Venerated on this day as a saint and martyr, Barbara was a third century Greek maiden, a steadfast convent and affiliated with the Fourteen Holy Helpers and enjoys an extensive and varied patronage. Barbara was, according to her hagiographer and the Golden Legend, the daughter of a wealthy and prominent pagan whom was seeking to strengthen local allegiances through strategically marrying her off, keeping her locked away in a tower to spare her from outside influence, though in this splendid isolation, Barbara yet became a Christian and rejected the betrothal her father had arranged. Suspecting it was one of her attendants that introduced his daughter to the gospel, her father ordered an adjoining private bath house be added to the tower. The final straw for her father was Barbara’s architectural input to her new quarters, installing three windows to represent the Holy Trinity instead of the two that her father originally designed. Flying into a rage, the father drew his sword, but through the power of prayer, Barbara created a rift in spacetime and opened a portal in the wall of the tower that led her to a remote mountain gorge. There one shepherd betrayed Barbara’s act of teleportation to her father’s men, transformed into stone and his flock of sheep into locusts for divulging her whereabouts. Barbara was captured a brought before the prefect for sentencing brutally tortured though refusing to relent. Daily for some weeks, Barbara would be nightly bathed in a miraculous, healing light and emerge from her prison cell with no wounds or signs of the previous beatings. Burning her failed as well so her father undertook to carry out the punishment of the condemned by beheading Barbara himself. This finally worked but in retribution, Barbara’s father was struck by lightning afterwards and consumed by flames. Due to circumstances surrounding her death, Barbara is invoked against flame and lightning and by extension is the patron saint of dynamiters, pyrotechnicians, artillery and mining—that is any professional who face the danger of sudden and violent death in discharge of their duties, and might not have the change to repent their sins or receive extreme unction at the moment of expiring. According to some sources, the barbiturate family of drugs synthesised first by chemist Adolf von Baeyer (not to be company that was originally a dyestuffs factory founded by Fredrich Bayer) in 1864 on her feast day and are so called in her honour.
Friday 4 December 2020
Thursday 24 September 2020
6x6
hollands venetiรซ: revisiting the enchanting village of Giethoorn—previously here and here
youtube enthusiast: Ruben Bolling (previously) illustrates a day in the life of Trump’s America
the colour of pomegranates: Lady Gaga’s visual homage to the Armenian filmmaker Sergei Parajanov
kirie: artist Lito experiments with the ancient Japanese art ofๅใ็ตต, cut pictures
flattening out: an illustration of how map projections distort our view of the world—see previously
Monday 21 September 2020
order uลmiechu
Distinguished from other knighthood and foreign honours, the Order of the Smile is conferred on recipients after being nominated and voted on by children in recognition of their love, care and aid. Bestowed biannually from ลwidnica outside of Warsaw since 1968, laureates—knights and dames, though the right to use the title is restricted to only those decorated with an official ceremony at one of the organisation’s chapters—include Astrid Lindgren—author of Pippi Longstocking, Saudi pediatrician Abdullah bin Abdulaziz Al Rabeeah, the Fourteenth Dalai Lama, Steve Spielberg, German singer Peter Maffay, Pope Francis, Nelson Mandela, Peter Ustinov, Oprah Winfrey, Mother Teresa and Tove Jansson, creator of the Moomins.
Monday 31 August 2020
porozumienia sierpniowe
Today celebrates the August Agreement—otherwise known as the Gdaลsk Social Accords—reached on the last day of August in 1980 between striking dockworkers on the Baltic and the Polish government over untenable demands, poor working conditions and continual shortages of essentials. The labour strikes had the immediate effect of changing the country’s leadership and revealed endemic corruption and mismanagement that had culminated in the dysfunctional economy and legislature and further led to reforms in the market, freedom of expression, civil rights and launched the Solidarity Movement.
Tuesday 16 June 2020
vaderbase
Unsurprisingly, Trump is confirming his intention to withdraw soldiers stationed in Germany over rather baseless accusations that the host nation is either not contributing enough to the NATO common defence fund—or more likely, is not willing to pay protection money (pizzo, Schutzgelderpressung) for the increasingly questionable privilege of quartering troops. The corroborating reporting also reminds that the art of pandering is not the exclusive bailiwick of the United States with Poland’s willingness to take displaced army units and even finance (haracz) the construction of large installation, the namesake of their attested benefactor and defender.
