nocturne

While the feast of Saint Lucy (Luciadagen or Lussimesse) is not exclusive to the great white north, marking a moment of rebirth and illumination during the darkest time of the year and promising that if one has made it this far one can expect to survive the rest of the harsh winter and the daylight will soon begin to outshine the night (going by the Julian calendar—13 December would be the Winter Solstice, instead of 21 December, the longest night of the year), it is strongly connected to Norwegian and Scandinavian tradition.

Parents of daughters can also expect a special breakfast in bed, in addition to the pageantry and ceremony.  Though perhaps symbolism is divided between celebrations in far climes and in the Mediterranean south, where the lighted crown born by the saint represents the non-consuming fire at her martyrdom rather than a night-light, customs evolved at both poles—in places like Malta, Italy and Finland, Sweden but little in between.  Recognition, however, has spread and new and unique traditions and interpretations have formed. One area where Saint Lucy has taken root is Denmark, who honour the insertion of an unfamiliar holiday, which came about quite recently and an export from their Nordic neighbours as a means to subtly protest occupation during World War II, both with a flame that does not sear but also does not waiver.

googleganger or shift + print scrn | sysrq

Since the federal moratorium on purchasing pilfered or questionable data—far from quality intelligence and doing far greater damage to German/Swiss relations, some constituent states are still engaging the bounty of opportunists and scorned employees for compact-disks whose authenticity and reconnaissance is never guaranteed. One of the latest dossiers is apparently little more than a screen-capture from a bank’s terminal, but it still fetched a high price.

Bavaria, among the other states, is a hold-out and so far has refrained from seeking out or taking up any offers that purpose to tattle on tax-avoiders—directly, least, but has allowed other authorities in some cases to extend their jurisdiction and have cooperated in investigations. While in America one’s identity is tethered to a social security number (though it was never intended to be a universal identifier and certainly not a better or more secure system) or the like, in Germany one is triangulated through name, residence and date of birth. In a case of mistaken and insisted identity from earlier in the year that was only very recently resolved (not identity-theft but rather identity-burden), a woman from a community in Bavaria with the very ubiquitous name of Kristin Muller was approached by out-of-state tax-agents (Bavaria had agreed to allow these agents to fight crime by proxy) who rifled through this housewife’s modest home and accused her of hoarding a half-million euro in Swiss institutions. The woman was aghast, naturally, but at quite a loss when it came to distinguishing herself from her sister-in-name, who remains unknown and at-large. When Muller tried to clear her record with the reporting bank, no one was able to confirm or deny whether Muller and Muller-Prime were the same individual or not, since this data list only contained names and account numbers, due to Swiss banking secrecy laws and even if the bank knew more, it was legally bound not to disclose it. What an awful mess to untangle for Frau Muller and other potential victims of circumstance, and I wonder if should could have claimed the balance of the deposit along with the liability the tax-agents insisted she owed. Perhaps Bavaria has been right in not pursuing what’s lauded as maverick justice and a way to level the playing field but in reality does not always deliver.

making spirits blithe

It’s funny how the latitude of bad (but not chaotic) weather compartmentalizes things, not in a way, hopefully, to create a chore or hardship out of every errand but rather to mask, imbue it with some seasonally fun challenges. Of course, a lot of underlying support goes along with the invitation to be out-of-doors and resist the urge to hibernate or curse the snow and ice, reliability to oppose the exception throughout the rest year of good health and adequate sanitation and infrastructure.

I suppose (though I am the first to admit to being not among the it-getters when it comes to skiing) it’s like the thrill of being outside of one’s comfort-zone that comes with winter-sports and being able to take to the slopes and to push oneself to enjoy the elements. Jingle, jangle, jolly.

peer, neighbour, hierarch or honeycomb hideout

Though I don’t know that the later was an inspired criticism of the former, it is nonetheless interesting, especially in much more fickle times when opinion and sentiment are hoisted kept circulating with a steady volley, that these constructs are less than a generation apart. Neither illustrates an extinguisher or a fire-brand, neces-sarily, but does reflect the revolutionary movement of the times, to which not all nations succumbed to in the same way. I wonder what figurative architecture, sturdy and steadied like an arch or a flying-buttress and sense of surface tension allowed some to resist transformation, before or behind the curb depending on where one stands, while many other regimes were turned or reformed. It’s as if, like a keystone or some other hack of gravity like centrifugal force, there is a strange kind of inertia from civic pyramids where internal and external pressures are in equilibrium, up to a point, and resist change. 

taurus-littrow

Just ahead of the fortieth anniversary of mankind’s absence from the Moon, Boing Boing shared a poignant little website that exists for the sole purpose of answering the question how many people are there in space right now.

