Diary: My First Day at a University in Berlin

THIS AUTUMN I'm beginning to study at the Freie Universität here in Berlin, and yesterday I went to the very first course, which is a two-day "Brückenkurs" or "bridging course" for first-year biology students. Biology is not my major or even my minor; but it interests me and it was the scientific field I took in high school after Grade 10, and participation in the course was not recorded so there were no administrative obstacles.

I found out the date, time and place from the university's Vorlesungsverzeichnis (course index) online, and looked up the route on the website of the BVG, Berlin's city transit authority.

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THE MAIN FU campus is in Dahlem, a quiet neighbourhood around a former royal farm in southwestern Berlin.

Recommended Reading: Behind the Scenes of 'House'

A look at House [IMDb] and its abstruse diagnoses, with nice side notes about the ideal work of a doctor in general.

"House MD: The art of looking for zebras" [Daily Telegraph]
By Cassandra Jardine, September 26, 2011

Fashion Week: September 7: Vena Cava, and Organic by John Patrick

Tonight is Fashion's Night Out — a series of imaginative and celebrity-graced publicity events designed to create fiscal interest in the fashions that are to be shown — in New York, Milan, Paris, Berlin, Sydney, Lisbon, Mexico City and London and the second day of New York Fashion Week: Spring/Summer 2012.

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Photo: Willow wood shoes (2004), Photo by Rasbak
Licenced under GNU Free Documentation License
via Wikimedia Commons

* * *

I am not at all an expert, so please excuse the inaccuracies and see the following strictly as an impromptu outsider's snapshot of some of New York Fashion Week's shows:

1. ON Wednesday John Patrick was one of the first to show his collection with his "Organic" line, which appropriately enough given the name is environmentally friendly in its design.

According to the Vogue critic its theme was the safari, and given the chin-strapped hat and the spare lines of the trench coats and shirts as well as the brown, black and white shades, it was not too difficult to see. The make-up was light and suited to the heat of day, not only on the Kalahari but also on the streets of New York during the worse stretches of summer heat; the hairstyles were natural-looking and simple, loose or tucked back into a bun.

The garments were a neat collection of wardrobe basics: dress shirt, slacks, simple white dress, sweater, T shirt, shorts, hoodie, crop top jacket, camisole, trench and minidress.

I liked the colour when it came: the dark bright wine red, the plum colour of the camisole and the bits of yellow, and the browns were beautiful intense chocolate. The tasteful clutches and purse were that colour, and so were the handles of a roomy canvassy white weekender bag.

While the Vogue interviewer was not overwhelmed and said that "the almost exclusively white-and-brown palette looked a little like a blank canvas just waiting to be washed in color," I think it is too harsh an assessment. What my inexpert quibble was, that lighter-coloured stitching against dark fabric backgrounds does not look very solid or elegant, and the crinkly fabrics looked intransigent both for those who sew with them and those who wear them.

The rarest outfit, I thought, was a transparent white latticed dress with a crossed sash at the waist, though I disapproved of the flap down the back on its own aesthetic demerits and because of an irrational horror of its "mullet dress" relations.

There were four women of colour among the models by my quite politically incorrect count.

"Review - Organic by John Patrick" [Vogue USA] by Emily Holt (September 2011)
Slideshow: "Organic by John Patrick" [Vogue] Photos by Marcio Madeira (September 2011)


2. VENA Cava brought to life a clear sixties theme, with bright blocks of colour (tangerine, saffron, crimson, etc., contrasted cheerfully to solid black) and long, elegant silhouettes; the models wore huge round sunglasses and platform heels with their hair pulled back and particularly with the sunburnt dark blush at the cheeks gave a very summery impression. There were homages to Chanel, I thought, with the more formal jackets and minidresses, with their ribbed edges and analytically marked sections and clear cuts.

Or, according to the Vogue review, this clothing is in fact inspired by Vietnam, the designers' (Sophie Buhai and Lisa Mayock) early Brooklynite fashion-making excursions, and slightly by 1940s films. The dresses were worn at a party instead of being presented through the customary formal parade in single file or a Birds-esque mannequin assembly. I like the bold colours, at any rate, and except if I am mistaken in the designer remember being infuriated a couple of years past by what I thought was a wash of weakly neutral tinges on rather limp fabrics.

It's hard to tell because of the sunglasses, but I think that there are two models of colour in these photos:

Slideshow: "Vena Cava" [Vogue] Photos courtesy of Vena Cava (September 2011)
"Review - Vena Cava Spring 2012" [Vogue], by Chioma Nnadi

* * *

THERE are further slideshows and reviews of shows available at Style.com. I'm not covering all of these for fear that this would drive me mad.

The "Virginia Earthquake" in a Nutshell

An earthquake that reached 5.8 on the Richter scale shook Virginia, Washington D.C. and New York City today, and it was felt, according to website commenter anecdotes, in states as far away as South Carolina, Georgia, Massachusetts, Ohio, Maine, and in Canada.

The event had a shallow focus at 6 kilometers' depth; it took place at precisely 17:53 UTC. Two aftershocks followed in the first hour, in the magnitudes 2.9 and 2.2. By coincidence there had been a 5.3-magnitude earthquake in Colorado earlier.

There was apparently no damage to public transportation in New York City. Trains in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania reportedly had to run at 25 mph as a precaution for possible aftershocks; the Washington D.C. metro was cleared so that it could be examined. Buildings like Goldman Sachs's and the City Hall were evacuated, however, and the Newark and John F. Kennedy airports were shortly shut down. The Pentagon in Virginia, and the White House and Capitol Building in D.C. were also cleared. Notable damage befell the spires of the National Cathedral — Wikipedia: "the sixth-largest cathedral in the world."

The North Anna nuclear facility, in Virginia near the epicentre,

Blogspotting: Epi Log

Epi Log: A repository of cookery blog paraphernalia, which I discovered today, at the American culinary website Epicurious, which is owned by Condé Nast and has been online since 1995.

