plunder

It was announced that agents of the US-led occupation stumbled upon untold riches in Afghanistan in form of  previously unknown veins of copper, lithium and gold.  I am wondering how premature the release of this news was, since the Russians are far better pre-postioned to jump this claim, and what will it do for the only stable commodity on the world-markets, gold?  I am happy for the Afghanis if they can rebuild their country and undo the waves of damage wrought by the English, the Soviets, the Taliban and the Americans but I don't think such prospects will be surrendered so calmly.

mosaic mosaic

A woman at work was going back to the States permanently the other day, and before leaving she had asked several times to look through our photographs from Turkey.  On her last day, I finally brought my laptop to work and we looked through some of them, but it made me realize that I didn't have a good way to share pictures, short of an afternoon slide-show on the Wii, which is a lot of fun.  I don't do bookface and I don't use one of these photo-sharing sites.  But thinking back to another farewell, I remembered that a computer-technician had made a mosaic portrait for the woman who was leaving made up of all her former coworkers.  H and I take so many pictures and there has not really been a forum or occasion for all of them.  I found this pretty neat application that will remake an image into a mosaic of selected pictures.  This tile mosaic from Hagia Sophia contains 10 000 little images from our Istanbul vacation.  I'll have to fiddle with the settings and the target composition to sort out a better, wider collection and so its not a lot of microscopic pictures of ceilings and concrete but this was fun to do.

swift justice

Recently, the German high court in Erfurt ruled that the summary dismissal of a cashier with some thirty years tenure at the super-market for pilfering a few bottle deposit coupons worth a euro and change was grossly disproportionate to the crime.  The proceedings lasted for some time before a verdict was reached, but right away I noticed that the check-out girls in Bad Karma, our fair city, and elsewhere now have been tutored to put the deposit coupon (Pfandbon) aside, wedge it in the cash-register like it was a fifty euro bill, until they're done ringing up (this was done more casually everywhere just last week), that was intended for payment so there's no argument on the matter of change back.

slant operation

As collective outrage rallies for more than cosmetic changes to allowances for off-shore drilling, reinstating the ban, leving windfall taxes, and British Petroleum is gleeful claiming that by early next week, virtually all oil will be virtually contained, but if one was not watching carefully, it may be missed since after the news item tumbled into achival obscurity, it seems that the company bought off internet seach engines in order to re-direct people from the negative press.  I suppose that's a very bad thing, trying to muzzle the interwebs, but I guess it's not the worse thing they have done: the worse thing would be the oil spill.  There is still a big impact zone that will not recover for years, and the oil clean up operation negates all other good intentions of sound environmental policy and stewardship

shortfall

The Local has a fairly good breakdown of the austerity measures that the German government enacting in order to allign its budget within EU standards.  Meanwhile, economists within the Treasury are projecting that US debt to earnings are continuing rise and spiral out of control.  These are very different metrics and with different intentions, but it seems that German cut will do more than stave off the enevitable insolvency, compared to the grim prognostication of the Americans.

peppermint disco

Today was Tom Jones' birthday.  The normally sedate and conservation German news radio station that I listen to during my commute to work announced this and really made my morning super-charged.  Last week I mentioned the virtue in being disabused from misheard lyrics but could not summon up any other examples, but now I recall that I always thought the song Sex Bomb was actually Sex Bot, as in robot or Adrienne Barbeau-bot with baby you can turn me on and other references to satillites and infrared vision.

status nascendi

New Scientist and several other sources are excitedly citing findings on a chemical, topographical study on Saturn VI (the moon of Titan) from Strasbourg's Space University (that's a pretty snazzy alma mater) as possibly indication of alien life.  Akin to noting that concentrations of oxygen were inexplicably less at the surface of the Earth, research has revealed that there may be a respiratory exchange of hydrogen for methane on Titan, for which life forms could account, from unexpectedly low concentrations below at certain altitude.  I imagine that such aliens would be like nothing decades of sci-fi fandom have primed us for, no humanoids that are political animals in any familiar way or disembodied intelligences, but delicate membranes carried aloft on the wind like jellyfish in the sky.  After all, humans are still only just recognizing that whales are not just prey or dolphins not just gay sharks, not to mention the wealth of living things that lie just below our line of sight.  Nonetheless, it is certainly news to get goosebumps over.

ancient chinese secret, huh?

This is still the year of the Tiger, and I wonder if some of what's happening around the world would have been predicted according to the trends expected in the lunar year.  Hindsight is delightfully useful in these sorts of things.  Soothsayers forewarned that it would be turbent for global economies and the Tiger is the steward of things chthonic, elemental and buried.  The same soothsayers urged investment in gold and other metals, which was not really going out on a limb with that one.

I wonder, however, given that there's all this news that lingers--and it seems no one has the tolerance or the attention span for protracted, drawn-out hearings or middling suspense any more, if Tiger can be blamed for that too.  The network news cycle does not even have the stamina for economic collapse day in and day out and soon turns its gaze on other things--but it seems like the disruptions of air traffic from the volcano in Iceland, a series of earthquakes, and now the oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico are not flagging. 

Of course, few stories end really once their notoriety runs out, and most people tend to forget about the recovery process, missed opportunities for revenue-generating, or environmental impact right away, despite hearteninged attempts to the contrary.  I wonder what else the year of the Tiger has in store, Golems that awake and slither from the underground.  Maybe the big lesson of the times, is not to be complacent about one's surroundings