Mit der Dummheit kämpfen Blögger selbst vergebens

Poetry corner at Riddled is this week devoted to Bertie Brecht's "Die Lösung". Disappointingly, the pome is not about the late-period Amon Düül album with Bob Calvert on vocals. Rather, its topic is apparently the dissolution of people... albeit at a political scale instead of the alchemical sense or the old-fashioned one-at-a-time acid bath. Which brings a Myles na gCopaleen story to mind:

Yestreblyansky has explained the background to Die Lösung: how the East German gubblement incensed Brecht by abandoning their pretense of being in power to serve the people (when the relationship was in fact the other way around).

The Whackyweedia would have us believe that

"Die Lösung" (The Solution) is a famous German poem by Bertolt Brecht about the uprising of 1953 in East Germany [...] It was first published in 1959 in the West German newspaper Die Welt

Any number of websites repeat Die Welt's priority and elevate it into the giddy empyrean of fact. But the Whacky is a lying witch, for I have Martin Esslin on Line 3 (writing in 1976):

The pome was in high rotate during the 1980s... when ministers of the Thatcher government were given to complaining that the British people had failed to live up to the expectations that the government had set for them. If royalties were payable for political-commentary quotation then Brecht would be almost as wealthy as George Orwell, although just as dead.

The alternative "abolish the people" version also spiked in the early 80s; the task of tracing the origin and spread of this mistranslation is left as an exercise for the reader (note the revival of that version during the Clinton years, when pundits were dismayed by the public for remaining in favour of Clinton despite their own hostility to him). Anyhoo, the crucial words appear on lines 4-5:

the people \ Had forfeited the confidence of the government

-- a World-Upside-Down reversal of the more familiar situation where a government has lost the support of the governed and becomes illegitimate. Clear enough, shirley?

Yet a rightwing opinionator in 2004 was blithely oblivious to the parallelism of the inversion:

Ten years later the opinionator has still not wasted time reading what Brecht actually wrote, and remains unclear on the concept, for he repeats the same error, and indeed the same words. Recycling is good!
Evidently the words 'Brecht' and 'quip' are linked in his mind by bonds of long propinquity so that if either finds egress from his head, the other is sure to follow, in the manner of anal beads. The conjoined concepts seem to follow a five-year cycle, lying dormant between emergences, like cicadas. In 2009 their escape route was Liberal Fascism.
It does not speak well for the intelligence of one's readership if one is obliged to remind them when a quotation is well-known. There was to have been a Knock-Knock joke here about Al Kahest (the universal solvent), but we don't have time for that, because Myles wants to finish his human-dissolution joke.

A perineal theme

We consulted a panel of observers of the art scene, well-informed, impartial, no axes to grind. We also consulted Old Jem, famously acerbic art critic at the Pahiatua Sentinel, whose exhibition of ground axes opened last night at the Masterton Regional Gallery and Lawnmower Maintenance to general acclamation (and complaints from Another Kiwi about stinginess with the servings of wine). We asked them about the sculptural genre of Conceptual Buttplugs.

Axe, grounded

A consensus emerged that Paul McCarthy is a poseur and a provocateur and that his buttplug-themed inflatables are a retrograde step in the genre. Also, AK vouchsafed that when you drop olives into the wine glass to raise the level a bit, this does not improve the flavour of either. Upon further inquiry, the panel agreed that the leading exponent of conceptual buttplugs is in fact Tony Cragg.


I am very disappointed in you, Intertubes:

Concerned as we are about integrity in conceptual-buttplug journalism, we should mention that the artistic tradition goes back at least as far as the Viking era, when Loki "fed

[Thor] a gallon of Castor Oil, painted his arse blue and shoved a cork in his bum-hole."

A precise depiction of the cork is not available.

What a good way to go

So a Billionaire Experience Vehicle was transmogrified into pieces of carbon-fibre composite adorning the Mojave Desert. One possible inference to draw is that God hates CamelCase, for it is confusion and an abomination. Alternatively, one could conclude that the combination of messianic techno-hubris* ("Our technology is far too innovative to fail!") and deadline-loomy time pressure does not bode well for staff safety.

An interesting and prescient article reminds us that the rosy-tinted press releases about "Private-enterprise space tourism Real Soon Now" have been coming out for twenty Friedman Units, ever since June 2004. The public relations may not have fooled nature but they did convince enough ticket-buying Wealth Creators that they were really D. D. Harriman and that a five-minute high-altitude Experience had always been their childhood dream. They also convinced New Mexico voters to spend $210 million paying for Virgin Galactic's ground facilities (which is how billionaires stay billionaires).

I learned that the engine which exploded did not explode** the other day was an eleventh-hour substitution on its first test flight, being substituted only one Friedman Unit ago, after 19 FUs were spent trying to get acceptable performance out of the previous engine design (and after every feature of SpaceShipTwo had been optimised to fit that abandoned design). Part of that effort was the 2007 test-rig explosion which led to a previous round of Hoocouldhaveknowns and left the consortium looking for a new team of engineers.

I also learned that both designs follow the hybrid liquid-oxidiser / solid-fuel principle [not actually reusable]. That approach was familiar from a Mythbusters episode -- "salami rocket" being a phrase that sticks in a guy's mind -- but it was also used by the Top Gear team in their proof-of-concept attempt to turn a Reliant Robin into a space shuttle.

This was a daring departure from the pressured wine liquid technology that has become International Best Practice for maverick astronautical ventures. Although beer propellent is also acceptable.
SpaceShipOne (which won the Ansari X Prize) was intended for multiple test flights to discover and solve the teething troubles of hybrid-propellent rocketry... but once its second manned flight qualified it as First Private-Enterprise Reusable Manned High-Altitude Vehicle, there were financial incentives to put it on show in a museum as F P-E R M H-A V, and it was far too valuable to risk the typographical wrath of God by actually re-using it.


One can only advise Richard Branson to use Papyrus for the logo if he decided to go ahead with funding SpaceShipThree. That would really get the deity's attention!

Below: Artist's impression of SS3

* Riddled style sheet prefers this word to "vainglory" and "insouciance". Some of our best friends are Hubris.
 ** Updated to reflect announcements that the rocket chamber is intact and that rudder performance was involved. Someone forgot to switch their cellphone to Flight mode.