It originated on March 9, 2006 itself. Despite a low profile and modest number of comments it has held steady and is unusually prolific; today it has three blog posts already.

The well-written, very succinct posts are contributed by divers food writers and editors, from the print and pixel realms; some work for the magazine and others are expert friends; and there is a New Englandy, New Yorkish focus.

The Lesser-Known Freedom of Being Obnoxious, Wasting Secret Service's Time and Taxpayer Money

On October 22, 2008 a Californian man, Walter Bagdasarian, posted racist comments on a Yahoo! message board in which he called for Barack Obama to be killed.

Mr. Bagdasarian was reported to the Secret Service. After the investigation he was charged with and convicted of uttering criminal threats. A Californian federal appeals court has overturned this conviction in an opinion filed on Tuesday.

The plaintiff was drunk at the time of the comments and besides the court has concluded that any average person would have understood him to mean that he was for such an assassination in general but not intending to carry one out.

Comment: Based on the details I've read it would have been irresponsible not to investigate the defendant and I think his comments went too far. So I rather wish that he would have had to pay for the Secret Service investigation or given some form of community service around victims of shootings or (though this is less relevant to the actual criminal charges) around African-Americans so that he would have the opportunity to have more enlightened ideas about the advisability of gun crimes and about racism. As it is, he was originally ordered to serve two months at a halfway house.

Besides I wonder, looking at the Huffington Post article mentioned below, who posted his $100,000 bail (which is, after all, a lot of money) back in 2009 — whether his actions and views have the support of people with more money and more power than him.

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"Urging Obama’s Assassination Is Lawful Online Speech, Divided Appeals Court Says" [Wired.com], by David Kravets (July 19, 2011)
(Decision) [United States Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit] (July 19, 2011)
"Walter Bagdasarian Convicted Of Making Racially-Charged Threats Against Then-Candidate Obama" [Huffington Post] by the Associated Press (July 28, 2009)

Roland Petit

The ballet dancer and choreographer Roland Petit has died at the age of 87 in Geneva.

"Roland Petit obituary" [Guardian], by Judith Cruickshank (July 11, 2011)
"Roland Petit, Choreographer, Dies at 87; Conquered Ballet Taboos and Hollywood" [New York Times] by Anna Kisselgoff (July 10, 2011)

The Guardian article in particular is excellently thorough. So I will leave it at that, but cite a passage from Margot Fonteyn's self-titled autobiography (Wyndham, 1976; pp. 114-5) which conveys something of his earlier career in Paris:

Paris certainly gave me a much needed change of atmosphere in work and play. The dancers wanted to show me everything from the Bois de Boulogne in spring to the night clubs of the rue de Lappe, where my mother was not at all dismayed to see men dancing together, and the famous Mme Arthur's all-male cabaret. Wandering about the city in the warm night air we once dived into the Seine for a midnight swim, and we always got home in the small hours, only to get up a few short hours later to be at the class of Boris Kniasev, a teacher of oversized personality and enthusiasm [. . .]. A big man, with powerful voice and generous laugh, talkng, correcting, explaining throughout the class until everyone excelled themselves in effort and accomplishment, he was exactly the teacher I needed at that time.

It was de Valois's favourite, Roland Petit, with the black eyes like Massine, who thought up our various exploits. He was a veritable dynamo of energy and ideas — dancing, choreographing, seeing new designers, composers, writers, his mind everywhere at once.

[. . .] We were perfect opposites in temperament. [. . .] I told him he needed the stability of the Paris Opéra, from which he had broken away. Neither of us took the other's advice. I was not too swept off my feet to forget that my success was based on the position I held in Sadler's Wells, while Roland knew he wanted complete freedom to create ballets in his own way.

(He incidentally introduced Fonteyn to the fairly fledgling house of Dior, and she had met him previously while he was a roughly nineteen-year-old dancing student who had choreographed his first ballet (pp.106-7).)

Lastly, the New York Times has a nearly bottomless archive of ballet reviews, etc., for Roland Petit. I didn't attempt to dip into it because of the 20-free-article limit. But if the link works, here it is:

Search results: "Roland Petit" [New York Times]

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"French choreographer Roland Petit dies at 87" [BBC News] (July 10, 2011)
"Disparition de Roland Petit" [Opéra national de Paris] (July 11, 2011)
Ballets des Champs-Élysées [Wikipedia.fr] Read July 11, 2011

Paris Haute Couture Fall/Winter 2011/2012: Giambattista Valli

On Monday, the haute couture shows opened in Paris. Intermittently the demise of haute couture is postulated, since only three hundred — maybe more or less; this writer heard or saw this figure once and never saw it again — women in the world have the finances, inclination and daring to wear it; this year there have been no ominous forebodings.

Excitement ran at a feverish pitch even among those who follow scandals rather than fashion closely, since the house of Dior showed its first haute couture collection not masterminded by the Briton John Galliano. (Dior announced that it was firing the designer on March 1st; he is still being prosecuted for racist insults.)

..................................

A second first was Giambattista Valli's inaugural haute couture collection, which was displayed in a small old-fashioned corridor in the Galerie de la Madeleine. The guests sitting in the two single rows of gilded chairs included Daphne Guinness, Bianca Brandolini, Olivia Palermo, Shala Monroque, Tatiana Santo-Domingo, and the editor of Vogue USA, Anna Wintour. (On July 1st Charlotte Casiraghi, the daughter of Monégasque Princess Caroline and frequenter of fashion shows, wore one of his designs during the wedding festivities for Prince Albert and Charlene Wittstock.)

In Honour of Anna Massey

On Sunday the British actress and CBE Anna Massey died, and though I have admittedly only seen her in one role I wanted to pay tribute.

