coeli porta (11. 892)

 

Departing Röblinsee through the Fürstenberg lock and crossed the canal into Stolpsee, and although intending just to stop at a municipal harbour to check out the town, we ended up staying moored at entrance to Himmelspfort, the spot turning out to be idyllic, essentially all to ourselves and aligned with what we envisioned camping by boat would be. After we got settled, we took a look at the ancient town named for a former Cistercian monastery, abandoned and left for ruins after sacralisation but the adjacent brewery founded by the monks was still intact and active.

The town is also known for its Weihnachtspostamt, upholding a tradition began by two postal workers in 1984 when they started answering children’s letters to Santa Claus (the Weihnachtsmann in East German times)—the whole town kind of has a Christmas theme and today, the postal service answers around three-hundred thousand letters from all over the world, but apparently is only one of seven addresses in Germany for such dispatches.

 synchronoptica

one year ago: fantastic spiralling art with AI (with synchronoptica), a graphic design collection curated by Kristen Lound plus LEGO as a media for fine art

seven years ago: murderous dioramas, proposed sovereignty for a Great Lake plus Japanese bathroom ghosts

eight years ago: Obama to his successor on unfinished business, solar plasma eruptions, a new front in the Cola Wars plus early canned, robotic music

nine years ago: holiday creep

ten years ago: the Ebola outbreak, stealing drug-offenders identities plus the landed gentry unchanged for a thousand years 

finowsee, woblitzsee, drewensee und zurück (11. 891)

Leaving the habour, we hooked up and to the north through a narrow channel that led to the Greater and Lesser Priepert lakes through the Finowsee that forms a round bend in the river.We pasted underneath the Hausbrücke Ahrensberg, a covered bridge (one of the few intact in northern Germany) that spanned the crossing to Drewensee.

 

 

Taking a long canal through the forest, we arrived at the inlet to Woblitzsee and stopped in the small town of Wesenberg to walk the dog and have a late lunch. The place is dominated by a high Middle Ages hilltop fortress (Turmhügelburg).

 

The lock at the outlet turned out to be the the most powerful one in the network of waterways with the floodgates really powerful instead of the usual sinking and rising and ended up passing through twice in rather quick succession as the anchorage we planned to stay at on the way to Neustelitz was closed for the season.Rather than risk getting stuck somewhere after the locks closed, we headed back to the first camp by Fürstenberg, seeing some of the boating lesson in practise and navigating the buoys which warn of hazards and the course to take that switch depending on whether one is travelling up- or downstream, and arrived just at sunset.

one summer never ends, one summer never begins (11. 890)

Starring Sterling Hayden, Nancy Gates, Jacky Gleason and featuring Paul Frees in on his rare on-screen appearances, the 1954 noir (released on this day) is about a small eponymous town in California in turmoil when the president of the United States is scheduled to make a stump speech there for his reelection bid and a team of assassins overtake a home with an ideal vantage point to carry out their plan. Holding the occupants hostage, the contract killer (Sinatra) proclaims that his retainer is his only motivation and manage to foil the plot, after appealing to patriotism fails, by sabotaging the weapons. The writer of the original novel based his story on the actual whistle-stop campaign of Eisenhower through Palm Springs and went on inspire The Manchurian Candidate five years later, also with the same principal but this time working to stop an assassination and government takeover—with Frees narrating. According to studio lore, Sinatra bought all copies of both films when he learned that reportedly Lee Harvey Oswald was inspired by them to undertake the killing of JFK but is apparently untrue as both were released and still available. Moreover, due to a lapse in copyright renewal, Suddenly! is accessible in full as public domain.

*    *    *    *    *

synchronoptica

one year ago: more vineyard adventures (with synchronoptica) plus Hamas launches a surprise incursion into Israel 

seven years ago: an intelligence service’s guide to semantics plus more terrorism from Trump

eight years ago: Ze Frank on the Angler Fish,  an amphibious camper, more vexillology, litter box beautification projects, more wit from Edward Gorey plus pin-up houses

nine years ago: human chess with refugees plus assorted links to revisit

ten years ago: potential scuba innovations, Dalí’s lollipop campaign plus AI rewriting photography

 

vom ellbogen see bis pälitzer seeplatte (11. 889)

Well provisioned and with a plan, we set out crossing a number of small and expansive lakes linked by a series of narrow canals through the woods and wetlands facing fairly soon our biggest fear—justifiably so—about navigating such a bigger boat with the locks, sluices (Schleuse) before us. All different given the landscape, some vessels one can secure by hand or hook—though I was feeling my arms loosed from their sockets by the end of the day and the preferred method is tying them down with ropes and despite being somewhat of a knot enthusiast and knowing the ropes as it were in the case etymology and terminology, logic was failing in practical application and made the experience more stressful than needed. Regardless, we made it—I couldn’t imagine doing so during full-throttle tourist season with other big boats piloted by amateurs and gaggles of canoes. 

