unbanked

Previously we’ve explored how the existing infrastructure, network and antecedent of the mail delivery system—not to mention how every other advanced and most emerging economy on Earth already have allowed their national postal systems to provide non-usurious financial services support for convenience and for to the large swaths of the precariat that are otherwise locked out of traditional banks—might supplement and back the savings and bill-paying needs of those who cannot by dent of poor credit or remoteness avail themselves of mainstream branches, so we were quite excited to learn that a bill in the US legislature has two sponsors, both contenders for the presidency, and might have a fighting chance to counter the predatory, self-perpetuating institutions that people in a pinch have had to turn to in the States. Learn more at the link above.

unvoiced

Found among Sentence First’s latest batch of carefully curated language links comes this quite provocative and revealing of the unapologetic nature of English orthography abecedary of silent letters—demonstrating how from A to Z every letter can be silent (with perhaps one exception), or virtually so. We are all accustomed to occasional superfluous g or the errant p or k in a word that’s forgotten its original mission but what about the a (or s for that matter) in aisle, the first d of Wednesday?  Merriam-Webster addresses each malingering letter with a clever couplet filled with examples.

elle est ohoho!

Via Dark Roasted Blend’s latest Link Latte (with much more to explore), we are introduced to the musical stylings of pop duo Ottawan (Annette Eltice and Patrick Jean-Baptiste) with their 1979 break-through single D.I.S.C.O., the initialism spelt out, “She is D, delirious—she is I, incredible—she is S, superficial—she is C, complicated—she is oh-oh-oh! Even if this group strike you as new, you are probably familiar with their other hit to reach the charts with Hands Up! (Give me Your Heart) which was covered by the Norwegian band Hype in 1995—which became a pretty popular standard in Europe. Hands up, baby, hands up! Gimme your heart, gimme, gimme.

ox horn campus

A Chinese telecoms giant has built a research and development centre near Shenzhen, which will be home to some twenty-five thousand employees (find out more about model factory towns here) and which includes twelve faithful recreations (see also) of European landmarks. Among them are the Neckar Bridge and Palace of Heidelberg, the halls of Oxford, Freiburg and Verona, co-located on the car-free compound serviced by a Swiss Rail train. Learn more and peruse a slide show gallery at the link up top (nur auf Deutsch).

bedroom community

Aiming to draw people away from the comfort of home and back into the theatre, Cinema Pathé has retrofitted a couple auditoria with double beds in their movie halls in Spreitenbach in the canton of Aargau.
Beds are freshly made after each screening, the limited capacity lending an air of exclusivity to the experiment, and tests of the concept suggest that audience members would deport themselves in a respectable and courteous manner. What do you think? Laying in whilst consuming media experts tell is a bad sleep hygiene association and there’s no word on dress code.

musterküche

Via the always brilliant Nag on the Lake, we learn about the Frankfurt kitchen (die Frankfurter Küche), which transformed our relationship to food preparation, dining and living, created by interbellum designer Margarete Schütte-Lihotzky (*1897 – †2000) and first Austrian woman to be credentialed as an architect.
Assigned the task of creating the kitchen spaces for a new, post-war housing project to rebuild Frankfurt am Main in 1926, Schütte-Lihotzky took inspiration from the efficiencies of railway dining cars and created kitchens for hundreds of thousands of units and though perhaps not as narrow, one can detect elements of Schütte-Lihotzky’s vision and basic layout in our own new kitchen. Sensing the eminent fall of the Weimar Republic, she and other architects joined Ernst May—the chief designer behind the New Frankfurt project and other rebuilding and re-housing efforts to form the “May Brigade” and went off to the Soviet Union to help with Stalin’s Five Year Plan. Once conditions again became untenable during the Great Purge (Большой террор, 1937 – 1938), their group became unrooted again and Schütte-Lihotzky settled in Chicago and worked on the World’s Fair Century of Progress exposition.

biblioclasm

Among many other events of great pith and moment, our faithful chronicler records that on this evening in 1933 Hermann Goebbels agitated an already blood-thirty fraternal order, still giddy from their organised attack on the Sex Research Institute of Magnus Hirschfeld earlier that same week, and expressed their rage with a symbolic book burning (Bücherverbrennung) in the square (now known as Bebelplatz) before the State Opera building in Berlin.
The Student Union coordinated other similar events in university towns across Germany, attended by area Nazi officials, aiming to consign to the flames everything that was un-German. This was not the last of such rituals but some twenty thousand volumes deemed subversive where destroyed that night in Berlin alone, including works published by socio-economic theorist Karl Marx, novelists Thomas and Heinrich Mann, the Bauhäuslern, Erich Maria Remarque who penned the pacifistic recollection All is Quiet on the Western Front, playwright and lyricist Berthold Brecht, imminent scientist Albert Einstein and psychologist Sigmund Freud.

chumbox

Exploring further the “rewards” (see here, here and here) we get for actually finishing an article, Vox correspondent Kaitlyn Tiffany wades through the dregs of advertising—dubbed in the industry as chumboxes.
The goal was to chase down the elusive identity of the “vegetable” that an equally dodgily credentialed gut doctor is begging Americans to throw out now, or one of any number of snowclones in the form of body horror, oversized aloe vera, distressed comfort animals, celebrities behaving badly and far off–the-mark “targeted” ads. It’s impossible to track down definitive answers (and not like the answer would be less than enlightening and not very satisfying ultimately) but rather bounces one from spammy website to another, lower-rent one featuring progressively worse advertising marginalia, chumboxes being bait for bigger fishes that in turn lure bigger fishes, a regular pyramid scheme or rather multilevel marketing opportunity is the preferred term nowadays, comprising an unending garbage food-chain. Much more to explore at the link above.