posture pals: one sufferer’s quest to alleviate her own pain caused her to notice that many indigenous peoples never get back pain
Previously on PfRC, we set out to experience what’s called a Paternoster, a cyclical elevator, and upon learning that there were two housed in buildings I knew, spent the lunch-hour investigating. First I tried the Federal Office of Statistics (Statistisches Bundesamt oder Destatis), which I always regarded as a curious institution to begin with. It’s sort of like the Harper’s Index for the state of Germany—whenever rarefied, detached facts and figures, the numbers of bean-counters, are cited in the news (employment, traffic accidents, annual litres of beer per capita, the price of eggs in China), it’s often given the dateline of Wiesbaden—and I suppose it’s doubly curious that this bureau would hold on to its relic of a Paternoster as I could just imagine the report being compiled in those corridors about how x-number of Germans were maimed by this contraption in the past quarter. The staff at the reception area were bemused with my request and friendly enough but said it was too dangerous and reserved only for employees of the bureau. Maybe in keeping track of statistics, they somehow avoided becoming one. The staff at the reception also recommended that I try another place, an insurance building just two blocks away. I was skeptical about there being another so close and in such a modern (and squat) building but I asked at the front desk.
Replying that this had been their third inquiry for the day, I was again told that it was too great a liability (being an insurance company) that I could not ride in it but was allowed through the lobby to look. The conveyor-belt of narrow coffin-like wooden compartments going up and down at a really brisk pace was really keen to behold and I wasn’t sure that I would have stepped into this Jacob’s Ladder willingly myself under other circumstances. H, who was unaware that any still remained, had ridden a Paternoster before and admitted it was a little scary but exhilarating. The construction reminded me of the wooden escalator H and I rode on in the original Macy’s department store in New York City. Undeterred if not now a bit obsessed with the idea, I plan to look a bit further afield. Next time I find myself in Frankfurt, I will make it a priority (or make a special trip) to visit the campus of Goethe University, whose iconic administration building (originally the ensemble of the IG Farben company with intervening incarnations as the command-and-control of the Allied powers, the headquarters of the US Army and the seat of US Army Corps of Engineers) where there is a bank of eight functioning Paternosters—beloved by the student-body and probably won’t be gutted any time soon in the name of safety.
I had forgotten that even with not counting Bobo, the Olympian blacksmith Hephรฆstus was also the original robotic engineer, as the always interesting BLDGBlog points out in an excellent gloss reflecting on advances in the discipline and navigation that has many leads to follow.
Looking a little deeper into these Homeric references to automata, like the roving, tireless tripods and mechanical guard dogs that served on an unending security detail, I realised that Hephรฆstus’ other masterwork, in collaboration with sister Athena and under instruction of his father, Zeus, was the first mortal Woman, as company for the lowly creature called Man. Pandora was her name but she was not some clumsy fembot that bumbled into some pithos and released all evils into the world. Rather, according to Zeus’ instructions, Pandora (meaning “all gifts”) was meant to be Man’s punishment for having accepted the stolen goods from Prometheus (technology, for the flame was taken from Hephรฆstus’ own forge), fashioned of the clay of the earth but imbued with charms from each of the gods, beauty, wisdom, craftiness as well as long-suffering guile and unquenchable curiosity. Accounts vary, it seems, but somehow it was arranged to have Pandora and that infamous vessel in the same room, and all hell broke loose, except for Hope, which Pandora managed to trap before it too escaped into the now less than pristine ecology.
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.
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.
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
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.
