6x6

the art of vehicle maintenance: further notes and take-aways from Why Buddhism is True

great railway journeys: an intrepid duo visit every train station in the United Kingdom over fifteen weeks

urban spelunking: thieves bore into Paris cellar from catacombs and make off with a quarter of a million euro worth of vintage wine, via Super Punch

interstitial: much like with the latest iteration of the Star Wars saga, fans of Blade Runner will be treated to series intervening short films

psychic-driving: technology and psychotherapy are not guaranteed to be compatible nor risk free

nothing ventured, nothing gained: whilst dashing off to witness the solar eclipse, the Fancy Notions team visited the micronation (we have only gotten to visit one) of the Republic of Molossia 

wohnblockknacker

Seventy thousand residents of Frankfurt am Main—a tenth of the city’s population—will be evacuated on Sunday (EN/DE) out of an abundance of caution as an unexploded bomb (Blindgänger) discovered in the Westend district is defused. The UK-made munition was dubbed “blockbuster” for its capability to take out whole streets and was dropped during one of the seventy-five aerial attacks that took place, destroying some seventy percent of the city. This event marks the largest post-war mass-evacuation and the latest in a series of ordnance uncovered by construction projects in urbanised areas.

gentleman farmer

Writing for the Awl, correspondent Clinton Crockett Peters shares the biography of that charismatic megafauna, kudzu, that has invasively engulfed much of the southern United States and is spreading. Growing up in east Texas, Georgia and Alabama I can remember those kudzu monsters, how trees covered and choked with the vine were propped up and seemed like dinosaurs in the dark, and how aggressively out-of-place it seemed but I never knew its provenance and how it was once peddled as get rich-quick-scheme.
While certainly not without merits if kept under control, kudzu—which was introduced to the American public at the 1876 Centennial Exposition in Philadelphia alongside ketchup, root-beer and the telephone—is native to Japan and afforded greater range will spread with devastating consequences including damage to other agriculture and ecological changes in carbon-cycles, not to mention the pesticides that some resort to beat back its advance. The versatile vine is useful for preventing erosion—though the Dust Bowl still occurred—recharging over-farmed soil and as food for people and livestock, but as with other short-sighted schemes it seems incredible in retrospect that kudzu was subsidised and its planting was encouraged, championed by celebrity “front-porch farmer” Channing Cope through weekly radio broadcasts, and took nearly another century to classify the vine as a noxious weed and begin to realise the effects of introduced species. Read all about it at the link up top.

weiße haus

I’ve passed this villa in the Hessian capital numerous times and it always caused me to do a bit of a double-take but never realised until recently that the similarity to the US presidential mansion was intentional.
In 1903, sparkling white wine (Sekt) magnate Friedrich Wilhelm Söhnlein commissioned a Zürich architectural group to build a residence for him and his new wife and re-import Emma Pabst, heiress to the American brewing dynasty, specifically in the style of the White House. The design (an homage to Irish architect Jame Hoban) was also part of the motivation for the US military authorities to commandeer the compound from 1945 until 1990 and utilise it as a local head-quarters—just removed from the Kurpark by a few hundred metres. When the villa was returned to the state, it was considered for a time as a new home for the state government or alternately listing the property as a consulate—even though many countries were represented in nearby Frankfurt. Presently the building is in private hands but can be rented for special events.