Saturday, October 18, 2014

Mortal danger

Yep. This warning infographic is completely clear:
Possible interpretation: "do not use front crawl to race powered watercraft!" or maybe "boats hereabouts occasionally gain sentience and attack lone swimmers." Perhaps it means "there is a strong wind near the ground, which will push you into the spanking robot!"

In either case, the language barrier provides a completely clear and unimpeded avenue for comprehension. ("Lebensgefahr" means mortal danger. Clearly.)


This post's theme word is sitzfleisch, "the ability to sit through or tolerate something boring," or "the ability to endure or persist in a task." Strong selective forces ensure that all fully-matured, adult Swiss residents have super sitzfleisch and singular serenity.

Frame of reference

The framing suggests one direction of gravity; the framed, another.
Dark silhouettes in the foreground give no additional hints. Overhead dangling backpack-straps give light context. Distant lake suggests. The sound, if you could hear it, would give away the whole game: giant gears, grinding in track-inset teeth. We climb a mountain.
The view is well worth the auditory attack of the train experience. A clear sky, clouded only distantly and intermittently by sports more active than mountaintop viewing: paragliding, helicopter tours, gliding. (A glider buzzed our lookout point, profiting from the mountain's updraft.)
My instinct, looking out over such a well-curated landscape of diverse blue, light green, dark green, road, city, and house-tiles, is to figure out the ruleset and try to optimally manage my resources. Because this view, if nothing else, makes it clear that all of Switzerland is a giant (German-style) resource management game. Sheep for wood?
Frames of reference affect perception. The general approach adopted by tourists is this: seeing something is good, seeing more things is better; higher vantage points see more things; higher vantage points are better. The flow of tourists led here, to this sky-scrapingly high cablecar over a cliffside and down to the village below. Higher is better. But lower has cows, and those cows are wearing cowbells, and those bells are ringing. Audible from a distance (thought: "is that a cowbell?"), from an approaching street ("who's ringing those cowbells? is it a parade?"), and in the pasture itself ("oh, cows are ringing the bells.").


This post's theme word is fangast, fangast, "fit for marriage." Mostly gone are the days where fangast denominated a certain number of cows.