8x8

don’t wait for me beneath the mistletoe: the Allusionettes compose a festive carol for 2020 

ashika: chubby seal pillows  

extravehicular activity: a brilliant infographic of every spacewalk undertaken—from Voskhod 2 onward 

your branches green delight us: a stunning abstract Christmas tree in Tokyo crafted from a thousand corded mizuhiki balls 

solargraph: a forgotten pinhole camera took the longest exposure photograph on record

oină: archiving images of a ubiquitous red ball with white polka dots in Romania’s recent past 

disbarred: US attorney general to step down before Christmas  

boughs of holly: a round-up of seasonal plants beyond the tree and trimmings

bring a pitchfork and a torch

Our thanks to Cory Doctorow for directing our attention to more bardcore musical stylings with this delightful Old English tribute to a safe-for-work Megan Thee Stallion and Cardi B with Well-Armed Peasants, including some deserved swipes and disses at the shortcomings of the massively overrated Magna Carta and the necessity of revolt and revolution.  Much more to explore at Pluralistic at the link above, including some choice lyrics.

location scout oder deckname topas

Hearing that someone might be making a weekend of visiting nearby sites where films had been shot sounded like a fun activity and piqued my curiosity as to whether any might be in reach for me. I was surprised to come across this image from 1968 in the Stars and Stripes photographic archive of the filming of the 1969 release of the Cold War spy-thriller Topaz, the cinematic adaptation of Leon Uris’ novelisation of a real defection, the Sapphire Affair, that took place in 1962 directed by Alfred Hitchcock.  Here is the same building from last summer from a slightly different angle and perspective.
The story follows a French intelligence agent who becomes entangled in a spy ring and the geopolitical situation on the eve of the Cuba Missile Crisis. A high-ranking Soviet officer reveals that nuclear warheads will be placed in Cuba (mirroring the US installation in Turkey) and he and his family are evacuated to Wiesbaden. Filming also takes place in Copenhagen, Washington, DC, Paris, New York with Havana scenes filmed on a studio lot.

évêque de reims

Credited with prophesizing the invasion and saving a significant number of the city’s citizens—depending on one’s sources of either the Vandals in 407 or the Huns fifty years later—Bishop Nicasius (Nicaise) who established the first cathedral of Rheims lured the marauders to the church as the main repository of plunder, affording more people the chance to escape is venerated on this day. Along with some faithful companions, Nicasius was beheaded at the altar, his matyrdom grouping him with the cephalophores—head-bearers, praying as the ax came for him, reportedly from Psalm 119, finishing the verse after being decapitated and frightening the attackers into temporary retreat. Having earlier in his career, survived a bout of smallpox and attributing his recovery to piety and prayer, the Church made him patron and protector of the disease.

great aspostasy

Suspending the fact for a moment (which the author, a lapsed rapture-ready individual himself owes to straightaway) that much like malleability of horoscopes, prophesies about the End of Days can and have been applied to countless leaders, charismatic and otherwise, this analysis, coming to us by way of the illustrious Mx van Hoorn’s cabinet of hypertext curiosities—updated but not all the way up to the present and his loss reaffirmed in the courts and his minions rioting and rallying to overturn the outcome—and supposition whether American evangelicals might even be able to recognise the Anti-Christ were he to show up is an interesting one. 

Point for point, verse by verse the Trump administration is subjected to the predictions and again keeping in mind the caveats above and by the end, the correspondence is a bit unsettling—suggesting that they are following some ordained protocol, one which is arguably canon rather than fandom.  Insofar as God does not care to be dragged into this, it echoes the passage of the Grand Inquisitor from The Brothers Karamozov when Jesus returns to Seville during the Spanish Inquisition and is told in his cell prior to execution that he is no longer needed as the world is getting along fine without him.

hamildolph

Via Memo of the Air, we are transported back a few years to enjoy this carol recounting one particular up-and-coming reindeer as told in the timeless style of rapped-through narrative of one of America’s Founding Fathers by a capella group the Eclipse Singers.

odile of alsace

Though no longer officially commemorated on the Roman Catholic liturgical calendar, Saint Odile’s cult was an extemely popular one (see previously), rapidly spreading across central Europe from the ninth century onward, with many chapels, churches and wells dedicated to the abbess born blind in France and Germany. According to her hagiography, daughter of the wealthy duke of Alsace, Etichon also called Aldaric, was bade be taken away by her mother Bethswinda to be raised by peasants in distant Burgundy rather than suffer the indignity of a handicapped child. Aged twelve, Odile was baptised, miraculously restoring her sight, prompting her brother, Hughes, to bring her back home. This reunion enraged her father so much that he let us wrath loose on both siblings, striking Hughes dead. Odile was able to revive her brother and they fled into the Rhin valley where a cliff face opened up to hide them from her father’s pursuers. Going on to found several religious communities, Odile’s father repented in his old age and endowed the abbeys his daughter had established. Expiring herself at the convent of Niedermünster in 720, Odile briefly returned from the dead at the insistent prayers of the sisterhood to describe the wonders of the afterlife, afterward taking communion alone and dying a second time. With many of the fountains associated with her credited with curing vision ailments, Odile is the patron of good eye-sight (and protector of the blind and partially-sighted) as well as the whole of the Alsace region and is sometimes venerated as a companion of Saint Lucy, with whom she shares this feast day.

umleitung: bedheim

We made a brief stop in the village outside of the town of Römhild in the county of Hildburghausen to take in the architectural ensemble, typifying a Baroque manor, of the three-wing castle and fortified church. First constructed in the thirteenth century and coming into ownership of the aristocratic family Rühle von Lilenstern once ennobled by Hapsburg Emperor Charles VII after 1743, chiefly then as a summer residence for Prince Joseph Friedrich von Sachsen-Hildburghausen, it is still the ancestral home of the heirs and an interesting architectural footnote on its own. 

The village became more intriguing, however, seeing that its crest features a pipe organ and a dinosaur. I don’t think we’d ever encountered this sort of charge before on a coat-of-arms and the raptor is definitely not a mythological griffin.  It turns out that one of the notable descendants, Hugo, was an avid paleotologist and had made many finds in the surrounding area, discovering among others an example originally referred to as the leaping lizard (Halticosaurus, springende Echse) and later renamed Liliensternus. 

I recall my grade three teacher, Miss Friday, one day bringing in a cast of a fossilised dinosaur foot discovered on their property with the taxonomical classification of Arkansaurus fridayius, which I thought was an odd instance of show-and-tell to end all show-and-tell sessions. A museum was established in the castle to display skeletal remains, but once the family could reestablish residence after the war in 1969, the collection was transferred to the Museum of Natural History in Berlin. The organ of the coat-of-arms is in deference to the pair of instruments installed in the church, a greater and a lesser installed in the early eithteenth century a decade apart (and can be played in tandem) by prominent local master builders and is adjacent to the entombment place of many members of the family Rühle von Lilienstern. We weren’t able to glean much about the war years and there was a sombre and intriguing memorial plaque to all those who underwent forced sterilisation during Nazi times and research yielded little. In better times, we’ll return to learn more, go to the Schloss café and maybe take in an organ concert.