vacay and staycation

Traditionally, August is the month when Germans and most other Europeans take holidays, and there's an old, rather tongue-in-cheek adage against falling ill during that month since hardly a doctor is to be found. I heard a report on the radio on Monday—the first workday after the last huzzah, I suppose, of August, which I thought at first was a bit tongue-in-cheek too, but the topic was addressed with all earnestness and I guess that really reveals where my mindset reverts to.

The callers and the panel of experts sounded like a bunch of recalcitrant school children, dragging their feet and dreading the new academic year, when talking about resuming Common Time for the work year, girding oneself mentally and techniques for easing the transition. I know we have been very bad about travel this year and taking any extended leave of absence (or rather very good from an American point of view, since one rarely hears as a lament “we only took three vacations this year”) and am never eager to return to the day-to-day drudgery—which is only endured for the chance to make the next trip, but I was mortified that I was unable to at first relate and mistook the whole exchange as a lampoon against day-dreamers and leave-takers. There is another adage—that Americans live to work and the rest of the world works to live. I hope I am firmly in the latter category.

he ain't ratched

Although the truly positive associations stop at fancy and at best the term quickly atrophies into a back-handed compliment, like being called a champagne-socialist, I think I would like to champion the introduction of the German word Prunk into the international pidgin. Like posh that never really caught on, prunk can indicate something elaborate or ostentatious, flaunting or ceremonial—bling, I think it describes a lot of things and people's attitudes towards presentation and deportment. There's a certain weightiness—on loan—that gives the term a certain substance, as if one could plonk it down, whatever the estimation, rather than just being some glittering, costume-badge.

dynamic duo: parish church of saint cecilia

Taking a leisurely but unwanted drive to start the work-week, and having learnt about the further collaborations of master architect Johann Bathasar Neumann and fresco artist Christoph Thomas Scheffler, I stopped in the town of Heusenstamm by Offenbach. On my way to see the baroque church, among their , I first passed under a very fancy (prunkvolle) gate, which the German Emperor Franz I had built in honour of his son's, Josef, being crowned the king of the Romans in Frankfurt am Main.

This post is  a precursor to becoming ruling the parallel Holy and Roman Empire of the Germans, and keeping control in the Hapsburg family.
Franz was residing at the Palace of Heusenstamm for the event—the Schloss is today used as the town's city hall and holds other administrative offices, surrounded by a palatial garden.
The town itself, after the extinction of earlier, founding dynasties, was firmly under the control of the dukes of the Schönborn family, prince-bishops and electors of Würzburg and Bamberg.

Family members, I learnt, were buried in the crypt of this church, which with the support of her famous relations Duchess Maria Theresa had commissioned. I marveled at the ceiling, depicting among other things the resurrection of Lazarus, and discovered that the patroness, a Roman maiden that got cold-feet before marriage for pious reasons (quite a common reason for beatification back then, it seems) became, for singing at her wedding, in a round about way the muse of church music and someone for composers to look to for inspiration. In fact, the Cecilia that Paul Simon extols in the famous song is a little prayer for frustrated song-writers, lamenting the distractions that come with the lifestyle.

triple-witching or who you gonna call?

The mayor of a sizable village in Abruzzo has conscripted the assistance of the Italian branch of the European Paranormal Activity Society (EPAS) to investigate mysterious sounds haunting the area.
I thought, sadly, that society had become too jaded for claims lacking photographic documentation or peer-review and appropriate adjudication or co-opted by the within-explanation biology and pathology of zombies, and so it is pretty keen to discover that there are still true-believers (despite their public front, reminiscent of faux-documentaries) just rearing to be of service for situations like this. Surely there are phenomena that do not yield for tradition explanations, despite whatever array of chroniclers that ought to be available, at any place or at any time and strangeness that is camera-shy. What do you think? Does your part of the realm of the living need the help of the ghost-busters to help settle accounts? Just remember, don't cross the streams.