Wednesday 6 May 2020
analytical analyser of harmonics
From Pasa Bon! we are acquainted with the with the 1959 breakthrough computing advancement from engineer and scientist Jacek Karpiลski (*1927 – †2010) in collaboration with Janusz Tomaszewski, the transistor-powered AKAT-1.
Constructed to solve differential equations for better modelling of heat dissipation in motors and shock absorption in brakes and building off the success of an earlier prototype used to make more precise weather forecasts, Karpiลski gave his latest analogue unit a space-age housing and interface that looks like something out of science-fiction. Later achievements in the industry include standardising coding language and a machine called the Perceptron that could distinguish objects by shape and was one of the pioneering examples of algorithmic learning through supervised learning. Normally the AKAT-1 can be visited at the Muzeum Techniki in Warsaw.
Monday 13 April 2020
ลmigus-dyngus
The second day of Bright Week—the Octave of Easter, is a public holiday in Germany, the Netherlands and Scandinavia as an extension of Eastertide and events sometimes traditionally include egg races and other activities to use up, put away the festoonery—a pretty practical idea, which in parts of central Europe, including parts of Poland, Czechia, Slovakia, Hungary and Ukraine they had down to a science, once at least though the practise seems to be less and less common.
Called in Polish above and Oblรฉvaฤka in Czech, “Wet Monday” (or simply Dyngus Day by diaspora) was chance for adolescents to throw water on each other and flirtatiously beat each other with willow branches that made up traditional egg trees and decorative boughs. With suspected roots in pagan fertility ceremonies and the welcoming of spring countered by Christian missionaries trying impose their religion on the natives, linguists conjecture that ลmigus refers to baptism—an involuntary or unwanted one at that, going all the way back to the conversion of Mieszko I, the Duke of the Poles in 966 (coincidentally also on this day)—and Dingnis—from the old German for ransom—refers to the tribute that one can pay in leftover eggs to avoid getting doused or whipped.
Tuesday 25 February 2020
on the cult of personality and its consequences
Though leaked contemporaneously by Mossad and intermediaries to the press, Nikita Khrushchev’s so called “secret speech” («ะ ะบัะปััะต ะปะธัะฝะพััะธ ะธ ะตะณะพ ะฟะพัะปะตะดััะฒะธัั
») that was critical of deifying the past and of Joseph Stalin’s brutal purges in the name of promoting communist ideals delivered on this day in 1956 to a closed session during the twentieth party congress of the Soviet Union, transcripts of the text were not officially released until 1989 under the auspices of Mikhail Gorbachev’s campaign of glasnost.
Tuesday 4 February 2020
argonaut conference
Following on from the Tehran Conference held in November of 1943 under the above code-name, the leaders of the United Kingdom, the United States and the Soviet Union—with the conspicuous absence of French and other Allied Forces, convened near the Black Sea resort of Yalta in a palatial ensemble on the city’s outskirts beginning on this day in 1945 to address the reorganisation and self-determination Europe and Germany post-war. Though the ostensible objectives were to promote peace and reestablish invaded and annexed nations status quo all parties to the talk came with their own agendas and shortly after peace was achieved with liberation from Nazi Germany declared the Cold War erupted.
Wednesday 9 October 2019
defender 20
Reminiscent of the massive Exercise Campaign Reforger (Return of Forces to Germany) drills that took place annually from 1969 to 1993 that involved thousands of NATO troops as a demonstration of agility and responsiveness in the event of a conflict with the Warsaw Pact, US and partner military planners are engaged in preparation for the largest deployment in a quarter of a century with next year’s operations. Some twenty thousand American service members will join seventeen thousand members of the NATO forces (though signals are quite mixed at the moment) to conduct training primarily in Germany and Poland beginning in February 2020, and to strengthen skills in tactical movement and logistics that have otherwise atrophied in the intervening years whereas such rotations were routine and second-nature during the Cold War.
