Saturday 26 May 2012
not to scale
Thursday 24 May 2012
bottle of red, bottle of white
We’re no connoisseurs just yet but with the heat of the summer descending on us and for want of something lighter and with a bit less of a wallop, but we are enjoying discovering white wine as well, instead of just the usual spectrum of reds. That white wine does not seem as strong is a bit counterintuitive to me and I suppose one must consider all the chemistry to appreciate the different notes.
catagories: ⚕️, ๐ฑ, ๐ฅ, environment, lifestyle
Wednesday 23 May 2012
chinese fire-drill
Cornered with prospects of more market bubbles (a dot-com bust redux of 1999 and 2008 after a less than stellar performance of a networking platform that’s only, but, not merely, the sum of its user-generated antics), aspersions are quick to be cast out, like so many throwing-stars and there are the usual targets, scapegoats.
catagories: America, economic policy, labour
Tuesday 22 May 2012
unkraut bleibt unkraut or a fist full of flowers
There is a German tongue-twister that goes, Blaukraut bleibt Blaukraut und Brautkleid bleibt Brautkleid—that is, red cabbage stays red cabbage and a wedding dress stays a wedding dress.
I don’t find it so much of a challenge to enunciate but believe it has philosophical value, especially as a tongue-twister which is not. Unkrรคuter are weeds (not herbs) and belongs to a funny class of German words with Unwetter (storms, bad weather), Unding (an anti-thing, something impossible or unbelievable), Unart (not disciplined, a bad habit), Unverstandnis (a misunderstanding) and Unwort (a contrived nonce word). After getting some flowers for the balcony, quite by accident and not even in view of the home improvement/garden store where we found the geraniums, I spied this advertisement for a much decorated and controversial brand of weed-killer. Germany has roundly rejected the other toxic vertical monopolies of this agribusiness concern, at least publically, pressuring their genetically modified foodstuffs into exile and not subscribing to the patented plantation-style farming programme (a modular scheme where gardeners and farmers are obligated to buy all the precisely formulated extras—from seeds to fertilizer to insecticides), and I don’t know anyone here who would go to the time and expense of forgoing getting one’s hands dirty and doing a little gardening and maybe even tolerating the spare weed. I was happy to see that this billboard’s location was not an affront, and was relegated to an alley by a casino and a discount store, like an advertisement for cigarettes.
catagories: ๐ฉ๐ช, ๐ฑ, environment, lifestyle
svegliarsi
Monday 21 May 2012
sock puppet or propagaะda
catagories: ๐ง , America, foreign policy, language
canary in a coal mine
It is not as if we have all collectively woken up in some bizarro-universe that’s suddenly, jarringly ruled by the friction, influence and speed of money, not the viscosity or ingenuity of wealth.
Sunday 20 May 2012
six degrees, sechs grad
Researchers at the University of Heidelberg extrapolating from the native nosiness of plug-ins and sharing short-cuts have mapped out a shadow network of a-social students, predicting connections with a fair degree of accuracy. A match rate of forty percent, as the New Scientist article reports, may not sound so revealing but I am sure it can be a little disconcertingly prying and people are shunted as terrorists and put on no-fly lists for more tenuous and specious reasons, never mind the targeted advertising.
catagories: ๐ฉ๐ช, ๐, ๐ฅธ, networking and blogging