ballungsraum

Not that the journey would be a particularly arduous or lengthy one and there’s no excuse not to visit more often, but it does strike me as odd to live in such proximity to one of the nodes of culture and commerce, an alpha world city, and not be bothered to make it out more often, but I’m going to challenge myself to get to know Frankfurt am Main (previously) a bit better and take advantage of my workweek nearness to the metropolis.
Having heard that the Altstadt was recently reopened after completion of restoration work to the Dom-Römer quarter (the space between the merchant house and the cathedral) to rebuilt structures lost during World War II, I convinced H it was a good excuse to return. We walked down the shaded promenade of the quay of the river Main (Mainkai) and several of its crossings to take in the skyline and get our bearings.
The new seat of the European Central Bank in Ostend had been completed in the meantime and although there was still scaffolding and some structures under construction in the Römer plaza and my memory of it wasn’t exactly photographic (the new addition is the right-most Goldene Waage, the Golden Scale) but it was a pleasant afternoon out in the sunny square.
Learning about the extent of the project and what was still left to do we were curious to see more but were a bit disincentivised due to the fact that just beyond there was a rather complex series of protests and counter-demonstrations going on that involved a right-leaning group trying to appropriate and rebrand a 1953 East German uprising and general strike (der Aufstand vom 17. Juni 1953) against working conditions under the Communist government which was violently suppressed and commemorated in the West as a national holiday observed until reunification as an excuse to rail against immigration policies.
Counter-demonstrators, however, eclipsed members of the Bürgerbündnis (the anti-Islamification group)—which in turn was equally obscured by a police presence which happily was not pressed into service. We’ll return when there’s more time and space for exploration.

black hole sun

Using a super computer to model a complex and exotic star system, Universe Today reports, a physics professor worked out a theoretical arrangement wherein that a modestly-sized black hole could be the centre holding in stable orbit nine sustaining Sun-like stars with upwards of five hundred planets (plus their own satellites), a good portion of them under conditions (experimentally) suited for life.
Calculations demonstrate that such a fantastic solar system could exist—or various permutations thereof including a sufficiently advanced civilisation that could engineer such compact and neighbourly systems and tow them around the Universe—and that denizens of those places would experience frequent close-encounters with other worlds and see their skies (inexplicably to them or perhaps scientifically grasped) periodically distorted, objects gravitational lensed by the marauding black hole (which surely informs its own mysterious mythology as well) that groups them all together.

burg sonnenberg

H and I are in Wiesbaden (the main boulevard that runs past the storied State Opera, wellness spa and casino usually is lined with international flags but the banners have been replaced for this month with pride flags) this weekend while he chairs a few seminars and I had the chance to take a long hike through the city via the Kurpark and Garten (previously).
Walking along a short segment of the Höhenrhein trail following the Rambach valley to the district of Sonnenberg, I was rather deep in a an urban woodland until arriving at the foothills of the Taunus and dominated by the ruins of Burg Sonnenberg hewn into a mountainous spur.
Although much of the thirteenth fortification has crumbed and was cannibalised as a quarry when the settlement below was devastated by a fire during the Thirty Years War one can still see the intact tower of the Bergfried and extensive defensive walls and imagine the castle protecting the Count of Nassau’s domain from raids of the Dukes of Eppstein.
The two neighbouring and competing houses  never settled a border dispute amongst themselves owing to overlapping jurisdictions that arose out of Wiesbaden’s imperial immediacy, a distinction that the city fought to keep for over a thousand years since the time of Charlemagne. Now the area is a venue for a series of open-air events and quite the staging arena especially in the summertime.

the purge

Courtesy of Miss Cellania’s links, we learn that a US State Department advisor, formerly a food industry lobbyist turned wine-blogger who goes by the handle “Vino Vixen” has been surreptitiously vetting the political sympathies and loyalty to cult leader Trump’s of career employees at the World Health Organisation, the United Nations and the Department of State itself. Her primary investigatory strategy, which is only compounding the exodus of veteran diplomats and an irreplaceable wealth of institutional knowledge, apparently consist primarily of nosing around staff members’ social media accounts for signals of lingering faith in the policies of Obama or the potential for independent, critical thought.

scientists’ corner

Preeminent scientist Stephen Hawking’s ashes were interred with honours in the royal peculiar and hall of fame, Westminster Abbey today. In addition to recognising his contributions to the understanding of the Cosmos by according his mortal remains a special place (between Charles Darwin and Isaac Newton), the European Space Agency—after the service—beamed a recording of one of Hawking’s lectures, a missive of peace and hope, into outer space aimed at the nearest known black hole, designated 1A 0620-00, with his voice expected to reach the event horizon in thirty-five hundred years.

logophilia

We were hoping to enrich our vocabulary with this word of the day from Fancy Notions but then were a little deflated to verify that in fact aibohphobia is a deliberately constructed palindrome and part of a family of humorous phobias rather than a serious term describing the actual fear of things read the same in either direction.  It’s strange that we tend to give scary or adverse things Greek names. I think the term is ingratiating itself, nonetheless, as well as another word I came across while investigating: semordnilap. Palindrome spelt backwards, an example of a pair of semordnilaps would be stressed and desserts. Curiously, it should also be noted that there’s a genus of spiders native to Africa called Palindroma whose five species all have palindromic names, which I suppose would elicit a fear response in those disposed to arachnophobia.

low rent, high stakes

We were temporarily in denial about the images circulating—courtesy of the US Department of Health and Human Services—of the Trump mural prominently displayed in a detention centre for young boys housed in a former Wal-Mart in Texas, wishing it weren’t true but knowing deep down that there is not irony too dumb or cruel for that regime who are presently defending separating some of the same adolescents from their families by citing a Bible passage that was also used to justify slavery. The quotation on the mural—helpfully bilingual—is from the book ghost-written for the sub-literate slob The Art of the Deal, chapter ten, seemingly to inculcate the youths with aspirations for the American Dream shortly before their deportation.

8x8

i’m ready for my close-up: a selection of vintage Hollywood test shots

emeco: a look at the indestructible chair commissioned by the US navy in 1940 that could withstand the blast of a torpedo 
columbo: US ambassador to the Holy See, Callista Gingrinch, returns a pilfered letter penned by Christopher Columbus to the Vatican Library

fjallkona: Iceland picks a drag queen to be its national personification, the Lady of the Mountain

flare-up: periodically the Sun erupts

jankó layout: an alternative keyboard to the traditional piano format

pitchforks: main-stream media is ignoring the protests of poor peoples in the US

x-ray vision: Massachusetts Institute of Technology researchers harness ambient radio signals and WiFi to see through walls