briar rose or aarne–thompson taxology

Bob Canada has presents a brilliant, clever cinematic review of the film Maleficent, a retelling of the classic Sleeping Beauty tale from the perspective of the evil fairy god-mother.

This trend of letting the villains present their side of the story is just the latest installment of what the author refers to as Wicked-ization in story-telling, alluding to the novel and successful adaptations on the life and times of the Wicked Witch of the West, and has been applied to several fables. The results are mixed—Hook (Peter Pan), Into the Woods (various), Snow White and the Huntsman, Mirror, Mirror (also Snow White), and in a similar vein, Hansel and Gretel: Witch-Hunters, Saving Mister Banks (Mary Poppins)—and sometimes the original versions are sacrosanct and don’t need improvement but it’s always fun to revisit these characters and learn more about the original sources, portrayals and motives.

federales or blazing saddles

The first mechanised incursion of the United States of America into battle, with motor vehicles, aircraft and even the first incidence of intelligence gathering in the form of wire-tapping and radio interception—in the name of national security, occurred in 1916 with the so-called Punitive Expedition against Mexican revolutionary leader Pancho Villa.  After the exile of the monarchy, a dictatorial government took hold of Mexico, which supported the lingering high level of gentrification among peasants and wealthy estate-holders for some thirty years.  The Villistas sought to break-up the Hacienda-System, and enjoyed the materiel support of the US government for these raids—the intent being to install a friendly and democratic government.  Once that objective was met, however, the support of the US withered and publicly backed the less radical faction of the Revolutionaries, who did not share the vision of Pancho Villa of social equality nor his violent tactics (with a lot of horse-robbery), as more politically palatable.
The casus belli that followed is of course debatable, but America mobilised some 5000 troops to hunt down Villa and his com- patriots—dead or alive, after Villa reputedly pillaged a border town in New Mexico, killing dozens of US citizens.  If Villa personally directed this attack, it was due—or exacerbated at least, to the munition supplier there either demanding payment in gold, though they had already paid thousands in US dollars and/or delivery of defective merchandise. As the chase was being prosecuted under the leadership of General John Pershing—curiously with the help of mercenaries from China that comprised more than ten percent of the fighting force at a point in US history where immigration for persons of an Asian background was banned completely, which were rewarded after the mission with citizenship, provided they work in army mess halls—several other border towns came forward, claiming to be victimised by Villistas though these other incursions into US territory were later disproven. The hunt continued for months but the wanted individual evaded capture, and the adventure was eventually called off due to the US entrance in World War I. Officially, the mission was declared a success, since no other US towns were terrorised, but privately Pershing held that it was a shameful failure and a dangerous precedent for American chest-pounding, despite the logistical baptism of modern warfare.

gold doubloons and pieces of eight

Kottke shares an interesting project to help pull up its boot-straps about the developing phenomenon of alternative currency. Using Bit-Coin as a point of departure, the documentary in the making aims to not just demonstrate how any one with a computer can create a tiny bank in full faith and with credit but also to question what the public deign as fiat and therefore trustworthy and exchangeable.

What is it that makes a government mint any more or less legitimate than any other up-and-comers? It is a funny thing that these producers are soliciting donations in order to finish their project and would probably prefer actually recognised money over a trillion PfRC lira. What do you think? Are imagined curries as good as the real thing so long as one believes in them? Would you want the security that your investments, wealth are redeemable in at least food and shelter?

émigré

The Local (Germany's English daily) has a provocative op-ed piece reflecting on the distinction among the German terms Ausländer, Zuwanderer, Einwanderer and the self-styled ex-patriate and the connotations the words carry.

The adopted designation of expat, in general, is usually reserved for communities of professionals, sojourners under contract and with a housing-allowance, retirees or self-exiles (like the French equivalent) from lands less exotic and swarthy in German eyes. Moreover, ex-patriate conjures up romantic ideas of the Lost Generation and cafe-culture in Paris, Berlin and on the Italian riviera—whereas the words for foreigner and immigrant, while not necessarily with mean intent or like the politically-correct classification of mit Immigrationhintergrund that seems to suggest the opposite of good-will, are selectively applied to unwilling refugees and to guest-workers, who generally take on unskilled jobs. There are the same nuances in English, of course, and many loaded ways to not talk about xenophobia. I usually consider myself having gone native—or as a legal alien. What do you think, and how carefully do you choose your words?

humdrum

Maria Popova from Brain-Pickings has crafted another brilliant and consciousness-expanding on the formative and soulful importance of boredom. This is simple boredom being addressed here, restlessness and not ennui, world-weariness, which Oscar Wilde quipped as the one unforgivable sin.
The essay examines the nature of being bored through the lens of various writers and disciplines, showing how it is disdained as childish thing, something to be beaten back post-haste with one’s full quiver of distractions and shiny-objects and something that one ought to out-grow as soon as possible. Not a disheveling feeling that necessarily matures into quiet meditation or offers more than a vague sense of irritation of not knowing precisely what one wants, expects or can look forward to, boredom is nonetheless developmentally critical and something that ought to be cultivated—and not repelled, especially in children though that irritability that comes of unsure footing can quickly escalate. Boredom is essentially attention untethered, and when indulged, it allows care and courtesy to bob along until it can leash itself to something new and novel—in new and novel ways. The full article is an inspired and rewarding read, and makes one pause to think about how quickly one reaches for any number of pacifiers when made to queue-up.

