going home every week, I pass by signs of the future local of “Barbarossa City” shopping centre, that I am supposing will be erected outside of the industrial park of the ancient town of Gelnhausen—home to one of the emperor’s palatial estates, and it makes me moan a little to think about the state of property development in Germany. There perhaps was a legitimate pitch to be made at one point but once there comes a saturation point when we only have ourselves to blame for siphoning off business from the Altstadt and Marktplatz, which still retain their charms, making online shopping commitment-free—delivered to your door via drone, and there quickly comes a point where the appeal and utility of galleries “anchored” by ample parking and a super-market diminishes to the point it’s no longer tenable.
Every other purchase made in the client stores is really just an impulse-buy and the domain who those who couldn’t be bothered to comparison- shop beforehand. There are several ghost malls—completely vacant or nearly so, that are one the periphery of Wiesbaden’s city centre and while the former has been kept because of it auto-garage for as long as I can remember, I’ve watched the rather sharp decline of the latter, whose retail spaces are ninety-percent empty and random (by not a rotation) of car rental outlets, a stationary shop, a t-shirt screen-printing business and a ubiquitous electronic store are all that are left. Even outside city limits, these projects seem designed for ruin after the developers, the barons have made their profit and saddled yet another middling-sized town with reticulated grocery store that steals commerce away from downtown and denying people the ability to shop—or at least the impression thereof, and leaving a landscape of struggling restaurants and shuttered corner shops, boutiques and antique shops to be replaced by mobile telephone and fast-food outlets. What do you think? I don’t care for this zombification, and given the parallel crisis in affordable housing, maybe such flagships of the retail sector might (or rather do) work if (when) they offered accommodation for living as well.

6x6

purdah: in defiance of statute and accepted cultural norms, an online campaign invites Iranian women to share images of themselves with their heads exposed, and in solidarity, men appear in hijabs

final frontier: the monumental park outside of Moscow honouring the pioneers of space exploration

red dwarf: the hinted at existence of exoplanet Proxima Centauri β is confirmed

goodwill ambassadors: Messy Nessy Chic digs up some vintage pocket guides issued to American service-members fighting overseas

at the third stroke: British Telecom is seeking out the speaking clock’s new voice, via the Presurfer

beyond antares: ladies and gentlemen, presenting the musical stylings of Miss Nichelle Nichols

gestalt or fifty-seven channels and nothin’ on

As an addendum to the spiffy tip we had on the crack-team of super-recognisers that could reform the way police work and mass-surveillance are carried—since what’s the use of closed-circuit television if nobody’s minding the screen, not discounting the progress of biometric markers—Dangerous Minds and Boing Boing offer up a self-assessment (a battery of tests that are like elimination rounds) that lets one find out if he or she might be blessed (or cursed) with this super-power. Science believes about one percent of the population can potentially harness this ability, and I thought it was interesting how some felt odd or embarrassed about having this breed of photographic-memory, and were worried that people might mistake being recalled as being stalked or obsessed.  Although the limited discriminatory powers of people might sometime result in profiling and mistaken identity, spotted and connected with human eyes seems more keen and focused that the indiscriminant use of facial-recognition software. What do you think? How did you score?

night flight

With a nod to the nostalgic look and feel of the Stranger Things phenomena—which strikes me as something liminal, almost familiar but not quite—Boing Boing shares a cache of 1980s animated production logos from film and television that are sure to incite a flood of memories over these faithful, old taglines. “Sit, Ubu, sit! Good dog!”

concourse oder down in the underground

The ever intrepid explorers at Atlas Obscura treat us to a stunning gallery of the urban-spelunking project Manhattan-extract artist Claudio Galamini’s framed and thorough discovery of Berlin’s metro system (die Berliner U-Bahn). Since opening first in 1902, the expansion of the network to one hundred seventy stations sprawling over a distance of over a hundred and fifty kilometers, each one of the terminals (and methodically, Galamini visited every one) are unique preserved expressions of the tenor of the county, style and the economy. Be sure to visit the links above and travel along the whole line, with more to explore through the artist’s lens at each stop.

for the nonce

Thanks to our friends the OED, we learn that today, the Saint Day of Bartholomew the Apostle, patron of bookbinders, butchers and cheese-mongers, was traditional feted with a charter fair in London (chartered in the sense the market days were established to help raise fund for religious and municipal buildings, namely the priory of Saint Bartholomew) and marked the end of Summer. The evening’s repast for members of the printing guild (this day also marking the anniversary of the first printing of the Gutenberg Bible in 1456 in Mainz) was concluded with a special banquet given by a publishing house proprietor for the benefit of his apprentices.
After this break, called a wayzgoose, with the days waning shorter, scribes and later typesetters would now by working by candle-light. Although I much prefer the folk-etymology of “wase-goose”—that is a sheaf or wayward goose, for the way it sort of links the traditional dinner to customs attached to Saint Martin’s day in November, the goose being a creature that meanders aimless and betrayed the reluctant saint’s hiding spot, and in the sense of a sheaf of paper, the practise of paper-makers to use the last of the season’s pulp for making windows to be hung by Saint Martin’s Day (in commemoration to his selfless act of giving his cloak to a beggar to protect him from the element—however, it probably is a corruption of the Danish word for Weghuis—that is, an inn or guesthouse where these banquets were held. In modern parlance, the term occasionally appears when speaking of an annual outing or Organisational Day for a Fourth Estate institution. In any case, we all ought to celebrate with a little wayzgoose this evening.

sisyphean or gravity-assist

One of the sad ironies of electrical infrastructure is that the places, like Germany, with the highest utilisation rates of renewable energy also have the highest incidence of air pollution, due to fact when there’s not enough wind or sunshine, there’s only recourse to burning coal or natural gas and no large-scale means to store excess production for use when it’s needed.
The impediments lie in not only not being able to save energy for a later time, unpredictable vectors like the Sun and the wind can easily over-burden a distributed grid whose output has to be spent, along those wires, in one way or another. There are some methods to harness this abundance, however, like the sluices that store potential energy (please don’t mind my bad German)—or project in the state of Utah called the Sisyphus Train, where excess aggregate of electricity is used to power a locomotive to the summit of a hill, and there it rests like the accursed boastful king’s eternal task to roll a boulder uphill. This labour is not futile or in vain as when needed the turbine rolls back downhill, generating electricity during its descent.