She was the daughter of Adrianne Allen and the actor Raymond Massey, who is familiar for instance for embodying the menacing Karloffian cousin in Arsenic and Old Lace (he was also in East of Eden with James Dean, in the black-and-white Scarlet Pimpernel adaptation as Chauvelin and in John Ford's How the West Was Won playing Abraham Lincoln), and was born in Thakeham, West Sussex in 1937. As a teenager she acted first on the stage, and in the course of time covered works from classic playwrights from Pinter through Shaw and Shakespeare to Ibsen, Beckett, O'Neill and Sheridan; in 1958 she began her film acting with a role in the crime drama Gideon's Day.

The minor film role in which I saw her is as Eudora, the maid to Helena Bonham Carter's heroine in Hazard of Hearts. Adapted from a Barbara Cartland novel, this kind of role seems a test at once of the seriousness and the humour of an actor, since you can either find the material beneath you and do a cynical work of it, or take pride in embellishing the material and enjoying the melodrama with a strain of critical wit. Since the script was slender the portrayers had to fall back on a rich vein of stock characters. Anna Massey's touch as a Cassandra-like croaker and affectionate elder servant was deftly convincing, dignified and individual at once.

In the 80s BBC filming of Mansfield Park, she was Mrs. Norris — still a busybody and a chatterbox, but sincere, which was not the case in the book but certainly makes her far more sympathetic. Besides her expressive face, diction, postures and gestures, and formal, old-fashioned air are the traits of a distinguished thespian tradition.

Her important roles, in controversial films from the 1960s and 70s and then a series of classic film adaptations, testify to her range. In recent years she was Miss Prism in Oscar Wilde's The Importance of Being Earnest with Reese Witherspoon and Rupert Everett, and Mrs. Shrike in The Machinist (2004) with Christian Bale.  The CBE (Commander of the Order of the British Empire) was awarded in 2005.

"Anna Massey dies aged 73" [Guardian], by Xan Brooks (July 4, 2011)
Anna Massey [IMDb] and Other works Accessed July 4, 2011
Raymond Massey [IMDb]
"Actress Anna Massey dies at the age of 73" [BBC] (July 4, 2011)
"Anna Massey" [Daily Telegraph] (July  4, 2011)

Nine Pillars of the Judiciary To Go On Holiday

The current term of the United States Supreme Court is drawing to a close, so the Atlantic's website ran a list of the best dissent that each justice has filed.

In case a little "Supreme Court for Dummies" is helpful: Since there are nine judges on the court, at least five of them must agree to rule for or against. Then they write an opinion. One opinion explains the majority's decision; the dissenters write another; and sometimes a justice disagrees with minor points of the colleagues' opinions enough to write his or her own. Each remaining judge joins the opinion which best fits his or her understanding of the case.

A long time ago I read former Supreme Court justice Sandra Day O'Connor's Majesty of the Law. She explains that Chief Justices have historically had very different views about achieving a decision; one or two were obsessed with forging a consensus, which extorted uneasy compromises, and others couldn't care much less about whether the decision was 5-4 or 8-1 as long as there was a decision. This term, around 48% of the rulings were unanimous, 28% were 5-4.

During the past three or so months I haunted the Court's website and scrolled through a couple rulings; the dissent I remember is Sonia Sotomayor's challenge to the majority ruling in United States v. Jicarilla Apache Nation. American constitutional law and the circumstances of this particular case are beyond the scope of my amateur legal erudition; so the following may be a complete mischaracterization of the case:

From a human rather than judicial perspective I thought that Sotomayor was right. The issue basically seemed to be that the U.S. government exercises a kind of statutory guardianship over Native Americans. But wards in the traditional sense have much freer access to details of how their legal representation is being run. So the government's lack of transparency and accountability to others is getting in the way of properly pursuing it in the courts where there is reason to believe that it has abused its role. I don't know if the system is really that claustrophobic and defined by Catch-22s, but then I see no foundation for optimism. But Sotomayor's taking up the gauntlet was rather heartwarming.

"I Dissent: A Different Kind of Supreme Court Term Review" [Atlantic], by Andrew Cohen (June 28, 2011)
O'Connor, Sandra Day, The Majesty of the Law (Random House, 2003)
United States v. Jicarilla Apache Nation [Supreme Court], decided June 13, 2011 [PDF format; Justice Sotomayor's dissent from p. 31]

Counting Pence and the Prince of Wales

The Prince of Wales's annual review has been published and with it his finances up to March 31, 2011. It is a jumble of costs pertaining not only to Charles but also to the Duchess of Cornwall and the Princes Harry and William.

In an article by Stephen Bates, the Guardian does not hold this fiscal annum entirely in good odour, on account for instance of this rise in travelling expenses, which are partially disbursed by the taxpayer:

although the review indicates the prince travelled 34,000* miles on royal duties in the past year, to the end of this March – 9,000 fewer than the previous year – and halved the amount of foreign travel he undertook, the cost rose by £388,000, to £1,080,000.

*Officially 34, 287 miles.

The obvious, amateur question is whether there is not a good reason for the rise in expenses, or whether these expenses were incurred by (an)other member(s) of the household. Overseas travel tends to be undertaken at the behest of the government, for example the Foreign and Commonwealth Office.

His income from the Duchy lands rose, too, apparently on a strong bond portfolio. Since about the only industry that is doing well (though food prices are also rising, and with a little rampant exploitation there are riches to be garnered here too) is the oil industry, investment in which would not correspond to his environmental convictions, I wonder at and rather admire his ability to find anything else that is remotely profitable.

Sir Michael Peat, who is the Duke's secretary, evidently admires it too; but when he observes that it is a 'fall in real terms', I assume based on my solitary catastrophic Macroeconomics course that, though impressive-looking, these figures would have had greater solid worth a couple of years ago. If I'm interpreting the chart correctly, using 2005 as a baseline of 100, the consumer price index shows an inflation of 14.5% in the past 5 years excluding 2011; it means that if you had 100 pounds in your wallet in December 2010, it was really only worth what 85.5 pounds were worth in 2005, so you might have to go to H&M (the horror!) for a pullover instead of Topshop. So if you're dealing with over £10 million, the decrease in purchasing power will be proportionately worrisome, and of course there are other economic factors likewise at play.

