narcotráfico

Incredibly with little notice but overwhelmingly positive results, the government of Portugal decriminalised (not legalised but offenses are addressed as a matter of public-health resulting in a referral to counselling services but not incarceration) all drugs—fifteen years ago.
Usage has not skyrocketed (as some opponents to the change feared and use vociferously as an argument against reform in other countries presently) and moreover, deaths from over-dose or infections spread by using dirty needles have plummeted to essentially zero as has gang activity, and probably just as significantly, there’s far less of a problem in Portuguese cities with novel synthetic experimental substances or ones that skirt the pharmacological standards as legalish highs. There are of course probably other systemic problems, like political corruption and inequalities in sentencing that has been reduced as well. I should think that if Portugal’s long-running experiment was the success that it appears to be, other countries would have been emulating it for a long time. The places, however, with the biggest drug and crime problems also reinforce the most wrong-headed understanding of abuse and addiction, I think, treating dependency as a sin or some kind of moral-failing and treating it almost exclusively with the corrective measures, penance, that held that other ailments where a curse that the sufferer brought upon himself. What do you think? No other disease diagnosis questions moral fiber or attributes a relapse to a lack of willpower.  Do we expect the addict to take the retribution that he had coming like we did lepers and other outcasts not so long ago?

winzer oder vitis vinifera

Over the weekend, H and I were treated to a tour of an award-winning vineyard and wine-tasting on the escarpment over the River Main outside of Volkach. This chalky cliff-face (Volkacher Mainschleife) winds around the river and produces an ideal micro-climate for the cultivation of grapes. The guide was quite funny and informative, teaching us about how the colour of a grape is not an indicator of the character of the end product and cultivars are only identifiable before they ripen by the shape of their leaves.
At another juncture before climbing further into the vineyards, the guide explained the origin and advantages of the distinctive canteen-shaped bottle of that region, called the Bocksbeutel—which folk-etymology suggests was named for its resemblance in shape to a ram’s (Bock) scrotum (Beutel, sack)—but was probably derived from the term for a book satchel that one could swing over his shoulder for easy transport, such containers also being the approximate size of a book in the hands and amenable to being carried in such a way.
Moreover, the design was easy to balance and would not roll away out of doors. Higher up and among the vines, we learnt about the vagaries of the weather and what impact that had on harvests and found out that the hedgerows used for wind-breaks were always rose-bushes, sometimes centuries old like the grapevines, because like the proverbial canary in a coal-mine, they were the first to show signs of disease and might also be a stop gap for the spread of pests. The local wines we sampled while on our hike were exquisite and a very pleasant reminder that there is a lot to explore close to home as well.

soy cuba

This collection of vintage Cuban political posters (propaganda is always such a dicey and loaded word) of curator Michael Taylor of Bath, UK comes to our notice via Messy Nessy Chic’s intrepid searches. Circa the early 1970s, most of these artworks were commissioned to mark the annual Tri-Continental Conferences that Cuba hosted through its Organisation of Solidarity with the People of Asia, Africa and Latin America (OSPAAAL in Spanish) to bolster support for human rights, social development and the ideals of socialism as a counter-weight to imperialism and globalisation. Due to a lack of ink, during the height of the Cold War in the 1980s, production dropped off, but there was a resurgence beginning in the year 2000 and still publish to this day. A comprehensive gallery of organisation’s posters can be found at this partner-site, Docs Populi.

beyond the uncanny valley of the dolls

Apparently, there is a market (novelty restaurants or Renaissance Faires, I am thinking) for talking automaton, which a firm specialising in such custom, made-to-order dolls.
Dangerous Minds features a selection from the company’s exactingly bizarre and surpassingly creepy catalogue, and while these animatronic characters aren’t realistic they nonetheless can elicit unease and there’s a strange resemblance in all of the models to celebrities and politicians that does not seem intentional but comes through.

vegetable lamb of tartary

I had heard of the Vegetable Lamb of Tartary beforehand—the way that scribes in the Middle Ages first passed on their second-hand accounts of a mysterious thing called cotton, but all the fantastic taxon of chimera put forth in this bestiary from the Medievalists’ Network.
All these strange creatures, with the exception of the Monoceros (the unicorn), were new to us, and we especially enjoyed learning about the legendary Barnacle Geese that were believed to spontaneously generate at sea on pieces of drift-wood, instead of the usual route of reproduction. It reminded me of how post-Enlightenment biologists thought that exotic birds of paradise lived a purely ethereal to never touch ground nor roost. The name for both the barnacle goose and the goose barnacle (from whence they were thought to hatch) has persisted as well as the prohibition of the eating of these geese during Lent for their unnatural life-cycles. Be sure to check out the whole strange menagerie and find more interesting articles at the link above.

krebs’ cycle

Researchers at the University of Chicago are perfecting a solar-capture process that mimics closely the process of photosynthesis rather than traditional photovoltaic that converts sunlight directly into electricity. Instead, the membrane of an “artificial leaf” uses solar energy to convert atmospheric carbon-dioxide into a fuel that can be burnt. The engineers are achieving efficiencies not quite at botanical levels but at least as something comparable to the (sunk) costs of refining gasoline.

foot traffic

Quite used to our Ampelmännchen, I haven’t encountered a wordy pedestrian crossing signal for years but I did rather enjoy pondering the poor punctuation of the lack of an apostrophe in don’t—which I’d never noticed.
Granted, apostrophes can be confusing and prone to abuse and especially glaring and galling and when superfluous but I suppose in its omission—not so much, but it is wholly unrelated to the recent assault that British civil engineers launched on diction on the roadways in hopes of staving off confusion for navigation devices. It turns out—and there’s some interesting diversions and detours along the way—no one really knows why that tradition was carried on, but one’s best guess is that it was for symmetry and easier to make the NT a ligature with the earliest sign illuminated by neon tubes and skip the apostrophe.

gravy train

A retired farmer hailing from Fort Worth, Texas named Eugene Bostick began taking in unwanted dogs that people would abandon on his property and by the time he had acquired nine new canine friends, he realised that taking them all on a walk would be a much too daunting task. Thus, we learn via Twisted Sifter, Bostick got inventive by hitching plastic barrels to his tractor and puttering through the countryside on weekly outings to the sheer delight of all.