olfactory bulb

Via Marginal Revolution, we are introduced to artist Sissel Tolaas celebrates the olfactory when the world becomes estrangingly deodorised, enshrining everything that’s visceral and memorable about the often derided sense of smell.
Her brave and unabashed landscapes perfumed with perhaps what we’d as soon forget create a odour distinctive to time and place and craft a unique narrative with each waft—telegraphing specific characteristics that rather defy digitalisation and the usual heraldic shorthand, though our sensibilities seem to shy away from confronting the vulgar without detergent. Tolaas has even crafted a compliment of vials containing bespoke smells never smelt before to break in case of an event that one wants to create an indelible memory for. It’s assuredly a good thing that we must needs be present for the perception that is most immediate and unmitigated to the brain (though whole industries are devoted to building those barriers) and to perform witchcraft, chemistry and biology, unable to elevate ourselves above the miasma that was formerly blamed for all maladies.

rewilding

We took a drive through the countryside and stopped at the foothills of the Rhön and hiked up the stony and wooded slope of the Schafstein, the Sheep Rock. A lot of forests are maintained in a sustainable manner (or at least so we’d like to hope, not really appreciating the impact of our harvesting has on the ecosystem) in Germany but there are few untrammelled places but since the 1990s, the inner core of the trees growing here, within a much larger reserve, have been left to their own devices in hopes of re-establishing an old-growth forest.
Please click on the pictures for larger images.  Basalt boulders and fallen trunks covered with different mosses punctuated the terrain and were stepping stones for the ascent, not treacherous but certainly a demanding climb. Let’s hope more places are allowed to revert to their pristine state. Afterwards we continued on to Guckaisee, a series of lakes at the base of the mountain whose water levels had been essentially negated due to the hot, arid summer—though visiting ducks were content to plop into the lake bed and do a little bit of mud surfing.

silent majority

Echoing the 1919 turn of phrase employed by Warren G Harding during his campaign in the aftermath of World War I that was meant as a euphemism to distinguish the quick from the dead (with those who’ve passed then and now far outnumbering the living and by extension more moral weight like all future generations), Richard Milhous Nixon popularised the appeal to the quiet in a speech on this day in 1969:
“And so tonight—to you, the great silent majority of my fellow Americans—I ask for your support.” Assuming that those who were not actively protesting Nixon’s policies, joining the counter-culture and rallying against the Vietnam War were in fact an overshadowed demographic and gave Nixon their tacit approval. Casting this idealised demographic against a “vocal minority” was a strategy of divide-and-conquer and the “disenfranchised” were not the precarious, forgotten or downtrodden but rather the comfortable who aspired for more and were menaced by those that had less. It was effective.  This demographic of Middle America (though now more international in its application) has gone through many incarnations since—from the Angry White Male to the Soccer Mom, Loggers, Coal Miners and many other labels before returning to its original form. If one does not speak up, it becomes much easier for others to speak for you.

expedition 1

On this day in 2000, the first long-term residents arrived at the International Space Station, ferried up by a Soyuz spacecraft, the crew activating ISS systems and unpacked equipment to prepare for a series of deliveries by shuttle and other resupply vehicles.
During their four-and-a-half month stay in orbit, the three person crew also conducted experiments to study the behaviour of plasma and protein crystallisation in microgravity and filmed footage for a 3D IMAX documentary. Since the complement was refreshed with Expedition 2 in March 2001, there has been an uninterrupted human presence in space to the present day.

8x8

queen bee: a review of the 1955 Joan Crawford film that informed Mommie Dearest  

solar sail: speculation that the mysterious interstellar interloper Oumuamua (previously) might be a remnant of an alien propulsion system

oobi land: “I contain a message to another human being. Please further my journey an inch, a foot or a mile.”

envir-o-can: a beer can touted as more ecologically-friendly due to the absence of a pull-tab

ad astra: an ode to the immeasurably expanding achievements of the nine-year Kepler mission that discovered over twenty-five hundred exoplanets

development hell: former cast and crew reflect on earlier attempts to make The Other Side of the Wind

ask the past: how to eat a pumpkin, 1597

innuendo: Queen’s lesser-known, soulful operatic anthem