stockenten oder libellen

In Brandenburg not far removed from Berlin, there is a unique and protected natural reserve known as the Spreewald (the forested lands of the river that runs through the capital or Błota, the swamp, in the regional Sorbian language) shaped during the retreating phases of the last Ice Age and irrigated, kept from flooding at bay by a labyrinthine network of over one hundred and fifty “navigable” canals (Fließe) spanning over fifteen hundred kilometres in all.
Many visitors to the area avail themselves on a punting tour through picturesque villages like Lehde only accessible by water (with no motorised traffic allowed) but a lot of tourist stake out their own adventures in kayaks readily available for hire and paddle through the landscape on eye-level with ducks (deserving of their own ethnographic treatment) and various tribes of dragon-flies and privileged pushing along as silent as a cloud to some remarkably peaceful scenery.
We ended up taking little footage of our drifting through the reeds due to a bit of gun-shyness with our not water-proofed cameras that was probably for the best after all in terms of travel time not to mention sites we are hardly worthy of seeing, plagued by mosquitoes and my inferior piloting as we were, but it was an experience that we’d recommend without stint to anyone and we’re sorry for the limited opportunity to explore—we’ll have to return for a longer stay one day soon.

hoodwinked

Via the ever intriguing Nag on the Lake, we are finding ourselves rather blown away to learn that the English language—especially idiomatically, was informed by a sixteenth century amateur falconer and sometimes playwright by the name of William Shakespeare, who peppered and punctuated his poetry and prose with phrases known intimately to hawk-fanciers. Under one’s thumb, wrapped around one’s (little) finger, Macbeth’s “scarfing the eye” as reference to hoodwinking—keeping the bird of prey with its eyes and head covered until ready to engage and prevent distraction, broadening the meaning of the term to rouse to mean to awaken, fed up to mean something more than surfeited and haggard to mean incorrigible all came into common parlance by way of the Bard’s pastime.

the shavian alphabet

The elves at Quite Interesting—whose media properties include, funnily enough (after reading the below) the podcast There’s no Such Thing as a Fish—always present us with some very engrossing morsels of knowledge—not trivia—that we’d like to learn more about.
Often times it seems some serious scholarship—more than we are ready to commit—is required to go beyond and tease out a deeper explanation and one of their latest briefs looked to be the same sort of cul-de-sac with the fact that playwright and literary critic “George Bernard Shaw left a considerable portion of his estate to increase the [English] alphabet from twenty-six to forty letter; this was never achieved,” but happily a little research yields more answers and speculation.  Consistent in his disdain for the received rules of English orthography throughout his life (whereas Shaw was just a likely to reverse other intellectual tenants as he was to fight for their honour) and how the whole convention was fraught with confusion and indignities of spelling that no one ought to suffer for the sake of lucidity, Shaw urged spelling reforms and stipulated in his last will and testament that future royalties ought to be paid into a trust with his stated goals in mind. Truly with some forty-four phonemes commonly occurring in English and just a few letters being dual- and trice-hatted, English could admit more letters, and though his legacy did not result in widely accepted changes to traditional spelling his bequest did posthumously fund the creation of an eponymous Shavian alphabet in 1960 (a decade after his death), which represented the spoken language as phonetically as possible and had a distinct script from Latin characters (this shorthand was also used for Esperanto) so that the new spellings were not taken as misspellings.

to toot one’s own horn

It wasn’t so long ago that we had German politicians stumbling over one another to fall on their swords and getting very confessional over accusations that they had fibbed on their credentials decades ago or plagiarised the graduate theses that launched their careers.
While these indiscretions ought not be dismissed without consequence as it does speak to character and integrity—and I suppose the world would be different if certain statesmen were called out on their originality earlier and were shamed into a different career-path, it does strike one as quite illustrative of Dear Leader’s personality and business acumen that he—without doing the requisite homework that comes with adopting a family crest or inquiring with the registrars that handle such things, perhaps he ought to have gone with canting arms (I can think of some imagery)—copied the shield from a duly-vetted and awarded noble house and replaced the motto Intergritas with his surname. The coat-of-arms adorns a lot of the signage on Dear Leader’s US properties but not on his golf links in Scotland, since inside of UK jurisdiction, he can be sued for infringement and misappropriation of a family’s good name.

flash in the pan

Apparently legions of a virtual robot army are massing to fight under the banner of Dear Leader with the ranks of these fraudulent accounts growing by half a million per week.
Despite the suspected anæmic constitution of such a following, it remains unclear what these ditto marks hope to influence and where the recruitment campaign is focused—if indeed in one place. With just over one half of Dear Leader’s current supporters on his social media platform of choice thought to be real and authentic (a ratio that has climbed significantly since the US presidential election and spikes whenever impeachment is discussed), one has to wonder who is behind the messaging and to what ends. It’s not just ditto marks all the way down, and perhaps it is another ploy to distract public attention from the investigation into Russian meddling in the US election—maybe lifting a play from their own script. While such tactics may have influenced the outcome in an election in unexpected ways, measures of engagement are not the same as ballot-stuffing when it comes to arguments against an ouster.

parforce

Recently H and I had a chance to visit a pair of monumental hunting lodges whose architecture and ceremonial follies illustrated how the occupation become leisurely pursuit of the powerful of the hunt was a way of reinforcing fealty and was a metric of noble means beginning in the Middle Ages (parforce hunting) and articulated as a social arena for centuries thereafter.
The great wooded area around the village of Wermsdorf was a royal park for many generations and there was an ancient though modest lodge there already—but as existing accommodations were proving inadequate to impress visiting dignitaries, August II. der Starke (called the Strong for his physical strength that could apparently break horseshoes bare-handed and won him prizes in the prince-elector bracket of competitive fox-tossing—literally and as cruel as it sounds) commissioned the construction of the Hubertusburg (announced on the feast day of Saint Hubertus—3 November—who is the patron of hunters and the vision that led to his conversion is popularised in the Jägermeister logo) to showcase his family’s power.

The prince-bishops were not only instrumental in choosing the emperor, the leader of reformationist Saxony was also the king of Poland and the grand duke of Lithuania through martial unions that honoured the traditions of those brought into the fold—exemplified in the Catholic court chapel that was rather unique in the region and is the only room to have escaped plunder and destruction.
Lavish, choreographed hunts continued at the Hubertusburg, whose grounds and layout was favourably compared to Versailles—the quarry of choice being deer—up until the outbreak of that first global conflict, the Seven Years’ War, in 1755—whose own chambers saw the peace treaty that brought its end as well as the French-Indian War.
The residential palace never wholly its former glory and was at times used as a sanitarium and prison and even a porcelain factory. Presently, the trappings of the hunt are re-enacted by skilled equestrians and enthusiasts who dress up in period costumes, but mercifully the hounds are put on to the scent of human decoys to pursue through the forest—harming no one in the end.
The other hunting lodge we visited was Schloss Moritzburg, an earlier Baroque example also set in the midst of a favoured game preserve not far from the royal capital of Dresden. Constructed on an artificial island, the quatrefoil design reminds me of the Seehof of Memmelsdorf by Bamberg, it served a similar function with protocol and entertaining dignitaries.
A showroom of course for hunting trophies, the collections quickly expanded to display pieces side by side to compare Japanese and Chinese ceramics with Meißen faience. Later an ensemble of other buildings were added to the parkgrounds, including a Rococo pavilion called the Little Pheasant Castle (Fasanenschlösschen) that’s meant to invoke an Oriental style and despite Saxony’s landlocked state, it’s one and only lighthouse—for when the occasional mock naval battles were conducted in the lakes that bordered the gardens.