coffee and tv or tea and sympathy

A very clever Dutch entrepreneur, frustrated with the cavalier, disposable attitude of many consumers but also sensitive to the hardships that make it usually easier to replace an item rather than repair it, is running a chain of cafes in Amsterdam (with more planned throughout the Netherlands) that brings together darners, tinkerers and fixers to give broken goods a second, fighting chance. Like knitting groups and crafting clubs, this new café culture attracts like-minded Do-It-Yourselfers and offers a workshop where they can meet, over a coffee, to repair gadgets, mend clothing, refinish furniture and educate themselves about how stuff works. This is a great idea, and I hope the founder’s continued success is contagious.

olive tree, very pretty or gartenschlau

With the beginning of Spring, it is nearly warm enough, aside from some frosty mornings, to put some of the plants back on the balcony. Indoors real estate (with a view and a share of the sun) came at a premium and a lot of the houseplants were crowded and vying for space. I have had this ornamental olive tree for years and it has refused to grow much, since with the onset of Winter, it would drop all of its leaves and go dormant, which I figured was normal, especially in German climes, because a few tentacles of leaves would come back every year and continued to branch out over the summer.

It was always a little pathetic, however, since it never was again full and bushy and I would trim back the decidedly dead twigs and thread the one or two strands of leaves around, like a comb-over on a balding man. I keep trying with this one and I refuse to give up. It has sprouted a single leafing branch late this Winter again, however, this time, in revolt to whatever I am doing wrong, it seems to have evolved, mutated with these big wanky leaves that don’t appear to be regular olive leaves at all, which ought to be narrower and more cactus-like.

Maybe it’s some parasitic plant, I thought, at first, but it seems to be part of the olive tree. If this is the case, I never knew that a plant’s frustration could lead to adaptation. Here are some proper olive trees in temperate Rome, growing around the Triumphal Arch of Constantine, just behind the Colosseum.

vor ort, for you, die II. staffel

The debate over continuing financial assistance for former East German stabilization and development, sparked by the election season rhetoric of some municipal hopefuls, has now, fuelled by bidden commentary, broadened from a suggestion, that could have had xenophobic overtones, to a discussion about power of the purse and the sturdiness of statistics (DE). I am not sure how to translate the meaning of “poor-mouthing.” Unlike private banking institutions in Germany, like Deutsche Bank or Commerzbank, savings and loan banks (Sparkassen) are supported and partially owned by their host communities.  Traditionally the profits of the Sparkassen have either been reabsorbed into the network in order to promote more growth and investment, locally, or have underwritten local charity initiatives, aside from shoring up capital, which can be problematic in an environment of tight credit, against expanding requirements for reserves.

Though not without resistance and fear of undue influence (benefit going not to the public but the politician), savings banks in a few of the same communities that were calling for the end to solidarity payments have agreed to share a part of the some 4,7 billion € made nation-wide last year in profit with the cities. Money is a very emotional issue and can be set on edge even more by accusing one group, making an otherness, of contributing to one’s own insolvency. Annually, the Sparkassen turnover for North Rhine-Westphalia is over 200 million €, which is, incidentally, the amount that the communities of the Ruhrgebiet have contributed to the Solidarity Pact fund. The pledge for financial assistance cannot be a matter that individual communities can take leave of at will and probably should not be ended prematurely, since wealth redistributed (within the same country, too) is not squandered, but neither should the social support of charitable organizations be beholden to political will, because even local-politics is not always in civic interest.

socks cousteau

Vacationing in London several years ago, we each got a pair of posh socks from Harrods’ as keep-sakes, perhaps lucky socks.

I try to wear mine gingerly but they’ve held up quite well. Inside-out (for washing—although I am not about the rationale behind the technique) one can see that each individual colour panel is stitched separately and the loose threads flay like some exotic sea-slug. Laundry can be quite an adventure of discovery, too.

eine torte? nein danke!

beacon

Thank goodness for radio broadcasts and hobbyists, I was thinking while driving to work, since larger and larger swathes of the communication spectrum is going silent. First cable made aerials unnecessary, then quite a wide plateau followed with satellites but now analogue (and seemingly approachable) are being replaced wholesale by digital channels. Of course, everything is awash in an invisible smog of cellular and wireless transmissions but those do not have a significant range nor persistence.

For decades, the compendium of human business rippled, diffuse and faint but still with some tiny hope of being seen, out—slouching in all directions from television and radio. Now much (and with a tendency towards more) of communication is tethered, careening awkwardly in sort of a closed-circuit matter-of-record. Never before has so much been recorded verbatim, and many people are committing more words to the ages than exchanged in conversation, but the audience is limited, private and through the annuals of time, probably would not be beatified as a chronicle of the moment. I’ve amassed some visitors to PfRC from all over the world and it’s fun, but there’s no possibility, no point of entry, for anyone outside of our idiosyncratic protocols and routines, to share what we have done and what we are doing. One does not need to imagine some alien culture, curious that we've gone quiet, for this argument, since already we are finding difficulties with backwards-compatibility and our own future generations may dismiss our records as inscrutable or irrelevant, like so much surplus magnetic-tape and floppy disks.  The world-wide web is a closed system and perhaps irretrievable and irreparable should the architecture of the internet go away. That buzzing swarm of cell phones and WiFi and their longer-range counterparts are, besides, garbled and coded—further to make the intended the exclusive audience and allow no spillage, but I do wonder sometimes if encryption could possibly appear more intelligible than natural language.