currier & ives

Over yonder on the indices Mental Floss, contributor Glen Gower (the self- described Cliff Claven of Caroling) features some of his favourite trivia about Christmas carols gleaned from an amazing list of curious facts he is busily compiling. It’s fascinating and some that struck me so far is that O Holy Night was the second song to be broadcast over the radio in 1906, and that Do You Hear What I Hear? was written in response to the Cuban Missile Crisis, and that Silent Night (Stille Nacht) exists as a song in over one hundred forty different languages and has been declared by UNESCO as a treasure of intangible cultural heritage.

yule log or tron, troff

Normally, the last few days in the office before Christmas and the inter-festum week are pretty quiet and peaceful with calling on each and every colleague with season’s greetings, but there has been some ruinous and reactionary business that’s managed to sideline everything else.

 Though I know the urgency, a rolling and universal audit, is not over trifles and reflects the tide of public sentiment over bigger contemporary tragedies and the inertia of delay (until after the holidays) and procrastination is a dangerous thing as well, exculpating policy and exporting blame and failure without perspective is neither an enduring remedy. On top of all that, being exhausted and not of the jolliest persuasion, I feel ashamed for worrying about the little distractions—like my generations’ old laptop having become suddenly less reliable and clenching up when I try to use it normally. There are four other computers to use around the house besides, so I think I am not really justified in devoting more time to tinkering with the boot-log that comes rolling past on start-up and the range of non-functionality that comes out of my experiments—but that’s also been a fount of frustrations and causing a bit of writers’ block. I just need to sing some carols and batten down the mood and everything will work out merry and bright.

MMXII: revue and not for prophet

I am sure that in the moment and even more in the near future, the apocalyptic associations of the year will evaporate, replaced with stauncher stuff and remembered for what’s important. While most of the fretting and hand-wringing involved issues of less cataclysmic proportions, there was still surely a bit of vanity in being the height, the end, or possibly final straw of humanity, the Holocene age, and maybe the shadow of rush or procrastination (else, of satisfaction and contentment, too) in the back of people’s minds. Here’s a poorly remembered selection of just a few moments of the past year. It is a little early for superlatives, maybe, but no one is writing 2012 off just yet and it is certainly not a diminishing but rather the opposite as events past into the chronicle.

January: The European Union and others levy trade embargos against Iran over the countries continuing efforts to enrich uranium and nuclear research in a process and debate that has lasted through the year.

February: Queen Elizabeth II celebrated her Diamond Jubilee on the throne of Great Britain and the Common Wealth States. We had to say goodbye to Whitney Houston.

March: After 244 years of publication, the Encyclopædia Britannica is no longer in print—that is, in book form.

April: World stock-markets drop precipitously in reaction to talk of euro-zone debt realities and rumour. China unpegs the yuan from the US dollar and threatens the dollar’s status as a world reserve currency. The Arab Spring continues with uprisings in Bahrain and Syria. We had to say good bye to long-time Band-Stand and New Year’s Eve gala host Dick Clark—well-played, Mayans, well-played.

May: There was spate of bizarre and gory attacks in the United States that invoked both cannibalism and zombies. We had to say good bye to Vidal Sassoon and Donna Summer.

June: We had to say good bye to visionary author Ray Bradbury. Germany rejects proposals to pool EU debt, arguing it is an individual responsibility, while Greece elects an anti-austerity government.

July: CERN laboratories isolate the Higgs-Boson particle. Electricity blackouts in India leave more than a half-a-billion without power for days.

August: The rover Curiosity lands on Mars and begins exploring. We had to say good bye to astronaut Neil Armstrong.

September: A number of terrorist attacks are coordinated against Western interests overseas, including American embassies in response to outrages over contemptible portrayals of culture and religion.

October: A sky-diver plunged from the stratosphere and descended faster than the speed of sound. A hurricane caused death and destruction from the Caribbean up through the eastern seaboard of North America.

November: Barack Obama was re-elected for his second term as US president. The United Nations voted to grant the Palestinian territories with cadet status. We had to say good bye to Larry Hagman.

December: A horrific school shooting happened in a Kindergarten in Connecticut. We had to say good bye to architect and incubator Oscar Niemeyer, sitar-man Ravi Shankar, and jazz innovator Dave Brubeck.

We will see what the close of the year and the new one to come bring.  A lot of the matter of 2012 appears to be continuation of old business, only to out-do itself and be more glorious or notorious.

