double-decker

Updating from a story circulated in May about China’s design for an elevated bus to skirt traffic snarls effortlessly, the same source is now reporting that the concept has gone from model to fully-functioning prototype already, just as the developers had pledged that they would deliver. First conceived in 2010, the programme did not go anywhere until just this summer, due to skeptical reception and lack of funding. The government was convinced, however, once it was demonstrated as navigable and a fleet of such straddling buses would cost only a tenth of what a subway would and reduce congestion by at least a conservative thirty percent.

couplet and quatrain

Appreciating, like the troubadours of yore, that news and current events are especially good subjects for verse and there a quite a few social mediators out there doing just that. These are not ballads, quite (I tried that once during a long car trip in Ireland, “Heiko in his Aygo, he was a sheep-dodger!” and was asked to please stop) but rather poems adapted for genre and format of immediacy of meaning that can be teased out in a few choice words.
There is one superb individual, writing under the pseudonym Brian Bilston, whose been accorded the title of poet laureate for his moving and pithy works. I only found out about Mr. Bilston having heard tell that he’s been recruited by the traveling circus of the rich and powerful that will be descending on der Zauberberg later this year for the World Economic Forum as sort of a court-minstrel, but unbound by any patronage. His most famous poem that earned him the laurels, entitled “Refugees,” tweeted in March of this year, appears below. Please do heed the author’s request (and I promise, the effect is arresting) after reading it from top to bottom, re-read it from bottom to top:

Refugees

They have no need of our help
So do not tell me
These haggard faces could belong to you or I
Should life have dealt a different hand
We need to see them for who they really are
Chancers and scroungers
Layabouts and loungers
With bombs up their sleeves
Cut-throats and thieves
They are not
Welcome here
We should make them
Go back to where they came from
They cannot
Share our food
Share our homes
Share our countries
Instead let us
Build a wall to keep them out
It is not okay to say
These are people just like us
A place should only belong to those who are born there
Do not be so stupid to think that
The world can be looked at another way

(Now please re-read from bottom to top)

linea degli alberi

In October of 2014, a really fantastic pair of residential towers were completed in Milan and opened their doors to its new occupants. The structures incorporate some one thousand trees and other plants, creating a self-regulating micro-climate on the apartment blocks’ campus plus all the other benefits of plant-respiration, and this vertical forest, if grown in the usual horizontal fashion would require almost seven square kilometres of space.  Such a comparison really turns the notion of a “carbon-footprint” on its head.
We appreciate the fact that there are two towers, since after all, the only downside of living in such a building being that one would have no view of it; Parisian author Guy de Maupassant supposedly thought the newly erected Eifel Tower was such an abhorrent sight, he lunched in a café directly underneath the landmark, reasonably assured that that was the surest spot in the city where he’d be spared of seeing it. We were a little astonished that we missed or dismissed as one of those concept models that never get built this incredible project before, and really appreciated the comprehensive update from Twisted Sifter and will be certain to seek this amazing structure out next time we are in Italy.  Moreover, it was a needed antidote to other trends we’ve heard about recently—like England’s newly discovered penchant for astroturfing in favour of little grassy plots.

6x6

omnishambles: Atlas Obscura features an interesting omnibus article on Olympic ruins, but maybe the same fate won’t befall Rio de Janeiro

touch of evil: a look at admissible evidence in the seventeenth century

tundra: thawing Siberian permafrost is reanimating long frozen pathogens

surrealismo: artist Benoit Paillé experiments with flash and coloured gels in documenting his road-trip across Mexico

salty peppers: cringe-worthy original names of now epic bands, via Boing Boing

gingerbread palace: a pictorial profile of the Victorian seaside resort, the Cliff House, of San Francisco

down-spout: a home in Japan designed to let the rain in, because it should be embraced just as much as sunshine