Friday 9 October 2015
upvote, a condรฉ nast publication
catagories: networking and blogging
Thursday 8 October 2015
humbug or the great pumpkin
catagories: ๐ซ, ๐, food and drink, myth and monsters
Wednesday 7 October 2015
5x5
mind the gap: month rental prices for a one-room flat in London superimposed on the Underground map
night gallery: curation of paintings by producer Thomas J. Wright for the macabre anthology
diorama: a dedicated California artist recreates faithful miniatures of New York’s disappearing store-fronts
treuhand: EU high court rules that social media giants may not freely repatriate international user-data as the integrity of it cannot be guaranteed
catagories: ๐ฌ๐ง, ๐บ๐ธ, ๐, ๐บ, ๐บ️, ๐ฅธ, environment, labour, myth and monsters, networking and blogging
boom! bonk, bonk on the head
Vis-ร -vis the mounting refugee situation as hundreds of thousands families and individuals fleeing war-torn Syria and other regions transit through Asia Minor and the Balkans or risk a harrowing trip across the Mediterranean—trafficked or through their own determination—for Germany and to eventually be resettled, the ever brilliant BLDGBLOG presents a sort of alternate and modern historical study with the manner in which the US dealt with its own possibly bidden (Germany’s is considered inviting too) crisis for the care and housing of migrants, especially of unaccompanied minors that surged on the Mexican border from points further South, quickly overwhelmed accommodating institutions.
Cynical as it sounds, finding storage solutions for surplus is pretty dehumanizing and the notion of a generation brought up by ghost-malls and derelict warehouses makes me think of that Star Trek episode where the “onlies,” the children are the only one left in a dilapidated, crumbing world—without the “grups” to take care of them. While searching for a pharmaceutical answer to immortal youth, a plague was inadvertently unleashed that attacked any grown-up, past puberty, and caused them to succumb to the disease within seven days. As childhood spans several centuries, with the pre-teens protecting the younger ones and the whole planet having fallen to wrack and ruin, until Doctor McCoy isolates a cure and Starfleet dispatches teachers and counselors to the planet to help rebuild it. Temporary shelters—hopefully without the potential of becoming a more permanent limbo—are not much better in Germany with up to ten thousand refugees daily entering Germany and corralled in empty sports halls and other locations, quickly over-crowded and with inadequate facilities. No amount of shuffling and hide-and-seek will address the underlying geo-political causes but may result in more dignified housing for both new-comers and established residents, already struggling with exorbitant rents and gentrification.
catagories: ๐ฉ๐ช, ๐บ๐ธ, ๐, ๐, foreign policy
Monday 5 October 2015
vulgate or hashtag hastings
It strikes me as a little paradoxical that the claim to the Divine Right of Kings comes of the newer, reformed protestant tradition with monarchs dual-hatted as heads of state churches, the Church of England, the Church of Norway, et alia rather than from something more seeped in history. This political and religious creed, holds that the kings rules by God’s grace alone is not subject to any earthly estate or institution, including the will of the papacy. In other words, the monarchy was invested with both civic and spiritual powers, bucking ancient divisions of authority, which were nonetheless prone to overlap and currying favour or displeasure and later developments, revolts and the spread of democratic-thinking cut short the tenure of a monarch, but this doctrine. Prior to the Reformation—however, alliances were built and strengthened through military campaigns, persecuted under the papal banner, that continued nearly without interruption up until that schism for Western Christianity in the form of the Crusades, launched against whomever was deemed to be a heretic. The first instance of this type of campaigning on a grand scale had a different character than the retaking of the Holy Land but there are definitely parallels with the Norman Conquest of England in 1066 and the First Crusade that coalesced just three decades later.
catagories: ๐ซ๐ท, ๐ฌ๐ง, ๐ณ๐ด, ๐, foreign policy, language, Middle East, religion, revolution, Wikipedia
Sunday 4 October 2015
bamberger freiheit
Of the Old Rathaus—which today houses on of the largest porcelain collections in Europe, a fine place for window-shopping too, there’s a simplified legend that it was built on the artificial island that straddles the Regnitz, the tributary that divides the city in order to isolate a particularly tyrannical mayor. The citizens of Bamberg never had such an intolerable civil leader, but rather, like Nuremberg, aspired for Imperial Immediacy and (Reichstadt, only answerable to the emperor) but the episcopal and secular division of the city—the Lord Bishop’s borders were statutorily defined by the Regnitz—and civil authorities hoped that a little engineered encroachment might consolidate powers. Though the domains remained under separate governance, forcing the bishop and his retinue to pass through the civic hall did go far in keeping the Church in check.
catagories: antiques, Bavaria, holidays and observances, lifestyle
Saturday 3 October 2015
5x5
pork rembrants: Liartown, U.S.A. now offering an Apple Cabin calendar, chronological accuracy guaranteed
victory garden: hobbyists were encouraged to irradiate fruit, vegetable and flower seeds in the 1950s and 1960s and see what mutations thrived
fire dance with me: arcade game dance-off to celebrate the weird genius of Twin Peaks
citizen science: the Pocketlab is an affordable Tricorder to conduct ad hoc experiments
attica or cultural studies
Though best remembered international for stellar performances of roles that were not able to contain her energy and talent, stock-characters in good but less acclaimed films like the happy hooker in Never on a Sunday, the good-time girl-type, naughty nun, or gal Friday in Topkapฤฑ, Greek singer and actress of the stage and screen, Melina Mercouri, had another equally impassioned calling as a politician. Finding herself exiled, stateless—her passport having been revoked for outspoken socialist sentiments against the junta government of a cadre of conservative colonels who overthrew the liberal government in 1967, while away on performing on Broadway, Mercouri—along with other prominent members of the Greek diaspora focused attention and shame on the military coup d’รฉtat.
Despite tepid support in Greece and an overall laughable platform that no one took seriously, the junta lingered on and on for seven unbearable years—not ousted until their adventures with a one-Greece-policy by invading the Cyprus that was so poorly executed and resulted in the partition of the island nation rather than its annexation. Once Mercouri could return to Athens, this “last Greek goddess,” as she was nicknamed, decided to focus her energies on rebuilding her homeland—which had suffered considerably in the intervening years with dismantling of cultural capital and censorship. When questioned on her credentials for entering politics as an actress, Mercouri retorted by questioning what qualified lawyers to represent the people. Mercouri went on to become the Minister of Culture, and lamenting that it was always just the chiefs of finance that met and that money was not certainly everything—a pretty bold truth to speak, especially in the present atmosphere where Greek financial ministers are characters people might actually recognise by name—and called together, for the first time, all the European ministers of culture and the arts. The legacy of this summit survives today in the rotating European Cultural Capital and the open dialogue it invites with a less rarefied form of diplomacy that everyone can appreciate. Mercouri was also the first voice in a growing choir of protests and calls of vandalism to have the so-called Elgin marbles returned to the Acropolis and for the protection, stopping trafficking and the repatriation of other national treasures.