Altogether there are 132.8 persons in the household (up from 124) who contribute to official work; the income from the Duchy comprised almost £17.8 million and the taxes with value-added tax (VAT*), national insurance contributions for his employees, and council tax payments** £4.9 million. From taxpayers he received, through various avenues, £1.96 million. Contributions to charity and ecological measures, among them solar panels, have both been raised. I haven't read the whole review, but even in these general terms it's interesting and well-presented nuts-and-bolts stuff.

What has not been divulged was the cost to the Prince of Wales's household from the wedding of his eldest son in April (which was likewise paid for by the bride's family and the taxpayer), on the royal principle that the mechanics of weddings are best decently shrouded in privacy.

(* Proper pronunciation: each letter separately. Value-added tax is paid on goods and services at the grocery store, pub, etc., like Canada's Goods and Services Tax or like Germany's Mehrwertsteuer.)
(** The council tax is paid to local authorities and is known elsewhere as a municipal tax; it is unpopular and the Conservative government has been pushing councils to lower the rates.)

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Table taken from the Annual Review:

INCOME AND EXPENDITURE

Year to 31st March	2011	2010
	£000s	£000s
Income from Duchy of Cornwall	17,796	17,161
Funding from Grants-in-Aid and Government Departments	1,962	1,664
Total income and funding	19,758	18,825
Official expenditure	11,406	10,723
Surplus after official costs	8,352	8,102
Taxation	4,398	3,484
Non-official expenditure	2,539	1,694
Capital expenditure (less depreciation), loan repayments and transfers to reserves	1,184	2,695
Net cash surplus	231	229

And, since His Royal Highness is a greenie:

SUSTAINABILITY ACCOUNT

Year to 31st March	2011	2010
	Tonnes	Tonnes
CO2 equivalent emissions
Household: sources under the Household’s control	1,523	1,581
Household: official overseas travel	438	1,479
The Home Farm	2,025	2,060

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Prince Charles's income up by £1m [Guardian], by Stephen Bates (June 28, 2011)
"Annual Review 2011" [Prince of Wales]

Fashion as Sadism: Men's Fashion Weeks

IN THIS SLIDESHOW, the Daily Telegraph picks out the runway looks that best incarnated the French saying, "Il faut souffrir pour être belle." — "To be beautiful one must suffer.":

"Bizarre trends from men's fashion week, spring/summer 2012" [Daily Telegraph], Photos from various agencies (June 24, 2011)

It seems far too early for Spring/Summer 2012 fashion weeks; in fact these are only for men's apparel. The outfits here — some of which are fairly conventional for the extreme aesthetic of the catwalk and some of which, like the giant green egg in the first slide, verge on the extraterrestrial — appeared in the Paris and Milan showings.

Mythdusters: The Seven Sleepers of Ephesus

IN HONOUR of Seven Sleepers' Day, observed today here in Germany: The day itself is founded on the old Catholic myth of the sleepers at Ephesus and like a religious Groundhog Day it is traditionally considered as a harbinger of the weather for the following seven weeks:

Cave of the Seven Sleepers, Turkey (1987)
by user Kpisimon, via Wikimedia Commons (Creative Commons Attribution 3 Unported License)

TO BE honest, I'm fond of the tale in a secular way because I'm very fond of sleeping, especially at epic lengths if there are no particular responsibilities to fulfill and therefore relaxing is in order.

A New Ascetic: Peter Zumthor

In anticipation of his turn at the Serpentine Gallery in London's Hyde Park, the Guardian's website has published an article and slideshow of the Swiss architect Peter Zumthor.

The last and first time I read about him was in an exhaustive article in the New York Times, which did not strike me much then but must be good to adhere in my memory: "The Ascension of Peter Zumthor" (Mar. 11, 2011) by Michael Kimmelman.

He is 68 years old and an inhabitant of a Swiss village, with his office in Chur. His father was a cabinetmaker and put him under considerable pressure to take over; instead Mr. Zumthor went off to study art, industrial and interior design, and ended up informally in the architectural field. Eventually he was officially designated as an architect by the Swiss government, waiving the formal qualifications. In 2009 he won the Pritzker Prize.

Rowan Moore's Observer article has good descriptions of his architectural style. His famous projects have so far included a baths (Therme Vals, 1996), field chapels, and a construction in Cologne where he had to work with the ruins beneath. More recently he completed a commission from philosopher Alain de Botton, building a low hilltop house in South Devon, England, as one of five holiday homes within the "Living Architecture" project. (The houses, which can be rented, pursue de Botton's aim to endear the best and brightest in modern architecture to hoi polloi.) These works are very individual and his architectural team is little; he neither seems to sprawl internationally nor expel a worldly urban flair like Zaha Hadid or Frank Gehry. (Sir Norman Foster, for instance, cooperates with around 600 people. Zumthor is also unusually prone to picking and choosing what he wants to do, which enables admirable creative independence.)

Two years ago, Jonathan Glancey captured something of the high regard in which Mr. Zumthor is held as he wrote, for the Guardian's website,

I find it thrilling when I come across something – be it a school, a factory, a place of worship, a Tube station – that could be a lasting memorial for our own age and endeavours. I see this in the work of contemporary architects such as Peter Zumthor, Caruso St John, Tadao Ando, Oscar Niemeyer and Alvaro Siza.

Zumthor's work is generally sombre (it is tempting to take Glancey's "memorial" literally, as "funerary"), though he would probably not appreciate such a reduction, and has a Scandinavian spareness and severity of line that echo the sterner alpine geology and historical religious strains in Switzerland. It also counteracts the idiosyncratic (for instance) Austrian tendency to seek brightness in its art, trim houses with geraniums and petunias and folk crafts, and turn to neatness and colour and transalpine Mediterranean warmth in its architecture. In his Bruder Klaus chapel, for instance, the inverse-ribbed walls are dark and though a circle and shaft of light emanates from the top the joy of religion seems too contemplative to be very present.

