missed connection

I am justifiably miffed and disappointed with myself for having missed the visit of His Holiness the XIV Dalai Lama right here in Wiesbaden—for a dialogue on the occasion of his eightieth birthday (news article in German).

I saw the posters at least a week in advance—but, and I don’t know what I thought, like lions would be falling from the sky and that’s all anyone would be talking about, I guessed it was a telecast birthday greeting beamed from different gatherings around the world. After the fact—and I was even in town while it was going on in the Kurpark, I can see why the hosting of such an event might be kept low-key so as to not jeopardise any tenuous political- or business-relations. Happy belated birthday.  I ought have investigated and planned more carefully, especially if I am expecting the mountain come to me and then be absent myself. It’s nearly paramount to missing out on a visit by the Pope. This city always has something in the wings and next time, I’ll need to be more gracious and forthcoming—especially considering what others might have given for such an audience.

dwarf-planet or plutocrat

This week, the New Horizons space probe will have achieved its primary mission, after a journey of over nine years, powered by a plutonium reactor and carrying the ashes of its discoverer, and deliver the first detailed images and measurements of the planet that was downgraded after its launch, but will be traveling around fifty thousand kilometers an hour and barely have time to blink before it sails past. On its approach, it’s already beaming some amazing pictures back so astronomers believe that this one pass will afford them with a great trove of data to last for years. It is really remarkable that for the first time in decades, we’re going to be presented with an accurate portrait of another world—and not just an imaginative artist’s conception, with geographical features to be named. The hunt for Pluto began in earnest in the late 1920s when physicists grew fretful over the unexpected sideways orbit of Neptune that did not fit into the model of the solar system as described by the reliable, certain Newtonian mechanics that had been a sustaining grace for centuries.
The scientific community feared it would lend too much credence to that new physics of uncertainties and probabilities. Not wanting more revolt and upturning just yet—what with the age and world affairs and the ideas of Darwin still being fully masticated—astronomers hypothesised the existence of a yet unknown Planet X beyond that could account for Neptune’s odd behaviour. Fortunately (for Newton since the fate of scientific thought hung in the balance) the hunt yielded Uranus and it did mostly explain the outer planets’ orbits—however, there was a need (and public excitement to forward the cause and exploration) to call for a second scavenger hunt in the night skies for a consolation prize. The competition was fierce—since the discovery of yet another planet and immortality to be gained lay in the realm of immediate possibility, and interestingly as the hunt was on, science-fiction and horror writer H.P. Lovecraft captured it in his own mythos, calling it Yuggoth, before the planet was ever sighted (though naming-conventions were strict and there was probably no movement to name it as the Cthultu author had done). Planet X´ was first spotted by Clyde Tombaugh in 1930—while working at an observatory in Arizona—endowed by a wealthy Bostonian by the name of Percival Lowell expressly built to save the Newtonian system (as above, the naming-conventions were strict and one could not very well call a planet after a benefactor, no matter how generous—although it looks pretty sly how the astronomical symbol ♇ adopted was basically a monogram of Lowell’s name, once Pluto got its designation, suggested by an eleven year old from Oxford, Venetia Burney, grandniece incidentally of the Eton professor who named the moons of Mars Phobos and Deimos), whose ashes are being ferried to his discovery. That this mission even got off the launch pad at all is also a story of coincidence, timing and politics—more on these plutocrats at the link above. Afterwards, for as long as its plutonium battery lasts, New Horizons will pass into the Kuiper belt and study some of the nebulous, icy objects in this mysterious hatchery for comets.

