spacely sprockets

Since visiting the first test facilities at Peenemuende, notwithstanding the occasional pleasant afternoon at the local airshow, I have a renewed fascination with rocketry.  The excellent museum there tempered science with war-waging and was thoughtful but not in an overly preachy way.  German engineers at the National Aerospace Center have successfully developed a new sharp rocket that is poised to revolutionize space travel--all for a paltry 12 million euro.  The new, reusable space glider is much more manueverable, and manages to guide itself safely back to Earth.  Its faceted nose-cone makes it especially resilient and resistant to the heat of reentry.

In related news, the Russian space agency, with no shortage of ambitious missions waiting in the wings, will slowly vacate its cosmodrome at Baikonur, since while the whole region benefited from Soviet investment in space infrastructure, the cosmodrome is fully in Kazahk territory which Russia leases at a high price.  A bigger and better space port will be built in the Russian far east at Vostochny near the Chinese border and the city of Harbin.

capitol intelligencer or no such agency

The Washington Post released its compendious study of the parallel topography and the sprawling landscape of Top Secret America.  It's a very clever read.  The two-year project concludes that the forces to combat terrorism have grown so large as to be unwieldy, information is not promulgated nor shared for coordination and triangulation, and petty tyrranies and turf-battles not only are squandering the whole enterprise with redundancy but also inviting warring shadow-factions to rise up. 

No creature is better at job-preservation by sustaining need than government bureaucrats and job-security could turn vicious.  Maybe this is not as sensational or surprising as the revelations of Deepthroat but maybe it can cue public attention and bring about reform to a problem that is endemic to the US government and cull some unneeded duplication and coveted red-tape.

insektenvernichter

I thought that the name of the friendly guesthouse by our campsite on the Prorer Wiek was a bit ominous and foreboding, Zur Muecke, the Mosquito, and we sustained a few nasty bites and an inconstant nuisance in the evenings but it was not intolerable.  I have a cruel and untested in field conditions bug-zapper that I forgot to bring along, which was probably a good thing.  I also tried to guard myself from the perils of the sun, and considering the defensive freckles that surface on my whiter shade of pale skin, I think I managed pretty well with two weeks of fine weather on the beach with sun protection factor 50.  I emerged a bit tanned and unscathed, except for a patch on my knee that I guess I missed.  I felt like Achilles dipped in the River Styx, with my vunerabilities that I am sure that the mosquitoes took advantage of as well through the cloud of Autan/Off, or more appropriately like when Nibelung Siegfried bathed and that one leaf fell on him.

baltic avenue or gravity's rainbow

H and I have just returned from a camping--though not actually roughing it, holiday, spanning as H points out the entire length of the former German Democratic Republic, from Thuringia to the lighthouse at Kap Arkona at the northern tip of the Island of Rügen. 

Lazily making the transition from one, beautiful, clean and uncrowded beach to the next, we saw many remarkable things and took in a lot of history, including Werner von Braun's rocket facility at Peenemunde, which saw the first launch into outer space, ancient fishing villages, buildings bleached white and authentic and justified martitime decor, outstanding natural beauty, the chalky cliff face at the Jasmunder Bodden,

to the endless coastlines of Usedom, to our final campsite and headquarters at the Kraft durch Freude (KdF) seafront resort ruin of Prora, built to accomodate some twenty-thousand holiday-makers and some 4.5 kilometers long but never used used for that purpose.

It was absolutely outstanding to be nomadic and take away so many impressions, even more than I can list here, while sustaining the relaxation that should come with the standard--or non-standard two-weeks' vacation, and cannot wait for the next adventure.

 

im urlaub

H and I are touring the exquisite Baltic coast, and PfRC is on sabbatical too.  Please check out Our Little Travel blog for further adventures.

mucke

As H and I prepare for our next flying carpet adventure to the Baltic coast, I have been thinking a bit about the lowly mosquito, girded to be made a little mad.  Apparently, and I think later in the vacation season, the shores turn into a stew of exhausted ladybugs, but I don't know what the tiny wildlife has in store besides this spectacle.  Mosquitos have a brief and dreary existence, mostly in the form of nymphs in stagnant water.  In there adult stage, and here's a fun fact: only the females bite but only the males buzz, so I guess one need not worry about swatting when there is the microscopic bleating of an insect, only when there's not.  Further, the female mosquito only sucks blood not for herself but to nourish her eggs.  As adults, mosquitos do not even have proper digestive systems, only having emerged from the swamps to reproduce.  Considering malaria and all the other ills visited on humans by flying pests, it seems like a lot of unnecessary sound and fury.  And though the peddlers of insecticides would argue, I'm sure, it seems that the geraniums on our balcony make a pretty effective chemical barrier against unwanted carousing.

(UNCLASSIFIED)

With news of a successful bust of a Russian espionage ring by the FBI, using technology of all things but probably not James Bond Q gadgetry, still reverberating, I recall a very matter-of-fact expose on the corporate spy situation in Germany.  Though the actual particpants seem right now to be fairly pedestrian, the whole idea of pervasive spying, escalation of operatives sounds very romantic, to have a secret existence just beneath the surface, Mati Hari and swinging sixties and Spy versus Spy.  I wonder about the neighbors in the Little Odessa compound across the street and what trade secrets they could be trafficking out of Bad Karma.  The US bust probably was wanting for better timing since Obama had just shared his Bush-Putin moment with Dmitry Medvedev in a DC burger joint, and apparently the Russian spies employed such dastardly techniques as invisible ink and the US post office.  Sometimes, though this is an awful thing to let one's mind wander about during a classic movie, I imagine how short, brutish and uninteresting vintage mysteries would be cellular phones or *69.  Mystery solved, oh that was exhausting, what's next?  Maybe the Russians kept ahead of US intelligence for all these years because no one who stoop so low to cobble shredded documents back together or deem anything not electronic worthy of serious investigation.  I remember writing secret messages with lemon juice and then magically revealing it by holding the paper over a toaster.  Maybe spying will return to martinis and Aston-Martins after all.