In his Serpentine Gallery pavilion, the projected image shows a big, slant-edged rectangular roof aperture in a tombesque room of slate grey, which opens a flower garden to be arranged by Piet Oudolf to the air. Glancey elucidates that the walls will be made out of timber and finished with "scrim and black paste made with sand." Previous pavilions, ten in all, were designed among others by Hadid, Gehry, and Daniel Libeskind.

"Zumthor Rising" [New York Times], slideshow by Hendrik Kerstens, and Julian Faulhaber for the Times (March 13, 2003)
"Peter Zumthor - in pictures" [Observer] by various photographers (June 19, 2011)
"Peter Zumthor: In pursuit of perfection" [Observer] by Rowan Moore (June 19, 2011)
"Swiss architect untouched by fad or fashion wins prized Pritzker award" [Guardian], by Ed Pilkington (April 14, 2009)
"Jonathan Glancey on architect Charles Holden" [Guardian], by Jonathan Glancey (Nov. 5, 2009)
"Alain de Botton commissions holiday homes to promote modernist architecture" [Guardian], by Robert Booth (May 9, 2010)
"Peter Zumthor unveils secret garden for Serpentine pavilion" [Guardian] by Jonathan Glancey (April 4, 2011)

National Geographic: Chilean Ash, an Unburial in Heuneburg, and the Solstice

Photos of the volcanic ash around Chile, where the Puyehue volcano erupted on June 4, smothering cars and roofs and rivers, exacerbating drought, and disturbing air travel in Australia and Brazil as well as its immediate neighbours:

"Pictures: Volcano Ash Smothers Lake, Buildings, Sheep" [National Geographic] Text by unknown, with photos from agencies (June 21, 2011)

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Celebrating the summer solstice (2008). And the obligatory slideshow of Stonehenge.

In Brief: Series of Internet Tubes Apparently Embiggens

In the laziest blog post since Ascension Day, here is a link to Boing Boing's article "ICANN votes to roll out 400-800 new generic top-level domains", by Cory Doctorow, from today.

It seems important but I wouldn't know how to explain it. :)

Blog: Joy the Baker

Introducing various blogs:

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Today it's the turn of Joy the Baker, a Wordpress-based food blog which is written and illustrated with bright photographs by a resident of Los Angeles, in her late twenties.

Her baking and occasional cooking is American with a contemporary concentration: garlic knots, a cinnamon sugar loaf that is baked in slices ("pull-apart bread") and a pineapple upside-down cake minus the pineapple and with strawberries, and time-honoured, classic-sounding recipes for roasted new potatoes with mustard and strawberry cupcakes.

Habeas the 796th Anniversary of the Magna Carta

Disclaimer before hundreds of wroth barristers descend on me in a twitchy-eyed swarm: Please take the following skeptically since I am not a legal expert.

Paul Revere's Ride (Against the Commie Invaders in Alaska)

Never mind the geography and rhyming and rhythm, etc. . . .

Listen my children and you shall hear:
Of the Palin ride of Paul Revere,
On the eighteenth of April, in Seventy-five;
Barely any Joe sixpack is now alive
Who remembers that famous day and year.
He said to his buddy, "If the Commies march
By land or sea from the town to-night,
Hang a lantern aloft in the lighthouse dome
Of the seaside village as a signal light,—
One if by land, and two if by sea;
And I on the opposite shore will be,
Ready to ride and spread the alarm
Through every Alaskan village and farm,
For the country folk to be up and to arm."

Italian Vogue and the Three Plump Graces

It can be done after all: editor Franca Sozzani has honoured plus-sized women with the cover story and photo of Vogue Italia, June 2011.

On the front of the magazine the three models — Tara Lynn, Candice Huffine and Robyn Lawley — are posed in lingerie around a restaurant table, in black and white, against a blurry white and silver backdrop of a waitress and other figures, walls and natural light.

It is a part of the editor's campaign against pro-anorexia websites and the fixation on slenderness which European and American society pursue.

N.B.: Ascension

Today the bookshop is closed for the Ascension, which is "Christi Himmelfahrt" in German.

As the r.W.a. explains, it comes forty days after Easter, and in the Christian faith celebrates Jesus's rise into heaven.

Edicula on Mount of Olives, Jerusalem
Photo by Adriatikus [via Wikimedia Commons]


Ascension of Jesus [Wikipedia] Read June 2, 2011
Ascension of Christ [Wikimedia Commons]

Border-crossing

After over a hundred thousand refugees have left Libya, for Egypt or Tunisia or Europe, the Arab Spring and the resistance to it have now led to the flight of hundreds of people from Syria.

In Geneva, Andrej Mahecic, spokesman for the UN High Commissioner for Refugees reported today that during the past week around 1,400 people have left the Syrian town of Tall Kalakh, which is under attack by the military, and crossed the border to the Lebanese regions of Wadi Khaled and Tall Biri. Refugees had already been entering Lebanon around the end of April.

"UNHCR working with Lebanon to help people fleeing Syria" (Briefing Notes) [UNHCR] (May 20, 2011)

Don Lemon and the Black + Gay + High Profile Equation

Yesterday, in a New York Times article about his forthcoming book, the CNN news anchor Don Lemon effectively 'came out.'

There are only two other major news anchors who are 'out'; the others are Rachel Maddow and Thomas Roberts of MSNBC. So, through his public profile, Mr. Lemon hopes to encourage openness and feelings of security in other gay Americans.

His coworkers at CNN, he explains, have partly already known that he was gay, and the company is inviting him to appear on its shows to promote the book Transparency, like the Newsroom.

In the Times article, he says, “I think if I had seen more people like me who are out and proud, it wouldn’t have taken me 45 years to say it [. . .], to walk in the truth.”

The reaction to it seems to have been friendly. "I'm overwhelmed by all your tweets and support!", Mr. Lemon wrote on Twitter, "Hoping this prevents more tragedies like tyler clementi's suicide." (Background on Tyler Clementi.)

