Tuesday 16 August 2016

6x6

fiction is a house with many stately mansions: a study of the hideous design of mcmanions, via Kottke

best in show: there will be an art exhibit especially curated to captivate canine visitors in London, including paintings executed in the limited visual palette of dogs, via Nag on the Lake

sounds like someone’s got a case of the ‘suppostas: the UK copyright authority will allow a firm to trademark “should’ve”

pro bono: that public defender bot that has gotten thousands out of parking-fines is now helping the homeless and marginalised claim benefits, via Boing Boing 

the internet is leaking: oceanographers discover a googly-eyed squid

ecce homo: the botched restoration of an otherwise ordinary religious painting will now be adapted into opรฉra bouffe   

jellystone or where the buffalos roam

Via the always engrossing Everlasting Blรถrt, we discover that not only is the generic human symbol resigned to his tortured fate of slips, trips and falls and now hapless goring by bison whilst visiting national parks, he also has a nickname, Helvetica Man. The origins of this luckless pictogram pre-date the typeface’s foundry and was called so to invoke the font’s neutrality—ever stoic, even in the face of the gauntlet of Olympian contests and undaunted by any and all hazards, and suggests the Vitruvian Man or one of those prehistoric victims of an avalanche or tumbling into a tar pit, unfrozen or extracted ages later.

smoke-screen or homo habilis

Just as a tolerance for dairy afforded some populations an advantage over their neighbours in more recent epochs, an early mutation in humans may have privileged them over their hominid competition. As Mysterious Universe informs via Strange Company, Neanderthals may have been quite literally smoked out by humans who could far better handle the ill pulmonary effects of cooking and keeping bonfires for warmth, light, staving off predation and perhaps rituals. Our view of our extinct cousins is generally a dim one, but gradually we are being disabused of a lot of these primitive stereotypes, including the discovery that most all modern humans have a small percentage of stowaway DNA fossilised within us as a reminder that we once shared our society.
It strikes me as a little ironic that this respiratory robustness may have been responsible for humans pulling out ahead, while there’s such incapacitation and moral panic over air-pollution, asthma and allergies—external and self-imposed. I wonder if those bits of cavemen genes (though a very small component of our total genetic makeup, the traits that we’ve inherited are different from one individual to the next) aren’t responsible for our collective frailties. Maybe our ancient ancestors got help from other sources as well.

sturz oder post and lintel

Goslar has been honoured with an ensemble of UNESCO accolades, some tied to a place and some not, and so it was pretty remarkable to find another piece of World Heritage reconstructed in one of the suburbs of the town.
In Hahnenklee, there is a stave church, called the Gustav-Adolf (named after the Swedish monarch that reigned during the Thirty Years’ War and made his country a European power) and was constructed in 1907, inspired by those outstanding examples to be found in Norway.
Many of the main architectural elements come from the iconic edifice of Borgund, but the wooden structure is a pastiche of all then surviving examples. The interior felt like being in the galley of a great wooden ship, a reflection of the Vikings’ sea-going skills translated to architecture and preserved for the ages.
The organ, housed in all that ornate carpentry, was something brilliant in itself but the musical possibilities don’t end there. Just separated from the congregation hall stands a belfry that houses a carillon (Glockenspiel) and a very skilled carilloneur gives performances on the church lawn in the summers.

Monday 15 August 2016

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.

Friday 12 August 2016

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 Blรถrt

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

kaninchenfelder fรผr 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

Thursday 11 August 2016

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.