peak oil or race to the bottom

The last time that petrol prices were at this level was just after the so called Great Recession impacted the markets and caused an industry glut and gas was on the trajectory upward in June of 2009. This flashback index, which is just a point on the continuum that’s made all the more painful by knowing it’s neither a wholly good thing nor liking to be lasting, finds H and I fresh from our Roman holiday—Qaddafi was apparently visiting at the same time. 

Elsewhere US forces were withdrawing from a tumultuous Iraq, Michael Jackson passed away, France is in Sarkozy’s court, North Korea prepares for nuclear ballistics tests, civil war rages in Somali, too big to fail enters economic terminology, bird flu is spreading and swine flu becomes endemic and Russian aggression in Georgia continues with the establishment of a permanent military presence. Seeing the prices at the pump is not as jarring as seeing the gas station billboard conserved in that 1985 (the Iran-Iraq War and the OPEC price-war) Tears for Fears music video Everybody Wants to Rule the World—but conveys almost the same sense of apprehension. Whatever factors are behind this downward trend, nefarious, punitive or accidental, is no favour or respite, as current prices do not provide any incentive for diversification, even if there was already a little will and delicate momentum to improve, businesses, with transportation costs less of a consideration, can well afford to cast its tenterhooks further afield and stir up some cut-throat competition, and for consumers, once prices do rise again, it will be particularly punishing. What do you think? Will any good come of this?

two spirits, one body

Though I didn’t realise that there was any portrayal or awareness outside of Arthur Penn’s anti-establishment screen adaptation of Little Big Man, the special esteem afforded to members that did not fit into traditional gender roles that was not something hidden but rather respected and was an unsettling surprise for the early explorers and later anthropologists encountering Native American tribes.

Recognising and even valuing those whom had both female and male personality traits and sustained same-sex relationships was nearly a universal institution among groups in North America—which Europeans labeled derisively as berdache, from the French term referring to a male-prostitute or a sex-slave. Tribally, they had their own words to describe these individuals and assigned communal duties, including taking on the roles of singers, dancers, tailors, crafters, baby-naming authorities, fortune-tellers, and matchmakers, which were specially set aside for these experts. In some cultures, men and women would cross-dress to classify themselves as such—but it was not a requirement and no scarlet letter to identify themselves to others as butch or effeminate. In the 1990s, Indians eventually came to reject externally imposed terminologies and concepts like gay—and hetero-normative, which reflected the backward thinking that eclipsed aboriginal ways and which also got to give the definitive account—to bring Two-Spirit in as an overarching designation. I like Two-Spirit—simple and straightforward and not confusing like non-binary and does not sound politically frustrated.

foo-fighters or roadside attractions

During the last years of the war, Nazi scientists were working on a secretive underground construction programme in the catacombs of mines in the Lower Silesian region, code named Project Riese—Giant.

Although this massive project was presumably undertaken to house displaced administrative divisions along the Western front and as a logistical extension of Nazi-Germany’s deadly real and substantial rocketry programme, no one is entirely sure what was happening in these mine-shafts. Some believe, gleaned from various descriptions and accounts of forced-labourers, that a Wunderwaffe was being developed there. Die Glocke, the Bell, as the device was dubbed because of its shape, seemed to be a very mutable armament, the subject of much popular conjecture—and fearfully capable of anything or feasibly nothing at all.
Supposedly the housing was a containment field for a mysterious substance known as Xerum 525, speculated to be anything ranging from red mercury to anti-matter—and once activated, the device may have been an experimental fusion bomb, an anti-gravity propulsion engine, a TARDIS, or a sort of magic, quantum cauldron for looking into the future. “Foo-fighter” was the term that Allied airmen used for unidentified flying objects and other strange aerial phenomena. If die Glocke did exist, its ultimate fate is too unknown, some say it was an escape pod, some theorizing that it remains in South America and others believing that it’s mothballed in Area 51, with the occasional cameo-appearance, like in the 1965 space acorn incident in Kecksburg, Pennsylvania.

hold for release

When the first twenty-four hour cable news network debuted in 1980, ushering in a new era for the way we thought about and expected from the media and I think to a large degree conditioned us to use and be exploited by the internet, the founding mogul pledged that the US National Anthem (the traditional sign-off music for when television stations had an end to their broadcasting day) would only be played once for the network’s inaugeration and be on the air until the end of time. There was a contingency video prepared in the event the end of the world which would consequently stop the intrepid reporting—I wonder what they imagined back then as opposed to now and what catastrophes have changed and what have remained the same—that was rediscovered by an intern in 2009 and might be worth a look at what was supposed to never be seen—not out of morbid curiosity but a glimpse at how one individual prepared for such an occasion with dignity.

abuela hypothesis or santa hanna

The mother of Mary and grandmother of Jesus is not named in the Gospels, but as with the narrative of Mary and Joseph and the holy kinship, Jesus’ extended family which was a very popular theme for medieval artists, the faithful soon were introduced to Saint Anne—Hanna as she is known in Islamic and the Orthodox tradition.

