ich bin ein berliner

On the fifteenth anniversary of the start of the Berlin Airlift (previously) in response to the Soviet blockade of the West German exclave, on this day in 1963 US president John Fitzgerald Kennedy addressed an assembled crowd and the wider world from the portico of Rathaus Schöneberg, nearly two years after the Wall was built to stem mass-immigration from the East to the West.
Inviting Soviet officials to work with NATO allies rather than continue this tense stand-off and posturing, Kennedy intoned, “Two thousand years ago, the proudest boast was civis romanus sum. Today, in the world of freedom, the proudest boast is ‘Ich bin ein Berliner!’ …All free men, wherever they live, are citizens of Berlin, and therefore as a free man, I take pride in the words ‘Ich bin ein Berliner.’” Outside of the German Sprachraum, it seems quite baffling that there’s a misconception that it would have been understood that Kennedy was proclaiming himself a jelly doughnut—though the article is superfluous and the regionalism exists, Pfannkuchen is the term employed in the Berlin area. Kennedy’s speech is considered to be among the most powerful appeals of the Cold War and would go on the influence and inform many politicians to follow.

to boldly go

The always engrossing Futility Closet podcast introduces us to the eminent figure of the Swiss physicist, explorer and aviation and submarining pioneer Auguste Antoine Piccard (*1884 - †1962) who along with his twin brother and collaborator Jean Felix were the inspirations and the namesake first for Professor Cuthbert Calculus in The Adventures of Tintin and later for Gene Roddenberry’s character, Jean-Luc Picard, implying that the captain is one of their descendants, with their actual lineage continuing in the spirit of exploration and adventure. Within the decades of the 1930s (with some years to spare), Piccard remarkably designed both a pressurised aluminium gondola that allowed him with a hot-air balloon to ascend to an unprecedented altitude of fifteen kilometres above the Earth, taking ground-breaking measurements on atmospheric conditions and newly discovered cosmic rays, and six years later, a bathyscaphe, a free-diving, self-propelled deep sea submersible, ferrying its crew down to a depth of over four-thousand metres and observing some of the alien denizens of the deep in proper context.

zwischenstopp: urspringen

Incorporated as a district of market town Ostheim vor der Rhön, I had passed by the village of Urspringen several times, noting the stone, Gothic Revival steep that dominates the fields and forest from an impressive distance but unable to find much information on it was never drawn to explore.
I ought to know better (by now) that the lack of scholarship or research is never a sign that a place isn’t worth investigating and was pleased that I stopped the car and took a look past the façades of half-timbered houses that line either side of the main street. Referred to as Villa Urspringa for the first time in church records from 811, it is the site where the tributary of the Streu, the Bahra branches in two and is itself the sources of three powerful natural water sources—Quellen or rather Springen, the strongest of which flows from under the church mount and through the village under a covered promenade.
The church itself, which was probably finished at the turn of the last millennium, was rebuilt after it was destroyed in a fire in 1841 and two neighbouring buildings were added, reflecting the architecture of the time, a school house and the parsonage. The village contains far too many historic cross-timbered farmers’ homes (Fachwerkhäuser) to list and along the Hauptstraße and down hidden alleys and would more than merit a follow-up tour, better-armed next time with more history.

drawbridge

Emboldened by geopolitics elsewhere, Saudi Arabia, we learn via Super Punch, is entertaining bids to terraform its escalating, long-standing tensions with neighbouring Qatar (previously) by turning the peninsula the country occupies into an island in the Gulf of Bahrain. The Saudi government plans to dig a two hundred metre wide moat along its sixty kilometre border, at an estimated cost of three-quarters of a billion dollars.

bowiebranchia

Via fellow internet-caretakers the Everlasting Blört, we find a selection of nudibrachia or other species of marine opisthobranchia (sea slugs, from the Greek for naked gills, having shed their shells after their larval stage) fastidiously matched to the various outfits and personæ of the transcendent Sir David Bowie. All of these side-by-side comparisons (there are over three thousand known varieties though many are endangered) are amazingly elegant, spot-on and very satisfying.

exposure value

Not only were we very impressed with the designer skills of Helen Sham for creating a fully-functional, iconic Hasselblad 503CX medium format cameras out of LEGO (which may be added to its official line of models), we also appreciated the chance to explore the company behind the design.
Founded in 1841, the early years of the Swedish company consisted mostly of being a distributor for Kodak-Eastman products, offering that though the executives didn’t think the venture would be very profitable, at least they’d be able to take pictures for free and really came into its own, making military grade aerial surveillance cameras during the wars. The company’s success continued after the war and was again boosted when NASA began to exclusively use Hasselblad cameras for its Gemini missions in 1962. Prized for their compact size and modular lenses, the space agency continued to use custom-build Hasselblads for the Apollo programme and the images we have of our manned-mission to the Moon were captured with those cameras. Learn more about Sham and her other projects at the link above.

thanatopsis

Though perhaps wholly conjured up in my head, I seem to recall a ban (at least a seasonal one owing maybe to the impenetrability of the ground in winter) on death on parts of Norway’s Svalbard archipelago, we nonetheless this overview from Futility Closet on other places where dying was or is currently prohibited, under threat of severe punishment. While some sacred spaces exclude both birth and death to maintain the purity of the place, most cases are enacted when room runs out at local cemeteries and graveyards. Unfortunately, the ban is repealed once the municipalities can secure more land to expand their grounds reserved for burial.  Visit them at the link above to learn more.

change happens at the edges

Historically—which will also be the first time the Armorial College gets to produce a crest for a same-sex couple though wisely rules were established some time ago—the first gay marriage in the extended royal family will occur later this summer on an estate in Devon.
With the blessings of his third cousin, once removed, the Queen (by statute the monarch must give ascent to the first six unions in the line of succession and in this case, the couple’s too far removed and already have heirs) Lord Ivar Alexander Mountbatten, geologist and gentleman farmer, will wed James Coyle. At the suggestion of their daughters, Mountbatten’s ex-wife will lead Mountbatten down the aisle and give him away.