genesis or æolian dust

The always intriguing Æon magazine invites us to imagine an ecosystem that’s parallel to our own familiarly flourishing one but possibly quite independent—not quite like the writhing, invisible world of microscopic beings that Anton van Leeuwenhoek saw for the first time in the 1670s as this discovery did not have immediately recognisable and world-shattering consequences, since these animalcules seemed to have less to do with the majesty of man than anything imaginable—and along side the life that we know in such a radically different and unorthodox way so as to be completely alien in organisation and expression.
I think there are good indicators that our prejudice is slowly succumbing to surprise and serendipity—the resourcefulness of biology, as the search continues for extra-terrestrial intelligence and we find niches of creeping and reproducing beings in the most unexpected of places, but for all these positive developments, we still could fail if our criteria for thriving only cleaves to what we know and expect. Of course it would be more exciting and apparent to be confronted with the mute artefacts of an otherworldly civilisation or megafauna lopping across far-away plains—rather than enigmatic crystals, sludge, erosion, curious matter circling the drain, or creatures perpetuated by human belief in numerology or patent medicines and are happy hitchhikers. One concrete example given of a seemingly biogenic phenomena (that may have originated in a genesis before the one that’s our creation narrative or afterwards, like viruses, plasmids and preons that seem to prey on our weaknesses) is in the patina called desert varnish, debated since before the time of Darwin whether vegetable or mineral, of a sheen that forms on the surface of rocks, that’s extremely hydrophobic and contains elements not native to the local environment. The varnish, however, is inchoate, endemic to deserts around the world, from Africa to the Antarctic, and is even that verdigris that was scrapped away by our ancestors to produce the most ancient and enduring petroglyphs as signs that we were here too.

huginn and munnin

Though it is probably more likely that the later Czech sociologist Karl Deutsch expressed the sentiment to the effect that, “the essential part about nationhood is getting one’s past all wrong,” rather than the earlier French historian and orientalist Joseph Ernest Renan (whom it’s been attributed to), Renan did certainly write that the coalescing of a state requires that people have a lot in common as well as a collective amnesia—remarking that no respecting member of the New Republic dare own up to the frenzied, shameful massacre of the Albigensian Crusade.
This theologian who had a crisis of faith while looking deeper into the historical personage of Jesus and was unable to reconcile Church doctrine with the time-line was writing during a period of transition, the late nineteenth century, generations from the French Revolution, the terrors and resurgence with the Napoleonic Wars and during a time sadly insatiate for what was called progress. Posthumously, and despite Renan’s own critique of tribalism, certain elements of his readership championed his works as justification for colonialism, empire-building, and later eagerly advocating fascism and the politics of race. It nonetheless rings true, I think, that it’s an essential part of a founding, abiding myth—from Rome, England and to America—that a people joined or lumped together be mistaken about certain contexts and have heroes to worship. The later Deutsch, inheritor to all this misguided zeal, in contrast, helped people realise their folly and installed counter-measures.  Huginn (Thought) and Muninn (Remembrance) are the pair of cosmic ravens that surveyed the Earth and roosted with and reported to the Norse god Odin—sort of like the private counsel of a conscience or complimentary set of shoulder-angels.

5x5

vapour-lock: intoxicating atmosphere of the breathable cocktail chamber

cachepots: origami planters that grow with the plants they hold

loving-cup: whimsical, personal hand-crafted trophies (not pictured)

shiver ye timbers: EU Pirate Partei representatives save freedom of panorama

dot-dash-diss: in 1903 a white-hat hacker disrupts Marconi’s telegraph demonstration, via Kottke

bagful of wits or the fox and the hedgehog

Greek poet Archilochus, reflecting on the perils of being too clever, said of the fabled fox that he knows many things, but the hedgehog knows one big thing.
I wonder which character society finds more palatable, to be peripatetic and know a hundred means of escape, evasion, succeeding that we can adapt—or try to in the moment—to a given situation or be content, hunkered down with one sure and reliable idea. Reflecting on the ongoing centennial of the Great War and the horrors that followed, ideologies that took root in the scorched pastures of Europe where God and King were beforehand disbanded by terror and revolt and brief revanchment by Napoleon and the brittle empire of the Hapsburgs that couldn’t hold the centre led us down terrible paths that put us off outwitting ourselves—for a generation at least. Maybe ideologues do admit of one core idea driving their agenda but in practise and execution, it’s only maybe a fox disguised as a hedgehog. Presently, I fear we’ve again acquired a taste to be clever and forgotten about the dangers of nationalism and rank hypocrisy in wealth and technologies. We don’t need to dart down those manifold paths—a hundred routes to utopia—another time and hopefully we’ve learned enough from history to restrain and humble ourselves.