 

 

 

Having stopped briefly in the village of Priepert to walk the dog—in my head I was calling it Pripyat like the Chernobyl disaster town, first no good reason and perfectly pleasant but not a lot outside the dock, we had to turn back from our goal towards Rheinsbergs in the southern reaches, as the sluices were already closing down early and many of the available harbours were shut for the public. We had to turn back in time to make the last connections and docked overnight back in Priepert.

synchronoptica

one year ago: more adventures in Frankonia wine country (with synchronoptica) plus proof of galaxies beyond our own

seven years ago: De Dion-Bouton four-wheeler, the storyboards of Sergei Eisenstein plus Trump visits Puerto Rico

eight years ago: Japanese joinery, a French driving hazard, a Mexican Bat Woman plus combatting typographical tofu

ten years ago: the demands of the Olympic Committee

eleven years ago: the Rushmore Syndrome 

bundeswasserstraße obere havel (11. 888)

H and I travelled north for a houseboating holiday on the Havel, which intersects with a few different national parks crossing the borders between Berlin, Brandenburg and Mecklenburg Vorpommern. 

With our point of departure Röblinsee, leading to connections to the various lake districts (Seenplatten—including the Müritz where we visited years and years ago), we arrived at the harbor at midday and after orientation and a training module to operate the boat safely, it was too late to venture out before sunset and stayed in the dock in Fürstenberg overnight. 

The neighbourhood fronting the riverbank was lined with fancy villas and the industrial ruins of multipurpose food processing factory (Mischfutterwerk) was visible on the opposite shore. Three years prior to the Cuba Missile Crisis, the Soviet Union placed six armed launch for medium range R-5 Побе́да (Victory) nuclear warheads in early 1959–garrisoned troops left the small town in 1994. Behind the row of stately homes built originally for retirees from Berlin, a housing high rise for soldiers and their families stationed there. After an evening of planning and studying the channels and rotes, we were ready to head out.

dromomania (11. 887)

Returning to his hometown of Waseca, Minnesota from the west, having departed on his journey accompanied by his brother and a mule nearly four years earlier and setting forth eastward, on this day in 1974, having walked just over twenty-three thousand kilometres, Dave Kunst became the first independently verified individual to have circumambulated the globe. Received by Princess Grace in Monaco and by chance meeting fellow adventurer Thor Heyerdahl in a restaurant in Italy, the epic walkers solicited donations to UNICEF along the way. Denied entry into the Soviet Union, about midway through their journey, the team continued through India and Afghanistan, where the two were tragically ambushed by bandits who believed they were carrying the monies pledged to the United Nations’ emergency children’s fund, killing his brother John, but Kunst finished after months recuperation, joined by his older sibling Pete. After the loss of his mule in the Australian Outback, a schoolteacher, who Kunst became enamoured with and eventually married, towed his supplies with her car for a thousand miles at walking pace, Dave keeping up alongside. Kunst’s trip consisted of twenty million steps and went through twenty-one pairs of shoes.

 

synchronoptica

one year ago: wine and quinces (with synchronoptica)

seven years ago: drawing logos from memory plus biofuels from moss

eight years ago: turning Twitter into a public utility, ghost signs plus an unpopular file format

nine years ago: the Norman Conquest and the Divine Right of Kings

ten years ago: Roman tax regimes

project skydrop (11. 886)

Corresponding with the previous post, another treasure hunt has just concluded with the discovery of a golden trophy and pot prize of money that grew as hunters joined in, totalling at the end of more than one-hundred-thousand dollars. The radius where the prize was hidden shrank incremental from an area covering Washington, DC to New Hampshire, eventually going down to a square foot. Tension building as the search area got smaller, but not minuscule and still a sizeable amount of forested terrain to explore, the treasure was discovered by a local weatherman who took advantage of meteorological data embedded in a live-feed, and found the trophy through a process of elimination according to where it might be clear or overcast.

sur la trace de la chouette d’or (11. 885)

Via Meta Filter, we learn that the world’s longest ongoing treasure hunt with a single prize is reportedly over with an individual finding the buried owl statuette after thirty-one years of searching (the bronze replica redeemable for one crafted in gold, silver and diamonds and worth an estimated three-hundred thousand euro)—if verified that the treasurer hunter correctly deciphered a series of clues and didn’t happen on it by chance or with a metal-detector. Writing under the pseudonym of Max Valentin, Régis Hauser designed the challenge in 1993, publishing a notebook of secrets, riddles whose solutions gave hints on where to search—launching a line of other treasure hunts through the early 2000s, but this first one defied resolution—the subsequent ones being solved much quicker, leading to a bit of remorse on making this puzzle so complicated and having devoted so much time and effort into crafting it, not living to see it found, having died, aged 62, in 2009. A highly esteemed communications and marketing consultant and early adopter of technological advances, Hauser released additional clues to put treasure hunters on the right trail and steering them away from false leads, like Notre Dame or Mont Saint-Michel. Shortly after On the Trail of the Golden Owl began, Hauser introduced a Minitel (see also) server to field questions about the game, answering thousands of queries from the public and creating a community of loyal enthusiasts (chouetteurs) that sustained the mystery through the decades. The record for the longest ongoing treasure hunt is Byron Preiss’ The Secret, which challenges seekers to find twelve boxes hidden in cities in North America (connected to personnages who played roles in colonial history) dates to 1982 with only three found so far.