ad confluentes

We had the chance recently to visit the city of Koblenz, where the Moselle joins the Rhein, and survey the colossal monument to Prussian Emperor Wilhelm I, designed by the architect Bruno Schmitz who collaborated with other artists to build other gigantic monuments in the area, from high above on the cliff-top campus of Festung Ehrenbreitstein (Fort Honoured-Broad-Stone). This ruler wanted more than cooperation, strategic partnerships and petty tyrants but unity among the peoples of Germany.
Wilhelm never realised this goal during his reign and more democratic institutions were responsible for that, as for the Weimar Republic that followed soon afterwards, but the monument was erected originally to commemorate the decisive Battle of Sedan. Successive governments then used the monument as a call for unity.
It was the figure that is evoked in the patriotic song Die Wacht am Rhein and during the 1980s, an image of the sculpture was used in West Germany as a rallying point for unity, with the iconic symbol of the Deutsches Eck being the standard sign-off signal for television stations at the end of the broadcasting day (before the advent of 24 hour, continuous programming) shown, from this vantage point with the national anthem. Herman Melville, along with other contemporary writers, makes mention of the fortress above in Moby Dick, “this pulpit, I see, is a self-containing stronghold—a lofty Ehrenbreitstein,” and the massive installation is a venue for exhibits on art and history.
Though the fort was never taken in battle, the statue below was heavily damaged in 1945, less than fifty years after its dedication, by an American bomb-run and the French administration of the Trizone forwarded a proposal to demolish the giant completely and put a peace memorial in its place. Those plans were never realised and the decision to restore and rededicate the monumental statue at the head-waters was announced in 1990, just after Reunification.

manifest-destiny or the pineapple speaks

At the risk of being accused of crying sour-grapes—and despite being very glad that I tried to refresh my knowledge of US history and civics, reviewing world capitals, major treaties, colonialism, recent wars and trying to memorize the amendments to the US constitution and presidential line-of-succession—I found myself really at a loss as how to rate my experience essaying the diplomatic corps' written exam. The anticipation and being escorted through the cavernous consulate compound and speaking to the other hopefuls, who were mostly young, recent international relations students with interesting backgrounds, was really exciting and memorable. The test itself, however, struck me as a bit of a disappointment—not implying that I aced it or completely bulloxed it up, since it was one of those standarised exams where it is difficult to differentiate between the best or the right answer and the test's author's intent. A few questions seemed so poorly constructed, I could only guess at the question, and I got several verbatim repeats, plus technical difficulties at the start did not exactly instill confidence when it came to the custody of the proctors. Next, there was a whole battery of biographical questions, some of which required a narrative though many did not, that was mostly just a self-assessment of ones leadership ability.
Those questions that did call for some contextual justification were limited to two-hundred characters—barely more than a tweet, and generally fell far short, in my opinion, of soliciting any sort of complete or insightful answer. Though this exam was only the first step of many in the selection-process, it did seem like an unnecessary and expensive obstacle, not really any sort of value-added or scientific sieve for potential candidates. It all seemed a little naïve, like realising that the motives that run economies into the ground are really, really basic and nothing more than greed and corruption and one expects such a grand failure to have a better rationale. Noticing that the practise drills were more rigorous and old-school (peppered with questions that some might consider trivia, whereas the only question that could not be answered without basic literacy or elimination had to do with the Thirteenth Amendment), I come to find out that this was one of the first iterations of the exam to be given by an educational corporation recently awarded the government contract to administer and grade this entry test for the US Department of State. This concern is infamous for its mismanagement of standardised testing in public schools, for requiring teachers to teach to the test and the expense of genuine education and for introducing such confounding concepts as fuzzy maths, known as Common Core. I am no educator or social-engineer, but I do strongly suspect that it is more indemnifying for pupils to struggle with straightforward logical operators, for instance, before inventing their own short-cuts to cope with basic arithmetic. Though students, teachers and parents in America alike are pretty helpless against such tyrants, the question that really tested everyone's patience was a strange fable (the company later admitted to plagiarising from a real American story-teller, Daniel Pinkwater) involving a sessile pineapple that challenged a rabbit to a race. Suspecting that the pineapple had some trick (or sophistry) to ensure its win, the other animals of the forest bet against the rabbit. When the rabbit actually won in the end, however, the animals ceremoniously devoured the pineapple. The test then asks grade school students to divine the thoughts of the characters of this poorly re-told story and imagine, under the category of reading-comprehension, what would have happened the pineapple not challenged the rabbit. Maybe that is an apt parable for the commercialization of teaching and learning. Education and experience are not in themselves limited and have to wonder, cringing loping up to fear, what it means to put bounds (or to take them away wholesale) on what is supposed to be a meaningful assessment.

michigan j. frog

I had often heard the phrase Wetterfrosch (Weather Frog) used as a segue to the weather forecast—I, however, assumed it was a gimmick, mascot or inside-joke and never imagined that term referred, at least figuratively, to an actual prognosticating frog.

Similar to the principle that the rise in temperature can be heard in the tempo of the chirping of crickets and locusts (though there is some scientific truth to this method), the frog was not the actual barometer, but it was the key part of a closed-environment, kept in a terrarium of a weather-station with a branch or ladder to scale and a supply of flies. People constructed these little biospheres in the belief that the flies responded in a predicable manner to up-coming changes in temperature and conditions waxing fair to rainy by either hovering higher or lower, and the resident frog would position itself accordingly to catch its prey. There is also a folk-belief that certain birds are also pretty good forecasters—for the keen-observer—by flying lower to the ground when the air pressure falls. The idea of harnessing the predictive powers of the Wetterfrosch (and all of Nature, by extension) may certainly have something to it but it does remind me of the Warner Brothers' cartoon character: the singing frog that can belt out rag-time numbers, but who proves quite taxing for the individual and his visions of fame who discovered this amazing creature, since the frog will only perform in front of him, alone. Ehi, Figaro! Son qua.