and you will know them by their trail of pine-needles

I think it is a little sad to take down Christmas decorations prior to Three Kings' Day, the twelfth day of Christmas—especially considering the preparation and the investment of time to trim ones home and then to have to acknowledge that it's all over and back to normal schedules and especially too when the weather has yet to deliver anything seasonal.
It is, however, a little bit unseemly to have public decorations too far after that date. This year, we waited a little too long to take down the Christmas tree. It looked ok and not overly dry, provided that one did not disturb the boughs. After removing the lights and the ornaments there was a thick halo of needles on the floor, raining down every time you touched the branches like one of those sand-paintings. Even more exploded off once the tree was tossed over the balcony, so it could be drug—with due ceremony, mind you, ritualised like every aspect of the holidays (in Sweden, the ceremony is named Julgransplundring—publicised in part by a Swedish furniture giant—when the family plunders the tree for edible ornaments and launches the tree out the window but takes place on the Feast Day of St. Knut, which roughly corresponded with Epiphany under the Julian calendar), to the composting lot, the Christmas tree grave yard.

coin-op or waxing-nostalgic

Do you remember these?

I can distinctively recall summoning up some aquamarine elephant with a Mold-A-Rama vending machine at the zoo in Oklahoma City as a little kid. One could choose from a whole variety of souvenir animals and even dinosaurs, hot from the extruder. At the link, watch one at work from a recent visit to the animal-park in San Antonio.  Three-dimensional printing is potentially revolutionary but maybe nothing particularly new or novel in application, considering the mania introduced in 1962 and with these free-standing legacy machines still in action at zoos and other venues across America.

romance dies at the touch of dishpan hands

Iris, you need to work on your you-know, your S.A.—stocking-appeal. Marketers are still pretty blatant about appealing to our insecurities, both private and socially-acceptable ones. Just think of think of all the wonderful pharmaceutical advertisements that one is able to enjoy on his-and-hers envy-of-the-neighbourhood 3D, ultra-high-definition big screen television sets.
 Maybe one day such medical, ideological, litigious and consumptive assaults will appear was antiquated as these outrageous vintage ads—really an assault against humanity, especially the feminine variety, brilliantly curated in Collectors' Weekly gallery on selling shame from the 1950s and beyond and the exhibitions of the outstanding artist and collector behind the blog Do I offend? but it's hard to imagine what more well need to outgrow to top these.

odelay or hindsight is 20/20

On the way home, noticing the dramatic contrasts of skies and the still green pastures and lapping brook of the village of Döllbach on the border of Hessen and Bavaria at the foothills of the Rhön, I stopped at the seventeenth century church dedicated to Saint Odile (auch Ottilia oder Odilie). Just opposite there was a spring, the source of the nearly over-flowing stream, also named after the saint traditionally from Alsace (Elsass), and having learnt a bit about her legend and hagiography, wondered if it was not so named with respect to some healing properties of the waters.
The story goes that Odile was born blind to an aristocratic family and her father, rejecting a disabled child, sent her to be raised by peasants. Baptised at the age of twelve (around the year 670), she miraculously had her vision restored, and after her canonisation was popularly venerated in France, Germany and Switzerland as the patroness of eye-sight—especially at the time before the invention of corrective lenses. Now sighted, Odile's brother brought her back to the family estate—which made Odile's father so angry he killed the brother, accidentally, and still rejected his daughter, the duke fearing that the church and monasteries were a threat to his power and embarrassed to disclose to his subjects that he had banished his daughter, whom the faith had made whole.
She restored her brother to life and the two fled across the Rhine to Basel and her father gave up pursuit. Father and daughter were ultimately reconciled years later, after the duke's health started suffering, and he constructed a convent, Hohenburg Abbey, in the Bas Rhin for her to oversee. The duke, Eticho of Alsace who was the founding-father of the Hapsburg family line, is too venerated as a saint for this death-bed conversion, a popular example, especially for the nobility, perhaps with the message that secular powers and piety could be harmonised.

hieroglyph or non verbis, sed rebus

There is a long and well-established history of substituting symbols for words and alphabets are classed as such by linguists. In the fourteenth century, the rebus sentence was introduced first by French word-smiths as a playful and endearing way of sustaining a dialogue, adopted by many following epistolaters.  The related article above from Kottke has many keen images documenting the evolution of the form. How do you think symbols are altering communication? Compare this antique example of dialogue to an exchange using smileys, short-hand and the like.

ne pas être un vide-poche à l'origine

Via the intrepid and inquiring Nag on the Lake, a single one of Intel's latest batch of innovations introduced at the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas has captivated the public above others. This so called smart-bowl is basically a vide-poche, a place to deposit the contents of one's pockets at the end of the day, which generates an electric field to transfer energy from the bowl to a cellular phone or some other battery-operated gadget within via induction and without wires. Though inductive charging is not the most efficient method and only works at a very close range, the idea is pretty clever and maybe will led to improvements in the technology, particularly for something like electric cars that could charge passively without plugs and cables.

currents and gyres

Despite the headlines, Germany, like America has far from a monolithic climate, but nonetheless the weather reports on opposite sides of the Atlantic could not be further apart. While in Germany, we have been spoilt by a series of glorious, balmy days that seems more like an extremely early Spring than a lingering Autumn, in contrast parts of the US have been dealing with unprecedented lows. Birds are confused and flowers are blooming.

The Germans, I think, do not speak much of it, partially to avoid the appearance of Schadenfreude, partially as the weather—especially the traditional and accustomed conditions, is an essential topic of conversation and no one really knows what to do with this spate of bright days at this time of year, and partially out of a jinxing superstition that this too will pass and Winter will arrive with prejudice. Meteorologically speaking, I've heard no discussion whether these opposing phenomena are related—save for a chat between the weather man and the anchor, where the host asked if these two events have anything to do with one another. Yes, indeed, the weather man replied, not with exactly qualifications or explanations, going on to say that the cold front in America was fuelling conditions over Europe. Of course, weather one place always has influence further afield but I didn't exactly follow, and wonder—for something as big as the weather, not just some little black rain cloud, if such an exchange really means that the warming of the oceans or changes in the salinity by degrees is occurring, resulting in the recalibration of the motor of the Gulf Stream and North Atlantic Drift, whose circulation is a key component to the climate we recognise.

mercator projection

Biologist and television host, Joe Hanson, also hosts a truly splendid blog, featuring discussions—which for instance discuss the practice of flattening out the globe (more ovoid than a sphere) in two dimensions and depending on ones centre of focus makes Greenland seemingly as big as the continent of Africa with a study in phrenology. This vignette also explores other representations that try to depict a more accurate picture. I just wonder what sort of inculcations that these examples instilled in the classroom—either an ever-present awareness of the exaggeration or a smug pride.