The $3.9 Million Retirement and a California Hospital

Yesterday the Los Angeles Times reported that California's State Assembly has decided to audit the Salinas Valley Memorial Healthcare District, after the newspaper dug up the fact that its former CEO Samuel Downing was given a retirement package with nearly 4 million dollars in extra pension benefits last month.

There are more details in the article, but the splurge looks even more grandiose contrasted in this paragraph to the general financial situation of the hospital and its low-level employees:

International Nurses Day

It's International Nurses Day and the birthday of Florence Nightingale.

Albertus Seba and the Didelphis Marsupialis Terror

The Guardian's website is running a slideshow of Albertus Seba's painstaking colour-plate portrayals of animal and insect life, in honour of publisher Taschen's release of his drawings. And if old-fashioned illustrations of people and cooking implements and so on can be peculiar, sometimes animal sketches can be even more so.

Greek Salad and the Dodgy Sheep's Cheese

Greek salad is a dish which I have never managed to get very wrong. Today I tweaked the dressing and it turned out fine, so here is the (mostly) unquantified recipe:

From: Wikimedia Commons, by Fir0002/Flagstaffotos
Licensed under GNU Free Documentation License, 1.2

In Brief: Philip Morris and Labour

On May 9 the watchdog Verité published its report on tobacco industry workers in Kazakhstan and the firm Philip Morris reemphasized its commitment to protecting the workers in its supply chain. In 2009 Human Rights Watch criticized the mistreatment of migrant labourers under the Kazakh farmers who cultivate tobacco for the company's Kazakh base; for example the suppliers withheld their workers' passports, used child labour, and refused to pay their wages.

The language of the HRW and Verité reports is surprisingly gentle; apparently Philip Morris approached Verité to examine the problem in the first place and it is probable that the company had not known what suppliers' working conditions were like. From one or two other instances I guess that on the whole multinational corporations are taking more pains not to be flagrantly diabolical; from what I remember of the No Logo era, the attitudes used to be far more unrepentant and belligerent.

Kazakhstan: Philip Morris International Overhauls Labor Protections [Human Rights Watch] (May 9, 2011)

*

Postscript: Child labour in carpet factory, Pakistan (UNICEF photo)

Forewarned, Forearmed: Da Vinci in London

The exhibition of Leonardo da Vinci's paintings and sketches at the National Gallery in London will probably not fail to be talked to pieces once it opens in November,

A Day in the Life of a Bookshop Help

IT is Monday and, as must be sometimes the case, I was not in an awake frame of mind even when I got up, and once at the bookshop submerged myself in news, blogs and blogging as customary. The paradoxical question of how to look and be forthcoming to customers when sitting at the computer remains unsolved;

Photo credit: Deutsches Bundesarchiv (German Federal Archive)
via Wikimedia Commons

The Question of Pioneer Woman

The way I discovered the website Pioneer Woman was that people on Jezebel were recommending the recipes; after looking at it three or so times and finding it impressive, I have revisited it semi-regularly since.

Among the rubrics of photographing, gardening, cooking and homeschooling life on a comfortable ranch in the American Midwest . . .


Medieval spoons from the Château de Chillon, Photo by Rama
Wikimedia Commons

A Retrospective on Princess Beatrice and the Hat

A thing of beauty is a joy for ever:
Its loveliness increases; it will never
Pass into nothingness; but still will keep
A bower quiet for us, and a sleep
Full of sweet dreams, and health, and quiet breathing.
Therefore, on every morrow, are we wreathing
A flowery band to bind us to the earth

— John Keats
From The Literature Network

*

A week after the marriage of Prince William and Kate Middleton, our absorption in the Ascot-esque hats and fascinators worn by their guests has endured, and Princess Beatrice's hat has outdone all the rest.

A confection by Philip Treacy, it stood at her forehead, a beige ring with a loopy bow and rippling ends affixed to its top, placed on (from what one could tell on photos) a rounded foundation like a flatscreen computer monitor. I didn't think it was too bad, but it has generally been deemed incredibly ugly. Now it has acquired immortality by virtue of Photoshop.

The masterpiece of the genre is undoubtedly the photo where the hat is 'shopped onto President Obama, Hillary Clinton and the other American officials in the situation room during the military operation against Osama bin Laden. But the rest of the photoshopped oeuvre is also worth a look:

Princess Beatrice's royal wedding hat goes viral [Daily Telegraph] (May 6, 2011)
Princess Beatrice's Royal Wedding Hat: Birth of a Meme [Gawker] (April 29, 2011)
Etc.
Princess Beatrice Royal Wedding Hat [KnowYourMeme]

The milliner has defended The Hat in the press. But Hilary Alexander's article in the Daily Telegraph today implies that Mr. Treacy has decided to stop swimming against the current; he promises that whoever wins the newspaper's competition will receive an extra-special item of his headgear.

Win a 'mystery' hat by Philip Treacy inspired by Princess Beatrice [Daily Telegraph], by Hilary Alexander (May 6, 2011)

***

Postscript: the 3-year-old bridesmaid covering her ears with her hands:

"Royal Wedding Girl" [KnowYourMeme]

Cinco de Mayo: A Profoundly Researched Insight

It's Cinco de Mayo! To look at this traditional Mexican-American feast in greater depth I turned to Wikipedia and the Urban Dictionary, where the first definition put the feast in a somewhat insensitive but likely accurate nutshell:

Photo: El Castillo at Chichén Itzá [Wikimedia Commons] by Eric Baetscher (March 29, 2008)
Licensed under GNU Free Documentation License

Trig-Birthery

The most popular story on the Guardian's website this morning is Megan Carpentier's perspective on the conspiracy theories surrounding former vice-presidential candidate Sarah Palin's youngest child.

(Megan is the ex-Washington, D.C. lobbyist who once wrote pseudonymously for the political blog Wonkette. Then she contributed her expert commentary as an editor at Jezebel before, during, and after the 2008 presidential elections.)