And though attention and tolerance usually seek out familiar shores right away, it might be that some of the incidents and accidents of the past chapter of months make their consequence known and bring about reform and inspection, like in terms of managing violence and protection or environmental stewardship, in the next.

reportage or end-user agreement

On the state level, two separate regions of Germany are calling for very different reforms whose intentions and actions wear both the sticks-and-stones persona of cyber-affairs and speak to the growing entanglement, irretrievability and dependence on connections and the synapses between people. Officials in the state of Sachsen-Anhalt want to give law-enforcement the ability to shut down telecommunication service providers unilaterally in cases of imminent threat to life and limb, and as a staunch corollary, courts in Schleswig-Holstein want a certain social-networking service to change its policy about joining under a nom de plume and is poised to impose hefty fines should the requirement or real names continue.
Currently, law enforcement can only shut down a cellular tower outside the express physical presence and permission via warrant if and only if there is bomb inside the cell tower. Opponents to the measures fear, as has been done in the US and elsewhere, that the police and government will use these martial-powers to silence dissent and hinder coordination for protests. The proposal further imposes that all infrastructure (along every point) have an easily accessible kill-switch, which can only be brought back online by competent authorities. The social network is refusing to waive the requirement on identity (I never knew that one had to use such credentials but apparently so) and is not entertaining arguments, despite the fact the rule is in violation of German and European Union privacy protections—not that people are guaranteed anonymity or pseudo-anonymity but that people are guaranteed certain protections on their personal data which no business or aggregator government can pretend to honour. Anyone who exercises freedom of speech and expression does so contractually, knowing that there is no intent to harm or befoul, but that contract is not drawn up in a vacuum, by companies or by government agencies. The right to be forgot entails that one’s footprints are not tracked without good reason and that an shadow that cannot be shed be linked to one’s name evermore. It is strange that the trade and tools of civil rights has been summarily reduced to this sort of smugness.

wappenschmied or great seal

While researching something else entirely (and I hope they never manage to work up a deliver system that can filter out all things tangential and only present exactly what one was looking for), I can across this really neat, abstract—modern totem for the City of Frankfurt am Main in use during the years of the Weimar Republic between World War I and II. The constitutional convention of 1919 took up the standard of the city that had hosted the last attempt, some sixty years prior, in deference to those efforts to first unite the German peoples under a constitutional monarchy.

Those seminarians were overcome by war and political intrigues but the task was one worth repeating and the Reichsadler (not empire but rather the word suggests realms) of Frankfurt is reflected in the contemporary seal of the federal government and seen on government buildings. Frankfurt modified its symbols and coat-of-arms to distinguish itself from the central government, and while the vexillology passed down does look quite dignified and officious, this sort-lived alternative offers an interesting statement on anachronism, seeming almost tiki inspired and with the talons of a Lego minifig.

magnificat or o du fröhlich

The evening prayers of the last seven days of Advent, leading up to Christmas, in Western church traditions are punctuated with vocative calls and responses called the O Antiphons. The cycle begins on 17. December with O Sapientia (O Wisdom), then O Adonai (O Lord), and so one, dedicating the evening’s meditation to one aspect attributed to Jesus. The tradition was originally restricted to the cloister and each of the seven days was an occasion to exchange presents among the community, but later was made part of Christmas time celebrations.

This seems like a very nice and collected way to approach the holidays and properly wind down from all the jingle-pressure, and although the 21. December has garnered an awful reputation—though only, I think, for this year and not for very much longer, I do appreciate the fact that the chant or that night is O Oriens—o breaking of the day, splendor of the light eternal. Though we should fear not, we ought not, I think, to stammer along without any take-away. It is not necessarily something dodged or a saving grace, to reboot from dreary pessimism, but could still be an antiphon that days, no matter how limitless or numbered, are gifts and should not be taken for granted.

3. advent: trim up the tree with christmas stuff

night gallery or genius mode

Occasionally I wish that I had better recall of my dreams. Mostly they evaporate too quickly and I’m only left with the nagging tug of something forgotten, and regardless of what techniques I try, I am usually only able to remember my dreams as I am dreaming and they all come back in many layers with similarities that tunnel through. Although I am far from sure that I am loosing anything particularly creative, profound or prophetic by not remembering or if that’s just the preserving nature of dreaming, I do sometimes manage to retain, with some effort, not so much the content but rather the mechanics of an idea that I dreamt. I woke with the impression, already slipping into vagaries, whether ones nightly imaginings were responsive or pre-programmed.

I have experienced of course the alarm clock or other noises or physical urgencies ingratiating themselves an instant before waking, and I wondered if whole themes weren’t triggered by the mind’s chemistry responding to being too cold or overheated or other subtle stimuli. I also recollected the possibility that dreaming run on a fixed schedule, that maybe one dreams ones entire life as the subconscious sees it, or pre-determined segments of it, like a radio station’s broadcast day, with different scheduled hosts. Thanks for joining us for the Witching Hour, and next we’ll be playing you through 0400 with some familiar classics like impossible staircases, small dogs, driving from the backseat and vertical warehouses, but first here is a one-hit-wonder from the eighties, repetitive Tetris stepwise motion. I wonder if what strikes us as memorable or contemporary—or even as therapeutic or cathartic, in dreams only sticks because anything and everything is cycled through and the waking mind latched on to a coincidence of memory and revises, rewrites the whole evening’s play-list in a way we can make use of it in the here and now. Dreaming’s clearing-house, I suspect, is both responsive and on a certain timetable but maybe the masks that the waking and sleeping brain put on each other make such analogies very limited.