schuldenbremse

While the slow but inevitable train-wreck of the US economy lurches past more and more whistle-stops with the strange sort of glee of acceptance, and the parliamentarians of the EU’s financial agenda, happy to be upstaged by their American cousins, reflect on how to mitigate national austerities fairly amongst its dues-paying members, Germany has with some quiet deliberation and luxury of discipline has achieved—projected at least, a terrain of a balanced budget. This comes some two years ahead of schedule after the 2009 passage, incorporation into the Basic Law (Gründgesetz) of a structurally reined in fiscal plan. Germany would have been closer to its goal but will maintain its pledge to the European emergency bail-out fund. Debt-holdings are still relatively high but so too conditions that allow a diversified portfolio, which seems kind of naïve or smug like a narrative from a text-book recently made irrelevant. Such an accomplishment is anomalous but definitely not something outmoded.

qwertz or lölly, lölly, lölly get your umlauts here

I recall being quite red-faced in college when a professor, exasperated, asked why on earth I would spell Goethe’s name with an ö. “I bet it’s just because you figured how to do that with your word-processor.”

Well, yes— technology barely had a foothold back then, and I thought at the time that all instances of oe, in German words, had to be because the type-setter either was not able or did not know how to create an umlaut. In English, they are still a rare enough occurrence to elide over quick, but I detest restoring to rendering really common German words as fuer or ueber or oeffen. It’s just not aesthetically pleasing—or seeing my address displayed to me on some websites with a bunch of garbled characters, like it’s a cuss, because the platform can’t handle a few exotic diereses. If your keyboard does not have the right keys for it, one can in Windows use the following short-cuts, depressing ALT plus:

Ä = 0196      ä=0228
Ë = 0203      ë=0235
Ï = 0207       ï=0239
Ö = 0214     ö=0246
Ü=0220       ü=0252
Ÿ=0178       ÿ=0255


On an Apple platform, it’s a bit more intuitive, just taking the Option key—or on a touch pad, just depressing the letter for a bit longer. For script, it’s the letter (Capitalized or lower-case) and uml(aut) preceded by an ampersand.

There is, however, the potential for minor irritation with spacing and kerning, even in the Sprachraüme, including Turkish, that use such accent marks. One particular Autobahn sign, which I pass on my way home, employees this funny, glaring non-standard g in order to accommodate Umlauten above and below. One would think that Germans could improve on this layout. Sometimes one finds stylized typefaces that minimize these effects without detracting from the sound or meaning imparted with vertical or embedded dots. If there’s ever celebrities or world-leaders with a lot of umlauts to their names, some clever person should make such a standard alphabet for newsprint and make it freely available. If I am able to figure it out, I will surely share.

curb-side service or scavenger-hunt

There has been quite a preponderance of discarded television sets throughout the city recently, just left on the curb-side, which does not quite seem in keeping with German laws governing electronic trash, so I thought that there was some kind of cathode-ray drive. Such a call, however, did not seem forthcoming, as I noticed that the tv’s were not disappeared right away, but lain and were re-shuffled for weeks.
Some enterprising professionals, I thought, might be able to harvest the components and scrap a significant profit, I thought, but then wondered if such expansive and Turing-complete progenitors, less pressured by a drive for miniaturization were themselves rife for prospecting and reclamation. I’m not sure if this is the case, or whether industry is truly prepared for its onion-skin of obsolescence and yet could suffer any takers. Not everyone could safely harvest the metallurgic legacy that appears in the trash, nor should they try. Vertical living affords an important level of anonymity, as well, and maybe more ought to be done to incentivize an unpopular breed of backwardness.

the life of pi

At some elusive yet definitive point on Thursday afternoon, for some blurred fraction of a second, just before school is dismissed, time will be aligned with Π, the fixed ratio of the circumference of a circle to its diameter.

Pi—pronounced pee and not pie by the Greeks, and corresponds to the 14th day of March and then the Pi moment comes (in military time) at some instant in the afternoon, an exact, though endless, star-date. Pi Day coincidentally also marks the birthday of Albert Einstein. In case you miss it—or don’t care for the switching between the month-day-hours conventions, there’s a second chance later in the summer, though not to be confused, known as Pi Approximation Day, 22nd July, in deference to the improper fraction sometimes used to represent the ratio. The seventh of October ought to be designated as World Ocean Day. It would be strange if we counted, based our number system, not just on the commutable properties of maths but also with landmarks of constants—one, natural logarithm, pi, etc. Could we have found the numbers of physics and nature without having first devised the means to number things for our own convenience?

