over the seven jeweled hills, beyond the seventh fall

Once upon a time, H and I did get a chance to visit the village of Lohr am Main in Lower Franconia after going to a flea market.
We had a rather nice stroll around the little town but passed a small palace, presently housing a forestry museum, not realising that it was in fact the family home of the genuine Snow White (Schneewittchen), Maria Sophia Margaretha Catherina von Erthal. We will certainly make it a point to go back and investigate.  This daughter of the Prince-Elector of Bamberg and Würzburg was born into a wealthy family, whose holdings included a mirror manufacturing workshop. The remains of the factory that folded in the 1850s can still be seen in Lohr today. Tragically, as the Brothers Grimm adapted to fable, Snow White’s birth mother passed away and the bishop and industry magnate remarried to a vain and cruel woman, having no end of mirrors at her disposal, and treated her step-child in a truly awful fashion.
The account that the Brothers Grimm retell is oddly not an archetypal fairy-tale but rather a story based on actual personalities and embellished with elements typical to such folk-stories. The story itself is a much older, with variations on the same themes in many cultures, and it strikes me that this real-life Schneewittchen Schloß remains relatively unknown while Neuschwanstein, further south in the alpine foothills, itself an idyll of a king, is celebrated as the inspiration for Sleeping Beauty’s Castle, though no historical candidate has been forth-coming. Back in Lohr, it would not be hard to imagine a traumatised young woman fleeing into the dense woods (whose history and ecology are now curated in her home) surrounding the town and sheltered by family of dwarves, later finding her happily-ever-afters.

bon mot

Although we have only last left our intrepid Language at the mercy of the Viking raiders and have not yet gotten to the Norman Invasion and that cliff-hanger for the Anglo-Saxons, which lent English fully one-third of its vocabulary and influenced grammar and orthography to a great deal, the Mental Floss list of French phrases that ought to be brought back into common-parlance was to good to wait on until the narrative catches up. There were quite a few priceless expressions that could easily be incorporated into everyday speech and it is pretty lamentable that lingual affinities are not as wide-spread as they once were. I especially like le roi fainéant, a do-nothing king and a term that could describe our friends the Merovingians or Charlemagne’s ineffectual issue, mise en abyme which describes something akin to the Droste effect, an image within its own image, and honi soit qui mal y pense—shame on him who thinks ill of it—do not jump to conclusions or talk something down prematurely, which was a quip by Edward III, the English courtly language being French in his day, which has a pretty interesting provenance.
Mad Princess Joan of Kent curried, unfairly, such a name because of eccentricities that were deemed unbecoming of the royal family, including eloping with a a young lover, a commoner, and subsequently also marrying the baron that her parents had arranged for her to and apparently unconcerned about bigamy or secret weddings. Although not the most conventional creatures of the court, the later mother to the unstable Richard II was still welcome at official functions. During a ball, Joan experienced a wardrobe malfunction while dancing with the king—who, suffering the snickers of some of his nobles and Joan’s withering humiliation, retrieved her fallen garter and adjusted her stocking. Presumably reserving this new honour for those who had not laughed at this act of chivalry, Edward III went on to establish the Most Noble Order of the Garter, the motto of the knights being the above phrase.

social committee

I had seen this playful casting-call, cat-walk circulating featured in Vanichi Magazine bz photographer and artist Viktorija Pashuta on the internet for several days but figured it was something swanky enough to go viral and then dank all on its own. In fact, the male line up dressed as social networking sites struck me as an extension of the so-called Gamergate controversy about misogyny in video games until BoingBoing revealed the full pageant with women posing as internet browsers.
I wholeheartedly agree that Firefox and Instagram ought to be dapper and dressed to the nines, but I think the other looks and personalities are spot-on as well. What do you think? Are these human mascots posh enough to capture what is characteristic about your favourite media tools?

hunting high and low

I had forgotten that the brilliant and quintessentially eighties band A-ha hail from Norway. Next summer, the performers will celebrate their thirty years as a group with a concert in Brazil, the Rock in Rio festival having been founded the same year as the band.

coolhunting or memetic

Via Kottke, Business Week magazine celebrates its eighty-fifth birthday with an articulated list of the eighty-five most troublesome concepts in the market-place.

The city-state of Singapore, mortgages, the interwebs, a coffee magnate, infant formula, out-sourcing, open-source, and global positioning among many others are included with detailed articles and charts that explain how each of these ideas changed the economy and society. For example, #75 is Jane Fonda’s Workout, which propelled both the VCR and the self-help industry, #84 is the Polaroid instant camera, which was a harbinger of social media and #25 is the decoding of the human genome that launched a mad-dash for Big Pharma and fostered an era of not scientific ignorance but rather scientific apathy as if anything that could be captive and quantified warranted no further curiosity. You ought to check out the entire listing of big ideas and maybe you’ll be the next innovative insurgent yourself.