konudagur

The date of observance and tone having shifted significantly since the Icelandic calendar was first codified and presently equivalent to Valentine’s Day, Woman’s Day has settled on this day—having beforehand been held on the first day of the month of Góa—which could fall anywhere between the eighteenth and the twenty-fifth of February, due to the strictly solar character of the traditional way of keeping track of the passage of time which employed interstitial weeks rather than leap days every few years to correct for seasonal creep. The extra week called sumarauki was always inserted into the summer and the rather ingenious and tidy system developed in the 900s had twelve months of thirty days each (three hundred and sixty plus four epagomenal ones) and the months always began on the same day of the week. The old Icelandic year was divided between “short days” (see also here and here)—Skammdegi—that described the length of daylight during the winter and its corollary “nightless days”—Náttleysi. The dark and harsh first half of the year consisted of:

• mid October – mid November: Gormánuður, Gór’s month which marked the time to harvest and slaughter livestock for the winter
• mid November – mid December: Ýlir, Yuletide 
• mid December – mid January: Mörsugur, feasting time 
• mid January – mid February: Þorri, dead of Winter 
• mid February to mid March: Góa 
• mid March to mid April: Einmánuður, the month of transition

Summer is welcomed with Sumardagurinn fyrsti and the six months of unending days, many named after now forgotten goddesses—making an even stronger argument to honour the women in your lives all year around, follow with:

• mid April – mid May: Harpa, the beginning of Summer 
• mid May – mid June: Skerpia 
• mid June – mid July: Sólmánuður, the sunny month 
• mid July – mid August: Heyannir, time to dry the hay for the livestock 
• mid August – mid September: Tvímánuður, for some reason, the second month 
• mid September – mid October: Haustmánuður, autumn sets in

neroberg

The foothill of the Taunus range just on the outskirts of Wiesbaden—going by the term Hausberg, home mountain owing to the sense of ownership and defining characteristic that the landform has for its neighbouring borough, that I took the opportunity to revisit was originally known as the Ersberg before taking on the more romanticised name in the title in the nineteenth century when an ensemble of structures were built at the summit—with more added over the decades, and a funicular train was put in service to ferry guests to the summit.
The little rail depot was yet closed for the winter—we’d taken it up from the valley beforehand—but walking was a pleasant option. After strolling through a folly-filled park that banked on either side of a small brook, one first encounters the gleaming gold domes and spires of the Russian Orthodox Church of Saint Elizabeth, whose striking beauty, visible throughout Wiesbaden belies a sad story.
Grand Duchess Elizabeth Mikhailova (*1826 – †1845), niece of Emperor Nicholas I, married Adolf, Duke of Nassau (*1817 – †1905), and celebrated a brief but happy personal and political union—living in Schloss Biebrich, until Elizabeth died during the birth of their first child.
Grief-stricken and inconsolable, the Duke choose the spot on the hillside for a memorial church so he could always have a view of it from his residence.
Along with a parsonage and a cemetery, the church is one of the largest Russian Orthodox congregations in Europe outside of Russia—Wiesbaden already having garnered popularity with Russian tourists as a health spa and with a sizable emigre population that grew after the violence and revolution of 1917, and houses the Duchess’ sarcophagus.
A little further up on the hilltop lies an extensive Bergpark, the focal point being a temple, specifically a neoclassic monopteros—a circular colonnade supporting a dome roof, with views of the city below.
All that remains of former guest accommodations (the hotel that catered to guests of the nearby thermal baths burned down in 1989) is a single turret that towers over an amphitheatre. There was also a parkour set up in the forest—dashing through the treetops—but I thought maybe I had hiked enough already for the day but would consider coming back to see how the course is set up.

chart of the moment

This animation, via Digg, of how the top fifteen global brands rankings have changed in the nearly two decades since 2000—set to a rather bracing soundtrack—ultimately proves to be a bit arresting, considering how business and economic models have changed (those rising to the top no where on the radar at the beginning of the video) and happy to see soda and cigarettes  recede but still a little shaken at the swiftness of the rise of tech giants—wondering if there’s much technology left in a sector so dominant.

pon de replay

Currently trending (which is a terribly presumption thing to say and assuredly no longer the case with as quickly as we are on to the next thing) is to find one’s abiding mood and moral compass by conducting an image search with Rihanna plus one’s birthday (day and month) to find the celebrity’s sighting that coincides with that day—and while I quite liked the results that I got of the Barbadian artist spotted on the set of the heist film Ocean’s 8 and think there’s nothing nefarious in this fun—I think it might make for a better daily horoscope if one went with the current date’s paparazzi photo—like this one of her leaving a private bash at Mayfair’s Novikov in 2010.

re: the sources of soviet conduct

Though never intended for public consumption but eventually published in Foreign Affairs magazine under the pseudonym Mister X eighteen months later, Deputy Chief of the Mission of the United States of American to the USSR George F Kennan dispatched his “Long Telegram” back to the State Department in response to questions by the Department of the Treasury as to why Moscow was not supportive of the newly minted institutions of the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund on this day in 1946.
Unable to articulate his answer succinctly—which is often a bit suspect of the author’s grasp of the matter at hand—as Kennan owes in the preamble to the five part thesis that overburdened the telegraphic channels. Kennan’s characterisation that Soviet power was “impervious to the logic of reason: but responded well to “the logic of force” and rooted in nationalism and neurosis—espousing a stance and ideology that would inform and define the policy of containment and excluded the idea of peaceful coexistence.

it’s bananas—b-a-n-a-n-a-s

As part of a series of episodes on the topic of cartels and monopolies, NPR’s Planet Money takes a look at how the pendulum of US justice system swung from one extreme to the other in its view on mergers and acquisitions—from advocating consumer protection and the fostering of competition to the notion that the public benefited from consolidation and corporate imperialism.
The shift in outlook was largely due to the influence of US Solicitor General (elevated to that position due to the carnage of the Saturday Night Massacre) and DC circuit judge Robert Bork (*1927 – †2012)—whose views coloured the opinion of the Supreme Court (whose nomination to the high-court was famously blocked, coining the term to bork as a verb for obstructing or de-platforming) regarding antitrust matters from the 1970s onward and resulting in these giant conglomerates and inescapable subsidiaries. One of the legal scholars contributing to this piece described the government’s extreme stance on both sides as a kid—beginning with the best intentions—starting to spell “bananas” and not knowing when to stop.

life electric

First isolated in a riverbed in 1987 and quickly recognised for the potential as an agent of bioremediation for their affinity for heavy metals that are otherwise toxic to microbes (see also), geobacter excrete electrons as by-products of their metabolism. In collaboration with the University of Ghent, Dutch designer Teresa van Dongen has created—as a demonstration project—lamps (though the frame of the piece is more reminiscent of the body of a virus rather multiplying proteobacteria) powered by this singular bacterial discharge, quartering a colony in a battery where it can thrive—recharged on a weekly basis with a drink of tap water cut with vinegar.