Literacy, practical and functional, comes in all forms and is an adherent to all things considered skills and human maneuvers; however, it is something hewn and honed and not some hard-wired instinct. Just as the human body needs to temper its appetites against the abundant temptations of the modern diet and lifestyle, with greater or lesser degrees of success, because survival and perpetuation is neither subject to the etiquette of restraint nor aestheticism that goes against the grain, the ability to quickly skim and assess information without mediation seems certainly much more useful than the ability to comprehend the corpus of great literature.
Tuesday 8 April 2014
boob-tube or tl;dr
frรผhschoppen
Generally there is more resistance and popular momentum to do away with the seasonal time changes in the Autumn—whereas the tilt-shift towards longer days in the Spring is usually welcomed with relief, but the deputy minister president of Bavaria, Ilse Aigner, pledges to start a campaign to keep universal time year-around.
The impetus came in part due to her superior, Horst Seehofer, missing the regular Sunday morning conference call with the Chancellor—having overslept and not adjusted his alarm clock. I suspect the later story is a promotion for championing doing away with the relic of switching time, and I also suspect that there won’t be a terrible lot of traction, since the change would probably have to pass muster in Brussels first. This administrative embargo is unlikely to be overcome by the feeble arguments of the counter-clockwise, equipped mostly with ninnyish but true observations like saying that we’ll have less to look forward to next March or contrarily, how on earth will we remember to check smoke-detectors and fire-extinguishers without a bi-annual cue. One maladjusted day aside, it hardly seems the time to be looking towards the Equinox, but what do you think?
catagories: ๐ฉ๐ช, ๐ , ๐ง , Bavaria, environment, holidays and observances, labour
Sunday 6 April 2014
salient factor
A little while ago, we had the chance to visit the spa town with ancient roots known as Bad Salzungen on the Werra river and not far from Wartburg. The settlement, which was founded originally over two millennia hence by Celtic tribes grew around a salty marsh, which contained the prized substance in high enough concentrations to yield commercial amounts through simple evaporation in shallow pools, salterns and saltpans, which at the time of its discover were mostly relegated to far off lands, like the coastal estuaries of Bordeaux or the northern reaches of Germany, die Salzmannstraรe was a trade route from here to Erfurt and Halle (named not for a hall but rather the Latin term for salt) and on a wider scale connected Frankfurt am Main with Leipzig and beyond.
Throughout medieval times, this proved a huge boon to local royalty and led to the building of many structures and offices (also halophiles) who sought to tax the exchange, but there was not quite a bust once salt became a less valuable commodity and more of a condiment to be given away freely. In the modern era, the place quickly reinvented itself as a wellness destination with a lavish resort and galleries of graduation lanes (degrees of salinity in the air, Gradierwerke, where one can stroll and breath it in) whose inland theatres look like they're based on locales on the sea.
catagories: ๐ฉ๐ช, Thรผringen, travel
marathon or hurtigurti
Kottke has a brilliant article, including links to the video broadcasts in their unedited entirety, of the Norwegian revival of the phenomena of slow-television—like the advent of the station-managers to broadcast a burning Yule Log over the holidays so staff did not need to work on Christmas or interstitial filler of city scenes accompanying temperatures and weather forecasts from around the world.
Norwegian productions have included a hearty fire in the hearth of course, hours of salmon swimming upstream, and most famously an epic and majestic journey, lasting some five and a half days in full, of a cruise through the fjords. The live broadcast was wildly popular and was not only viewed at least for some length by more than half the population of Norway, but many residents also went out to greet and even follow the ship as it passed to be part of the show. What do you think it means that such continuous shots receive such high ratings? What patient activity, from start to finish, would you recommend for the slow-tv treatment?
Saturday 5 April 2014
aerial archaeology
catagories: ๐ฉ๐ช, ๐, ๐ท, environment, lifestyle
tunnel vision
francophone
The French tend to be perceived as lingual purists and practise a healthy disdain for outside influences that threaten to dilute their language and heritage into some sort of pidgin, especially when there are already perfectly good native words, without the need for borrowing from other sources.
The guardians of the lingua franca, however, are entertaining submissions for candidates to be incorporated into the lexicon. The Local's French edition features some of these entries, which are unquestionably authentic in character and could already pass for common-parlance: some of the best include equivader—a French approximation of the concept of procrastination (for which there is no exactly equivalent), combining the words for chatting and avoidance to describe those easy distractions, se mรฉmรฉriser (from the term mรฉmรฉ for grandmother) means to dress like a granny, and oubliophobie to describe that sinking feeling of loss or dread that we have forgotten something when that experience comes too often as to seem like a malady.
zapadnik
catagories: ๐, networking and blogging