room 237

Der Spiegel (leiderlich nur auf Deutsch) has a nice photo-album tribute to Stanley Kubrick’s masterpiece of horror, The Shining, on the occasion of its thirty-fifth anniversary. The captions for these iconic stills need no translation but do have some interesting trivia—like that Jack Nicholson axed through sixty doors before the director was satisfied with the shot or the snow from the garden labyrinth ending was recycled from a neighbouring film production going on the same time, Kubrick gladly taking the stage-snow after the rebellion fled Hoth.

five-by-five

bellum omnium contra omnes: sobering graphic that charts percentages of US lives spent under war and peace

take-away: interesting look at the history of 出前一丁—the culture of Japanese food delivery

nocturne: darker sequel to E.T. that was never made

doctor zaias: simian newsletter back-issues

parallax view: China’s space aspirations to reach the far side of the moon

time-lapse or moraines and drumlins

I thought that this demonstration of mining images on the internet for photographic documentation of climate change was rather clever and compelling—and all the more poignant as the time-lapse featured was a place that H and I visited ourselves, back in July of 2012. I wonder if any of the pictures we took on our hike through the Briksdalen towards the Briksdalbreen there icy blue in the distance made the cut.

fort morgan or unredoubtable

While visiting Gulf Shores during our Spring Break, we drove up the coast to tour the colossal installation that defended the mouth of Mobile Bay.
The pentagon layout of Fort Morgan with its high masonry ramparts was really impressive and surprising, evoking images of the Vauban fortifications we’ve encountered along French beaches.
This megalithic discovery—which although seeming perfectly in place and familiar was still very unexpected for us in its cavernous extent and location, there, in Alabama—was constructed originally to bolster seaboard defences in the aftermath of the War of 1812 (not the striking back of the British Empire as usually portrayed but the North American theatre of the much broader Napoleonic crisis) in about twenty years, making extensive use of slave-labour.
Soon the bastion constituted a hotly contested strategic nexus that guarded the waterways and thus the supply-lines of the Confederate armies and the launching pad for attempts to break the Union sea blockade during the US Civil War.
This project was one of the first major endeavours of the US Army Corps of Engineers, buttressing existing earthen redoubts, temporary forts, along navigable rivers.  The term national redoubt refers to an area, ideally some place providing protection, where retreating or defeated armies can withdraw and regroup.
This notion of For- tress Amer- ica also con- vokes a metaphorical turning-inward and the US only, unlike many other countries, had to take a last-stand and make a temporary capitol under duress once.
The fort suffered extensive damage but was not long neglected before the citadel was reinforced and batteries added for the conflicts of Filipino and Spanish-American Wars.  Fort Morgan was again activated for the twentieth century’s hostilities but did not again experience the tempo of action it saw during the Civil War and is today preserved as a national park.