Here is a picture of the mayor of Reykjavik, Jón Gnarr Kristinsson—an actor, bassist and comedian besides, casting his ballot. It’s his business of course whom he voted for, but I’ll wager as a free-agent himself and founder of the Best Party (Besti flokkurinn) whose platform promised listening more to women and old people since those groups tend to be marginalised, he’s not in lock-step with the old guard.
There is a saying that there can be no nation without an anthem (keine Nationen ohne Hymne), and while poet and novelist and Auslander, hailing from Karlsruhe in the Duchy of Hessen and by Rhine, Joseph Viktor von Scheffel intended no overtones of political secessionism or dangerous patriotism when he composed the lyrical anthem of the Franconia region (das Frankenlied). I think it was pure exultation and inspiration that he found while on retreat for the summer in 1859, in the midst of a march-writing craze, as a guest of Cloister Banz and explored Little Switzerland (die fränkische Schweiz), which the people later adopted as a regional symbol. Apparently, school children learn the song, rife with references to Franconia’s cities, landmarks and lore, and there’s even the robust refrain “Valeri, Valera.”
Valer-rah-ha-ha-ha-ha! Much of the matter of the lyrics touch on what von Scheffel could take in from his terrace, the peaks each with their own myths, the remainders of Celts, Mongols, the French and the Americans that also passed through. The words are wonderful and genuine, and who wouldn’t just visiting want to break into song with praise for this area. There is a priceless element of pomp to it too, which I suppose resides in all anthems and similar state-songs, like Rule Britannia! (von Scheffel also composed that summer rhymes about dinosaurs when a scientist who was also in residence showed him his fossil discoveries), which I won’t identify, not wanting (nor willing) to take away from this enduring double-rainbow moment and enduring pride.
There are few, however, as recursive as the one indicating that at the next exit, one can find the medieval Altstadt of the town of Steinheim by Hanau—seeing the same ensemble of towers and turrets from the road just behind the sign itself. I stopped to for a quick walk around the place with a nice selection of half-timbered buildings. The castle and tower were built towards the end of the 1300s by the Lords of Eppstein to oversee trade and importantly taxation of traffic along the river Main where it joins the river Kinzig.
Later used as a residence by the Archbishop of Mainz when travelling through the region and as a head-quarters of the occupying Swedish army during the Thirty Years War. Steinheim is also the gateway of the renown Hessen Apple-Wine Route (hessischen Apfelweinstraβe)—which I have yet to sample.
There was an interesting pairing of news items this week under the category of very hot and extremely dense. Geophysics researchers concluded that the temperatures at the centre of the Earth are greater than those on the surface of the sun, and subjecting samples of iron to this higher threshold, learned more about how the internal churnings of liquid and crystal iron might regulate the Earth’s magnetic field. Previously scientists had discovered a curious property of these extreme conditions down in the underground, where molten iron took on new characteristics, insulating or conducting electro-magnetism, but without also undergoing the expected structural changes—think the phenomenon of super-conductivity attained when some materials are super-cooled but without being obliged to rearrange their configuration.
With more accurate soundings, we have a better understanding of the transition zones that may hide within uniformity as we burrow deeper to an inner realm that is re-frozen somehow.
The other milestone comes from an enormous international effort, that had its origins in the glasnost of the mid-eighties, when the Soviet Union offered to share its secret technology called the tokamak—think containment field, a magnet to suspend the plasma components of the fusion reaction since no physical substance could handle such heat—and proposed international cooperation on a project to find peaceful uses for nuclear fusion. Decades later, with construction plans finalised in 2007, the programme ITER, Latin for “the way forward” but a backronym of the original French designation for the facility that had the dreaded “thermo-nucléaire” as part of its name, the research is moving at a good clip with the fist plasma injections to take place in six years or so. Allowing the plasma to be heated basically without an upward limit will eventually coax over-excited atoms into fusing, producing a surplus of energy to capture in the process. The fuel in the case of fusion, proven feasible by many university reactors throughout the world (there’s even one in Greifswald on the Baltic Sea and a veritable Fusion Valley in the area in south France that hosts the ITER labs—who knew? Maybe in the not too distant future, if this demonstration project is successful, generators will be miniaturised for domestic-use, like Mister Fusion from Back to the Future II), is hydrogen with the by-product helium, but could happen with any element up to the iron, making up the nucleus of our planet and revealing unexpected lines of force. I wonder when the studies will coincide.
From Der Spiegel’s International Desk comes a report about how run-away melting of glaciers is transforming the alpine landscape of Switzerland with catchments of hundreds of new bodies of that come into being as marauding lakes—not something creeping at a glacial pace. It’s rather difficult to deny the sudden appearance of a quite large pond where there was not one before but the region is negotiating the change, beyond trying to just cope to the threats of flooding (having already bored emergency drains in a land noted for its geological infrastructure), whose lakes are proving very popular with vacationers and can be harnessed as sources of hydro-electric power. I imagine, however, that it is little comfort to see enduring and iconic inundated and feel helpless to do much about it.
Supermarkets are from a design perspective, which belies a lot of marketing and psychological cues and pandering that goes unseen, are a veritable vision quest of encouragement and reinforcement. Having some the tricks of the trade revealed and realizing that there is little departure from the established layout—although I am one to generally be overwhelmed and bewildered by an over-abundant selection—makes me think of those theories that ethnologists sometimes apply to mysterious ruins, suggesting that worn trails and monolithic configurations were ritual paths to entitlement and re-birth. That’s quite possible but we can’t access the intentions of the ancients, and it’s strange that we know grocers big and small have planned their sites not as a larder or granary but as sort of cake-walk, an anti-obstacle-course.