kofferraum or bring a towel

I stumbled over a delightful blog by the name of Ask the Past, full of practical albeit subject to ridicule advice from old publications. Trying to harriedly take stock of what I might need for our weekend-getaway and allay it most efficiently, the following recommendations from an Italian peripatetic from 1480 gave me some solice and direction:

"[A traveller] should carry with him two bags: one very full of patience, the other containing two hundred Venetian ducats, or at least one hundred and fifty... furthermore, he should provision himself with good Lombard cheese, sausages, tongue, and other cured meats of every sort; white biscuits, some cakes of sugar, and various confections, but not a great quantity because they spoil quickly. Above all he should take plenty of fruit syrup, because that is what keeps a man alive in extreme heat; and also ginger syrup to settle his stomach if it is upset by too much vomiting."

Though we need not worry about the goons at airport security confiscating liquids or foodstuff or undeclared monetary instruments, it is nice to know that patience, over-packed, is an inalienable prescription for any journey. The site is definitely worth the visit and further exploration on topics of all sorts.

social mediation

It should come as no surprise, since nothing seems out of bounds—especially for the information that we've volunteered for scrutiny, but the revelation that lenders world-wide are using ones social media connections to supplement more traditional means of gauging creditworthiness. Apparently, the company that one keeps and their own credit-histories can have a significant impact, especially for those absent any track-record of loans and repayments, young people and first time-buyers, to reference. I wonder what repercussions that this sort of financial-intelligence might have on how one cultivates connections, friends of friends, realizing that anyone may prove a liability and probably not a source of collateral. Maybe it's better to sit out this dance.

vee-dub or pão-de-forma

Via Jalopnik comes news that the last of the T-2's, which until this year were being produced at a Volkswagen factory in Brazil, will be manufactured and released on 31 December, due mostly to more stringent safety standards for automobiles.
To honour the end of the of the sixty-four year production run of the Bulli, the micro-bus (the hippie van was also known as the vee-dub to English speakers, since, like the world-wide-web, enunciating the W's of the initialism took more time than the whole name), the factory will be producing a special nostalgic line with the classic off-white and baby blue colour scheme of the sixties. In Brazil—which I remember manufactured the classic Beetle along with a plant in Mexico also for decades after it disappeared from US and European markets, the buses are modified to run on sugar-cane and are as popular as ever. It is sad to see such a classic line finally go but I know its legacy will live on.

context clues or you see, it's OK. he saw it on the television

Mental Floss featured an interesting round up of eleven creative interpretations of classic films that's a bit above the caliber of the investigative work my friends and I did watching a VHS cassette of Three Men and a Baby one frame at a time to catch a glimpse of the tortured ghost stage-hand that was caught on a millisecond of the released version of the movie, but still rather implausible though well-constructed. The alternative reading that struck me the most was theories on the Stanley Kubrick film The Shining. I had heard the suggestions before that the movie was a veiled allegory of the director's views of the Holocaust or the genocide of the aboriginal peoples of the Americas, a significant departure from the book on which its based, but over all not a very compelling argument.
As the author of the original novel posits, however, all writing is a confession although it is not always clear what one is owning up to—though in this case, the author admitted that he had had some dark thoughts about his family when they got on his nerves, the article, referencing a documentary called Room 237, debuted during the Directors' Fortnight of last year's Film Festival at Cannes, entertains the idea that the changes in the screen-adaptation were the esteemed director's secret confessions for his part in the mock-up, staging of the Apollo Moon landings. Conspiracy theorists and Moon-landing deniers have found all sorts of supporting evidence, including, the sweater that Danny Torrence wears bears the Apollo 11 rocket, the lunar mileage was about 237,000 miles—hence the warning to avoid Room 237—and the distinctive hotel carpet pattern that Danny races his Big Wheel across bears some resemblance to the launch pad for the mission. An awful lot of the iconic scenes only come from the film—the wave of blood from the elevator, the ghost twins in the hallway and the writer's block expressed on dozens of typed pages. It seems like a pretty far-fetched explanation and one can surely find hints like these anywhere, if they support one's thesis. What do you think? Do you think there are such admissions lurking in the subtleties of gaffing and artist license?