unterkunft oder happiness hotel

Recently, H and I were invited to tour the Imperial City of Goslar near the Harz Mountain range (more on the city later) by H’s parents. I wanted to remark first on the accom- modations that they choose, this being the first time that they’d not consulted a travel-agent but rather booked directly.  I think sometimes we distain and down-play the institutional-knowledge of travel-agents to our vacation peril although most things can be arranged under our own agency, and they found a pretty posh hotel. We noticed after checking-in, there were a few unaccountable irregularities: every second room being labelled Frau or Herr So-and-So instead of just with room numbers and I room hidden in the back of our suite that contained one of those Craftmatic adjustable beds.
Little by little, we discover that this hotel, spread over several buildings in the city-centre, was embedded within a senior-residence, Altersheim. Perhaps this was no novel arrangement but it was new to me and struck me as pretty ingenious as a model of mixed-used properties and integration.   We didn’t dine with the home’s population—but I thought we ought to have, but they weren’t hidden and sequestered either and seemed to appreciate the new faces. Perhaps the suites were held in reserve for elderly parents and children visiting to see if this place was right for them, or for visiting children—that maybe sadly was not booked often enough. We weren’t shopping for assisted-living for anyone, so I hope no one felt like that or assumed otherwise but it was a valuable but not oppressive lesson.
In addition to the uniqueness of the temporary and longer-term residencies, the edifice was moreover a great house dating the early Middle Ages with plenty of artefacts on display and the birth- and death home of one apprentice apothecary Dr Albert Niemann, who famously chemically isolated cocaine. The good doctor’s short life, however, was not owing to smack, but rather for a more infamous discovery, the precursor catalyst reactions that lead to mustard gas, whose experiments fatally damaged his lungs.

5x5

many bothans died to bring us this preview: watch the trailer for Rogue One: A Star Wars Story

horn-section: a look at the acoustic locators of wartime Japan, outmoded by the advent of radar, via Everlasting Blört

cristo redentor: an in depth look at the iconic statue that is Rio de Janeiro’s chief landmark, via Dave Log v3

kaninchenfelder für immer: a look at the neglected tribute to the rabbits who had the run of the no man’s land that separated East and West Berlin, via the brilliant Nag on the Lake

impressment: the Guess Who’s “American Woman” was improvised when the Canadian band, playing a gig in Texas, were nearly drafted and sent to Vietnam

petard hoist much?

We understand that one major social media outlet has launched a new campaign to combat catchpenny clickbait by monitoring misleading and salacious headlines engineered to lure people outside of their own walled-garden.
This pledge strikes us as pretty ironic since that same web-presence is responsible for and substantively little more than listicles, rehashing and the same sort of attention-cloying preying on the insecurities of visitors snatched from their ecologies and histories. What do you think? Indeed, maybe the same algorithm that keeps their advertising environment robust might be used to retool those touts and cut back on rhetoric without estranging readers from quality writing and meaningful content.

islands and bridges

For a quarter of a century, a Canadian couple have been constructing their floating home, a most unusual and self-sufficient estate called Freedom Cove and presently moored off of Vancouver Island. The massive and mobile island was built by hand and includes gardens, greenhouses, a beacon and a dancehall aside from the couple’s quarters. Please visit the link above for more details on this dream realised.