I opened the NZZ am Sonntag (the Sunday edition of the Neue Zürcher Zeitung, the paper of record for German-speaking Switzerland) today to read of yet another threat from Switzerland’s current favorite comic-book supervillain: Starker Franken. ...
The New York Times ran a story last week, essentially detailing the Zürich Model: increase the usage of non-automotive transportation by simultaneously making public transit more attractive (through increased frequency and punctuality though e.g. transit-priority usage of shared corridors) and automotive usage less attractive (via lowering the capacity of throughways via street and lane closure, the “red wave” of worst-case traffic-light timing, traffic calming, lowered speed limits, and so on). ...
I’ve finally given up arguing politics. The way the game seems to be played is indistinguishable from arguing whose football team is better. If I were slightly more cynical, I’d develop a market for jerseys with elephants and donkeys on them and make a killing. It’s even better here in Europe, where most political parties have nice, bright colors, so much the better for mascotry. ...
Basically every Swiss city, town, village, train station, or particularly wide spot in the road has one: the hauptwegweiser (roughly “central trail sign”), which tells you where you can go from here on foot, and approximately how long it will take you if you’re in decent shape and not taking too many photos along the way. ...
Zürich scares winter off by packing a snowman with explosives, lighting it on fire, and measuring the time until its head blows off. I am not making this up. ...
I’m packing for a trip to Memphis, for what will probably be the last time in the foreseeable future. I can’t really say that I’ll miss it. It’s a great place to be from, I guess, and the instant Elvis-and-Jack-Daniels association it has in the eyes of Europeans has started many an interesting train conversation. But most everyone I know, save a couple of friends and a pile of Facebook acquaintances, has moved on. My mother was a compelling reason to book a flight, but she’s gone now, too, and my stepfather moved shortly thereafter to San Diego. Even the Last Cat Standing in the ten year battle over the house has found a new home. All that’s left is the house itself, full of stuff. Most of this stuff is future garbage, if it isn’t already present garbage, which I’m off to dig through in order to find the small bits that aren’t. This is doubly weird, as Memphis is basically the capital of my past, and it’s pretty much impossible to travel there without also traveling in time. ...
Got yet another SVP (Swiss People’s Party) flyer stuffed in the mailbox yesterday, outlining what passes for their platform for the April cantonal elections, which is a straight cognitively-dissonant mix between xenophobic nationalism and classical liberalism. Schweizer wählen SVP, it says: Swiss people vote SVP, the implication being that all the other parties are for people who are somehow less than Swiss. The party somewhat disappointingly leaves the question of the impact of the rather stark protectionism implied by disengagement from Europe on the freedom of markets and Switzerland’s competitiveness unanswered. I get the impression this is because actually attempting to answer such a question would require nuance, which doesn’t fit onto a triple-folded A4 flyer in 36-point type underneath the picture of the scary foreigner. (You’d hope they’d be smart enough to realize, at least from the mailboxes, that they were advertising to a building full of binational couples. But alas.) ...
It is not yet completely clear the extent to which the Revolutions of 2011 were run on Facebook and Twitter, but to say they have not been instrumental would, I think, be disingenuous. Like Matthew Brady’s Civil War photographs, the body counts in Vietnam, or CNN in Kuwait, from the American standpoint the social networking protocols have removed one more layer of separation between the reality of these revolutions, and those watching them. The key here is that they are also used as a primary communications medium for those taking part. Now is perhaps not the time to point out that they’re doing it wrong. ...
Stuck at home this weekend: doctor said stay off a rather badly twisted ankle, not from snowboarding in Arosa, but from falling down the damn stairs in Bahnhof Chur after snowboarding. The upside is I’ve got a nice new lens to play with, so I’ve been shuffling and lurching around the flat taking photos of anything that doesn’t move. ...
This is Ivan S. (name der Redaktion bekannt). Ivan lives with his wife and young son in a dingy little apartment in an old building in a small town outside a small city in Switzerland, an Ausländerghetto filled with asylum-seekers and semi-skilled foreign workers. Ivan has held the occasional odd job, but most of his time these days is spent on low level criminal activity for the Swiss arm of one or another criminal organization with ties to the Balkan peninsula: petty thievery, drug dealing, armed lookout and intimidation, transport. If it involves breaking the law with only marginal autonomy, Ivan’s probably got his fingers in it. ...