Sunday 3 February 2013

manager of mirth or as you like it

The Bard, William Shakespeare, had such a circumspect command of English grammar (and other languages besides) as to be able to depart significantly from convention and intersperse his plays with what is regarded now as natural and essential parts of speech but created or rather committed to paper transformations of verbs in to noun counterparts and vice-versa and coined the antithesis for many words. The action to manage was in common parlance but not so a manager; there was hearten but no dishearten, the same for inaudible—not to mention inventive and intuitive words for the nonce, like swagger and belongings. One convention Shakespeare was unable to buck, however, was the Elizabethan proscription again having women on the stage and all roles were played by male actors. Often in the stage directions, one can find the abbreviation, “Dr.A.G.,” dressed as a girl, in other words, when these characters were cued. It was not until the latter half of the nineteenth century that the term drag (and the counterpart for a cross-dressing female, drab—dressed as a boy) appeared again in print, but maybe the idea can be traced by to the playwright as well.

Saturday 2 February 2013

1993 or janet reno, meter-maid

There was recently an afternoon happy-hour poll on Mental Floss that invited readers to participate in a rather nebulous exercise, which really turned into some provocative and poignant searching for me.
 The question posed asked what people were doing twenty years ago on that particular day, and though that date registered nothing particularly memorable, like the days the Kennedys were shot, the moon-landing or 9/11, I do have a few resources, like diaries than reach back nearly that far and watching the daily addendum to the Tagesschau (the nightly national news report) that broadcasts (sometimes with extensive warning labels) the installment from two decades ago. In the early part of 1993, William Jefferson Clinton was inaugurated as president of the United States, poet and statesman Vรกclav Havel became the president of the young Czech Republic, it was the dread beginning of nostalgic adaptations first with the Beverly Hillbillies and The Fugitive, there was the first World Trade Center bombings occurred, the cable channel Comedy Central premiered (I really, really wish-a I’d never heard of Amy Fisher—Mohammed Salameh, Mohammed salaam, I was only the driver, I didn’t build that bomb) , and the now redundant bureau of the US ATF (alcohol, tobacco and firearms) began a fifty-one day stand-off at the Branch-Davidian compound in Waco, Texas, Iraqi authorities refuse NATO weapons-inspectors access, fractures began to appear in Yugoslavia, the Red Army Faction was still active in a united Germany, the trials of the Rodney King beatings began, and Stephen Hawking published A Brief History of Time.
Later in the year, there was a lot more.  I couldn’t say definitively how a certain day reverberated for me personally, but the notion of taking time to review one’s life from the perspective of two decades or just two years on (everyone probably has their modern history well-documented though all time is full) is something powerful and perhaps an archive that should be sought out.





the bronx is up and the battery’s down

To celebrate the centennial of New York City’s Grand Central Station, which at the commission of the Vanderbilt family, first opened its doors at midnight tonight (or possibly, one minute of, so as to not technically fall on the next day), The Daily Beast presents an interesting collection of one hundred facts, which makes for a great scavenger hunt of trivia, no matter how far one is away from this gorgeous and storied terminus.

number-crunching or currently trending

As the capital city of the state of Hessen, Wiesbaden is host to a number of important offices of governmental affairs internally but also is home to a national institution, which one hears cited continuously on all topics, das Statistisches Bundesamt (the Federal Statistics Office of Germany)—also known by its short-form, Destatis.  It’s funny to be in the neighbourhood with such a voice of authority, not quite like living next door to the Encyclopedia Britannica but instead like knowing where the Harper’s Index is compiled or where the random fact factory is and where the sibilants try to triangulate all this data and bridge disparate trends.
All bureaus in all governments are mandated to report out and analyze micro- and macro-demographics, sometimes with different competency and the spin of omission, but I believe this independent institution that pries open raw figures from all sources, maintaining a one of a kind research library amongst the headquarters and field offices in Berlin and Bonn, and conducts its own surveys (Umfragen) and censuses (Volkszรคhlungen) from inflation, immigration, birth-rate, crime, employment to include delving into people’s attitudes and sentiments and venturing into the qualitative, rather than quantitative, arenas, like happiness and overall satisfaction, by studying the meta-mines of information that factor into civics for public benefit.

f.o.i.l. or quadratic erratic

From beyond the land of Mathmagic, there is a lively debate about the identity—and indeed the complexity of the infamous equation and set of approaches that dealt a coup de grรขce to the stock markets and exchanges, which ticker-taped out of Wall Street. Rather than a formula that takes an inscrutable and evil-genius to comprehend, however, one source, which is not alone in its disappointing accusations, offers proof that a much simpler but overlooked preparatory lesson caused that down-fall. Many sources were satisfied with putting the blame on early, emergent and exotic sets of equations that governed derivatives and other seductive pyramid schemes and championed by most all subsequent publications. I felt the dazzle of these novel formulas were to blame as well, but it is generally the case that it is easier to obscure one’s own motives, greed and misapprehension behind a knotty math problem than admitting to not doing one’s homework, despite the culture.

Friday 1 February 2013

punxsutawney

With the augurers turning their attention to omens of Ground Hog Day soon, I’m reminded of a weird tale, vintage sci-fi pulp by Frederik Pohl called the Tunnel under the World. That featured a day, however, whose repeating was a questionable occurrence.











toute votre base sont nous appartiennent

French illustrator Sebastien Feraut (with the nom de plume Niark1) has a wealth of artwork to explore, and I particularly like this adventure landscape mapping out twenty things that were recently brought to us by the internet. Can you pick them all out?