Easter in an Eggshell

In honour of the Easter holidays I have been culpably bad about updating the blog, but here is a culinary-centric retrospective of the past weekend:

1. Easter:

Breakfast with croissants, buns, cheese, ham, and jam. Tea, coffee, hot chocolate. A lot of Easter eggs, both proper and chocolate or candy, and two chocolate Easter bunnies for everyone. A bouquet; this year it was composed of a variant of cherry twigs, and red geranium and heart's ease from our flowerpots and box. The tablecloth was white as usual.

Listening to Händel's Messiah.
(Note: The umlaut on the "a" is important, since it is the difference between "handle" and the correct pronunciation "hendell," which is however so rare in English that it is probably best to go with the wrong pronunciation.)

2. Easter Monday:

Lamb roasted with garlic and sage and butter. Potatoes, broad beans and a lettuce salad with olive oil and aceto balsamico.

Gas Wells: The Trickle-Down Effect

The Guardian is running an article by Nina Berman for Alternet about the effects of living in a gas-rich part of Pennsylvania.

The creeping arrival of industry and the intensifying manifestations of subterranean chemistry sound like a surreal alien invasion.

Lest We Forget

It is the 150th anniversary of the shots on Fort Sumter which opened the American Civil War. In other words, a kind of wedding anniversary for battle reenactors.

Which presents to give? I turned to the relevant Wikipedia article for inspiration.

***

A Dagger to the Heart of British Architecture

While confessing to liking the Shard, I enjoyed the lament of the Guardian's critic, Jonathan Jones, over the new skyscraper in the core of London: "Shard Attack" (April 12). The comments section is also worthy of a glance.




The Shard From Southwark Street
by Loz Pycock
Licensed under CC Attribution-ShareAlike 2.0 Generic
(via Wikimedia Commons)

Los Angeles Police Officers Successfully Sue Over Ticket Quota

In 2006 a new head of Los Angeles's West Traffic Division reportedly started a policy that every officer had to hand out at least 18 traffic tickets a day.

Officers Howard Chan and David Benioff took issue with the quota, which is illegal in California, and were punished for it by their superiors.

On April 11th they won a lawsuit against the department and were given $2 million in damages.

"LAPD officers who complained about ticket quotas are awarded $2 million" [Los Angeles Times], by Andrew Blankstein and Joel Rubin(April 12, 2011)

Update: "10 LAPD officers sue, saying department has traffic-ticket quotas" [Los Angeles Times], by Andrew Blankstein (August 4, 2011)

Like Army, Judiciary Marches on Its Stomach

According to research published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, a sample of eight judges was 65% likely to parole prison inmates at the beginning of a session or directly after lunch, but increasingly unlikely to do so over time to the point that the judges are almost 0% likely to grant parole before lunch.

"Hungry judges dispense rough justice" [Nature.com] by Zoë Corbyn (April 11, 2011)
"Supporting Information: Danziger et al. 10.1073/pnas.1018033108" and the abstract of "Extraneous factors in judicial decisions" [PNAS]

Not Transiting in Transit

What it's like to be one of 28 people stuck in a New York subway elevator for over an hour.

"The Horror of Being Trapped in a Subway Elevator" [Gawker], by Brian Moylan (April 11, 2011)

"Sex trafficking victim wins substantial damages from Home Office" [Guardian.co.uk] (April 11, 2011)

A Divided Commemoration of Polish/Russian Plane Crash

In Warsaw there were two conflicting ceremonies yesterday for those who died on April 10th, 2010, when an airplane carrying Poland's president and his wife, scholars, legislators, military, and others crashed in Smolensk, Russia. Tensions are being fed by the question of blame and the revived history of distrust regarding the country's neighbour to the east.

Commemorating Smolensk: A nation divided [Economist] by G.C. (April 11, 2011)

Côte d'Ivoire

Human Rights Watch's detailed news release on the deteriorating situation for villagers in the Ivory Coast here. (April 9, 2011)

Windy City

Today a powerful spring wind has been sweeping in through Berlin, reminiscent of the one which Mary Poppins employed to carry away superfluous nannies. I was a little disgusted to find that according to the Institute for Meteorology at the Freie Universität, the peak windspeed (Windspitze) has been 21.7 m/s.

After a minuscule calculation:

(21.7 * 60 * 60) / 1000

we arrive at 78.12 km/h, or 48.54 mi/hour, or 42.18 knots, which still sounds (to me) unimpressive.

But, on the Beaufort Scale [NOAA], it is considered a strong gale, force 9, which

Uploaded by Petrusbarbygere,
Wikimedia Commons  
April in the Très Riches Heures du Duc de Berry

An earthquake hit Las Choapas, in the Mexican state of Veracruz at 13:11 GMT, and was recorded at a depth of 167 km and at a force of 6.5 on the Richter scale. (Later upgraded to 6.7 by the Servicio Sismológico Nacional.) It apparently caused no damages but it was felt in several cities; in Mexico City people left their buildings to investigate.

In the meantime a 7.1-magnitude earthquake has also struck beneath the sea east of Japan, in the region affected by the recent earthquake and tsunami. It was strongly felt on land and disrupted the electricity supply to the Onagawa nuclear power plant, but the tsunami warning was cancelled soon.

"Temblor de 6.5 grados sacude la Ciudad de México [El Universal]" by eca (April 7, 2011)
"Sismo fue de 6.7 grados, corrige Sismológico" [El Universal] by sma (April 7, 2011)
"Japan hit by new earthquake" [Guardian] by James Meikle (April 7, 2011)

Rule Britannia . . .

"Knit your own royal wedding" CNN, by Lakshmi Gandhi (April 6, 2011)

(It speaks for itself.)

"Slut Walk" protest after misguided advice on preventing assault

Earlier this year a police officer told a class at York University in Toronto, Canada, that women can prevent rape if they "avoid dressing like sluts."

He has apologized, but his comment indexed the kinds of poorly-thought-through ideas which in the end cast blame on victims of sexual assault. It is especially worrisome in a person who should help enforce the relevant laws.

So on April 3rd 1,500 to 3,000 people participated in "Slut Walk," a protest march, in Toronto.

