While I am not certain if historic records were broken all over Germany this weekend as predicted, it was certainly more than hot enough.
Sunday 28 July 2013
rain dance
catagories: ๐ฉ๐ช, environment
double-feature
- Whitehouse Down and Olympus has Fallen
- Armageddon and Deep Impact
- The Prestige and The Illusionist
- The Abyss and Leviathan
- The Truman Show and EdTV
- The Descent and The Cave
- After Earth and Oblivion/WALL-E
- The Road and The Colony (or any number of post-apocalyptic movies)
- United 93 and World Trade Center
catagories: ๐ฌ, ๐, networking and blogging
Saturday 27 July 2013
the real macguffin
pandora or who done it
Though the only thing to have definitely been disappeared is a portion of the US administration's public resource and engagement web-site that made the pointed promise for continued protection for so-called Whistle-Blowers—defined aptly as important stewards to mitigate fraud, waste and abuse, it is a very unfortunate time for the page to go off-line. It's not entirely irretrievable, according to the site's web-masters—safely retained in the archives, cheerfully referred to as the Wayback, and not some Orwellian bottomless memory-hole where censored materials are shunted and people are told they never happened and everything has always been this way.
teufelsbrรผcken 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.
catagories: ๐จ๐ญ, ๐ฌ๐ง, ๐ฎ๐น, ๐, networking and blogging, transportation, travel
zarathustra's roundelay
catagories: ๐ฉ๐ช, ๐ฌ๐ง, ๐, antiques, networking and blogging, philosophy
Friday 26 July 2013
yoknaparawpha county-line
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.