h-hour

Selected as a target due to its status as a regional transportation hub and medieval town centre that made it especially vulnerable to fire-bombing and with relative destruction surpassing the raid on Dresden a month prior, commenced by the same Royal Airforce Bomber bomber group, the city of Würzburg (previously, see also) was on this day in 1945 in the course of twenty minutes destroyed, with only a little more than a tenth of the historic buildings remaining. Over five-thousand individuals perished. After the war and the city’s occupation by American forces (which continued until 2008), in the ensuing decades, Würzburg was rebuilt as true to the original as possible.

black monday ii

With fiscal stimulus packages, interest rate cuts and quantitative easing announced the previous weekend unable to effectively stop the decline in global stock markets or restore confidence in future economic recovery, indices continued to repel to a new nadir on this day in 2020, triggering circuit breakers in place to suspend trading and control the crash and make for a less damaging landing. Worldwide, considering the amount of inherent precarity in terms of job security and the precipitous drop in consumption, travel and leisure activities it seems rather light, stock shares fell by a third, losing a percentile of value per day since the last week of February.

your daily demon: andromalius

Our final spirit in the calendar of demonology is the seventy-second infernal earl that presents as a man bearing a great serpent. When called upon by the exorcist, Andromalius enlists his thirty-six legions to bring back any thief and his plunder and generally mete out punishment for dishonest brokers and revealing hidden treasure. Classed as a Watcher, Andromalius spies on enemy activity and reports directly to Azazel and is countered by the angel Mumiah. The cycle of the Magical Calendar—in long form as the fifteenth century wall-chart suitable for framing printed by Freiherr Johann Baptist Großschedl ab Aicha in Frankfurt and laying claim to two astrological, astronomical charts by Tycho Brahe, a pharmacopia and the various sigils and signs iste Magnum Grimorium sive Calendarium Naturale Magicum Perpetuum Profundissimam Rerum Secretissimarum Cotemplationem Totiusque Philosophiæ Cognitionem Complectens—continues.

snapshot

Via their excellencies Nag on the Lake and Everlasting Blört, we are directed to a profound and touching curation and salvage operation a decade on launched by local photographer Munemasa Takahashi in the Lost & Found project, wherein volunteers gathered and conserved photographs scattered among the destruction caused by the earthquake, tsunami and nuclear plant disaster that struck Japan on 11 March 2011. Ranging from candid snapshots, vacation photos, wedding portraits and class pictures, over seventy hundred and fifty thousand pictures have been preserved and digitised with almost half-a-million reunited with those who lost them along with everything else in the catastrophe. Prints and framed photos are of course fragile things exposed but the damage that they sustained and personal connections they represent in whatever form speak to how this disaster upended lives.

6x6

antikythera mechanism: researchers rebuild a model of the ancient orrery, analogue computer using the latest cutting-edge technology  

uncertain times: learning from pastoral professionals to cope with volatility 

syncopated rhythm: turn your typing to piano jazz—via Swiss Miss 

long ambients: Brian Eno (previously) explains the origins of the genre with the teaching aid of William Basinski’s Disintegration Loops  

cargo cults: blockchain’s open ledger threatens to undermine efforts to reduce our reliance on fossil fuels—see also  

cleopatra’s needles: the strange obsession with Western powers taking trophy Egyptian obelisks and the transportation challenges involved

holy lance

Prior to the reforms of 1969 to the Calendar of Saints, a Roman soldier and first convert to Christianity was venerated on this day, since observed on 15 October. The soldier is anonymous in the Gospels and started out more as a Promethean figure, confined to a cave where a lion would maul him nightly only to have his body restored in the morning and condemned to this fate until the end of time for having stabbed Jesus on the Cross, and was given the name Longinius in the apocraphal testament of Nicodemus, Latinising λόγχη lonche, the Greek for lance—thus the Lance of Lance (see previously). The story is further developed in the legendarium of the Holy Grail and is considered to have made the fifth of the Holy Wounds of the stigmata.

bewarned the ides of march

Though speculation and debate has continued for centuries, shifting from one camp to another with the present academic consensus rejecting the Shakespearian conceit that an unmitigated reaction to being assassinated would have been in Latin, scholarship has Julius Caesar (previously here and here) speaking Greek καὶ σύ, τέκνον; (And you child?) with a somewhat different landing than Et tu Brute? The latter is only attested to in the Middle Ages and in accordance with Roman custom, it would have been more honourable, in the case of the former with Caesar being a long-time romantic companion of Servilia—mother of Marcus Junius Brutus—to have him die silently as a soldier. Some academics say it was misheard and more likely Caesar said “Tu quoque, fili mi?”—which is closer to the Greek—or “Quæso te, non!” –Stop it, please! and even the playwright seems to acknowledge the debate or unknowable nature of it with the earlier idiom in the tragedy, It’s all Greek to me, said by Casca to Cassius on Cicero and the co-conspirators, “…but those that understood him smiled at one another and shook their heads; but, for mine own part it was Greek to me.” It is perhaps doubtful that even a great orator could summon the wherewithal to deliver some famous last words after being stabbed twenty-three times by a mob of mutinous senators. Despite the line’s purchase on popular culture, even within the framework of the play itself, the last utterance before expiring is “Then fall, Caesar.”

deckname borghild

Though familiar with some of the more infamous hoaxes associated with Germany (see previously here and here) the defrauded operation above (thanks to Weird Universe for sending us down this rabbit hole), suggesting that the Nazis invented the inflatable sex doll was new to us, not to mention patently untrue. Resurfacing perennially with varying degrees of veracity and sounding at least plausible—like something that they don’t put in history books, it is nonetheless worth contemplating why such a story might be a tempting and enduring subject for rehashing. Aside from the salaciousness, it is established that the party exploited psycho-sexual fantasies and wish-fulfilment as a recruiting tool as well as documented antecedents that seem to inform and support the fabricated supposition. Viennese Expressionist artist Oskar Kokoschka did have a real doll creepily made of Alma Mahler, widow of Gustave and a piano virtuoso in her own right, in 1918—anatomically correct at least in the estimation of the consigner, and the narrative pursued involves the German Hygiene Museum in Dresden and the very real sculptor called Franz Tschakert who created the original invisible, transparent man and woman in the early 1930s that displayed full human anatomy as well as the internal organs, supposedly contracted by Schutzstaffel chief Heinrich Himmler to create a hyper-realistic sex doll (Sexpuppe) whose artifice would be better than reality. Leadership was motivated to offer such amenities for the troops to dissuade them from congress with sex-workers in occupied lands and staunch the spread of syphilis and other social diseases. The originating reporter of the repeated urban legend has the fifty prototypes made destroyed in the fire-bombing of Dresden with only anecdotes surviving.