Odd, the Great and Terrible Gurgle appears to have taken a dislike to this subsite.  Completely de-indexed, even after sitemaps, page fixes, and individual pages sent in.  (As I used to do this sort of thing for a living, not entirely clueless in that area.)  Also, the archive bots seem to have developed a similar distaste -- last snapshots were in March. (Posted a few pages there this afternoon, perhaps it will whet the bots' appetite.)

Bit odd.   Time was, this sort of hand-crafted content was the gold standard for search indexing.  A little like realizing that you haven't left any footprints on the trail for the last mile.  Might force me into mass-market authorship, just so I can be sure that a copy or two will still linger on Salvation Army thrift store shelves a century hence.  

 

The basic elements, perhaps: a tenfold increase in the global population in the last century, a vast expansion of industrialization in the Western postwar model, and considerable corruption in the Woodstock-to-Wall-Street generation that followed the generation of giants who built the place. 

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Not to use the interwebs for grousing or chuntering excessively, but this journeying isn't easy.  Away from the highways of air travel and proper hotels, one does land in the place itself.  In the pond, which is much more different from the last pond than one sunlit upland hill varies from another.  

No simple highway.

LG & Co. very strong at the Proms tonight.  Dvorak sumbime.  Seemed to be a deliberate wobbliness to the triumphs in the Sibelius that really made it interesting.

(Until the end, when it was rightly unalloyed.) 

 

 

 

It's not a disastrous place, just very underdeveloped.  It reminds me of anther city divided by a river, a bit to the southeast.  I can't help but think that part of the difficulty is that silent war. Defining your world as a marginal improvement on theirs, rather than a thing in itself, or taking a more distant model.  The nation to the northeast had less of that threat from the south, and is focused more on the northern models, to better effect.  The vibe is sort of underdeveloped small city in NJ.  Still evidence about of rougher times.  Banks barricaded behind double-door thick glass.  Was waiting between the two doors, and caught a whiff what must have been a cleaning chemical.  Essence of the visit, so far.  But time for improvement.

On the upside, found a decent English-language bookstore (unlike the US, people read here, so in all of these countries, pehaps save one, the bookstores have been ubiquitous).  Everything from abroad, though, so no translated locals.  Some of the shops in the last country made a point of setting a corner aside for translated locals, and that was always a good place to stop in for a bit. 

 

 Went on through midnight last night -- took the late morning.  The later-morning runs are really only practical in the rural areas.  In the cities, if you're not up before dawn, enjoy the coffee inside the blockhouse.

 Gently down the stream.  Well, there used to be a stream there.

In the homeland is the fullness of experience.  This is useful, as the task is to have the fullness of experience in strange lands.  Because the lands might get very strange indeed.

Not the things, not the places, but the possibility of experience that we have tied to them for safekeeping. 

 The news media, like the government, is equally a mechanism for keeping the bad people from getting away with things, and helping the bad people to get away with things.  A flourishing media scene or government can be doing either of these things.  

On this peregrination, I've tried to keep to the capitals and the tourist cities -- this is about travelling and studying while still within (a certain species of) European culture.   This isn't an Indiana Jones journey, in other words.  

That said, the southern parts of the peninsula can be a bit rough, as I discovered over the winter -- even in the larger/tourist cities.  There was a point of decision in January/February: I would either go out and buy some khakis and head into the dirty areas, or increase the amount of time at the kitchen table reading --  opted for the latter.  

I'm in one of the more decent parts of this city here, but there are still some rough edges and inconveniences, just from the nature of the place.  Far from what the locals have to go through, I'm sure, but it is a salutary reminder to stay as close to the pools of light as possible when travelling in this manner.  And there's always the table to read at.

Political coercion is not necessarily something you can identify by the clothing fashions, or even the vocabulary, of those enforcing the general compliance.  If you can't describe the way things are without getting run out of town, arguably, things have come to a pretty bad pass.

I do miss books a bit.  I've been careful to ensure that there were large research libraries nearby, whatever the nature of the times.  Given the peregrinations, though, everything's on the glowing screen of the foldable panopticon. 

On the other hand, I've been equally frustrated with the conditions of the books on occasion.  The other side of the fence is no idyll, just a marginal improvement, all told.

An ebook reader large enough to handle PDFs might be a marginal improvement, but those are still a bit pricey, and I'm wary of carrying expensive things around.  Inexpensive, interoperable, and easily replaced technology has been the watchword on these trips, and that approach seems to have worked well so far.