the phantom toll-booth or intersecting rings

In response to horrible traffic snarls that converged on the town of Swindon between Bristol and Reading, civil engineers installed this intimidating-looking but ingeniously effective array of roundabouts in the early 1970s.

Probably without the aerial view of this anti-clockwise clockwork, called the Magic Roundabout, I’m sure the layout directs drivers quite naturally and would result in no hesitation or panic. It was a challenge for me at first and I’m still content to circle a few extra times until I get my bearings, but I have learned to embrace the Continent’s shared fondness for the traffic circle to regulate cross-roads. I won’t forget, however, our shock and uncertainty upon the first time we came to Ireland together and leaving the airport in a rental car were confronted with a roundabout a few lanes deep. Maybe that first hurdle was intentional to remind visitors of the rules of the road.

zeichenträger

Designed by Gerald Herbert Holtom a few months prior, the first public appearance of the Peace Sign occurred fifty-five years ago today, at a rally against the proliferation of atomic weapons in the UK. The simple sign was quickly adopted as a banner by activist groups around the world. Although some point to much old and mixed origins of the symbol, including signs of Christian persecution and intolerance, anarchy, the Petrine office, and even as a unit badge by a Panzer division during World War II that led the advance into Russia and Hungary—which surely experienced distress to see the sign paraded and celebrated. The artist may or may have not known and been influences by these past associations but the popular legend has it that the Peace Sign is a overlapping of the semaphore signals for N and D—for Nuclear Disarmament. Whatever the true history, the icon is now universally recognised as a sign of outreach, engagement and reconciliation.

numbingness

Tom Stafford, psychological writer for the BBC and expanded gorgeously on his own blog Mindhacks, reflects on the newly named state of mind called Autonomous Sensory Meridian Response (ASMR) which is a sort of euphoria brought about by indulging mundane, boring things registered with a measurable galvanic response. I don’t think this phenomena, not fully limned nor described and entered into the annals of common experience, is merely an expression of the over-stimulation of the internet but perhaps rather identified and shared through it. There are blind-spots, naturally, in any trade but we like to think that psychology has been fairly thorough and that remaining discoveries are either ornamental or intolerably idiosyncratic. What do you think? Synestheia, the melding of perceptions, used to be dismissed as nothing communicable but now if Thursdays have an assigned colour or certain scent, that’s valid though not universal as well. Is it possible for a new sense to arise by motley consensus or is the new confessional attitude contagious?

tremolo heroism or darlings of oblivion

Here is a compact and gorgeously executed reflection on the ephemeral hardships, annoyances great and small with a significant license and latitude whose resolution and denouement does not rate, it seems, as the stuff of literary treatment. Film abounds with lucky breaks, some of which could be classified as what Vladimir Nabokov called his “darlings of oblivion,” but they are seldom acknowledged as something plot-forwarding. Minor annoyances make up the surplus of our days, unfortunately, and while those irritations overcome are not really the defining matters. Sometimes what rules the day is nothing savoury or bidden to repeat, despite the fading but all-consuming importance it once demanded. Is there more of a demand to merely relate or commiserate with a book? I don’t know—it seems like what’s ephemeral and overcome, a laundry-list with its associated dirty laundry is something never summarily done away with and still exists as nagging distractions for a faithfully limned character and a species of simplification for the reader. Are such trifles really eliminated and what does it mean if they are?

sunday drive or nutbush city limit

On the way back to my workweek apartment, after some nice dwell-time at home, I stopped along the way to explore the Frankfurt am Main suburb of Eschborn. I was surprised by the corporate skyline, heavy with headquarters that I would have thought the immediate proximity of Germany’s financial capital would have simply absorbed.
It turns out this town, displaying quietly all past influences as an agricultural area with ample spacing of field and farm among the skyscrapers, as a military garrison town for different powers (Camp Phönix is a commercial park, which hosted no decent flea-market as advertised, converted from a former US Army base that existed in the area until 1992), and most recently as a business annex of sorts for multi-national concerns, who’ve taken up residence here in order to be close to Frankfurt but avoiding the city’s corporate and property tax rates.
 I’m as likely to find anything by chance but I did stop here to seek out the Sculpture Axis, an exhibition of public modern art, which I was looking to find in some sculpture garden but the display continues in sort of a scavenger-hunt, I saw later, along certain lines of latitude and longitude and I suppose that I’d need to do some geo-caching to find Travel-a-Head, giant chair and the rest of the collection—or maybe just keep on in a straight line but the weather was being a bit dramatic.