open you the west door and turn the old year go

Open you the East Door and let the New Year in.

Happy 2015!

universal coordinated time

The tradition of dropping the ball in New York’s Times Square—and derivative celebrations, which began with the year 1908 after fireworks displays were banned in Gotham over safety concerns has much older roots that connect the count-down with navigation on the high-seas and reflect on the nature of time and time-keeping itself. The Naval Observatory in Washington, DC had installed a time-ball in 1845 for the benefit of fleets launching out from the Delmarva Peninsula for the antipodes that fell daily to mark high-noon. This temporal landmark goes back to the Royal Observatory east of London, which rests on the Greenwich meridian. While it was relatively easy for ships at sea to calculate changes in latitude (north, south) by gauging their position under the stars, reckoning degrees, minutes and seconds of longitude proved much more of a challenge.
A navigator could figure how far east or west one had traveled by knowing the difference in time at his present location relative to his point of departure, but clockworks did not yet have their sea-legs and it was not possible to keep good measure, until the development of the sturdy maritime chronometer, invented in 1737 in England, whose chief berth was at Greenwich, later declared to be the Prime Meridian in a convention chaired by US president Grover Cleveland. A bright red ball was installed on the observatory’s bell tower—visible from all around, that has fallen daily since 1833 as an aid cue for passing ships to synchronise their watches—although at 1300 since the crews were busy calibrating earlier with the noon-time angle of the sun. The newspaper magnate wanted to give the gathered crowds a similar cue, bereft of his former pyre and beacons, with a dazzling effect and commissioned the first illuminated ball to be lowered at the stroke of midnight to usher in the New Year.

banned to the bone or disc-jockey jump

Though Western music was officially restricted in Soviet Russia, some bootleg copies of jazz standards and the emerging rock-and-roll were already circulating in the 1950s and the privileged few who got to listen were starving for more and wanted to share—of course, the taboo experience with others. Vinyl as the media, however, came at a high premium and conventional propagation would have aroused the suspicion of censors, so the aficionados/bootleggers/pirates discovered an innovative and resourceful solution: raiding the dumpsters of medical facilities with radiology departments, they took discarded x-ray films and impressed the grooves of the music onto the radiographs. Colossal has a fine little gallery of these improvised albums plus several links that document more on the history of this phenomenon.

in der silvester-nacht

Though not to be characterised as weird or foreign and not exclusive to Austria, the country’s edition of the English daily, the Local, present a nifty summary of some of the ways Austrians ring in the New Year. Special credit, I believe, is due for not shying away from terms like agora- and ochlophobia (the latter being specifically the fear of crowds and not just being exposed and out in the open, fear of the Marktplatz) and molybdomancy (Bleigießen)—that is, divination by molten lead quickly cooled in water, complete with a description of the fun and an exhaustive Rorschach list of interpretations.

There are also some delicious recipes and more on merry-making. New Year’s Eve is goes by the name of Silvester for the sainted pope who baptised the Roman emperor Constantine and legitimised Christianity within the Empire, whose holy day is commemorated on the last day of the year and is combined with traditional celebrations and customs in Central Europe, like the countdown and fireworks. What are some peculiar traditions and rituals of your own? There’s still time to go out and augur your fortune with some ingots, a candle and spoon.  In der Silvester-Nacht wird das Blei zum schmelzen gebracht.

affix oder oh won’t somebody please think of the children

The Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers—under no official charter but not in the public-trust either—after a year of planning and negotiations, with deference to actual lexica and corporate nonce-words, is releasing an onslaught of new internet suffixes (DE/EN), some two-thousand new possibilities culled from different languages and markets. New German top level domains expand from .de to a whole uncharted wilderness of tags with the new naming conventions, like .gay, .islam, and .kinder as well as names of retailors and brands.
English speaking areas have the monopolisation potential as well with choices like .shoes, .pizza, .ninja—as if .biz and .free weren’t already chintzy and fly-by-night enough. All this cacophony strips dominance away from some appellation-squatters, I suppose—and maybe bursts a bubble for the online real-estate market, but it also makes for a lot of confusion too—where nothing’s not miscellaneous and not parsed and not delivered through search-engines.
I imagine most trafficking comes this way already anyway and most people are not willing to venture a guess at something new—for the very real fear of being led down a rabbit-hole and come to a look-alike site that’s maybe stealing one’s data. This move is rife, I think, for ideologues and for more spoofs, dodging and forgeries, but it is the off-chance that cartels go after one of the new domains that has people most concerned—seeing that confectioners are staking claim to the .kinder name to build brand loyalty to certain candies. What do you think? Are you prospecting for a new style, a manner of address?

