unikat

Friday afternoons are usually conducive to a bit of aimless browsing about.  Sometimes it seems that it takes people the whole work week to puzzle out a disaster of significant immediacy to spring from the end of the day on Friday.  Other times, especially during fairer weather, it seems those same dilemma-rousers can't be bothered for their keen sense of time.  While checking what was out-and-about for the weekend, I stumbled across this wonderful gallery of fashion, taken ad hoc on streets in Köln by a photographer very adept at capturing portraits of individual senses of style.  Yesterday, a coworker's husband, at a ceremony at the culmination of a big project, said that perhaps now with this over, we could enjoy a quiet and relaxed Friday.  I replied that we probably wouldn't recognize it if it came along.  Though it is a shame that one needs reminding--others seem to never forget--there is virtue in sometimes slacking off, confident that at least the immediate has been addressed and bedded.  It is a little like these expressive faces and unique costumes that don't seem so remarkable and photo-worthy in one's own eyes but brilliant through the eyes of another.  Sometimes, on a quiet afternoon, with the weather holding up, we are only tethered to our desks, passively on strike, to notice and celebrate such things.

billions and billions

While I am sure that some one could counter this with a statistical anomaly to explain this spate of occurences, it does seem that there have been quite a few earthquakes lately--or at least what's been deemed worthy for copy-cat reporting: Haiti, Chile, Turkey, Mexico and Indonesia.  I wonder if this uptick has any thing to do, as some would repute, with the CERN LHC coming back on-line and evaporating microscopic black holes destabilizing the earth's crust and mantle and magma being coaxed closer to the surface and causing seismic activity.

Carl Sagan, years ago, speculated that perhaps what accounts for the dearth of intelligent alien life, lack of encounters, is due to advancement to one critical point in technological progress, wherein the species either figures out how to safely harness the new power or ends up destroying itself with it.  Sagan thought that nuclear weapons were the dark test, but maybe it's in cellular phones and electro-smog or in courting the Higgs-Boson particle.

and tang was a spinoff from the space race

Egyptologists at universities in Switzerland and Germany (including my former home at the foot of the campus in the fair city of Würzburg) are finding a novel use for the latest reactionary technology meant to keep us safe: the full body scanner, surplus I suppose that officials are loath to install at European airport, are very adept at penetrating mummy wrappings.

The scanners can take good photographs of the mummified innards without being terribly invasive--at least the ancient Egyptians do not feel their privacy violated when they are being screened for contraband and fairy dust.

free-range or event-horizon

Enforcement of a recent decision to liberate the hens, banning the keeping of battery fowl, has meant that German is experiencing an Easter egg shortage that has caused the Easter Bunny and his accomplices to bring in imports.   The surplus eggs, I'm sure, are being supplied by strike-breakers still confined to cages, though.  The chickens should have unionized a long time ago.  The shortage did not stop H, however, from masterfully decorating the place for Easter.

In other developments, CERN's Large Hadron Collider (the German term for particle accelerator is Teilchen Abschleuniger, which is hard to puzzle out) is back on line and has crossed a new energetic record.  Power unleashed by the collisions approach conditions experienced during the Big Bang, and interestingly, the facility is also the coldest place in the universe: the magnetic coils are kept within a fraction of absolute zero in order to run effectively.  Researchers are underway to new discoveries about the cause of universal gravitation and supersymmetries.  Though the majority of the scientific community downplay or dismiss fears as unfounded, a vocal minority warns that these experiments could destroy the earth by creating mini-blackholes or anti-matter.  Angela Merkel, the Kanzlerin, has an advanced degree in Physics from the University of Leipzig, and I am sure would voice her warnings if she thought otherwise.  If she and others underestimated the consequences, I doubt an official apology would suffice.

arguendo or Catchascatchcan

Angela Merkel has been meeting this week with Recep Tayyip Erdogan and Abdullah Gul and today is being treated to a signt-seeing tour of Istanbul of the Blue Mosque and Hagia Sophia after a summit that has not hurdled many disagreements and points of contention.  Merkel is our scout and cruise director, at least.  Resistant to the notion of assimilation, Turkey is pressing for inclusion of Turkish language primary and secondary school for the diaspora.  On the other side, Merkel has reaffirmed her shared hesitation about EU membership for the state, whose admissions process has been held up on more than one count, like refusal to recognize Cypriot sovereignty.

My current unit for my MBA studies focuses on international business law, and while it is just a smattering of knowledge--I understand what is meant by the various legal and accountable spectres of ltd and plc and even GmBH and KG--I feel I have learned a few things.  Not many matters of diplomacy and politico-economic unions, outside of trade and the aegis of common law, are touched on as such, per se, inter alia but I suspect that when Germany says that it and Turkey have a special relationship already and the two should work within that framework, it refers to an old Roman by the name of Status Quo.

eastertide or turkish delight

Spring recess for German school is this week leading up to Easter and many families are taking this break to embark on the year's first vacation.  It's relatively slow and quiet right now, due to this exodus--short of like the lemming health care professionals' escape en masse during the month of August.  Mind you don't get sick then. 

But we have had nebulous plans to have our next trip a bit later in the month, and for quite some time, though the agenda has not been fully articulated.  Who would want to take a break, unless compelled, when things are not so hectic and one can expect a lot of company?  I am excited and I fully expect the planning phase to come together very soon.  We have booked at least the essentials of passage to Istanbul, and have just been overwhelmed with history, ancient and modern, and have been studying to be a little better prepared for the next adventure.

universal coverage or dragnet

Being a civil servant and a conscientious bureaucrat, I feel I am a bit spoiled when it comes to entitlements like health care coverage.  I complain about the quality and speed of reimbursement, at least in a strictly theoretical sense since I fortuneately have never had occasion to make a claim against my policy and that's mostly just commiseration with those who have been at the mercy of insurers' schedules.  I realize, however, that most others would be happy and grateful to have a plan like this, subsidized by the US government--at least until last week.

I  hope this new reform act, which also has a clever proviso that's not been talked up much that better defines SallieMae as a quasi-government agency and culls predatory lenders from the student loan process, guarantees at least these baseline standards for everyone.  One special case, however, I do wonder about would apply to this corps of us diplomats, ambassadors of red tape--I get worn down by the fact that in this job, one is not allowed or encouraged many times to be smart or helpful but the exact opposite and most of the end-products of government work is of the same ilk.  Before (at least, last week) one was allowed to drop this relatively gracious insurance package if due to what's called a "life event."  If I became eligible for insurance under the German system--or chose to go route, I would be able to opt out.  Am I still allowed to do so, and what of those already under German Krankenversicherung?  Or does that now take a full and complete renunciation.

cute interlude or the rites of Spring

The online German cultural magazine The Local (auch auf englisch) has an adorable montage of zoo babies.  This website is great to browse through from time to time for human interest and off-beat articles that usually aren't part of mainstream translation.