or how our digital assistant got her name:

In Norse mythology, Elli is a personification of old age who, in the Prose Edda book Gylfaginning, defeats God Thor in a wrestling match.  She is the embodiment of the crone and the wisdom and strength of the elderly.

There are a lot of strong Goddesses to be found in Norse mythology, but Elli, nicknamed ‘the Giant Crone,’ takes the cake.  She challenged the God Thor to a wrestling match — and won.  We have to be fair to Thor though, as the whole thing turned out to be a bit of a trick.  Elli, although the weakest of the giantesses of Utgardr, was actually the personification of old age.  After the giantesses told Thor about their stunt, he obviously wasn’t too happy, even though the fact that Elli only managed to get Thor down to one knee was a mark of his strength.

This serves as a valuable lesson not to underestimate old people.  We often think of the elderly as unfit, forgetful and out of touch with modern times, but they have a wealth of knowledge and can often give good advice.  They are also not necessarily as helpless as we imagine ..

Elli is not mentioned in any other extant source but the notion that not even the Gods are immune to the effects of aging is supported by the fact that they must consume the apples of Idunn on a regular basis in order to remain young.

(Nordic wiccan blogspot)

don’t know why or where this old crap came from today. but I just love old crap! ;- )

And for Thanks. To Tom Robbins. The author who turns sad nights into bright ones. The author who is an endless source of inspiration. To work. To write. To live. With quotes at the end of our pages, we thank him and nod in awe, not only to him, but also to the red beet, the sock, the satyr and the badger. Well, badgers in general 🙂

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Tom Robbins has been called “a vital natural resource” by The Portland Oregonian, “one of the wildest and most entertaining novelists in the world” by the Financial Times of London, and “the most dangerous writer in the world today” by Fernanda Pivano of Italy’s Corriere della Sera. A Southerner by birth, Robbins has lived in and around Seattle since 1962. (Biography by bookbrowse.com)

It’s good that in the development we regularly define people first … because then in practice it is like this.

Is it unusual for a moderately small design studio that half of the employees are administrators? They write, read, copy, fill in forms. There are several reasons for this, one is that we occasionally participate in public tenders.

For example, last time we won on one such tender. A well-thought-out idea was presented, but our price offer was worse. Still, we won by a narrow margin. The second-ranked bidder submits a request for review of the procedure and explains the suspicion of the selection due to a small deviation in the total number of points.

Belgians make sour beer through a system in which micro-organisms fall from the air, walls, the wood and through flies into cooled beer. They have been doing this in the same cellars for a hundred or more years, which is why a constant microflora has developed. In our country, the primary fermentation, which is very turbulent, is first done in stainless steel containers and lasts from one week to a month, depending on which microorganisms are added. If this brewed beer were immediately poured into barrels, the fermentation would cause all of the content to burst out of the barrels. That is why already partially fermented beer is poured into oak barrels, in which it begins to age. It is only in the secondary fermentation, when, if needed, new microorganisms are added, that it acquires its characteristic acidic taste. We actually produce craft beer, which is aged and altered by microbial additives.

Miha Tome, Dnevnik, 10 January 2018

An obsession with early blues, the search for a handful of surviving LPs from the 1920s across the American Deep South, the mighty remnants of only formally ceased slavery, and souls which today cling less seriously to the same body. The highlight of summer reading begs the question of how Hari Kunzru is able to deliver such an epic work a mere three years after Gods Without Men. And with some balls.

There’s also a modern definition of private property, page 40: “… I think the meaning of private property had never quite sunk in for me until then; its weight, its peculiar authority. Privacy was disconnection, the power to take a section of the world offline.”

author: Harry Kunzru
title: White tears
Hamish Hamilton, Penguin books