dewey decimal or oracular vernacular

Before the advent and propagation of the internet and search machines, the inquiring public relied on certain institutions and librarians in particular for answers.

I do hope that there still are such venerable human experts—at least, the trained and the willing that are still there to field inquiries and riddled with such questions, like Mental-Floss shares a cache recently uncovered in the New York public library system. It seems that librarians jotted down the questions they found either humourous or very challenging, and I would wager that there are similar repositories to be found in libraries the world around. I remember well when librarians were mysterious oracles and when browsing the stacks lent a way of formulating a question that had been asked, in some form, before. Seeing these notes is certainly an interesting juxtaposition to allowing predictive software finish one’s sentence, where is, what is, how do I...

la vie en rose ou cressonière

During autumn’s travels in Normandy, which we’ve been woefully remiss in writing about, H and I stopped at the village of Veules-les-Roses—a darling little spot, whose mills and watercress (Brunnenkresse) bogs (cressonières) are fuelled by the shortest river in France, la Veules—only eleven hundred metres long, escaping to the sea through a breach in the high chalk cliffs of the plateau of Pays de Caux.
This village was a jewel to discover, even on a soggy day, and has been made the subject of literature and visual arts. It was very pleasant to have this pause amidst all the other history and dramatic views of this region.

 

boilerplate or ultramar

Abrecht Dürer’s famous and celebrated woodcut of an India rhinoceros—which the artist never saw in person, has much more than æsthetic value, approaching the crossroads of modernity from all possible angles. The trading magnates of Europe were cut off from Asia via the overland route, the Silk Road severed by the Ottoman Empire, and so they sought other ways to reach China and India. Spain opted to reach the East by sailing West and Portuguese explorers scaled the African coast on a southerly trip to round the Cape of Good Hope and onward across the Indian ocean. Seamanship and navigation had reached a level of sophistication that made such long voyages possible and profitable. There was, however, the problem of competing colonial claims to lands and exclusive trading outposts. The kings of Spain and Portugal eventually turned to Pope Leo X to settle matters and both sides tried to woo a blessing from the Pontiff. In 1494, the Treaty of Tordesilhas settled the dispute to a degree by dividing the world outside of Europe, Africa and Asia, between the two maritime empires. Keeping up patronage, however, was important and Portuguese King Manuel I had merchants in Goa fetch a rhinoceros and bring it to Lisbon, via Saint Helena.

People were absolutely astonished to see such a beast, which was unknown in Europe since Roman times—the animal described by the classic naturalist Pliny but generally regarded the rhino as some legendary creature. Vilified and curious, Europeans at this time were also rediscovering elements of their heritage that had gone missing during the Dark Ages. The Dark Ages weren’t all that grim and backwards but it is interesting to think how we know more of the Romans than people half a millennium nearer to them, and ruins were being excavated and art uncovered that no one suspected. Manuel was keen on getting this exotic specimen, however, to present to the Pope—thinking it would complement his pet white elephant Hanno, which the Pope rode around the streets of Rome on. Sadly, after being admired in Lisbon and communicated to draughtsman Dürer, the rhinoceros went down in a shipwreck off the coast of La Spezia and never made it to Rome—doubly sad because the rhinoceros is an able swimmer and probably would have survived had he not been chained to the deck. Of course, this print became as famous as it did and still remains in circulation because of emerging printing-technology in Dürer’s home-haunt of Nürnberg, another aspect of the modern age.