days ninety-eight and ninety-nine (13. 490)

Glomming on to another crisis whipped into a social media frenzy, US secretary of war Pete Hegseth used the observation of the anniversary of D-Day speaking from the beaches at Normandy to cast aspersions on liberated Europe over its immigration policy and courting cultural erasure with another sort of invasion. Whilst Pakistani diplomats continue to work behind the scenes, talks seemingly remain stalled—though American has ostensibly entertained the idea of paying reparations to Tehran, Washington is also floating the idea of confiscating Iranian assets to fund reconstruction projects for gulf nation allies who have sustained losses during the conflict.  Pope Leo condemns the adventure as a unjust war.  

 synchronoptica

one year ago: Psycho Killer (with synchronopticæ) plus a sign post forest

fourteen years ago: Friday afternoon crises plus German fiscal solidarity

fifteen years ago: German chancellor awarded the US Freedom medal 

sixteen years ago: the chemical topography of Saturn plus performer Tom Jones

leval ii (13. 489)

 

 For the first time on a return trip, I think, we stayed again at the campsite outside the village of Leval near the German border for the last overnighter before getting back home, prepared this time now to try to capture some images of the brooding stork nests that seemed to occupy every available eave and column of the little town.

The wading birds are considered a symbol of Alsace of course—we hadn’t encountered such a preponderance of them before—and the subject of many legends and folktales, like the tradition of the Easter bunny that also originated here, first described by fifteenth-century botanist (see also) Georg Franck von Franckenau of Strasbourg, and though their association with fertility and expectant mothers go back to Ancient Egyptian myth, the lore was especially articulated in the Middle Ages, with storks said to retrieve babies from a nursery hidden inside caves and dropped them down the chimney (chimney-sweeping also understood psychoanalytically as an expression wish fulfilment or magical-thinking) of desirous households.

synchronoptica

one year ago: curating the Apocalypse (with synchronopticæ) plus Elton John’s debut album

fifteen years ago: misused tools plus macroeconomic woes

sixteen years ago: the year of the Tiger 

 

 

via rhôna (13. 487)

 

Our intermediate stop on the way back home brought us again to the banks of the Drôme, staying at a municipal campground on les Îles de Silon directly on the confluence of the the Galaure and Rhône rivers on the outskirts of the village Saint-Vallier. A Gallo-Roman station, called Ursuli, at least since the reign of Claudius on the Via Agrippa, the town is now stop on the EuroVelo cycle route that runs from Lake Geneva to the Mediterranean, following the river valley.

These step-up bivouacs are specially made to accommodate bikers and we thought we could manage such a construction at the edge of our property for bikers passing through—addressing the lack of real pitches in our village. Saint-Vallier’s most famous daughter was the fourteenth century courtesan Diane de Poitiers, who wielded much power and influence as Henri II’s royal mistress and adviser. Killed in a jousting accident, the king’s widow, Catherine de’Medici, had de Poitiers exiled after his death and Catherine’s unpopular regency for the legitimate heirs was highly unpopular and destabilising, leading to the French Wars of Religion.

ajaccio nach toulon (13. 485)

 

Departing Corsica—this time on the MS Mega Regina, the cruiseferry sold after the Helsinki-Stockholm route was curtailed during the pandemic in 2021 and put to sea in the Mediterranean where demand was more sustainable—we had to pace ourselves with the drive, unsure about how easy it would be to park a caravan on the streets of Ajaccio before the pier was opened for boarding, and stationed ourselves at various points along the way. We shared the dock with the Royal Clipper, a five-masted tall-ship. The steel-hulled sailboat, the largest in the world, was originally built by Polish communist authorities at the shipyards of Gdańsk as a floating vacation home for miners and their families and regularly crosses the Atlantic with passengers. The return trip was a bit rougher with more waves and wind but we survived, arriving back at Toulon.

mare e monti (13. 480)

 

stradi di e calanchi (13. 468)

synchronoptica

one year ago: the engineering of wine bottles (with synchronopticæ), closed-captioning plus a return to the Saale valley

seventeen years ago: climate change mitigation 

date::italy (13. 467)

Via Quantum of Sollazo, we enjoyed this addendum (see previously) to close gaps in historical records between New Style and Old Style and calibrate, synchronise dates matched to when different regions adopted the Gregorian calendar, a switch very unevenly distributed. Whilst most retroactive record keeping has a certain degree of tolerance for approximation, the advent of Julian days, a cyclical count whose current epoch started at noon, New Year’s Day 4713 BCE, a event unrecorded by any contemporary chroniclers we assume, with the alignment of the twenty eight year solar cycle, the nineteen year lunar cycle and the fifteen year indication cycle of Roman tax re-assessments, imposting, used until the Renaissance to date documents. The title function adjusts the day count to reflect when Catholic Europe had taken up the new standard, with England and its colonies changing over later, to convert from the civil calendar, the non-Julian Day date to a universal, effectively linear one—like the latter secular innovation of a star date, though the useful fiction has no consistent reckoning. Just one year after the adoption of the Gregorian calendar, in order to synchronise events not only with the Protestant world but also to bring Persian and Egyptian history into the fold, chronologically underrepresented, Franco-Italian Calvinist polymath Josephus Justus Scaliger (confusingly known as Giuseppe Giusto de la Scala outside of Anglophone circles) advocated for the date count, divorced from reign or religion and predating any written historic records, now some six thousand years hence, also confusingly not named for the just deposed calendar calendar nor its namesake but rather in honour of his father, fellow scholar Julius Caesar Scaliger, whom was christened after the first Roman emperor.

tafone (13. 465)

Though in my head I had been referring to such geologic weathering as Roadrunner and Coyote rocks, we learned that tafoni, from the Corsican pietra tafunata meaning perforated stones is bc the proper term for this sort of erosion and chemical reaction—with examples to be found worldwide in granite, limestone and sandstone and is especially prevalent on Sardinia and Corsica. 

These samples were just around the terraced campgrounds with some other particularly fantastic ones among the cliff-faces and the calanques on the coast. Though in my head I had been referring to such geologic weathering as Roadrunner and Coyote rocks, we learned that tafoni, from the Corsican pietra tafunata meaning perforated stones is the proper term for this sort of erosion and chemical reaction—with examples to be found worldwide in granite, limestone and sandstone and is especially prevalent on Sardinia and Corsica. These samples were just around the terraced campgrounds with some other particularly fantastic ones among the cliff-faces and the calanques on the coast.

synchronoptica

one year ago: what a decibel registers (with synchronopticæ)

thirteen years ago: bad operating systems,  cheese banks plus drone-patrols for vandals

fourteen years ago: Eurovision boycotts plus Centralia, Pennsylvania

seventeen years ago: jingoistic language