crocodile creek, neverspeak mountain

The ever intrepid team of Atlas Obscura presents an illuminating, nostalgic glimpse at the stellar rise and equally rapid decline of a gargantuan amusement park built in the southern marshes of New York state that opened in June of 1960 and closed after just four seasons, called Freedomland U.S.A. Civil engineer and architect of such ambitious family playgrounds named Cornelius Vanderbilt Wood, recently dismissed from his last project of putting another but more enduring pleasure estate in an orange grove—the successor would again be built in a swamp—and his role ultimately denied and disavowed, designed a huge area in the shape of the continental United States and placed several historical and cultural attractions and rides within those borders.

The park celebrated the cheerier side of manifest destiny, mercantilism and American exceptionalism, including the Great Fire of Chicago, the San Francisco Earthquake, the launch pad and mission-control at Cape Canaveral—plus a New Orleans where it was always Mardi Gras and live music acts for adults to enjoy. In order to attract and retain more, the educational character was quickly supplanted by more conventional rides but its decline was swift—despite the number of guests and a lot of fond memories. Some of the more conspiratorial-minded believe that Freedomland U.S.A. was never meant to be a commercial success but rather an experiment in urban development by real-estate magnates and large landowners in New York and was undertaken to demonstrate that the marshland could safely support large-scale construction projects—and in fact, just after the park was razed, a public housing and a shopping centre went up. I think it is more likely the case that people became much disillusioned with the notion of what their country was becoming with the string of political assassinations of those waning years, not to mention the competition from the nearby venue of the 1964 World’s Fair that was meant to cheer everyone up again. The in depth look at Atlas Obscura furthermore bounces the demise of Freedomland off of the other ruins of theme parks and presents an interesting retrospective on the culture and the times.

zoinks, jinkies and denouement

The Hanna-Barbera cartoon franchise Scooby-Doo, Where Are You? was conceived in response to parental concerns that the particular Saturday morning line-up, which consisted of Space Ghost, the Herculoids and Tom and Jerry, was too violent. Producers were initially infatuated with the idea of doing a spin-off of the Archie syndicate that featured a teen band who happened to slip off fight crime and solve mysteries in between gigs. The whole concept still needed re-working because these bandmates (with a cowardly mascot) were in pursuit of actual ghouls—rather than some villainous human disguised that those meddling kids would unmask at the end of each episode—and came across as rather too scary. The second, familiar version had its cast of characters drawn directly from the old-teenagers portrayed on the series The Many Loves of Dobie Gillis—Norville “Shaggy” Rogers voiced by DJ Casey Kasem and based on the template of beatnik Maynard G Krebs (Bob Denver, later of Gilligan’s Island fame) and Velma Dinkley is lifted from the tomboyish Zelda Gilroy (portrayed by Shelia James Kuehl presently a member of the California State Senate) as a couple examples.

It’s strange to think how all supernatural and superstitious elements were debunked by the show’s finishing scene—excepting the canine sidekick who was retained from the original proposal, of course, and one that could talk (I don’t recall a musical inclination, the Archies’ dog played the bongos)—and I suppose that expectation, moral placated fretful parents. The title character was named reportedly after the scatting verse at the end of Strangers in the Night rather than Detective Chief Inspector Walter Dew, who investigated the Jack the Ripper murders and some other gruesome crimes in turn of the century London, plus cases cat-burglary and forgery. It would not have even occurred to me to connect these two sleuths and wonder, had not I learned that the Inspector, in pursuit of a fugitive, had once travelled under the name Mister Dewhurst. It made me think of some of the reoccurring distant relations (this series was keen on extended families, too, it seemed and everyone had their pedigree) like those who lived on Doo Manor, or cousin Scooby-Dee, Dixie-Doo or Sandy Duncan.