According to a commenter (UnabashedOpinion) on the Globe and Mail's website:

What we're hoping for is really simple: That Toronto Police Services (1) Revamp their training curriculum on sexual assault and domestic violence, using experts in the field to provide content (the current curriculum was developed exclusively by the police themselves; (2) That experts in the field be used to actually teach the material (currently it is inadequately trained cops teaching ignorant cops); (3) That good methods of adult education be used in the teaching so that the learning sustains and actually transforms ingrained attitudes (currently, no actual learning takes place, since no transformation of worldview and understanding occurs).

The Snowy Path of Canada's Nunavut

On April 1st, twelve years after Nunavut parted from the Northwest Territories to form its own political unit within Canada, the Globe and Mail published an investigation of life in the Inuit territory today.

@TheRevAl

Reverend Al Sharpton

43 years ago today Dr. Martin Luther King was assassinated in Memphis. Let us remember his sacrifice for all of us.

43 minutes ago via Twitter for BlackBerry®

1:27 PM Berlin time Apr 4th, Twitter.com

[Technical Note]

Apologies to the reader (if any) who is artistically offended by the current experiments with this blog's layout. The use of pink is trite but it is timely, at least, since the website looks like an Easter egg.

It could be worse,

Stumbled-On Photos: Cyrene and Eyjafjallajokull

"Greek ruins of Cyrene draw goats, cows, few tourists" [Kathimerini] (March 29, 2011)

From last year, via @rfg2edit (Rose Foltz): "More from Eyjafjallajokull" [Boston.com] (April 19, 2010)

Open Season for Visitor Hordery on the South Downs in England

Winchester Guild Hall (1871). In city which marks western end of the park. (by Wyrdlight, Wikimedia Commons)

As of yesterday Britain has a new national park on its southeastern shore: South Downs National Park, which spreads over 1600 square kilometres from Winchester to Eastbourne.

It is not entirely the stereotype of the lonely national park. Brighton, its environs, and its high population throng under the southern margin at the side of the Channel; London is an afternoon's outing away; and over 108,000 people live in the park proper.

Like a central nerve the South Downs Way, open for cyclists and horseback riders and walkers, stretches between the cities and threads the expanding park. Besides the attractions of Winchester and Eastbourne, there are the white cliffs not of Dover but of Beechy Head (which seems to have, however, also attained the importance of a cliché), sheep, rolling slopes, the ex-forest Weald of Sussex, &c., &c., and an Iron Age hill fort by name of Chanctonbury Ring.

Despite the prevalence of the species Homo sapiens, a gently written article in the Guardian paints a pleasing bucolic portrait:

"Bronze age farmers knew the area, medieval ironmasters hacked at its copses, and 18th-century owners enclosed its fields. It remains a landscape that Jane Austen, who lived at Chawton near its northern boundary, would recognise"

"There are still wild spots: chalk downlands and woods, heathland and beech hangers, but this archetypal English landscape bears the marks of many generations."

And the writer remarks that corn buntings and grey partridges dwell in the downlands while nightjars and woodlarks haunt the heathlands.

South Downs: bells ring out to celebrate Britain's new national park [Guardian.co.uk], by Stephen Bates (March 31, 2011)
In pictures: The UK's newest national park [Guardian.co.uk], (March 31, 2009)
"South Downs Way", "Looking after", "Interactive Map" (Southdowns National Park Authority, March 2011)
"The South Downs above Tilton." by penwren [Flickr] (May 21, 2009)

Japanese Iodine-131 Emulates Kon-Tiki

Surprisingly for those of us who considered people complaining about radiation imminently flying from Japan to the Pacific Northwest coast in Canada and the USA as selfish and silly,

Why Is Easter Late?

From Wikimedia Commons

Half an Angleworm (World Poetry Day)

It's UNESCO World Poetry Day, an event which seems to be passing very quietly; but it has only been around since 1999.

In its honour, here is a classic from Emily Dickinson:

A Bird came down the Walk—
He did not know I saw—
He bit an Angleworm in halves
And ate the fellow, raw,

cont'd.

Quoted from Poets.org
World Poetry Day [UN.org]
Illustration from Wikimedia Commons.

The French Revolution

The historian Thomas Carlyle's thoughts on the rightness of revolt in a chapter from his work on the French Revolution. He approached it from a rather religious perspective. The text I cite is different from the original, since this blogger has rewritten it for the sake of fluency and accuracy; of course it may not be an improvement.

From Wikimedia Commons

Questionable

IS the "Age of Hope" only a chimera, cloud vapour with rainbows painted on it — beautiful to see, to sail towards — which hovers over a Niagara Falls? If so Analysis will gain the victory.

Security Council Resolves to Enforce No-Fly Zone

In the early evening of March 17th, the Security Council voted 10 to 0 in favour of resolution 1973, which establishes a no-fly zone over Libya and permits a military intervention as long as no foreign ground forces are sent in.

Five Pieces of Advice for an Interview

I am probably the last person to ask for interview tips. I take looking for work very seriously and rarely apply to places, so I have had four interviews and two disasters and one fizzle, and besides I have not been hired yet. The fourth interview, for a tutoring company, was on Tuesday.

Still, my advice is after the jump.

'Tis the Season for (Swiss Herbal) Cough Drops

In the Northern Hemisphere, at least, the mass of Facebook status updates indicates that the peak days of colds, flus, and other ordinary nasties are upon us again, making the interval before spring begins properly extra-especially miserable, as usual.

I have a not-so-secret vested interest in this phenomenon, since I have a sore throat, iffy voice, congestion and a mild fever. From the medical perspective honey is proving surprisingly unhelpful; alcohol mellows me out but since I've felt the urge to drink more than I normally would it had to be limited to the one glass; and I really wish that I had cough candies because they are delicious.

Of course, as you've heard before, you're curing the symptoms but not the virus anyway.

On the positive side, the cold subsided during a job interview yesterday. It may be the most considerate infection ever.