put away the candle, the book and the broom

Though together we both enjoyed watching Christopher and his Kind, the 2011 BBC adaptation based on Isherwood’s memoir Goodbye to Berlin, I think it might be a bridge too far to get H to watch Cabaret, but I stand by the suggestion.
The first time we saw the made for television movie about a newly-found freedom soon to be crushed by the rise of the Nazis in 1930s Germany, I caught myself thinking that one character was a lot like the great Sallie Bowles and did a bit of research before being able to reconcile this similarity. The parallels between Apocalypse Now! and Heart of Darkness would make a really good thesis paper… I suppose the those in the know knew the nods. After seeing this resonant, expatriate appreciation from Dangerous Minds with a divine gallery of candid behind the scenes images, I think I’ll try again in earnest to arrange a screening of the award-winning musical. That’s Liza with a Z.

5x5

post-mortem estate planning: last wills, Old Testament and ghosts make for an intriguing unexplained mystery

same as it ever was: Kermit the Frog, with accompaniment from Dr. Teeth and the Electric Mayhem, perform Talking Heads

mothra: a profile of the incredible Humming Bird Hawk Moth—I’ve spied these things in the garden and no one believed me

gesticulate: a glossary of essential hand gestures—especially useful for debates, via the brilliant Blört Everlasting 

expletive attributive: “Swear Trek” provides the profanity that ought to accompany interstellar exploration

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The Guardian encapsulates the past century and a score of Russian history with a gallery of photographs whose moments show the changes as the decades pass.
This glimpse, however, is not from the archives of a single museum but just a slice of the material collected by an ambitious project called “Russia in Photo” that has solicited submissions from museums and private collections all across the country. Individuals are encouraged to share their historic photographs as well.

imperial immediacy

The old, medieval centre of Goslar has been accorded World Heritage status and rightly so with its preserved lanes of half-timbered houses and canals along the streaming Abzucht—possibly named for the run-off, discharge of the silver mines of Rammelsberg that had secured this city’s wealth up until the discovery of even greater lodes in South America—and favoured residence of the Holy and Roman Emperor of the Germans.
Most reasons are clearly manifest but it’s interesting to note what sort of scholarship and rediscoveries lie behind it. This pair of Brunswick Lions (Braunschweig Löwe) are reproductions installed (of several around Germany) to celebrate the oldest and largest example of such Middle Age sculpture produced north of the Alps, but Germany had its own undiscovered heritage. Presently sheltered in the bowels of the imperial palace is the symbol of the city, the griffin, once thought to be an 19th century embellishment, like much of the restorative work done to the palace itself, replete with murals depicting German mythology and the rise of the nation-state and empire, but researchers revealed in 1988 that the object dated back nearly a thousand years, which was then just a weather-vein on some gable.
After the piece was studied and dated, it became the symbol of Goslar and a golden version of the Imperial “Eagle” of Henry I adorns the fountain in the main square amidst the old gothic Rathaus and the city’s other iconic landmark, the Hotel Kaiserworth with its wooden figures—including some rather lewd allegory, which I would have appreciated explanation for, like the random local in Trier who at length told us about the veiled meaning of the central fountain’s decorations. Another element of forgotten and re-discovered awaited us in the City Hall.
Over five hundred years ago, the Hall of Homage was created as a council chamber, at the height of the region’s economic prosperity—finely decorated by anonymous artists as tribute to municipal leaders and patrons who were answerable only to the person of the Emperor.
The upper storey of the Rathaus, however, was perhaps a bit much for a series of Bürgermeister to confront and contemplate on a daily basis and at some point, the hall was turned into an archive and storage space. Like the griffin, the rich decorations were only rediscovered in the late 1800s and is now visited by tens of thousands each year.  In order to preserve the artwork from so much traffic, however, one can only experience the chamber by climbing into a plastic porthole.

much coin, much care or the beagle boys versus the money bin

Part of the unintended but certainly foreseen consequences of holding interest-rates at historic lows has not provided the incentive for banks to loan money rather than hoard it.
And now faced with negative interest rates and the prospects of penalties on liquid assets with no end in sight, as Boing Boing reports, financial institutions are not backed into a corner but are rather redeeming their æthereal electronic funds for hard currency to avoid the fines put in place to stimulate the economy. The commercial bankers don’t strike me as protesting the policies of central banks—or even smugly side-stepping the regulators, merely taking the next logical step. Maybe we do not get to rush them with pitch-forks after all.  Though somewhat of a liability and inconvenience, banks are looking to secure all that physical cash in hidden vaults, just waiting for the tipping-point when negative interest becomes more costly than the price of guarding and moving around all that coinage. What do you think? I wonder if such an evasive manoeuver might hasten the demise and access to physical tender. I guess the next step would be to store one’s wealth in real-estate and start the boom and bust cycle all over again.

shoo fly or hectoring vectors

Business Insider has a pretty comprehensive primer on the facts and fictions on the ablutions and rituals that we perform to nudge away mosquitos.
Unfortunately, the majority of myths that we hold close are shown to be demonstrably wrong-headed and either a waste of time and effort or counter-productive. I would add one item to the list, which probably could be similarly debunked, but I think it works: mosquitos are not the most aerodynamically robust insects—that’s why they have their preferred hunting schedule and range, habitats and haunts themselves, and having a small oscillating fan blowing a breeze seems to knock them off course fairly tidily.

arboretum

Amusing Planet has a touching and gentle appreciation of Survivor Trees from all corners of the globe that bore witness all sort of human catastrophe and crime, but withstood the wreckage brought to its boughs and remained standing as a memorial. One of the more poignant profiles is that of the Miracle Pine that somehow made it through the earthquake and tsunami that devastated Japan in 2011 when everything else was washed away. This lone sentinel sadly too succumbed to the aftermath of the massive flood, poisoned slowly over the following months by salt water. An artificial tribute was put in its place and a high lookout tower surrounds it.

bandwidth and broomsticks

This latest item from the always brilliant BLDGBlog about the US Department of Defense exploring the “controlled enhancement” of the ionosphere by deploying fleets of tiny satellites high into the sky that would effectively self-destruct in bursts of plasma to create a temporary conduit for the propagation of radio waves made me immediately think of Project West-Ford—in that very special episode, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, under warrant of the government, seeded the upper atmosphere with hundreds of thousands of microscopic needles as a contingency measure in case the trans-Atlantic cables were cut.
The earlier project didn’t go over so well (it is cheeky to seek forgiveness rather than ask for permission), and with satellite com- munication having advanced so far, I had to wonder if this avenue was still a potentially profitable one. I suppose that greater accuracy in targeting signals and reducing some of the deteriorating effects of radio turbulence might prove useful and tending to essential in controlling larger fleets of aerial and autonomous drones. Moreover, relayed aloft by plasmatic mirrors, the curvature of the Earth would, in theory, no longer be a limiting factor in terms of range. What do you think? Be sure to check out the whole article for more synthesis and speculation. I also wondered if such a stratospheric infrastructure already being put into place might not also be used to reflect away some of the Sun’s radiation and combat global warming.