bivouac oder boofen

One of my favourite blogs, Nag on the Lake, directs our attention to a website devoted to treading lightly and minimizing our footprint and range called Living in a Shoe Box. It looks like there are quite a few interesting ideas here but the one that caught our attention—though Lady faces no completion—featured this bicycle mounted trailer called the Wide-Path Camper. Conceived by designer Mads Johansen, this folding, modular unit—no bigger than one of those bicycle-hitch strollers—boasts quite a bit space and comfort and would be perfect for exploring the her native Denmark and much further a-field.

perfidy

Patterned after the Monday Demonstrations that brought down the regime of East Germany, the PEGIDA (Patriotsche Europäer gegen die Islamisierung des Abendlandes—Patriotic Europeans Against the Islamisation of the Occident, the West) marches are growing in numbers and frequency but are still rivaled by counter demonstrations. The German government, rightly, condemns the movement as racist and xenophobic. Trying to lend a legitimising air to thuggish and insular attitudes that were first championed by football hooligans (at least in costume, one has a better idea of what one is up against), these marches are hardly proving to be a civil way to channel frustrations or fears, what with public opinion splintered, calls that immigrants refrain from conversing in their native language at home and arson-attacks on refugee housing. I believe there are two very different things occurring here and bigots always capitalize on this confusion: immigration politics are not threatening to displace one’s culture and the level of interaction that all of these marchers have had with any form of Islam is limited to seeing families out in public and making assumptions, which does not exactly equate to an agenda of systematically imposing one’s way of life and values. Petitioning one’s government over real concerns for reform is one thing and resorting to violence and fear-mongering is quite another. Ideology and identity are not the same thing—but both run both ways.

iconography or graven images

A very interesting set of quite different factors and historical influences came together, I recently learnt, in the fourth century to establish rich artistic traditions that allowed the Buddha, the Christ and the panoply of the Hindu gods to be portrayed in human forms for the first time and in a manner that was cultural diffuse and immediately recognisable. Though these movements took place around the same time, the religions were at different stages of development and acceptance at this point—what with the Brahmin’s gods already enjoying milennia of devotion, Siddhārtha Gautama having achieved enlightenment some eight hundred years prior and the latest incarnation of the Abrahamic faith in its fourth century.  Despite these difference, they all started adopting pictorial representations around the same time.
A maturing network of international trade is of course a contributing factor, as being able to mediate on a shared image of how Jesus and company ought to look rather than relying on more abstract translated texts and interpreted teachings would spread these big religions and ensure their survival, but it is not the whole story. Before we got to the images of the serene Buddha and Jesus Christ in his characteristic poses, the story of these two was communicated through symbolism, teaching aides that represented the bodhi tree, the footprint of Buddha or the Cross, the sign of the fisher of men. And while it does seem natural and an effective step that the adherents of Buddhism would create figures of a limited and iconic variety for the benefit of foreigners being introduced to the philosophy, for Christianity it was a break with ancient traditions and taboos of not depicting God or His manifestations.  The decision to show Jesus as a man may have happened in part because Constantine around this time declared that faith the official one of the empire, and Romans and Greeks, used to having statues of Dionysus, Hercules or Nike decorating their villas with triumphant flair, thought it was acceptable to have even more glorious statues of Jesus on display. As with Buddhism, the move was probably also good for the edification of foreign-speakers. Some three hundred years later, during the first few decades of the faith, Islam restored the proscription again representing the divine by human-hands by issuing currency for the Caliphate that only bore the word of God, instead of coins bearing the image of the head-of-state or other trappings.

Places of worship were becoming somewhat uniform in their delivery but the coin of the land was really the only mass-produced and reliable product of the Middle Ages in the West by any reckoning. Insisting on the rubic of a shared language was a powerful tool, and it is remarkable that this level of organisation developed in just as many decades as centuries it took for other religions—and without pictures. The Hindu gods and their different aspects were almost too innumerable to catalogue, but with the rise of the Gupta dynasty to power on the sub-continent at this same time, there was an ambitious and successful effort to standardise how each avatar looked and deported his- or herself. Because of this promotion and propaganda, one could communicate a certain devotion with a few accepted conceits. The personal nature of the gods and their care and custody would be instantly understood and copied.  A sketch on a napkin being equally holy as any statue in a temple, and the image is understood to be the deity itself, to be treated as a honoured guest.

jack and jenny

Camping at the end of the travel season in Normandy, H and I had a little fright late one night at a campgrounds that we had nearly to ourselves. There was an awful clanging of a metal trash bin from over by the restroom building.

H peered out the window to investigate and saw these long and lumbering shadows. In this empty place, it would have been too much to bear had I not mentioned that there was a pair of donkeys corralled at the far end of the camp, which was set back from the coast by just a few grassy dunes and shared the land with a golf range—which looked tended but was also sleepy and deserted. The donkeys had escaped and were conducting the nightly rounds. Reading this article from Modern Farmer about the virtues of these sentinels and their advantages over traditional guard animals made me remember how gingerly we tried to shoo them away from the Bulli—in case they did get spooked and decide to kick a big dent in the side of the bus. Apparently, we needn’t have worried about that.

impulse engines

Wired! Magazine’s science desk has an interesting profile on the research of two astrophysicists from Harvard aimed to identify theoretical hypervelocity stars.

Our Sun and Solar System churns through the Milky Way at seven hundred thousand kilometres per hour, but this is a relative snail’s pace compared to rogue stars that have been clocked with speeds millions of kilometres per hour hurling away from galaxies. Scientists believe that such ejections happen when a pair of stars waltzes too close to a black hole and one gets flung away. The astrophysicists believe that there’s no reason to believe that stars could not be travelling much faster even, and that there could be a trillion stars in the universe shuttling from galaxy to galaxy at just under the speed of light. Of course, there might also be a planetary system in tow on this grand tour—implying mechanical space-travel might not be the only means of reaching other worlds. Capturing a lone star streaking across the void of the intergalactic medium is outside the competency of today’s telescopes, however.

santa’s little helpers

Writing for The Daily Beast, columnist Sally Kahn reminds us how big warehouse distributors exploit workers, especially those brought on to take up the holiday slack, with a telling decision upheld in the courts.
Though happily in Germany, these elves can go on strike—and over lesser injunctions—for America’s sweat-shops there seems to be little hope, and no great change of heart for these grinches seems forthcoming. This stint is not an insignificant one, not paying workers for the time at the end of each shift they spend being subjected to mandatory screenings and searches to make sure that they are pilfering any merchandise, especially considering that this same company will be awarded (for its tracking and logistics expertise) government security contracts and help maintain that list of who’s been naughty and who’s been nice.

load of guac

The avocado is not only, like the tomato, a fruit and not a vegetable also known—apparently—as the crocodile pear, it is also the cultivar of an evolutionary anachronism. The avocado, like cherries or berries to lesser creatures, developed as a to spread its over-sized seed by way of mega-fauna, such as giant sloths loping about on the pampas of South America, which are long-since extinct. Fortunately, the humans that displaced the intended distribution system are still around for tending.