This cult of Anne had early adherents in the Eastern Church, a few shrines in France and the Cathedral of Düren, between Köln and Aachen, holds her reliquary since the fourteen century. Saint Anne or Santa Ana as she is known in Spanish enjoys most veneration, however, in Central America, dating back to the arrival of the Conquistadors. Most other religious settlement had been claimed long ago, through displacing pagan festivals with the moveable feasts of Christianity and accepting seasonal trappings—long since frozen as traditional, and the Church could not very well bend to accommodate every new encounter with a new liturgical calendar and agenda. Besides, no matter how convincingly disguised, missionaries were worried that aboriginal practises and believes would continue under a different sacrament. As violently cataclysmic as the contact between the New and the Old Worlds was, conversion probably was the most humane and peaceably conducted act of the whole business of colonialism in this part of the Earth, not that that particularly is saying a lot compared to the level of atrocity. Even if they had been willing to make concessions to the native beliefs, the priests found few archetypes—with one exception being the popular spirit of Xmucane, known as the grandmother of the Mayan pantheon of the gods. She and her consort, Grandpa Xpiacoc, also helped the creator spirits fashion the first people—out of corn once the first trials with clay and wood failed.  Churches dedicated to the Grandmother of Jesus were built on the foundations of temples of Xmucane.

café-culture

Learning that ritualising coffee and tea as national beverages and past-times, with plenty of celebrity endorsements to bolster acquiring the taste, carried aloft by these habit-forming tonics, was done on such an institutional level, in part to perk-up and pacify a proletariat given to drinking more adult beverages that were needed in the factories and in a condition to operate heavy-machinery. Beer, wine and spirits were still the safer alternatives to water, since Europe had been cursed with bad plumbing and poor sanitation since the fall of Rome, and had of course the added benefits of antiseptic properties and inebriation. Required to be brewed and seeped which killed germs in the process, coffee and tea, as production increased and came under colonial control, however, could be released into the mass-market.
Unlike tea, whose cultivation and ceremony maybe as far back as five-thousand years in China (allegedly due to a fortunate mishap that blew some tea leaves into a pot of water on the boil, the government having decreed ages before that all water must be boiled before it is drank) and slowly leached to the rest of Asia, coffee’s properties were discovered relatively late—possibly by observing the behaviour of birds and goats fiending after the berries, which were too bitter for human-consumption. This late entry and South American plantations had me convinced, considering the timing during the Age of Exploration, that coffee was purely a New World import. Introduced to Yemeni dervishes by Ethopian planters, the devotees sipped the strong wild coffee (qahwat al-bun, wine of the bean, loaned into Turkish as kahve, whence it was discovered by European merchants) to help them keep awake for all-night vigils. A domesticated variety of the plant was cultivated in the port city of Mocha and the drink gradually expanded beyond religious use. Conflating New World chocolate with the souqs of this Yemeni port is similar to the word for the quintessentially North American poultry coming indirectly to England via merchants from the Ottoman Empire. Just as the methods of silk and porcelain production were a highly guarded industry secret for China, so too was coffee for Yemen, East Africa and Persia. Only beans already roasted were allowed for export to prevent propagation. Another Sufi Bada Budan smuggled seven cultivars from the Middle East to India, where, like the British despoiling China’s monopoly on tea, the plant and coffee-culture thrived and promulgated to the rest of the world.

insular culture or gunboat diplomacy

As the culture had periodically done several times during the long history of its civilisation, Japan in the nineteenth century had turned inward and had isolated itself from the affairs of the rest of the world and incubated unique and refined art, literature and social etiquette.

This state (sokoku, a closed state, in the political sense) carried on for over two centuries until Commadore Matthew Perry appeared in Edo Bay, the former capital and close to Tokyo, suddenly in 1853 with his dreadnoughts and menacing missive from the US president Millard Filmore, obliging Japan to open its ports to international trade. There was just a little violence and the threatening language of the message, which promised worst of all to be unrelenting, thrust Japan towards engagement in the markets. A different sort of isolationist policy was taking route in America around this time—with the country healing from its own war against Mexico and earlier conflicts with Britain, and recuperation and military-industrial surplus, a militarised and recovering nation already despairing to expand markets—and America was compelled to trounce on this serene and nearly self-sufficient society to find new buyers and new suppliers of raw material.
While I suppose there’s a certain romancing element to uncontacted Japan, they definitely were not ignorant of the outside world, with a select few, government-vetted Chinese and Danish merchants doing brisk-business in a free-trade zone demarcated in the harbour of Nagasaki; they just didn’t care to be part of it. Maybe they conceded just to be rid of this presence, who lingered a lot in the area. Perry went as far as acquiring Taiwan (then called Formosa) as a base of operations, like America had done with Cuba and the Philippines. Once, however, their insular society was infiltrated, the Japanese did not suffer the fate of many other lands under colonialism, having taken the time to study the world at large, and instead excelled on the international stage and appropriated what was imposed upon them.