trist dag

Possibly not so much attention should be directed to the fact that this duo of lifesavers is a married lesbian couple (I suppose headlines focus on such quirks of heroism--like grandmother saves football player from burning building), but the rescue efforts of this pair, who saved forty youth from drowning during the shooting rampage on Utøya, are commendable and touching. The Massacre in Norway is too raw, frightening and disturbed to properly address, and maybe the only way one can approach such a situation is by recognizing help and heroics, neither because nor despite of who people are. Their story and the accounts of survivors strike me too now because of conservative factions in the Germany government refusing to entertain, at the same time these incidents occurred, debate on married equality. Proponents demurred, conceding that change cannot be forced, but in light of this rescue and heroines and in light of the xenophobia and stereotypes that propagated these attacks in the first place, one should take away the lesson that respect and tolerance are the stuff of civility and prosperity.

huckleberry hound or pantone 222

Slate magazine (via Neatorama), after reflecting on the big-screen revivals of the Smurfs and Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, who are rather uniform, monotone visually--made up this brilliant colour-wheel of other endearing cartoon-characters. On the website, one can scroll over the swatches and learn about each character. There is not an over-abundance of the classics, and most are squarely recognizable to audiences of the 1990s with the Snorks, Tiny Toons, Cat-Dog, Thundercats, but maybe the hue and cry of Hanna-Barbera and Tex Avery alone could not cover the entire spectrum.

truth or consequences, new mexico

The label on the Uruguayan wine bottle with dinner informed me that the country’s name “means ‘River of Painted Birds’ in the native language.” I stumbled upon a clever world map that gives an etymology of the names of nations—although I am not entirely sure how accurate some of these are and it is kind of a shame that the map does not explain who Amerigo Vespucci was or how he managed to have two continents named after him (though I suppose the terminally interested could easily look that up in their Funk & Wagnalls’). Incidentally, driving home through France, I wondered why the central region, containing Paris, was called Île-de-France (Island of France), and it turns out that this was probably because of an ancient Gaulish misunderstanding of an Germanic Old Franconian designation for the place--Liddle Franke, little land of the Franks. I think it would be a neat project to make a more local map of derivations and translations, streets and suburbs and towns--sort of like how Bad Karma got its name.

crawlspace or urban spelunking

Via the superlative BLDGBLOG, Der Spiegel (auf englisch) reports on a persistent mystery that’s been buried and forgotten in locations all over Bavaria. There are hundreds of discovered ancient stone passageways tunneled into the earth, mostly impossibly narrow and tight, in farmers’ fields, under churchyards and in towns, that have been described with such creative names as Schrazelloch ("goblin hole") and Alraunenhöhle ("mandrake cave"), because locals believed that they were the mines of dwarves and oubliettes of elves—since no one can really say what the purpose of these articifical caves were.

Though known of for a long time, with similar phenomena occurring in other parts of Europe, curators are only now taking interest in studying them, speculating on their functions from emergency food storage, like a fall-out shelter, refuge from marauders, like a panic-room but being impracticably small, others have interpreted them to have had spiritual significance. These Erdstall catacombs are never documented as being built prior and throughout the Medieval period—only their slow, accidental discovery, and maybe were the meditation chambers of a mystery-cult. No one knows, but perhaps the attention will lead to more finds, and maybe there’s something to be found down in the underground of Bad Karma.