intershop oder deutsch-deutsche grenze

As the twenty-fifth anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall approaches, there’s an array of tributes and retrospectives worth checking out. I am reminded of one small artefact that I found a few years ago at a flea market. This cancelled East German passport is only marked with the endorsement that allows the bearer unrestricted transit into the so-called Neue Bundesländer (it is still probably a little dig to keep the distinction of a West Berlin, which was a national peculiar). It is a little sad that someone’s grandmother never got the chance for further travel, as there are no other stamps, but maybe she threw out this one for a new passport of the united Germany.

nine dragons

Via the ever-engrossing maker of fine hyper-text products, Kottke, comes an interesting glimpse at the former Chinese enclave of Kowloon Walled-City in the former British exclave of Hong Kong.

Originally purposed as a garrison to oversee salt trade, the property remained nominally under Chinese control when the territory was leased to the British but the matter of administration was disputed, with the compound by turns becoming depopulated and abandoned, and eventually transforming into a den of iniquity and refuge for thieves, beholden to no authority. Prior to its demolition in 1993, Kowloon Wall-City housed an amazing thirty-three thousand residents, living vertically stratified in an urban environment of their own design. Somewhat covertly, just before being razed, a group of architects and civil-engineers from Japan had thoroughly documented and photographed the place, including detailed cross-cut and cut-away schema, illustrating the resourcefulness of the denizens and economy of dimensions.

light-rail or calvin cycle

The intrepid Atlas Obscura shares an innovative idea from an engineering firm called the Cloud Collective, hailing from Denmark, which aims to filter the air and sequester carbon dioxide more or less at its source. Like the temporaty installation featured in Geneva, the design group hopes to mount pumps and transparent tubes to house algae in an urban setting. The scheme aims not only to clean the air but the inventors also hope to smartly utilize the by-products, spinning the algae into foodstuffs, cosmetics and even fuel.

ephemeral or fascinating rhythm

Though I am certain that this template does not apply to every individual, this short article from EarthSky, via the Presurfer, about circadian rhythms does provide a pretty insightful illustration about how one’s biological clock can get easily thrown out of whack and physiological cues could quickly start to stack-up. Although the clock is an analogy that’s constantly adjusting its time due to the give and take of one’s environment to keep everything in sync, it is not just an extended metaphor but an expression of the incredible chemistry that orients us to our daily lives.

wanderwörter or all the tea in china

Though linguistics had been an acknowledged and structured discipline for quite some time, most scholars believed that noted similarities among families of languages—specifically between the Romance languages, derived from Latin, and the Germanic languages—came about through borrowing and commerce with the Roman Empire.

Albeit the theory was not completely original, as monks and missionaries had suggested the connection before, it was not until hyperglot and Orientalist Sir William Jones came to Calcutta to preside as a magistrate. The United Kingdom did not originally have colonial designs on the sub-continent, content to reap tax revenue from chartered companies to facilitate trade and administer themselves. This arrangement held, in European eyes, attracting healthy competition from other seafaring powers until the fall of the Moghul Empire, who tolerated these franchises. The situation became untenable for the Dutch and other players and soon only Britain and France were vying for dominance in India—still however, only in a commercial capacity, and the two nations raised armies, recruited from the local population, and entered into an expensive, protracted war. The Seven Years War as it was known in Europe and Asia or the French-Indian (Native Americans) as it was known in North American has the distinction of being the first world war, spanning four continents, and not only provided the impetus for Britain to formerly annex India but also led to the American Revolutionary War and the secession of those thirteen colonies. In order for the British East India Company to recover financially from its war with its French counterpart, the UK relaxed tariffs on tea and other goods for export but made up for the losses by transferring the burden to the western reaches of the empire in the form of duties imposed under the Tea Act. In the 1770s, Britain appointed its first governor-general, William Hastings, a fair-minded individual who respected the sub-continent’s cultures and heritage and believed that Indians ought to be allowed to retain their native institutions and Britain should only act as overseers and arbiters with minimal interference. The court system and codices of Hindu and Islamic law presented the highest linguistic and cultural hurdle. As the West had Latin as the static and universal language of academics and legal matters, India too had texts, terms and conventions—a body of Sanskrit writing to draw from.

Officers of the courts were unable to easily reach a middle-ground, lacking not just the language but also the historical context and means for interpretation. English judges had to rely on pandits, translator-advocates and source of the English term punditry, who could be selective with their elucidation in order to skew justice one way or another. Sir Jones’ prodigious love of learning and background made him a prime candidate to sit at the Supreme Court (though his elevation was called into question over sympathies for the rebels in America and relationship with the traitorous Benjamin Franklin) and find a solution to the possible miscarriage of justice. Studying the ancient Sanskrit texts, Jones began to see connections that echoed through the ages and in many tongues. Similarities that were buried and could not be explained by the notion of proximity and borrowing began to show themselves. Root words, disguised by shifting sounds but shared among seemingly disparate languages, pointed to a common ancestry, whereas before thought to have unrelated origins. The English word foot seemed to have a separate etymology from the Latin pod, ped or the Greek pus—since English especially tends to fold back on itself, with footprint, podiatrist (Fußspezialist) and pedestrian (Fußganger), but the words become convergent in Sanskrit, suggesting an undiscovered common-tongue. Jones called this forgotten yet very much thriving hypothetical language Aryan, the denonym of a noble people and as the Roman name for the eastern part of Persia the source of the name of the Iranian nation—though in modern times, linguists are more partial to the term proto-Indo-European language, the word Aryan having been infused with other connotations.

it happened on the way to the forum: the end or i have come to bury caesar, not to praise him

Though Ancient Rome during its last days was a poor shadow of its former glory and the academics of the disintegration were less captivating, merely a guilty glance at misfortune, I experienced separation-anxieties at seeing the epic come to an end and was sad to hear of the final succession of emperors slip away. Ruminating on the causes of the fall were well established—and sufficiently legion and with transparent allusions to contemporary times: the lack of checks-and-balances, usurpations, the taxation-scheme that destroyed the middle-class (placing a bounty and incentive for the tax-man that usually only haunted the vital demographic), racism (Rome was relatively enlightened, ruling over a multi-ethnic empire, but although the services and the fealty of the Barbarians were serviceable enough, they were forever excluded from holding high office), a standing-army with undue political influence, religious schisms, invitations that turned migrations and then invasions, not to mention the sanitising of symbols of State expressly linked to Rome's survival.
 For the haughty hegemony and revisionist history, often I found myself routing for the underdogs, but I did want Rome to linger a little longer before descending into melodrama and a soap-opera. Of course, the legacy did live on in the East for nearly a thousand years and the story could have gone on after the coup de grace at the hands of the Goths, the Huns, the Vandals and the Alans. The saga came to an end, with a flair that should not go unnoticed, with the elevation of the fourteen year old son of Orestes, a minister of Attila, named ironically Romulus Augustus. The boy ruler's namesakes were of course the founder of the Republic and the founder of the Empire and he reigned for ten months or so and made, probably, for an auspicious time to put this episode to bed. Romulus Augustus was sent into exile and claimant, the Germanic chieftain Odoacer, who announced himself merely King of the Italians and packed up and shipped whatever symbols of State that had survived successive raids to Constantinople, pronouncing that the Empire and the known-world now only required one leader. The exile of this teenager, however, is not a historic cul-de-sac as he finds himself connected to King Arthur and the Matter of Britain, as mythic heirs to the Roman continuum.