very merry

PfRC would like to extend season’s greetings and salutations to all that have visited. Peace on Earth and goodwill toward men. Thanks for stopping by and have yourselves a merry little Christmas time.

tolerance and withdrawal

From the news bureau of Weird Universe comes reports that the United States Air Force has been forced to recall hundreds of tubes of promotional lip balm due to trace amounts of tetrahydrocannabinol in the hemp oil component of the salve’s ingredients.
Though airmen and family members that were potentially exposed to this reefer madness at an Alaskan base were not at risk of getting even a mild high from this tiny, tiny amount—nor even risked showing up hot a drug-screening, although some argue that lip-balm can become habit-forming and lead to dependency—it would not have been in keeping with the armed forces zero-tolerance policy nor in the spirit, I guess, of the office and service that this give-away was endorsing—the Sexual Assault Prevention and Response coordinator, otherwise known as the installation SAPR.

mister fezziwig

Dangerous Minds shares a holiday tradition that channels a recitation of Charles Dickens’ A Christmas Carol in Prose, Being a Ghost-Story of Christmas (to wit) to be enjoyed by in whatever medium one prefers—though I’d agree that this séance with the venerable narrator Vincent Price ought to be one’s first resort.
It’s been argued that Dickens’ novella created and established the holiday in its received customs—nearly with a single, resonating stroke that elevated the celebration to his current status, but the classic story that gave Christmas and charity new leases (apparently both under attack) was originally envisioned as a pamphlet. The draft whose working title An Appeal to the People of England, on behalf of the Poor Man’s Child encapsulates Dickens’ motivation and concerns was penned in response to the network of crushing debt, obligation to work and dehumanising competition among employers sprinting towards efficiency. Realising that such a petition would only reach a limited audience (perhaps persuaded by spirits himself), Dickens decided he could possibly affect more social change by telling a story.

yule log

Via the fabulously odd Everlasting Blort comes a cavalcade of holiday—both for Christmas and New Year’s—customs beautifully illustrated by a jewellery designer called Vashi and Marie Muravski. I was surprised to see how many of the traditions pivoted on the fortunes for all the single ladies in the upcoming year.
And while many rituals and trappings of the season seemed quite touching and original—except perhaps the endorsement that a certain favoured purveyor of chicken-product is accorded as a Japanese institution and the contentious hidden gurken in the tree ceremony. Though still culturally reinforced, and it’s nicer to believe that some Civil War soldier received life-saving sustenance from his captures in pickle form on Christmas Eve or it’s an enshrined Old World custom—and these versions don’t seem in any way commensurable—rather than be disabused by being told that the story was a marketing manoeuvre for a retail outlet overstocked with pickle ornaments. What sparked the decision to make so many of such decorations in the first place still strikes me as a bit mysterious and perhaps there is a deeper Christmas miracle behind it still.

5x5

like genghis khan bathed in sherbet: the unlikely mantis shrimp is one of our favourite animals too

en voyage pathologique: a select handful of the throngs of tourists visiting the City of Light come down with the Paris Syndrome when it fails to live up to their expectations

jingle-jangle: mid-eighties Alpine White song was a strong forerunning carol in the assault on Christmas

axial precession: the December solstice falls on the twenty-second this year—plus nine bonus facts

life-savers: the marketing and minting of mints

c.h.u.d. oder down in the underground

Though I think my preoccupation with manhole covers contains a mostly untried yearn for urban exploration that I’ve rarely managed to summon up the courage (probably sensibly) to carry out, I would risk being caught trespassing to see what lies beneath Wiesbaden.
When I was a little kid, I can recall wading through flood canals in Oklahoma teeming with crayfish (crawdads—sort of giant sewer shrimps that one would readily barbecue) and once following a tunnel underneath the old officers’ club in Würzburg (formerly the local Nazi party headquarters) big enough to drive a tank through to it cemented up conclusion. H doubts the veracity of this latter Goonies’ adventure.
 A clever Redditor posted this portal—which I came across by accident—and to the turn of the century infrastructure that lies below. The city’s manhole covers (Kulideckeln) seem rather plain and haven’t really interested me like those that celebrate coats-of-arms and this entrance to the underworld, which I had crossed over without notice many, many times before, even less so. The protagonist, Harry Lime, of The Third Man descended a similarly constituted stairwell.
 Instantly, I knew right where it was—the vaunted brick arches reflecting other utilities of the age, like the landmark Gründerzeit water-tower in Biebrich, on the square adjacent to the Hauptbahnhof but I didn’t go to examine it right away—though it might be a time when others might be checking, as I discovered it’s secret while frantically searching for news on the evacuation of the train station, due to a terror warning that has not yet materialised. Out of an abundance of caution, the Christmas market was also cleared out. Presently, maybe it’s best to leave such spelunking to the professionals, the CHUDs and Morlocks.

403 - forbidden

Gizmodo reports how the supposedly sedate and apolitical group of infrastructure programmers called the Internet Engineering Steering Group have approved a new draft HTTP status code, along with the familiar bunch of bugs and failures that users might encounter—404 Not Found, designated as 451 (as in Ray Bradbury’s Fahrenheit 451) for pages and files suppressed due to pending legal demands—a takedown notice served or government censorship. Disclosing and logging what’s being blacklisted by whatever standards, be it the political views of dissidents or what’s considered blasphemous or people privileged enough to be forgot, does go quite a distance towards, if not reform itself, then at least towards assigning blame rather than hiding behind technical problems.

humbug and hyperthermia

Grumpy Cat is stopping at NO but the rest of us here at PfRC are getting into the spirit of the season, despite the eschatological forecast and unseasonably warm weather.