Kowalski-Segner
1872-1939
Detail from his diary, undated (maybe from 1908):
Other scholars, this time based upon his investigations, risk making the hypothesis that the triangle-shaped birthmark known as Nævus Triangularis is the reason for the spread of triangular writing in and around the Growing City.
Kowalski became confused in his later years, and attempted to create a peculiar radio detector with which he wished to receive messages arriving from the World Beyond. He was often to be seen in the vicinity of Paris's Place d'Italie, where he believed reception conditions to be the best in Europe. He claimed his radio, christened H.E.A.V.E.N. 193, to have entered contact with Mallerme. (62) Rotatable wire structures tinkled all around from his strange, yellow-painted Hispano-Suiza.
His final attempts at publication disperse into uninterpretable fragments, wearing all the signs of his sickness, although they also contain flashes of genius. His last words, according to mourning friends around his deathbed, were:
Minutes books of the Vicenza conferences
John Gherle: All About the Triangle, Cambridge University Press, 1931
Picture of his birthplace near Bréma
Kowalski-Segner
As a young man, the legendary hat on his head, with his pet dog Cicero
Kowalski-Segner's tombstone in Salzburg, with damage of unknown origin
The jettatore
You should be especially on your guard against its arrival at times of unpleasant chores. For instance, the jettatore is bound to make an appearance when you have to stick up posters about your exhibition on a main road during a winter downpour. It will greet you with evident brashness, and when it slaps you on the back you will step backward ankle-deep into the melting slush. It will help you politely back onto the pavement as with its foot it sweeps all your favourite tools into the nearest drain opening. Then it expresses how sorry it is, assures you of its sympathy, and then waves, tottering across the road through the jumble of crashed, horn-sounding traffic of which it is the cause. Having recovered from the excitement you turn into a public house for a pint of ale, where the hitherto sleeping dog of the landlord inexplicably attacks you and bites your posterior. Better to suffer the coral twigs...
Toward an anthropological examination of the Growing City's latter-day population
Attached to Kowalski-Segner's name is the fallacious view according to which the characteristic types of the old inhabitants of the City could be deduced through the anthropological ratios of the region's later inhabitants. We now have certain reservations as regards this claim. One instrument used for the above examinations was the measuring instrument known as the Segner-type anthropological metricum.
