sunday drive: flohmarkt

On way way back to begin the workweek, just one turn away from my apartment, I was redirected by signs for a massive monthly flea market. Passing through the parking area, I saw that the Omani Sultanate's diplomatic mission to Germany could not resist a good sale either. Perhaps they had some tschotskies to unload. I was first exposed to this distinctive license plate a few weeks ago on seeing a fancy fleet of sedans stop on a side-street in my neighbourhood while walking to the local grocery store, and curious, discovered what the null meant on car tags. I sprinted up and down the endless aisles and found just one piece that caught my eye—a little silver-plate bowl that is proving somewhat of a mystery.

It is marked REP. NEOVEDA 20 and bears the insignia of a face in a halo of rays. I could only determine that it was a German manufacturer of the 1930s and 1940s and the twenty referred to a low silver-content in the plate. As the sellers were already starting to pack up their wares, I had a bonus in the deal of wooden Moco weather station (I am not sure if the barometer and hygrometer still work but I liked the type-face) and a generic restaurant coffee service.

abc's and 123's

Slate has an excerpt from Daniel Tammet's new book on thinking in numbers, in which the author experiences the cultural nuance, chiefly while visiting Iceland, where amounts are treated as something qualitative as well as quantitative and not something separate and abstract.
For the numbers one through five, there are different forms for years, sheep (it reminds me of the shepherd’s rhyme and special number system for counting sheep and stitches for knitting—Yan Tan Tethera, and probably also useful for sending someone off to slumber-land), people, naming trains and highways and houses—reflecting declination and something categorical that has no equivalent English despite the occasional encounter with twain, deuce, score and murder of crows, a gaggle of geese, etc. The fourth sheep is called something like “Sheep Number Four,” as if it were a city-bus—preserving a sense of cardinal bias, something not strictly ordinal, since four follows three only by the reckoning of the counter, unlike the passage of time. Bigger numbers are not elaborated in the same kind of way. I would like to read this book and find out how ways of counting influence the cognitive process and possible assumptions made about the significance upon encountering the unusual.

checkout-lane

I stopped at an outdoor café under the shade of umbrellas and plane trees while walking through town the other day. I didn't mind sitting with a refreshing breeze wafting through the square while I waited for my order to be taken. After some few minutes, the waitress, who was very friendly but seemed a bit anxious and distracted—not exactly inattentive but rather occupied with sending text-messages on her Handy, it appeared, the waitress finally brought me a beer. Returning seconds later, like an after-thought that one usually experiences after hanging the phone, she asked if I didn't mind paying right away.

She apologized for being abrupt, but explained it was the end of her shift—crews changing at an awkward time, and she had to clear all of orders before leaving. I also noticed that she was not messenging her friends but rather trying to figure out how to work a point-of-sale application installed for managing orders for the cafe in her personal phone. That explained her behaviour. I was always a little suspicious of these traditional point-of-sales systems (also given here, there is not anyone who does not pay in cash), with strugglingly awkward interfaces, incompatibilities, expensive, and quite an investment to maintain, hardware exclusively serviced by company technicians, and regarded them as the surplus of the military-industrial complex, unnecessary gadgets that contractors, pawning off what they could not sell directly to the government, convinced small businesses were indispensable. I've never actually seen one in use at a bar, but a few years ago, the hospitality industry was trying to sell an electronic coaster that would alert wait-staff when a customer had downed their drink, ensuring prompt service. I can't exactly say that's necessary in most circumstances. In theory, I concede, such a network could speed up orders by altering the kitchen to the next dish as soon as the order was placed and be a big help when it came to monitoring inventory and studying sales trends, as well as the obvious cash-controls. Providing that all one's employees report to work with the latest cellular contraption anyway and consent to being temporarily corralled, being able to try this system out on the cheap seems a pretty clever idea and the platform, I think, would be flexible enough to fit the café's exact specifications—or be dropped altogether for a pad and pencil when gains do not materialise for the effort.

horse of a different colour

Not only do humans suffer from the heat and associated plagues, their animal companions do too and cannot adapt so easily.
In order to provide some relief from the oppressive mosquitoes and horse-flies that have really taken advantage of the hot weather, some ranch-hands have taken to decorating their horses with zebra-stripes, finger-paints mixed with a cocktail of natural repellants—experimenting with the recipe to find what works best and does not cause any further irritation for the animals or riders. The zebra got its stripes, biologists believe, for disruptive-camouflage—not to disappear into the background but to blur together, so a predator had a harder time singling out any individual member from the herd. There may be an element of glare thrown into the mix too, helping to regulate temperature. Maybe there is another reason such a coat is preferred altogether that we are completely missing. It's impossible to say, however, what a lion or mosquito actually sees when it looks at a fancy striped horse and I imagine that the horse has no concept how it looks to them either, though free to wonder with human and horsey bias.  I suspect the horses do not care, so long as the flies are shooed away.

the sound and the flurry - we've got a million of them

Quirk Books has a clever series of ice-cream flavours taken from book-titles, with some nice iconic packaging that is an homage to both industry-standards.  Be sure to check out there other entertaining and literate posts.  What sorts of similar product cross-overs can you come up with?

survival and revival

Finally I had the chance to see the interior of the Ringkirche in the Rheingauvierteil. Like the Lutherkirche, this Gründerzeit (Founding Epoch) structure was built as part of the Wiesbadener Programme, to introduce anchor-protestant churches in communities of the newly annexed Duchy of Nassau by the kings and later emperors of Prussia, of the evangelic persuasion. The church was a favourite of Kaiser Wilhelm II. 
I did not want to take many pictures of the interior, as I was being given a tour by another very house-proud church-lady, but there were some very fine, art nouveau elements and murals. Pausing for a few moments in that big space was also very serene.
The church's architect, Johannes Otzen, designed many impressive and keystone monuments, like this church in the Leipzig neighbourhood of Plagwitz that we visited earlier in the year.  The factory-community itself, on the banks of the White Elster, is a product of the Founding Epoch, characterised by a boom in manufacturing that grew municipalities to meet the demands of the Industrial Revolution and shift to urban and urbane living.