Kurz vor dem vierzigsten Jahrestag der letze Mondlandung, dargestellt einer schmerzlich Web-Seite, dass nur insoweit besteht als Anwort zu den Frage wie viel Leute sind jetzt im All.

thaw or back forty

The frigid weather and the cavalcade of snow made me wonder about the point of correspondence between the Celsius and Fahrenheit scales, having always thought that that unnaturally low but not unattainable temperature marked the threshold of one or the other measurements—that the system broke down after this point and relied on the other to carry it.

This thinking is sort of like the logic of citrus growers who douse their orchards with water before a hard frost, figuring the frozen water will shield the fruit and that cold attacks the more vulnerable first. Negative forty degrees Fahrenheit and Centigrade (Latin for hundred steps) is, however, only a spot where the two scales cross and immediately depart again, -50 °F and -50 °C being as different as 10° F and 10° C.
Mathematically, I suppose that it is not unusual that the two systems ought to match up at some point, as opposed to any other point, such as one that’s closer to everyday weather. The two scales are based on like fractions and intervals but have slightly different rationales: both are measured in degrees but the earlier Fahrenheit system takes the measurements of an angle more literally.
Knowing that there was distinct possibilities for something much colder than wintry ice, set its null point to the freezing point of salt water, and the 32° F of melting ice is separated from the boiling point of water (212° F) by 180 degrees with hopes of placing other natural phenomena at other perfect, round angles, like human body temperature at 60° from freezing, etc. but these hoped-for correspondences did not quite pan out. The more straightforward degrees, gradients of Celsius are one-one-hundredths of the way from freezing to boiling of water under standard conditions, by definition—it being worthy of noting that pressure, altitude differences have negligible effects on how water freezes (except in extreme cases like at the bottom of the ocean) but has quite a large impact in terms of boiling. Originally, the Celsius scale was inverted, based on this dismaying observation, with 100 set at the freezing point and counting down to zero where water started to boil. I image had it remained so, as the Swedish astronomer had proposed, there might be some very different match ups in the weather, but of course, cold to one person is absolutely balmy in other climes.

as plain as or party on the patio

A colleague from work and I were discussing the curious case of the Jarhesendflügelfigur (the end of the year figure with wings) which was the official term for a Christmas angel during East German times, which tolerated decorations but tried to remove the religious connotations from the holidays. My colleague shared another term that vied for acceptance first among German linguistic purists in the 1800s (and saw a bit of a revival among other purists to come later) called Gesichtserker, a face-porch, meant to replace the German word Nase for nose—though the notion that Nase was a “foreign” word was a misconception and Erker, an oriel window, was in fact a loan word from the French arquière and this group of linguists wanted to eliminate such outside influences, like popularizing other awkward words like Stelldichein over rendezvous. Such a lexical shift never took hold. I found it really unbelievable and a bit apocryphal, like I am sure future generations will view episodes of the recent past of using words as ammunition, like freedom fries for French fries, over France’s (pommes frites are a Belgian invention) refusal to join in the Iraqi invasion.

evergreen

We managed to free the old hand-me-down artificial, office Christmas tree from that storage closet that we lost the keys to just in time for the party. It did make the gathering a bit more festive and bright, but it looks positively bleak and overly contemplative there alone in the stairwell. We moved it out there from the conference room so others might enjoy it.

I felt a little sad for it, afraid it might throw itself down those four storeys. I suspect it knows it is an office tree by now, called a seasonal tree depending on the fashion and maybe during some years, not displayed at all, to be jammed unceremoniously back in the cabinet, tangled and with other junk stacked on top of it, not having been the centerpiece of any hearth or home nor focus of families, not needing to be trimmed with ornaments nor host to a gift exchange--our traditional White Elephant game has been a catered affair out of the office--just needing to be dusted off and plugged in. I will be able to enjoy it and look at it, though, when I look up from my desk into that weird and spacious breezeway over the landing on our floor, at least, and maybe the odd visitor will too. It nice how such old artefacts that need no upgrading but are rediscovered and reintroduced to their places are fast and old friends.