kiosk oder sehen, staunen, verstehen

There is a thoroughly enjoyable interstitial daily program, between talk-shows, the news and prime-time, on German television called Galileo that covers popular science, history and culture. There was a fun segment the other day, which prompted me to explore their internet presence and find that old, complete episodes are available to watch on-line with added profiles and references (one has to browse through the entire show to find a particular story but that’s OK and the commercials are entertaining as well).
The report canvassed Germany in search of its most unique Automats—discovering them in formats ranging from vintage photo-booths rescued, lovingly restored, and then installed by a pair of entrepreneurs in niches all over Berlin, including building lobbies—these simple and classic contraptions, which are not for passport-quality pictures, are proving wildly popular despite the fact that anyone with almost anything can take polished digital photos and make an omni-chronicle—to an out of the way coin-operated dispenser that a dairy farmer built that delivers fresh milk directly from a cow, robotically milked, to a promotional Automat in Köln’s train station that, in exchange for a good imitation of a cat’s meow, gives out a free sample of cat food. What sort of automated service would you invent? What convenience ideas from the past would you revive?

news round-up or won’t somebody think of the children

There has been a strange colluding focus in the reports towards the waning of the week with a somewhat strange commonality.

First, revelations that horse meat is being dished up in processed foods, albeit in frozen bricks of lasagna that seem a bit suspect to begin with, is sparking mass-hysteria among consumers, primarily because said horse meat was not on offer and some are a bit discriminatory, finicky about what animal they are eating. I think it’s perfect that the scandal coincided with the beginning of Lent and might make people rethink the importance of giving something up, a commitment that has lost a little bit of currency. The attendant panic, and more so in regions where horse is on offer and is husbanded and butchered quite differently than horses not meant for human consumption (as opposed to race horses and dray horses), concerns steroids and doping substances ingratiating themselves in the human food chain. Never mind that that’s already happened with all other livestock with antibiotics and the run-off from human over-medication that’s leeching into the environment from our sewers. The EU is forming a new task force to address these issues, and with more fell severity and forensic certitude than the mysterious food-poisoning cases of two summers ago.

The other strange headline was of course the meteorite that exploded over a populated area in the Ural mountains. That’s a pretty spectacular occurrence though its unfortunate that people were hurt and property damaged but surely something to remember. When I first half-attended to the story on the radio, I thought maybe it was the anniversary or new research into the Tunguska explosion in 1908 (though half a world away from the Urals) that perpetrated by a meteorite some a twenty times as big and leveled forests. The political reflex was to placate the shocked by pledge to protect the public from the threat of such impacts, which while it is possibly feasible to shield against something as big as the asteroid close to passing the orbits of Earth’s most high-flying artificial satellites (which supposedly had nothing to do with the impact but gravity has a far-reaching influence) could not provide an umbrella again every shooting-star.

eros, agape, xenia, storge, philia

civics lesson or universal sufferage

Along with the other city-state of Bremen and Brandenburg, surrounding Berlin but not the federal city itself, young people in Hamburg now reach the age of voting majority for state and local matters at the age of sixteen. Sharing responsibility and direction is of course not without precedent and probably the most opportune time for engagement, when outreach and not inculcation or unlearning the habits and attitudes of parents is the best antidote against feeling either in-between or later jaded and disenfranchised.  I hope that this trend sees wider adoption.

household heraldry

I spied this interesting frieze on a corner of an apartment building while on a walk—a really singular motif, I thought, under the eaves of constructionist, cubist embellishments bracketing pilasters and edges. I was not able to determine, just yet, what such a decoration is properly called, but I adore how each functional and formative element has its own name and style. To have a home dripping with the projections of a very specific period is something pretty outstanding, almost as keen as harbouring a saint’s alcove or some other legacy in one’s living-space.

austatten

There is a certain range of predictably and com- mercially classic, which one could expect to find decorating the walls of hotel rooms and dormitories the world around. Nothing against the gaffers’ and grips’ taste and sense of style, as I am sure everyone can recall his or her first exposure to The Kiss, La Chat Noir, an unseasonable string of Christmas lights, beaded-curtain, or at least the touch of disen- chantment, because maybe you wanted to do the same, that these worthy works (testified by their infinite reproduction) displayed are not very original. I am grateful that my dear landlords equipped my work-week apartment with less conventional art work. It’s funny though, because if I look at the photo-safari souvenir of the elephants a bit askew, my eyes are drawn into a mirage of Gustav Klimt—something with the patination of the baby elephant’s ear.

habemus papem

Benedikt XVI has announced his retirement, a transition to a post in a local monastery of quiet mediation and prayer, fearing that the infirmities of old age are making him an ineffective leader. The office of Pope is an odd one for precedence, with all possible permutations discoverable—bad popes, short-lived papacies and even a lady pope, supposedly. It has been more than seven hundred years since the last Pope removed himself. Like Britain’s reigning queen, however, experience and living-memory are prevailing and formative factors, never mind that most of England’s heads-of-state were male and most occupants of the throne of Saint Peter were Italian. Familiarity, I think, does not out-strip all institutions.

There are some guardedly mysterious whispers about health and higher-level intrigues, whose speculation probably plague all such decision, but I do wonder if the seemingly responsible decision ought to be besmirched with conspiracy. Nearly eight years of services were ringing with speculation that the Pope was a place-holder, a concession to crown later a Latin pope again. If that were the case, I think Benedikt surprised detractors by hanging around this long and not just on balance being a bridge, and if anything, this controlled though unexpected stepping-down engages the Church all the more and makes people scrutinize the candidates in such a way as to make any larger agenda untenable.

gale force

Der Spiegel’s English mirror presents an interesting compilation of interviews and analysis regarding just what exactly is stealing the wind of the sails of the renewable energy revolution, die Energiewende: namely subsidies (Subventionen).

Governmental support programmes (in Germany and elsewhere) for alternative power are being curtailed due to budget priorities, sometimes as a sort of inside-out Trojan Horse promising consumers that the policy redirection will help stifle rising home utilities prices. Such changes are enough to make investors, who would champion the building of new infrastructure and fund research skittish—though a really winning idea would succeed with or without government imposed controls, and probably in spite of bureaucratic support. The handicapping for wind turbines, however, is compounded by government subsidies geared in the opposite direction, meant to help wind-down the conventional powerhouses: support for coal and nuclear energy. The emergent and experimental technologies cannot compete and the markets react unkindly to these cross-currents.