what a piece of work is man

On this day fifty years ago, the rock musical by lyricists Gerome Ragni and James Rado and composer Galt MacDermot Hair began its run on Broadway, with over seventeen hundred performances.
Reception, with some notable exceptions, was overwhelmingly positive and became the anthem for several movements of the counter-culture uprising of the early 1970s and beyond—including racial and tribal identities, pacifism and environmentalism, and religious orthodoxy versus the esoteric.
One year later, “Bob” McGrath (one of the human neighbours) performed the song “Good Morning Starshine” on Sesame Street and the score helped launched the careers of Meatloaf and Donna Summer and many others. A decade later, production started on a cinematic adaptation by Miloš Forman, reviving the revolutionary spirit that the original inspired and brought the story to a broader audience.

jetzt sind wir voller energie

We enjoyed reading this bit of suspicious speculation on Angela Merkel’s good rapport with robots (something she shares with Justin Trudeau and Emmanuel Macron, incidentally) and how that might indicate the Chancellor is better attuned to what’s in store, these encounters seeming especially meaningful contrasted with the abjectly awkward record that bad politicians have with machines, animals and other people.

zwischenstopp: stockheim

On the old path in between Ostheim and Mellrichstadt lies the village of Stockheim, which was party to much the same intrigues and exchanges of ownership as other places in this region, but is particularly noted for its vernacular architecture.
The old, gabled and half-timbered Rathaus—the city hall whose administrative functions are now finding themselves displaced, is presently a restaurant and pension but was formerly known as an Amthaus, an administrative centre for a feudal bureaucracy and later as a Zehnthof, a repository of tithes, a tenth of one’s income or harvest rendered to the church. Formerly protected by a wall with watchtowers (Warte), one of these was also designated as a Darre or a Darrhaus, a place, usually silo-like where hops were dried as part of the beer-brewing process. The surviving tower is itself a source of tales told by people of Willmars (strangely enough) across the valley which include a kidnapping dwarf and a shoe-maker’s apprentice who did not succumb to hardship and give up once in the company of lumberjacks.

the matilda effect

As a corollary to the Bechdel test that poses three basic standards that the majority of film and entertain digest cannot pass fully or in part: at least two female characters, who hold a dialogue whose topic cannot include marriage or babies or the like, science journalist Christie Aschwanden, as Kottke informs, once suggested a similar gauge for gender-bias in the sciences.
The namesake of fellow science writer Ann Finkbeiner (the titular effect refers to academia’s general willingness to attribute accomplishment and discovery to a woman’s male colleagues rather than letting her have or share in the credit), who resolved to write a profile about an astronomer without calling attention to the fact she is a woman. The last being the first criteria, other subjects to avoid were her spouse’s profession, child care, her nurturing nature, how she was taken aback by the competitiveness in her field, how she’s a role model and how she’s superlative as a female. It would be nice if we as a society were more enlightened and that racial and sexist bias were an issue we’ve moved beyond.