freixenet

This overview of medieval European microstates (micronations can be equally idiosyncratic but with severely limited recognition) that came into being either through omission, neglect or force, with nearly half still in existence, struck us a fascinating material and urged us to learn more. One favourite that we had not heard of was the outpost Fraxinet, a stronghold founded and held by Muslim pirates (a press-gang) sailing from Andalusia (al-Andalus) in the vicinity of Saint-Tropez in the late ninth century.
The settlement expanded and was as much a centre of trade and commerce as a place of piracy, if not more, and peace was negotiated among other Frankish ruling families in the area. The uneasy peace held for an astonishing eighty years with the Andalusis bringing all sorts of innovations to the indigenous people, including medical skills, tar, ceramics and the tambourine, but Fraxinet finally ended with the Battle of Tourtour when a group of nobles from Provence dispatched with the raiders, worried that they would seize control of an important Alpine pass nearby, conveniently spurred to action at the ransoming of an influential abbot.

bois de la brigade de marine

Though perhaps it might have something to do with valid fears of spreading aggressive, toxic caterpillars that are plaguing oak trees in the UK presently and I would hope that the matter would have been addressed publicly and handled with due decorum (but that’s probably too generous for these thugs), the sapling that Macron brought as a gift during his state visit and planted together on the lawn of the White House has gone missing.
Part of the lore of the US Marine Corps and its role in World War I, the oak sprouted at Belleau Wood, memorialiszed the site of a battle between the US Second and Third divisions along side French and British forces against Imperial Germany. Initially sustaining heavy casualties, Marine scouts surmised that the Germans were regrouping for a second thrust that would certainly take the field, if they failed to launch a counter-attack. Gunnery Sergeant Dan Daly led the assault on 6 June 1918 with the battle cry, “Come on, you sons of bitches, do you want to live forever?” The protracted fight saw many fatalities but the Marines and allies eventually took the site (reflagged as the above), which became the namesake for decorations and naval vessels.

baby steps

One immediate outcome of the historic summit between the leadership of North and South Korea was to re-align Pyongyang’s and Seoul’s time-zones.
This disparity of half-an-hour having itself arose only three years ago under the direction of Kim Jong-un to mark the seventieth anniversary of the liberation of the peninsula from occupying Japan as a reassertion of independence from colonial rule. The synchronisation will occur this Saturday (5 May) but there’s no word if the North will keep its Juche calendar, which numbers its years on the birth of founder Kim Il-Sung in 1912, though its not unusual to record time in eras and reigns as a supplement to civil time in many cultures, and many societies tend to use even our modern time-keeping conventions (abolishing day-light savings time, having a single, broad time zone irrespective of the sun) to present a united, national front.

serpentine

Croatian abstract artist and founding member of the avant garde collective known as the Gorgona Group of 1960s Yugoslavia, Julije Knifer (*1924 - †2004) had a signature topic of exploration throughout his work: the meander, a geometric motif based on the repetition and regularly turning of a continuous line—which as a decorative border is sometimes called a Greek fret or a Greek key. With the country not enforcing the official narrative of Socialist Realism and the romancing of life and conditions under Communism, Knifer was free to create and mediate on hundreds of variations of the abstract concept, a quiet refutation against utopian plans that rarely pan out and just tend to lead one along.

what a piece of work is man

On this day fifty years ago, the rock musical by lyricists Gerome Ragni and James Rado and composer Galt MacDermot Hair began its run on Broadway, with over seventeen hundred performances.
Reception, with some notable exceptions, was overwhelmingly positive and became the anthem for several movements of the counter-culture uprising of the early 1970s and beyond—including racial and tribal identities, pacifism and environmentalism, and religious orthodoxy versus the esoteric.
One year later, “Bob” McGrath (one of the human neighbours) performed the song “Good Morning Starshine” on Sesame Street and the score helped launched the careers of Meatloaf and Donna Summer and many others. A decade later, production started on a cinematic adaptation by Miloš Forman, reviving the revolutionary spirit that the original inspired and brought the story to a broader audience.

jetzt sind wir voller energie

We enjoyed reading this bit of suspicious speculation on Angela Merkel’s good rapport with robots (something she shares with Justin Trudeau and Emmanuel Macron, incidentally) and how that might indicate the Chancellor is better attuned to what’s in store, these encounters seeming especially meaningful contrasted with the abjectly awkward record that bad politicians have with machines, animals and other people.

zwischenstopp: stockheim

On the old path in between Ostheim and Mellrichstadt lies the village of Stockheim, which was party to much the same intrigues and exchanges of ownership as other places in this region, but is particularly noted for its vernacular architecture.
The old, gabled and half-timbered Rathaus—the city hall whose administrative functions are now finding themselves displaced, is presently a restaurant and pension but was formerly known as an Amthaus, an administrative centre for a feudal bureaucracy and later as a Zehnthof, a repository of tithes, a tenth of one’s income or harvest rendered to the church. Formerly protected by a wall with watchtowers (Warte), one of these was also designated as a Darre or a Darrhaus, a place, usually silo-like where hops were dried as part of the beer-brewing process. The surviving tower is itself a source of tales told by people of Willmars (strangely enough) across the valley which include a kidnapping dwarf and a shoe-maker’s apprentice who did not succumb to hardship and give up once in the company of lumberjacks.