teufelsbrücken or a bridge too far

The ever fascinating Atlas Obscura presents a collection of unholy spans, which medieval superstitions credited to master civic planner and engineer, the Devil himself, over the seemingly impossible feats of architecture that ancient crossings imparted to people seeing them for the first time.
Featuring amazing old stone bridges from all over Europe, the article talks about the folklore that grew up around them, with common stories of townspeople striking a deal with Satan to construct a much needed but beyond human-abilities and gravity-defying bridge over rivers and ravines. The Devil agreed to give the mortals their bridge but usually in exchange for the soul of the first to cross it. The Devil was inevitably denied his due because either an over-excited dog ran across first or the villagers sent over a stubborn goat. How they outwitted Satan is preserved in local legend and sometimes commemorated with sculpture and artwork. At one of the hair-pin curves going into a tunnel along the shores of Lugano in Switzerland, there was a relief of the Devil coming out of the cliff-face—I wonder if there was some similar tale about connecting the region overland as well as by sea.

zarathustra's roundelay

Via Nag on the Lake's other blog, there is some interesting background on writer Friedrich Nietzsche's typewriter of choice—at least for a time—the very steam-punk and boldly designed Malling-Hansen Writing Ball. The philosopher ordered this model for portability and quietness—sort of a tablet computer for the late Victorian Age, but lack of manuscripts finished on the Writing Ball, which resembles a brain-scanner with its spherical keyboard suspended over a curved parchment, suggest that Nietzsche had difficulty mastering the interface, which is a contemporary problem too. Be sure to check out Nag on the Lake for a wealth of daily curiosities.

yoknaparawpha county-line

There is an interesting project called Placing Literature that aims to map out the correspondence between real and fictional places. The work in progress is a bit top-heavy with contemporary and anglophone works (who wouldn't mark Dresden with Slaughter House Five or Nordhausen with Gravity's Rainbow, unless they have yet to discover it?), but invites anyone's push-pins. What real-make-believe settings would you add? I wonder how a real-world map might figure in a universe, some cannon of works that only reference humanity and human-conventions sparingly.

cognation or parts-of-speech

A discussion with a linguist on the radio about the tendency not just for minority and endangered languages and dialects not only to cannibalise terminology from overpowering and domineering tongues with a colonial-metropolitan status, incorporating more and more elements of English (the lingua franca), but also of the cannibalism of so-called killer languages.

Beyond encroachment and influence and the convergence and separate goings of languages, which is something evolving while grammar and purity play an assertive game of catch-up, the greater threat to idioms and identity (since the conduits of thought are not always easy work for an interpreter or translator and surely differently formed according to one's native speech) was encapsulated by an older term called glottophagie (a French professor Jean-Louis Calvert coined the word in 1974 after anthropophagy, human cannibalism) that describes the death of a language through the loss of allegiance and functional literacy. Pressure in whatever form to abandon part of one's heritage does not, I think, serve to enhance communication or understanding.

sehtest or the bundeswehr is everywhere

Walking through my neighbourhood, I found a quite curious piece of detritus in the street. This white flier with a mysterious black square bears the equally inscrutable but unusually polite proclamation (in English und auf Deutsch) this a training (ranging) leaflet of the Bundeswehr—from a battalion for operational information stationed quite a distance from here. The translation reminds the finder of this piece of paper out of consideration for the environment to please litter (but surely they meant to please don't) and in case of questions, to please contact the competent unit—which begs more questions than clarification of what one is now holding.
I wonder about the glossy black square—does it contain an invisible message, like a camouflaged QR-code or something to calibrate drones or satellites? Or is a paper-bomb, really mean to check “our distance abilities” projected like a paper airplane or dropped by a very obliging and careful pigeon? What it just something tossed accidentally along the way to somewhere else? Does the German army hope that people ask questions or return it?  It's a little strange but nice that there is some transparency and explanation, but I suspect it's not enough to prevent imaginative speculation.

what's the frequency kenneth?

It's interesting when phenomena, shared and recognized but impossible to relate in a straightforward way, like the sense of déjà vu, earn a name—even if there was a perfectly sufficient descriptive term before pop-psy decided to call frequency illusion the Baader-Meinhof phenomenon. A linguist at Stanford University originally classified the syndrome later given an appropriately pop-culture name where one's reality seems suddenly inundated with an idea just introduced—thinking about buying a boat, for instance, summons up all sorts of unaccountable coincidences, not limited to targeted advertising beckoning at every turn, but noticing more and more boats, a documentary evening on boating, touts from a nautical-school or one's brother-in-law getting a party barge, a sale on Breton striped sailor shirts, and so on. In other words, the 

belief that things one has noticed just recently are in fact recent. Two factors comprise this feeling—one being selective attention paid to a new concept or idea and the resulting confirmation bias that reinforces its importance. That particular name was chosen by a journalist exposed to two unrelated and non-contemporary discussions about the German domestic terror group in one evening. Such an unshakeable feeling contributes to the plots of Repo Man (the plate-of-shrimp-effect), the number forty-two in The Hitchhikers' Guide to the Galaxy, Jim Carrey's character in The Number 23, as well as our own daily lives, like waking at the same time in the middle of the night. While I strongly do not believe that the universe only has indifferent coincidences on offer and it is nice to have something thematic, it is also good to distance oneself from cogitative partiality.

mediatisation or heavy is the head that wears the crown

While I am not but delighted for Britain's young princely couple over the birth of an eventual successor to the throne and out-pourings of well-wishes in general, the media frenzy and the general fawning and envy of the people of Germany (not to mention the royal-watchers who hang on every detail of the monarchs of the Nordic lands), I think it is high-time that Germany reinstated a monarchy to satisfy public-demand.
I do not believe that Germans are not engaged in politics, but their own royal family to look after might galvanize participation from more and welcome demographics, and a heredity figure-head, with all its rite and ritual—a source of fascination in itself, could take on the largely ceremonial role of the president of Germany. An heir-apparent could be prepared and preened for the job probably better than any accidental politician (appointed by a secret conclave), and surely the advent would be a boon for tourism, though plenty of intact, lived-in castles are to be found under various ownership. I'd nominate the Thurn-und-Taxis family or the House Hohenzollern but there are numerous other pretenders, each with their own cult-following and traditions vouchsafed. Perhaps there are enough grace-and-favour appointments available locally, something harmless and sine cure to satisfy ambitions and make public-servants vie for the honour.

odyssey or ministry of public order

Greece's on-going troubles are not something to be overcome by merely a hair-cut, like Samson, or like the half-giant Antaeus of the further adventures of Hercules, who lost his invulnerability once lifted off the ground, but such solutions abound. To exacerbate general frustration, expecting a solution with a failed package of austerity and tossing more bales of money on the fire, Greece, via the island of Lesbos and the border with Turkey, is facing a crippling influx of immigrants with unanswered pleas for a more comprehensive EU policy on migration and financial help to support an infrastructure already strained to breaking by a series of unconditional austerity measures.

Far from a ploy to get added economic assistance or to buy time for debt re-negotiations, these overtures from the minister of Public Order and Citizen Protection and UN observers in the face of the scramble and chaos of the migrant camps, maltreatment and insufficient means for integration, is a sombre way of redressing the highly concerning trends in the voting public, which has taken a decided turn towards xenophobia, and attitudes—as important and intimately connected with the welfare of the refugees. Greece is not alone with this nascent predicament and it would be advisable to quell such a choice or excuse for intolerance before it escalates and transforms a country's hospitality and sympathy.  To ignore the problem or wall paper over it with freshly printed euro imperils everyone.