huldufólk

Boing Boing furnishes us with an update on the follies of human civic engineers and the grave repercussions of incursions onto elfin habitats.
Numerous times, road construction has been rerouted or scrapped altogether by human advocates for the preservation of elf heritage (possibly even influencing the US Navy’s decision to abandon its base in Keflavík), since—nearly as many times, such ill-fated trespasses have not gone unpunished. The accidental burial of a sacred stone by highway workers riled the elves and their supporters (who sometimes construct wooden façades for them in order to help the more oafish of our kind realise that they are there), and after a series of mishaps were hurled at the offending stretch of road—the boulder was exhumed with due ceremony.

gas, food, lodging

Thanks to the resplendent Kottke, we learn about one man’s personal odyssey and motivational master-class to escape the tethers of mortgage and utilities and being roped to particular plot of real estate (the German and French terms Immobilie betray its Latin roots as something that can’t be moved) and live off (or along perhaps) the grid with a custom camper van.
The entire process is assiduously documented for any of those that might be inspired to do the same, plus follow on adventures cross-country. I particularly liked the poetic juxtaposition in that one of the places he visited was the Winchester Mystery House in San Jose, California—not only for the sheer delight in realising and then reveling in the fact that one probably would have never seen this place if not for a motoring lifestyle—articulated and embellished endlessly by the heiress to the rifle manufacturer’s fortune in order to confuse and confound the spirits of those who had been killed by fire-arms that haunted the mansion with stairwells to nowhere and labyrinthine architecture: minimalism in contrast to interminable elaboration. Of course, Lady is in a class by herself—but this installation is nearly, nearly as well outfitted.

7x7

regolith explorer: NASA to launch a probe to mine an asteroid and return samples to Earth

pole of inaccessibility: a visit to the most isolated settlement on Earth, Edinburgh of the Seven Seas on Tristan da Cunha

greywater: researchers will grow a forest in the Egyptian desert

karadashev type i civilisation: a strong radio signal originating in the direction of a distant star is intriguing alien-hunters

alice springs: still no resolution for the mysterious dismissal of Australian prime minister Gough Whitlam

ta-ta for now: the Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership was apparently dealt its coup grâce—at least until the next election cycle

gregor samsa: a giant, inflatable cock roach pool float

good night frau blücher

I always assumed that the image of Igor peeking through the chute persisted in the number two slot of the popular posts side-bar due to some glitch or error in the Matrix, but maybe—for whatever reason—people liked that moment from Young Frankenstein and now I’ll look on it in the margins fondly. It was sad to wake up to the news of Mister Wilder’s passing but feel privileged to have been entertained along with countless others by his characters.

side-scrolling

Sometimes, you come across a truly mesmerizing animation—the sort you could nod off to, having let your attention be dominated for too long to do anything else, like this one of a running Mario (whose motion is itself an optical illusion generated by the passage of the grate, sort of like the effect of lenticular printing) posted at a site called Mlkshk and spotted by the keen eye of Madame Jujujive of the Everlasting Blört.

juxtaposed controls ou liaison fixe transmanche

As the refugee encampment in Calais known as the Jungle is projected to pass ten-thousand “inmates” soon, the Local’s French edition gives us a primer in the Touquet Treaty, negotiated back in 2003 by then Foreign Minister, Nicolas Sarkosy (once and future presidential contender), who believes it needs to now be reformed or scrapped in the midst of the migrant crisis and the in the aftermath of Brexit.
Broadly, juxtaposed controls (bureaux à contrôles nationaux juxtaposés) are arrangements between France, Belgium and the UK that allow border checks on cross Channel (la Manche, Ärmelkanal) routes before embarkation, rather than at the border or destination and were formalised in the early 1990s when the Chunnel made rail transport possible and ferry-crossings increased in-kind.  Ironically, though the frontier between the UK and the Schengen Area has been pulled forward, immigrants massing at Calais and other port cities can only apply for asylum in the country they are physically located in, despite the entrepôt status of where they are biding their time and border authorities are obliged to stop them.  When Banksy’s dystopian theme park was dismantled and removed from Weston-super-Mare last year, the construction materials were donated to the Jungle.  What do you think?  Remote registration centres for asylum-seekers have been established in other locations in Greece and Italy, so called hot-spots, but Calais is not presently host to the crush of hundreds of thousands of refugees and making and designating the port as such could attract more hopefuls already enduring dangerous and deplorable conditions.

a moveable beast

Via the enchanting Messy Nessy Chic, we are treated to the rare sight of antique taxidermy specimens from Bergen’s Natural History Museum (the historic Hanseatic trading houses of the Bryggen port are the second from the bottom), as captured by photographer Helge Skodvin, as they are carefully moved to temporary quarters while the museum undergoes extensive restoration. The whole menagerie is really a delight to peruse and this undertaking reminds me of how the first provisional government of West Germany was convened in the Zoological Museum of Bonn, with a similar assortment of creatures in the gallery, as many were too big or delicate to move.

curveball

Although it was known for years that agents and informants were keeping their country’s diaspora under surveillance to uncover any expatriates who might be harbouring critical views of the ruling regime, it seems no one really appreciated the scope and the reach of this network in Germany (which rivalled the Stasi of East Germany) and other European countries with significant Turkish populations until the failed coup.  In fact Ankara’s MİT (Millî İstihbarat Teşkilatı) had formerly worked closely with counterpart intelligence services in host nations to thwart potential terrorism and smuggling operations (of all sorts), but in the aftermath of the failed coup, spies have been drawn closer to the regime and deployed to menace and intimidate (reminding the exiled that they still have family in the homeland can force anyone to be silent or even rally in the regime’s support) those that probably left the country in the first place over political reasons.
Now, instead of having faith in the intelligence of their partners, the BND and others fear that any information they act on might have been presented to them in order to incriminate individuals (sort of the reserve false testimony of the informant known as Curveball, a dissident who feed the war hawks the salacious details it wanted to hear) who don’t share the Turkish government’s vision of how national and religious identities are to be portrayed and exercised.