восток-6

The first and still youngest and only woman to pilot a solo-mission into outer space, Valentina Vladimirovna Tereshkova (*1947), accomplished engineer and current deputy of the lower house of the federal assembly—one of the few elected representatives to span from the Presidium of the Supreme Soviet to the Russian Duma, was launched into orbit on this day in 1963, spending nearly three days circling the Earth forty-eight times.
An amateur skydiver and in training to be a textile-worker, Tereshkova joined the Cosmonaut Corps and was commissioned as an officer with the first cohort of female space explorers and continued to instruct new recruits until 1997, though not going on another mission herself, despite subsequent re-qualifications. Her call-sign for the Vostok 6 mission was her nickname Seagull—Ча́йка, the asteroid 1671 Chaika so designated in her honour.

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.

hausnummer

As the scaffolding came down and realising that my workweek apartment (previously here and here) had after its latest exterior paint job also embraced the trend, we appreciated these monumental numbers on the housing estates of Singapore—albeit these are funkier and more personable—captured by photographer Peter Steinhauer, via the always excellent Present /&/ Correct (check out their sundries).
One’s address writ-large makes for an interesting contrast and we’re noticing all the new blocks going up in the city recently. Much more to explore at the links above.

townies

On the day in 1381, the Peasants’ Revolt that spread throughout Europe caused by levying higher taxed on a population significantly diminished by the Black Death yet having little leverage for higher wages over the scarcity of labourers, visited Cambridge with the mob under the leadership of the town mayor and one Margery Starre. The colleges of the University were ransacked with deeds and other legal documents destroyed as well as the library and archives set ablaze.
Starre raided the registrar‘s office and removed student ledgers and tossed them into a bonfire in Market Square, shouting what would become a rallying cry of the movement: “Away with the learning of clerks—away with it!”  Starre and her compatriots were not opposed to literacy and learning per se but rather to the system of oppression that charters and ecclesiastical jurisdiction represented, students and priestly professors alike aloof from the Cambridge‘s civil authorities. Starre—not much else is told of her story—was the inspiration for Geoffrey Chaucer’s character, the Wife of Bath—though expanding her conceit with the trope of the “loathly lady,” a medieval story-telling type (c.f., La Befana, Papageno’s Papagena or Princess Fiona) where a woman’s coarse nature is a curse to be broken by a hero that recognises her inner-beauty.  Starre was having none of that.

magna carta libertatum

On this day in 1215 in a meadow near Windsor, the Archbishop of Canterbury mediated a peace treaty between a contingency of rebellious barons and John, the unpopular king of England, signed and sealed with the promise of swift justice, a statutory limit on fealty to the Crown by the landed-gentry, a council for arbitration and restraining the monarch by rule of law.
As much as the document is romanticised and mythologised, neither party kept their ends of the bargain, leading to the decision to be overruled as moot and void by the pope in Rome, Innocent III, precipitating the First Barons’ War. John’s successor reissued the charter, albeit with some of its more radical provisions removed to win an uneasy peace and setting the precedent for subsequent monarchs to renew the deal at the start of their reigns until the Civil War and the execution of Charles. No correspondence is implied though certainly some would be willing to unyoke themselves from the tyranny of science—even if the disburdening of the tiresome proves ultimately uneconomic—but this anniversary greets England (again disunited, fortunately) approving the opening of non-essential retail. Most things don’t just end once we’re fatigued or told we’ve had enough and time to move on. I wish Lisa had been allowed to finish her mnemonic device—I wonder what the next verses would be.

look to this day graduates

Whilst not a word for word quotation of Neville Chamberlain’s appeasement of Adolf Hitler in the Munich Accords, agreeing to the annexation of the Sudentenland, for the sake of “peace in our time,” Trump’s vapid and vain commencement speech delivered to the graduating class at West Point Military Academy, cadets called back to attend in person placing themselves at their families at risk for catching and spreading COVID-19 does hit all the same points.
“It is not the duty of US troops to solve ancient conflicts in faraway lands that many people have never even heard of. We are not the policemen of the world. But let our enemies be on notice. If our people are threatened, we will never ever hesitate to act,” Trump intoned—an address written by Stephen Miller, an actual Nazi. The “quarrel in a faraway country, between people of whom we know nothing” could perhaps refer to ongoing incursions in Donbass that recently caused Ukraine to concede and the equally recent announcement to reduce the number of troops stationed in Germany.

papaver rhœas

The poppy seeds I gathered and spread last year failed to germinate—so will try again, but there’s quite an untended eruption of flowers (Klatschmohn) along the neighbour’s fence line, most in the vivid, distinctive red with orange tint, coquelicot from the French name for the wild corn poppy popularised by the paintings of Claude Monet, but there was a singular one with a pale lavender colouring that I had never seen before.
The red symbolises remembrance, white peace and the deep purple cultivar is used to acknowledge the role of service animals in combat, but for this particular shade I can’t find other examples of. Have you seen poppies in this colour?

wüstung schmerbach

Owing to the proximity of the former inner-German border, we knew that there were some depopulated places in the region as well as losses due to geopolitical forces and factors spanning from 1945 to 1990, but had not realised before how assiduously these abandoned settlements (Wüstungen)—often removed without a trace, have been documented and studied nor how recently removal and demolition was carried out.
One such place was the valley village not far from Helmershausen, first accounted for in 1562 as holding of the Henneburg cadet line, Schmerbach was destroyed during the Thirty Years War but re-established in the mid-1600s.
In the late nineteenth century, an industrialist from South Hampton founded a brick factory there and in Weimarschmieden, a village not far away on the Bavarian side of the border. When Soviet forces occupied the area in July 1945, employees of the brickworks were given parcels of land as part of reform efforts by the state, but because the frontier was only a few hundred metres distant and expensive to patrol, authorities decided in 1973 to raze the factory, stables, farmstead and eight homes and resettle the residents. A memorial stone commemorates the destruction and removal.
The surrounding area is all farmland and the only remnant of the village are the electricity transformer tower and a small cemetery in the middle of a field, marked by a grove of trees, the last burial having taken place in August 1948. There are other spots like this and we plan to explore and learn more.