5x5

flight-path: merry prankster living near an airport welcomes fretful passengers to the wrong city

i want to believe: nature reserve in Vancouver had the most screen time of any of the X-Files stars

prefab: Chinese engineers and architects construct flat-pack skyscrapers in record time

the place of shining light: holographic projector used to recreate the Bamiyan Buddha

identity politics: 1967 Mike Wallace documentary on the homosexuals

forbidden colours or darkly adapted eye

I am not positive that the so-called chimerical colours aren’t an explanation of that dress and the phenomena doesn’t truly strike me as an optical illusion and something more akin to a more intense exercise than one subjects his or her eyes to, but nonetheless catching a fleeting glimpse of the stygian colours—that is something both dark and super-saturated, is something to behold. There are other flavours of colours outside the visual gamut, what can be displayed, reproduced, or seen due to the structure of our eyes or even imagined in the conventional sense, but these contrasting hues and resultant impossible blue are suggestive of the mythological river Styx that separated the world of the living from the underworld.

To achieve the effect, one ought to stare at the target within the yellow circle for a full minute, then glance over the black square. Staring at the bright spot fatigues certain colour and light receptors (not like an after-image burnt into a television screen) and then those receptors that are used primarily to boost night-vision are excited, and one should briefly see the contradictory spectre. Maybe some have the ability to see such things everywhere—although the concept of colours can be communicated to an extent, I suppose we never know what another person perceives, and there was probably also a time not too long ago when unnatural colours like hot-pink or the florescent- and neon-tinged ones were unheard of and novel. Other descriptors include luminous and hyperbolic, and I think it would be fun to give names to that whole spectrum of overlapping colours and challenge our brains and eyes to see the impossible. Are these chimera colours—like the hot, bitter, baby and shocking, once seen unable to be unseen or must they be conjured up every time?

everyone knows hoverboards don’t work on water

I used to pass this charity hospital chapel (Spitäle Kirche) that’s been converted into a gallery space for local artists in Würzburg almost on a daily basis while I was discovering the city.

This museum at the head of the Old Bridge over the Main below the Marienberg Fortress, once dedicated to the Fourteen Holy Helpers, always made me think of the courthouse that gets struck by lightning in Back to the Future. The first instalment of the movie trilogy was released for US Independence Day weekend exactly three decades ago and the sequel travels forward from the 1985 of the characters’ past-present thirty years to our future now of 2015 (21 October). Where are the flying cars I was promised? Maybe it really is like Alex P. Keaton said upon ordering his father to ask his mother out to the prom, “My name is Darth Vader; I am an extra-terrestrial from the planet Vulcan.”

justice served or shamers gonna shame

Writing for the Daily Beast, columnist Ben Collins, together with humourist and author Jon Ronson, confronts the grave and impending travesty of social-justice that social-media is courting to the detriment and inattention of most of the other potentially positive aspects of these different venues.
I suppose, like the general drift of the article, that memorialising faults and faux pas is a way to claim political power over others, whether or not disguised behind one or more masks or exposed, known and recognised, for otherwise pleasant and civil people who’ve no truck with politics—nor in indignities neither. Members of that good company would also not like to be confronted with past blunders, embarrassments or regrets—and one’s known by the company one keeps, but perhaps with the tremolo-courage of anonymity and expediency that has no time for manners (or reflection) they hope to bully others before they’re victims of the same treatment. What do you think? Not everyone has lost his or her shoulder angels, sense of self-censorship, and genuine yearning to learn something or have a conversation (an intellectual rather than visceral response) but in distancing ourselves from those users don’t we risk fuelling this phenomena all the same in abandoning certain forums as the domain of trolls?

sunday drive: gemünden am main

Driving back for the work-week—the weekends are always too short but the intervening time does not drag on too awfully—I decided to take the scenic route which we’d just traced the day before, exploring Lohr and that narrow projection of Bavaria that extends into Hessian territory all the way to Aschaffenburg.
 It certainly was a more pleasant experience than rumbling along the Autobahn and I took the chance to stop in the town of Gemünden am Main—so named because it is where the tributaries of the Sinn and Frankish Saale empty (the streams’ mouths) into the River Main. Naturally this confluence was a strategically important spot and sometime in the early thirteenth century the Count of Rieneck erected this castle and keep as a toll-station to control traffic and trade along the waterways.
Only ruins of Schloβ Schreneburg remain but the view is an impressive one and is now a venue for open-air concerts and a home for bats. Competing claims on the land by the dioceses of Würzburg and Fulda, especially after the line of the family Rieneck went extinct, even saw the construction of successively higher castles on the rolling hills above Scherenburg, since levelled, to dominate the Main below. The waterways are still important components of the transportation infrastructure for the region, and the rail-links that run parallel supplement the connections. I think I’ll start taking this route more often in fair weather and get a better taste of what’s here for us to discover.