When the redacted Mueller report came out, there was a singular page (page 18) that was all black, except for the fact that it contained the unredacted word “troll”. This seemed an unlikely word to escape Barr’s busy pen, but none of the Attorney General’s actions made any sense, so the rationale for passing the … Continue reading
I was for the first time in Buenos Aires, home of Borges and his world of infinite mirrors. Reading a book on Borges on the plane, I discovered that among all his invented characters he may have picked from the world map, there is a Julia von Weidenau. Weidenau/Sieg (later gobbled up and denigrated to … Continue reading
. . This has been the fruit of 15 minutes spent with my camera in front of the Jubilee Supermarket, “The Friendliest Supermarket in the Neigborhood.” I stopped taking pictures not because I ran out of material, but because my fingers turned to ice.
Cenotes (sinkholes) form a halfring on the Ycatan peninsual with a radius of 50 km, around a point that marks the impact of the large meteoroid that wiped out much of life, including the dinosaurs 65 million years ago. The crater created by the impact, which is called Chicxulub, has a diameter of 180 km. … Continue reading
. Ever since I was a teenager I wanted to build a fountain. The fountain was the grand idea of reconciling nature with human engineering, my little Versailles if you will. I never got beyond the concept, as I’ve noted in a earlier blog, but, as close as I got to describing how I wanted … Continue reading
Just after passing the dog run on 72nd street there is the underpass under the Hudson parkway. It’s a depressing place, with puddles and acoustics that make you want to run and get out of it as quickly as possible on the other side. Think of my surprise to see the outline of a heart, … Continue reading
. I was in Sydney recently, at the International Conference on Electron Microscopy, and reunited with a friend whom I met in 1974 when I attended an early precursor of that conference in Canberra. At that time he took me to places with his car, to the bush and to an event at the university … Continue reading
. All blossoms along the River-walk are gone. I experience the world in Gleichnissen, in similes, in metaphors. The strongest metaphor is the image of death. Every plant, every flower is animated by my identification with them. I die a thousand deaths seeing flowers wither. As I expressed it to a person dear to me: … Continue reading
. The word play (if this the right word in the grisly context) between remembering and dismembering propelled my today to post a tweed on Twitter about Donald Trump’s denial of the complicity of his Saudi buddies in the heinous crime committed in the Saudi Consulate in Turkey two weeks ago. [Trump, I hasten to … Continue reading
. The test has established unequivocally that the subject is in fact an object. The absence of blood, the interior scaffolding — all clues point to an elaborate hoax. Life-like or not, we fail to feel sympathy for a contraption ostensibly made of plaster. .
. . The first Ancient Telescope that I discovered, depicted at the bottom, exists on the beach of the Olympic Peninsula. I reported its discovery years ago in COWBIRD (the social media platform that closed on March 31, 2017, but is still accessible). This wooden Telescope will have weathered a bit more, and the part … Continue reading
. . I recently visited Horst Schmidt-Boecking, one of my high school classmates, in Frankfurt. Until his government-mandated retirement he was Professor of the Physics Department of Frankfurt’s university, aptly named after Johann Wolfgang von Goethe. In his house was an oil panting my uncle did, Hermann Manskopf. My uncle’s fame as a painter did … Continue reading
The house/courtyard in the Hutong (lit.: alley) area near Tiananmen Square was originally the residence of a princess /concubine during the Qing dynasty. Later, after it was transformed into a restaurant, it became the favorite hangout of Mei Lanfang, a famous Chinese Opera singer and artist who played exclusively women’s roles. The restaurant is … Continue reading
. Out there on the coast near Bilbao, the Merman watches your car approaching, slowing down and coming to a halt, and passengers getting out with cameras in front of their faces. The Merman is permanently alone. He has no knowledge of Mermaids, only a faint glimpse that they could exist, that they even should … Continue reading
. This is what I found out as I recently visited the University of Freiburg in Germany, my Alma Mater: Herr Waldseemueller was a cartograph in Freiburg who in 1507 published an updated map of the world, which included the New World, a mere sliver on the left. It was made from several large woodcuts … Continue reading
. If after the demise of the Trump administration – we all hope sooner than later — a semblance of rational discourse can be restored, then the most important issue to discuss is governance of this country. The massive concentration of power in a single person – the President – makes possible an abuse of … Continue reading
. The vastness of what once was steppe, and now asphalt and concrete! What has become of this world? Nature has not been quick enough to equip us with bodies and hooves of steel, or with wings, with armor, with fire-breath, with conquering wit to reclaim what once was our home. . .
. Today I found Little Asphalt Dog, sniffing on a black amorphous protuberance. Little Asphalt Dog is content with this kind of existence. He doesn’t move on his own; he is lifted by the sticky soles of the shoes of unobservant passengers, and dropped off in random territory, even in the passenger’s home. Little Asphalt … Continue reading
. With language of almost touching naivite, which at once shows his ineptness as a diplomat, Rex (meaning “king”) Tillerson said in his recent commencement speech that a crisis of ethics infects the US. In his words, “When we go wobbly on truth, we go wobbly on America.” Ah, wobbly wobbly, that sounds like bigly, … Continue reading
I have in various places talked about the space under the verandah of my parents’ house, site of many childhood memories, a place of intuitive tinkering of an 8-year old boy trying to make sense of the world. As I was recently in Siegen, my home town, to receive an honorary degree from Siegen’s … Continue reading