surf and turf or pyroplastic treats

Our neighbours most always holiday in the Canary Islands and bring us little souvenirs (Mitbringseln). Knowing not very much about Tenerife, one of the main islands, I was sort of guilty of dismissing it as a destination that did not require an excess of creativity, especially in succession, and maybe a sort of rugged and isolated place—those sort of resorts duplicated inland and within easy reach with the peaks and lakes that one can see just outside of the window at home but won’t venture out to see even in the best weather but will brave reliably wechselhaft oceanic conditions and go out to see the grey just because one is on vacation. We’ll do that as well, so I am not judging my neighbours’ sense of adventure or taste.
The latest gift, however, of Los Piedras del Teide (Teide Stones) encouraged me to investigate. Despite the volcanic peak on the cover, it took me some research to realize that that the chocolate covered almonds were supposed to represent the pyroplastic blasts of this still active volcanic peak. It turns out that this projection is the third highest volcano on earth and dominates a land rich in outstanding natural beauty and a unique aboriginal culture, the Guanches, who revered this landmark like the Greeks their Mt. Olympus. Pico Teide was considered the pillar that held up the heavens, after its people saw the loss of one of their patron gods of light and magic was captured by their devil, Guayota, represented, in the main, by a black dog, from which the archipelago gets its name, and held captive here. They appealed to the ruler of the gods for intervention, Achamán, who obliged by fixing their cosmos to this rock, trapping the devil underneath. In modern times, the molten and other-worldly landscape has been used extensively as proving-grounds for scientists preparing for Martian exploration. It is pretty keen when one can learn something from a souvenir and bring a place into the foreground.

pope trope

The special chimney has been hoisted above the terra-cotta roof of the Sistine Chapel, the deliberation floor for some 115 cardinals, to proclaim to a watching-world their consensus or failure.

Though the Church leaders are now muzzled from talking to the press, there is much speculation about those considered papabile, some are suggesting that the time is right for a reformer, a manger of the faith and not just a theological defender with a few candidates from outside the bounds of the Old World. With or without the media-blackout, however, the ranks trying to apply a political template to the process know the members of the conclave quite well, and considering the change in Church suffrage, instituted not too long ago by Pope John Paul II, which only allows bishops under eighty years of age to vote (excluding some 35 grey-eminences from other arch-dioceses)—directly at least, all those to cast a ballot were appointed either by the Pope Emeritus or his predecessor, and possibly unlikely to depart far from the ideologies that elevated them—at least not in any way to achieve a consensus. This is a level above mundane politics, despite who might try to run interference. What do you think the outcome will be?

paved with good intentions

As the tenth anni- versary—and a decade on, it’s getting a little hard to remember that there was a time without unending struggle let alone envisioning it will come to an end but I think no one who was beating those drums wanted or expected the consequences wrought, of the US invasion of Iraq, author and former diplomat Peter van Buren is sharing his experiences and assessment of how the fronts and the genuine aspirations of Pax Americana demonstrated (gradually, reluctantly and still in denial for many) that the cavalry, the crusaders were themselves the greatest sources of strife and ruin for the region and beyond.
From potemkin humanitarian gestures that were detached from reality and insult to the basic needs of a war-torn population, stark disregard or ignorance of the counter-balances of power being sloppily removed, to squandered opportunities for promoting real concord—not to mention all the death and destruction in vain and demonizing a culture and religion to the whole of the Western civilization, van Buren tries to illustrate how the best intentions rang hollow, if not naïvely so.
One can argue that simple swagger and hectoring cannot account for all the misadventures and when things stop making sense, one ought to follow the money. That is an important consideration and I am sure there’s more than a kernel of greed behind a lot of the US overtures for freedom and democracy, but I do not believe it was ever the objective (well-meaning or not, which I tend to think on the levels that made the decisions) to fold the punished and enfeebled hand of the US out of the round of chaos they created. The entanglement—probably with roots reaching back several decades, is too big to bow out of gracefully and I am afraid that the withdrawal will be painfully stubborn for all involved.

liartown, USA and codename: SPENCH

The happy seekers at Boing Boing share a wonderful Tumblr cascade (not necessarily safe or appropriate for work or people without a sense of humour that ranges from crass to subtle) from Sean Tejaratchi whose eclectic genius for mashups and original juxtaposition creates some very funny reinterpretations.

I especially like some of his re-imagined signage, animal memes and, further back in the archives, movie-teasers and television series, like Marple after Dark and Gypsy Cop. It’s been said that the Tumblr platform is a backlash against the social, over-exposed blog, and while niche audiences entice further exploration, some things are definitely for sharing.