Just as a tolerance for dairy afforded some populations an advantage over their neighbours in more recent epochs, an early mutation in humans may have privileged them over their hominid competition. As Mysterious Universe informs via Strange Company, Neanderthals may have been quite literally smoked out by humans who could far better handle the ill pulmonary effects of cooking and keeping bonfires for warmth, light, staving off predation and perhaps rituals. Our view of our extinct cousins is generally a dim one, but gradually we are being disabused of a lot of these primitive stereotypes, including the discovery that most all modern humans have a small percentage of stowaway DNA fossilised within us as a reminder that we once shared our society.
It strikes me as a little ironic that this respiratory robustness may have been responsible for humans pulling out ahead, while there’s such incapacitation and moral panic over air-pollution, asthma and allergies—external and self-imposed. I wonder if those bits of cavemen genes (though a very small component of our total genetic makeup, the traits that we’ve inherited are different from one individual to the next) aren’t responsible for our collective frailties. Maybe our ancient ancestors got help from other sources as well.
Tuesday, 16 August 2016
smoke-screen or homo habilis
sturz oder post and lintel
Goslar has been honoured with an ensemble of UNESCO accolades, some tied to a place and some not, and so it was pretty remarkable to find another piece of World Heritage reconstructed in one of the suburbs of the town.
In Hahnenklee, there is a stave church, called the Gustav-Adolf (named after the Swedish monarch that reigned during the Thirty Years’ War and made his country a European power) and was constructed in 1907, inspired by those outstanding examples to be found in Norway.
Many of the main architectural elements come from the iconic edifice of Borgund, but the wooden structure is a pastiche of all then surviving examples. The interior felt like being in the galley of a great wooden ship, a reflection of the Vikings’ sea-going skills translated to architecture and preserved for the ages.
The organ, housed in all that ornate carpentry, was something brilliant in itself but the musical possibilities don’t end there. Just separated from the congregation hall stands a belfry that houses a carillon (Glockenspiel) and a very skilled carilloneur gives performances on the church lawn in the summers.
Monday, 15 August 2016
unterkunft oder happiness hotel
Recently, H and I were invited to tour the Imperial City of Goslar near the Harz Mountain range (more on the city later) by H’s parents. I wanted to remark first on the accom- modations that they choose, this being the first time that they’d not consulted a travel-agent but rather booked directly. I think sometimes we distain and down-play the institutional-knowledge of travel-agents to our vacation peril although most things can be arranged under our own agency, and they found a pretty posh hotel. We noticed after checking-in, there were a few unaccountable irregularities: every second room being labelled Frau or Herr So-and-So instead of just with room numbers and I room hidden in the back of our suite that contained one of those Craftmatic adjustable beds.
Little by little, we discover that this hotel, spread over several buildings in the city-centre, was embedded within a senior-residence, Altersheim. Perhaps this was no novel arrangement but it was new to me and struck me as pretty ingenious as a model of mixed-used properties and integration. We didn’t dine with the home’s population—but I thought we ought to have, but they weren’t hidden and sequestered either and seemed to appreciate the new faces. Perhaps the suites were held in reserve for elderly parents and children visiting to see if this place was right for them, or for visiting children—that maybe sadly was not booked often enough. We weren’t shopping for assisted-living for anyone, so I hope no one felt like that or assumed otherwise but it was a valuable but not oppressive lesson.
In addition to the uniqueness of the temporary and longer-term residencies, the edifice was moreover a great house dating the early Middle Ages with plenty of artefacts on display and the birth- and death home of one apprentice apothecary Dr Albert Niemann, who famously chemically isolated cocaine. The good doctor’s short life, however, was not owing to smack, but rather for a more infamous discovery, the precursor catalyst reactions that lead to mustard gas, whose experiments fatally damaged his lungs.
Friday, 12 August 2016
5x5
many bothans died to bring us this preview: watch the trailer for Rogue One: A Star Wars Story
cristo redentor: an in depth look at the iconic statue that is Rio de Janeiro’s chief landmark, via Dave Log v3
kaninchenfelder fรผr immer: a look at the neglected tribute to the rabbits who had the run of the no man’s land that separated East and West Berlin, via the brilliant Nag on the Lake
impressment: the Guess Who’s “American Woman” was improvised when the Canadian band, playing a gig in Texas, were nearly drafted and sent to Vietnam
Thursday, 11 August 2016
petard hoist much?
We understand that one major social media outlet has launched a new campaign to combat catchpenny clickbait by monitoring misleading and salacious headlines engineered to lure people outside of their own walled-garden.
This pledge strikes us as pretty ironic since that same web-presence is responsible for and substantively little more than listicles, rehashing and the same sort of attention-cloying preying on the insecurities of visitors snatched from their ecologies and histories. What do you think? Indeed, maybe the same algorithm that keeps their advertising environment robust might be used to retool those touts and cut back on rhetoric without estranging readers from quality writing and meaningful content.
islands and bridges
For a quarter of a century, a Canadian couple have been constructing their floating home, a most unusual and self-sufficient estate called Freedom Cove and presently moored off of Vancouver Island. The massive and mobile island was built by hand and includes gardens, greenhouses, a beacon and a dancehall aside from the couple’s quarters. Please visit the link above for more details on this dream realised.
hadj-podge
Add this being an election year to the series of crises that have fraught and jeopardised Europe’s attempts to shelter the displaced and the threatened (not to mention the spectre and reality of rising nationalism, preachers of hate and preachers of appeasement), it is little surprise that some German politicians are drafting a raft of proposals that would markedly change the country’s policy on immigration.
Though attested as measures to promote integration and public-safety, the reforms include, most provocatively, the banning of burqas and hijabs in public, following France’s rules. While other elements might be less sensational, the former seems the least worrisome considering that there is talk of relaxing doctor-patient confidentiality by introducing a duty to report even when the threat is not imminent, the expulsion of notorious characters for their potential to incite violence, or even removing refugees to massive encampments outside of European Union borders to wait it out until their respective conflicts at home end. What do you think? Whosoever champions one side or another seem unable in any venue to start a conversation that can be heard above the din of the repelling of opposites and the compacting of reasoned arguments down to their dread conclusions. One has to wonder if those policymakers are above that miasma of the democracy of the moment, in the thick of it, or are foolish enough to try to wield it.
yestersol, solmorrow
