gravity's rainbow

Apparently many of us were all had about the US forces' discovery of some Big Rock Candy Mountain of untapped wealth in Afghanistan.  It has been common knowledge since at least 1995 and the minerals have been buried in the earth for some millions of years before that.  Sometimes, I guess, news like this is recycled, like resuscitating some failing tourism campaign in fancy packaging.  Blood diamonds, get them while they're still cruel.  It is telling how the media touted this story as if it somehow justified the on-going war, but in reality it was another distraction that re-shuffled some imaginary wealth for a few hours.

plunder

It was announced that agents of the US-led occupation stumbled upon untold riches in Afghanistan in form of  previously unknown veins of copper, lithium and gold.  I am wondering how premature the release of this news was, since the Russians are far better pre-postioned to jump this claim, and what will it do for the only stable commodity on the world-markets, gold?  I am happy for the Afghanis if they can rebuild their country and undo the waves of damage wrought by the English, the Soviets, the Taliban and the Americans but I don't think such prospects will be surrendered so calmly.

mosaic mosaic

A woman at work was going back to the States permanently the other day, and before leaving she had asked several times to look through our photographs from Turkey.  On her last day, I finally brought my laptop to work and we looked through some of them, but it made me realize that I didn't have a good way to share pictures, short of an afternoon slide-show on the Wii, which is a lot of fun.  I don't do bookface and I don't use one of these photo-sharing sites.  But thinking back to another farewell, I remembered that a computer-technician had made a mosaic portrait for the woman who was leaving made up of all her former coworkers.  H and I take so many pictures and there has not really been a forum or occasion for all of them.  I found this pretty neat application that will remake an image into a mosaic of selected pictures.  This tile mosaic from Hagia Sophia contains 10 000 little images from our Istanbul vacation.  I'll have to fiddle with the settings and the target composition to sort out a better, wider collection and so its not a lot of microscopic pictures of ceilings and concrete but this was fun to do.

swift justice

Recently, the German high court in Erfurt ruled that the summary dismissal of a cashier with some thirty years tenure at the super-market for pilfering a few bottle deposit coupons worth a euro and change was grossly disproportionate to the crime.  The proceedings lasted for some time before a verdict was reached, but right away I noticed that the check-out girls in Bad Karma, our fair city, and elsewhere now have been tutored to put the deposit coupon (Pfandbon) aside, wedge it in the cash-register like it was a fifty euro bill, until they're done ringing up (this was done more casually everywhere just last week), that was intended for payment so there's no argument on the matter of change back.

slant operation

As collective outrage rallies for more than cosmetic changes to allowances for off-shore drilling, reinstating the ban, leving windfall taxes, and British Petroleum is gleeful claiming that by early next week, virtually all oil will be virtually contained, but if one was not watching carefully, it may be missed since after the news item tumbled into achival obscurity, it seems that the company bought off internet seach engines in order to re-direct people from the negative press.  I suppose that's a very bad thing, trying to muzzle the interwebs, but I guess it's not the worse thing they have done: the worse thing would be the oil spill.  There is still a big impact zone that will not recover for years, and the oil clean up operation negates all other good intentions of sound environmental policy and stewardship

shortfall

The Local has a fairly good breakdown of the austerity measures that the German government enacting in order to allign its budget within EU standards.  Meanwhile, economists within the Treasury are projecting that US debt to earnings are continuing rise and spiral out of control.  These are very different metrics and with different intentions, but it seems that German cut will do more than stave off the enevitable insolvency, compared to the grim prognostication of the Americans.