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.

bypass or great big convoy

Via the ever-excellent Kottke comes this rather profound study and projection of how self-driving vehicles will alter the economy and particularly the gas-food-lodging infrastructure built to support commercial trucking. While it does not take much boldness to imagine a phalanx of safer, more efficient robot guided convoys taking truckers out of the drivers’ seats as it has already come to pass, but the impact does not of course stop with this last lament of middle-class bread-winners.
The article is written from an American perspective and by analogy compares the seismic changes that could occur to those communities that the interstate freeway system passed by and withered for the sake of expedience, but I think the analysis is completely universal. With manufacturing increasingly retreating into yonder tightfistedness, goods are forever being shuttled back and forth. Consuming merchandise created and delivered by machine, vast swathes of the human workforce (and ultimately, all of it) become redundant and without access to meaningful employment. The untenable situation is accelerating to an important junction, wherein either there is no demand to satisfy the production-capacity because no one has the tender to pay for it or money becomes a rather meaningless trifle and in a utopian society, humans are at last allowed to enjoy the fruit of their labour. I suppose that’s precisely the point of progress but it is hard for me to imagine that the robber-barons might herald this event joyfully—especially if they knowing ushered in their own severance. What do you think? Will those automated cars drive us all off a cliff or make our existence better by abolishing capital?

circe or the call of the wild

Intrepid explorer Colonel Percy Harrison Fawcett first became enamoured with South America and the allure of the dense, uncharted jungles when as a surveyor was invited to help resolve a border dispute between Brazil and Bolivia. Some twenty years after the initial encounter (with World War I intervening), Fawcett resolved to return, ostensibly, to seek out a mid-eighteenth-century anecdote he’d learned of: a slave-trader who’d come across a mysterious city deep in the jungles. Braving the elements, predation and potentially hostile tribes, Fawcett assembled a small expedition and embarked to find this place he called the Lost City of Z.

The colonel, who had the imagination of colleagues and contemporaries like Sir Arthur Conan-Doyle and JM Barrie (Peter Pan), was setting out in search of El Dorado, many thought and considered reason enough, but his actual goal may have been far more elusive in reality and far harder to locate. As Fawcett himself reflected, Englishmen have quite the penchant for going native, which is usually a very positive attribute since it tends to cast a humanising light on the lands England has colonised—with some glaring exceptions, and must have felt himself too led onward. The expedition vanished without a trace and despite many rescue parties who themselves suffered not insignificant losses but all those who came after may have all been following a red-herring in the mysterious, lost city. Private correspondence and supposed membership instead suggest that Fawcett’s objective was to establish a utopian commune in the jungle, wiled by the ageless charms of a female spirit guide—a sith, a supernatural harbinger, messenger in the folk-tradition of his native Scotland, the colonel was going to establish a society based on his own religious beliefs, including deification of his own son (who happened to be in that original party) and the neo-theosophy, receiving the wisdom of God through the occult, which was popular, parlour interest at the time. Whatever the objective, no one knows the fate of Fawcett and company.  Reportedly, Fawcett’s family have tried to mask these supposed cult accounts by emphasising the hidden city. It is possible that Fawcett did not care to be found and surely didn’t want pursuers to come to a bad end while on a wild goose-chase, and he himself may have understood the city as metaphorical or at least incidental (like Camelot or the Grail quests) to his real aim and might have discovered Z after all.

dirty-laundry or romeo and oubliette

I wonder what happens—though not exclusively in the sense of data-retention and potential for blackmail and embarrassment, to one’s neglected and moribund dating profiles. Of course, there’s that distracting, distasteful feeling that the internet could be easily induced to vomit up everything—and nosy governments and those capitalising on what we’ve magnanimously shared make this seem like an inevitability—that’s specific to you and you alone, everything shady, exaggerated, secret, plus the occasional stray terror plot.
It’s funny to think of how that fear, which is something coddled like those forgotten avatars and familiars that we’ve no nostalgic feeling for that were once preened and shown for whatever audience, that signals the end of privacy as we understand it was pedigreed in the same fashion. We’ve surrendered, commoditised and compartmentalised every aspect of ourselves little by little, and at first only under our own compulsion and satisfy our own vanities—legitimising the argument that if one does not brand himself or herself, someone else will surely do them the favour. And like those dating or professional matchmaking dossiers, the transitional parts of our characters, habits, predilections are shed and cast away until that picture, even long after we’ve moved away from it, is complete in the enduring sense. What do you think? Do these past identities and identifiers have an unseen, unloved lives of their own (careering onward singlemindedly absent status updates), waiting to be sprung at the worst possible moment?

five-by-five

storyboard: scene-by-scene recreation of Doctor Strangelove using everyday objects

exoplanet: retro, WPA style NASA travel posters

enclava: another aspiring micronation cleaved out of terra nullius

riff-solo: a website that turns one’s typing into drum-beats

century of progress: seven maps that could only be made in the last one hundred years

daytrip: schmalkaden oder good knight, sir ywain

With the promise of nice weather and a reliably immaterial flea-market as passable excuses, we drove a bit north into Thüringen and took a tour of the town of Schmalkalden—a place we’d seen before but it had been a few years and revisiting these nearby places always makes me appreciate the history that the familiar, the accessible are quick to overshadow.
The medieval Altstadt displays some of the finest examples of Fachwerk (half-timbered) architecture in the region, and the place had a nice penchant for story-telling murals and wall-art that really tied together much of the historical context for us in the end.
The per- sonage of Martin Luther—beside the image of the Landgrave of Hessen, Philip I with a video game-control, was meant to depict the founding of the so-called Schmalkaldic League, a free-association of Protestant princes founded here under the auspices of Luther’s Reformation, first for religious reasons and later for political pretexts, to afford members with an overlord aside from the Holy Roman Empire. In fact, the county of Schmalkalden (presently Landkreis Schmalken-Meiningen) endured as an exclave of Prussian Hessen for over four centuries until WWII. It was the area’s status as a rail-hub that made it a target during the war.
And while I am not sure what the motivation was for the bat, this graffiti reflects another of the town’s celebrated treasures: Arthurian author Hartmann von Aue (a tributary of the Werra flowing near Schmalkalden) chronicled the tales of the Knight Ywain in the early eleventh century, the exploits of this errant-scholar influencing later, continental treatments of the Matter of Britain, including Wolfram von Eschenbach’s Parcival and the later adaptations of Richard Wagner.
Having this legacy associated with the literature and the legend surely is sufficient on its own, but these writings are also illustrated—uniquely and in some of the oldest, surviving secular sgraffito in Germany. The original illustrations were committed, around a century after von Aue’s active career, to the vaulted ceilings of the wine-cellars of the town’s chamber of commerce, since cordoned off from the public for preservation but were faithfully reproduced (for the benefit of the public) beneath the castle that dominates the city.

Wilhelmsburg, an auxillary residence of those afore-mentioned high counts, is somewhat singular as its Renaissance façade is essentially unaltered from the time of its construction and is a tidy time-capsule of the era. Afterwards, on the way home, we took a slight detour and saw the so-named Johanniterburg of the village of Kühndorf nearby—the short form of the Bailiwick of Brandenburg of the Chivalric Order of Saint John of the Hospital at Jerusalem—which is, testament to the Schmalkaldic League, the only surviving stronghold of the direct inheritors of the line of the Knights Hospitaller, this venerable and extant cadet branch being the protestant thrust of the knights.
It’s amazing how concentrated and noddingly near history can manifest itself, and I’d encourage all of you to take a little time and reconsider one’s hometown, old haunts and what’s in the vicinity from the periscope of a curious historian.