Thanks to a report shared by the exceedingly brilliant and adventurous Nag-on-the-Lake on the curious and quirky so-called Paternosters, I was reminded of an item I’d recently heard on the local news that’s unleashed a minor tempest. I thought the looping passenger lifts, like escalator stairs and properly called cyclic elevators or Personenlaufzรผge (people circulating elevator), were called Paternosters because the ride was particularly harrowing and induced one to recite the Lord’s Prayer—which may well be but they are also called such because the mechanism is similar to praying the rosary.
Tuesday 9 June 2015
personenumlaufaufzรผge
catagories: ๐จ๐ฟ, ๐ฉ๐ช, transportation
Monday 8 June 2015
hobohemian
Collectors’ Weekly took a field-trip to the Hobo Museum in Britt, Iowa—an old railhead and switching station back in the days when locomotion was a form of social-safety net, and returned to share a really engrossing, in depth look at the lifestyle, code-of-conduct, origins and legacy of these itinerant workers who comprised a sizable demographic of America’s population spanning a huge historical swath from the aftermath of the US Civil War all the way through the Great Depression and the onset of World War II.
Returning, aggrieved from battle to find homesteads overrun, many men discovered themselves homeless and continued to soldier on in look of employment—this mobile workforce, not seeking hand-outs and wanting to preserve their reputation, helped to create the infrastructure, like the railways that created commerce and opened up westward expansion and became the conduits that the hobos relied on themselves. The culture of these migrant workers was a rich and nuanced one, fraught with danger and discrimination at times, and in addition to the formative force it was for America, it has also left behind some expressive fossils in American speech, like yahoo (a brute who’s proud of his wanton ignorance—possibly in deference to Gulliver’s Travels), working stiff (for those unfortunates tethered to a fixed home and job), junkie (an addict), chow (for food) and hunky dory. The article is certainly worth the read in its entirety and it always pays in spades to check out the website that celebrates curators of all sorts of stories.
5x5
walkabout: reflections on how a stroll makes our minds’ ready to wander and wonder
sea-view: in honour of World Oceans’ Day, tour Google Street View is taking to the waves
chalkboard gag: renovators uncover century old blackboard images in Oklahoma
culture vulture: petri dish hand print of after a day of play
sailor moon: realising Carl Sagan’s vision, Bill Nye’s experimental solar-sail has unfurled
catagories: ⚕️, ๐, ๐ญ, ๐บ️, ๐ง , environment, transportation
libidinous or better living through chemistry
ex cathedra or east of eden
I wonder if there are different flavours within Creationist camps that are particularly bothered with one aspect of scientific theory over another. I understand that the Catholic Church—though I would not class the whole organisation with the literalists and the fundamentalists—accepts the Big Bang and Evolutionary theories nearly as incontrovertible facts and necessary for the framework of the divine’s cosmology, saying that God is not a magician with a magic wand.
catagories: ๐ง , philosophy, religion
Sunday 7 June 2015
sunday drive: stangenpyramide oder strawberry fields forever
This symmetrical gradient of four hundred fifty-six columns on the high ground in the middle of the fields but with forested lands visible in the distance beyond the cultivation (the manicured golf-course included) is meant to make people reflect on that forest of skyscrapers ahead and the tangle of antennas and RADAR station that is a satellite installation the airport behind. Although my pictures didn’t do it justice (the towers of the metropolis just visible there above the tree-line), walking down the path that separates the two mirror-hemispheres does offer a pretty spectacular view from this promontory.
catagories: ๐ฉ๐ช, environment, Hessen
bird-watching
Over the past two weeks from our balcony, H and I have been noticing some strange ornothological behaviour. Nearly over the downspout for the rain gutter of our roof, a few little birds have not been feathering a nest but rather, it appears, tending a small garden plot.
The greenery that’s been planted there hasn’t withered away in the sun and looks to be growing. I would not make the leap yet that the sparrows are practising the rudiments of agriculture—although it is pretty clever if they have to foresight (just like not building a nest in a rain gutter) to think that the plants might flower and attract bees or other insects or at the very least act as a sieve or dam to capture bugs that are washed off the roof in the rain. We’ll have to keep an eye on these two and make sure they don’t take over the neighbourhood.
catagories: ๐ฑ, environment