Saturday 17 August 2019
6x6
back to school: an assortment of usual college campus landmarks not to miss
exosuit: engineering shorts to amplify power for walking and running
meanwhile, back at the agora: an animated short about Hyptia, the last known chief librarian of Alexandria’s repository of human scholarship, murdered by a mob of suspicious Christian monks
architektura sakralna: Poland experienced a post-war church building boom
jordfästning: from the delightfully macabre Art of Darkness, Swedish funeral candies
mecspiquer: reflecting on a quarter of a century since the passage of the legislation to protect the French language
catagories: ๐ซ๐ท, ๐ต๐ฑ, ๐ธ๐ช, ๐, ๐ก, ๐ฌ, architecture, libraries and museums
Thursday 1 February 2018
bell, book and candle
From Valentine’s Day through mid-May, Washington DC’s Hirshhorn Gallery is reviving the political-charged projection of Polish-Canadian monumental artist Krzystof Wodiczko [UPDATED], first put on display on the museum’s faรงade in October of 1988.
The massive image of a clutched candle and a clutched pistol between a row of microphones was interpreted as a backlash to Regan-era foreign policies and gunboat diplomacy at the waning end of the Cold War—which I don’t think anyone saw on the horizon back then—is being presented as part of a wider exhibit on the 1980s when art became a commodity and the artist an influencer, a pivot that still defines and informs our notions of contemporary art.
Friday 5 January 2018
kuh und รผberkuh
Not content to limit their party’s ideology regarding eugenics to human beings, Reichsminister Hermann Gรถring (bedauerlicherweise, nรผr auf Deutsch) wanted to create a quarry worthy of the Nazis to hunt.
Inspired by historical accounts of the fearsome but unfortunately extinct aurochs—including encounters by a conquering General Julius Caesar—Gรถring worked with the husbandry experts, the Brothers Heck, who tried, through careful breeding, convinced that no animal’s bloodline truly disappears from the face of the Earth, scoured different types of wild and domesticated cows from all over the globe and selected for traits that they believed would reproduce the monstrous and formidable beast. The offspring of this experiment, the Heck cattle—sort of like The Boys from Brazil—were not the genetic heirs of the giant aurochs hunted to extinction in the seventeenth century but were perhaps close enough. The defeat of Germany prevented the project from coming to fruition but Gรถring planned to allow his รberkรผhe to roam in a wildlife reserve in an primordial forest in Poland—a Nazi Jurassic Park.
catagories: ๐ฉ๐ช, ๐ต๐ฑ, environment
Thursday 26 October 2017
kennzeichen
Once automobiles in Germany attain a certain age (a calculus of year of manufacture and number of vehicles produced) they are classed as Old Timers (what we’d call classic cars) and have an H added to their vehicle registration plates (see more about German and European license plates and tags here, here and here). Fully-electric vehicles have for the past few years earned an E at the end.
I was very happy to find out that in Poland, antique autos are distinguished with an old-fashioned coach. Vehicles registered to Americans stationed in Germany have undergone several different iterations of markings—going from having them really stand out to blending in.
Wednesday 31 May 2017
parforce
Recently H and I had a chance to visit a pair of monumental hunting lodges whose architecture and ceremonial follies illustrated how the occupation become leisurely pursuit of the powerful of the hunt was a way of reinforcing fealty and was a metric of noble means beginning in the Middle Ages (parforce hunting) and articulated as a social arena for centuries thereafter.
The great wooded area around the village of Wermsdorf was a royal park for many generations and there was an ancient though modest lodge there already—but as existing accommodations were proving inadequate to impress visiting dignitaries, August II. der Starke (called the Strong for his physical strength that could apparently break horseshoes bare-handed and won him prizes in the prince-elector bracket of competitive fox-tossing—literally and as cruel as it sounds) commissioned the construction of the Hubertusburg (announced on the feast day of Saint Hubertus—3 November—who is the patron of hunters and the vision that led to his conversion is popularised in the Jรคgermeister logo) to showcase his family’s power.
Lavish, choreographed hunts continued at the Hubertusburg, whose grounds and layout was favourably compared to Versailles—the quarry of choice being deer—up until the outbreak of that first global conflict, the Seven Years’ War, in 1755—whose own chambers saw the peace treaty that brought its end as well as the French-Indian War.
The residential palace never wholly its former glory and was at times used as a sanitarium and prison and even a porcelain factory. Presently, the trappings of the hunt are re-enacted by skilled equestrians and enthusiasts who dress up in period costumes, but mercifully the hounds are put on to the scent of human decoys to pursue through the forest—harming no one in the end.
The other hunting lodge we visited was Schloss Moritzburg, an earlier Baroque example also set in the midst of a favoured game preserve not far from the royal capital of Dresden. Constructed on an artificial island, the quatrefoil design reminds me of the Seehof of Memmelsdorf by Bamberg, it served a similar function with protocol and entertaining dignitaries.
A showroom of course for hunting trophies, the collections quickly expanded to display pieces side by side to compare Japanese and Chinese ceramics with Meiรen faience. Later an ensemble of other buildings were added to the parkgrounds, including a Rococo pavilion called the Little Pheasant Castle (Fasanenschlรถsschen) that’s meant to invoke an Oriental style and despite Saxony’s landlocked state, it’s one and only lighthouse—for when the occasional mock naval battles were conducted in the lakes that bordered the gardens.
Friday 10 October 2014
czy wiesz?
Tuesday 29 April 2014
tug-o'-war or ambisinistrousness
Spiegel’s international desk has an interesting analysis regarding an unlikely affinity that far-right, pro-nationalist parliamentarians and political parties are finding in Russia’s stance towards its former satellite states. Though there are East-West tensions similar to the chill of the Cold War, the conservative composition of the European caucuses looking to promote Russian partnership, covering the spectrum of maturity, repute and platforms that are often xenophobic, populist and anti-European Union, could not be of a more different leaning that the leftist politicians that many Western governments feared would side with the East and the communists, harbouring sympathies that threatened to further dismantle social pecking-order, whose preservation is the primary character of the right-wing.
Russia and the Soviet Union, of course, are of very different stripes too. I suppose too that some of the maverick representatives, hoping to secure more seats in the supranational congress, are finding a role-model to aspire to with the authoritarian style of leadership that’s unwilling to be reigned-in. There is a riposte to this strange alliance, however, that does not exactly emanate from the other side of the aisle—an ambisinistrous individual has nothing to do with a Transdnistrian but is rather someone who is uncoordinated, having “two left hands,” the opposite of being ambidextrous—with some primed to blame a shift in the parliamentary balance on Moscow propaganda and rallying of parties, those weaker and already disenfranchised allies, to undermine cohesion in Europe and subvert the EU’s willingness to cooperate with America and back American policy. While I cannot foresee some up-and-comer of la droite becoming a grip-knot (or slip-knot) in this battle, it is nonetheless an important corollary to note how much distrust there is about siding with the USA or jeopardizing standing-relationships. There is no beggaring the enemy of my enemy here and both sides seem to sense that there is something suppressed and duplicitous about one another and even their own posture.
Wednesday 23 April 2014
hegemon
Adolf Hitler might have had the laurels of greatest politician ever, a uniter and not a divider, had he ceased with the notion of collecting willingly German lands—Austria, the Memel, the Elsaร, Danzig and the Sudetenland.
catagories: ๐ต๐ฑ, ๐, ๐, ๐ง , foreign policy
Wednesday 2 October 2013
limes or probeauffรผhrung, รฉchantillon, prova
Just prior to the plebiscite to keep in place mandatory military conscription in the Alpine nation, Swiss authorities revealed that the army staged some war games, called Operation Duplex-Barbara, whose scenario seems creative if not outlandish but contingencies for such threats probably are not too far-fetched if not outright prudent.
catagories: ๐จ๐ญ, ๐ฉ๐ช, ๐ต๐ฑ, ๐บ๐ธ, ๐, ๐ก, economic policy, foreign policy
Wednesday 24 April 2013
secessionist or moderne
Often when walking into to town, I pass by the stately shadows thrown by the Lutherkirche of Wiesbaden, but I had not seen the inside until the other day. Other times that I thought about visiting, there seemed to be a gaggle of people there or choir practice and I didn’t want to disturb.
I suppose that these were the mega-churches of the day, with nothing derogatory intended, but also provided parishioners with a unique entertainment experience. In addition to the tradition of the Bach choir I overheard practicing, there are two celebrated and dueling organs, one at the front and one at the back, to produce a wall of sound. I’ll have to snoop around the other three architectural ensembles of the programme’s commissions.
catagories: ๐ฉ๐ช, ๐ต๐ฑ, antiques, architecture, Hessen