little birdhouse in your soul

Nag on the Lake acquaints us with Frankfurter clock-maker Guido Zimmermann who showcases his talents in a series of custom traditional cuckoo chimes housed in Brutalist, Plattenbau architecture—as a commentary on social housing gentrified and priced out of the range of its intended resident. His cuckcoo blocks also reference the original conceit of the clocks, not stowed away as a souvenir, were symbolic in themselves as a middle-class (spießbürgerlich) signal of success. View a video of the whole range of his designs at the links above.

ostheim vor der rhön

Taking advantage of the fine weather, H and I spent the afternoon enjoying the atmosphere of nearby Ostheim vor der Rhön (previously, here and here), first scrambling up and down the alleyways of the town’s landmark fortified church (Kirchenburg, previously here and here).

The complex’s maze of multiple warehouses and root-cellars for provisions plus a munitions dump and a powder tower made it a bastion for the people of the area to retreat to in times of strife and hopefully outlast a siege.
Historically, Ostheim was not aligned with the Catholic church that was the predominant influence in Bavaria and in fact existed as an exclave of the Protestant dukes of Henneberg, formally from 1920 to 1947 an outcropping of the state of Thüringen not geographically connected.

For simplicity’s sake, as was done for the Palatine territories on the Hessen side of the Rhein, Ostheim and the surrounding villages were made part of Bavaria as the American zone of occupation.
In order to maintain this island of independence throughout turbulent times is testament to the fortress’ imperviousness. Afterwards we took a stroll along the promenade of the river Streu, punctuated with footbridges and water-wheels that were once upon a time engines to drive various sorts of mills.
Finally, we ascended into the foothills of the Rhön to the Lichtenburg, the picturesque ruins of a high castle, a defensive garrison for a contingent of knights, from the eleventh century before returning home.

public law 68-175

Via the lens of expert British colourist Royston Leonard and the curatorial skills of Messy Nessy Chic, we’re able to be privileged witnesses to a rather dark episode in the fraught history of European settlers with indigenous peoples and those they’ve occupied and colonised. Though not perhaps not the worst slight in the scheme of things, Leonard’s print (more at the links above) show a delegation of Native Americans invited to the White House to petition President Calvin Coolidge in the early 1920s for the passage of a congressional act that would bestow US citizenship to the majority, up to three hundred thousand, who were systematically disenfranchised and denied participation in civic affairs and the democratic process.

Though the Fourteen Amendment to the US constitution gave (grudgingly) citizenship to all people born within US territory, regardless if they were descended from enslaved ancestors—with no state making or enforcing laws which shall abridge the privileges or immunities appertaining thereto. Native Americans were not covered by the amendment, however, many argued because, Article One, which deals with the apportionment of representatives in the federal legislature that each state gets, says that “Indians—not taxed” were not counted as constituents because they didn’t pay property tax on sovereign tribal lands (compare to the Three-Fifths compromise that counted only three out of every five enslaved individuals for setting a state’s population) and because they kept their tribal affiliations and did not integrate well with non-Native American society. Before the act’s passage in 1924, sponsored by New York Congressman Homer P Snyder, Native Americans could apply to become naturalised citizens, like any immigrant, and often vouchsafed the process through marriage or military service—and it was in part due to the role that the enlistment of many Native Americans had for World War I that the act was passed.

straw-man

Though superficially it might seem to some like a petty, nannying move though in reality every incidental, insignificant bit counts for something that hangs around well past its usefulness, the European Union has done something really bold and urgent in banning plastic products like drinking straws and disposal plastic utensils and cups for personal use.
Planned legislation also includes provisions to take plastic products out of circulation with scheduled milestones to phase items out and fining members per kilogram that goes unrecycled. Proponents are hoping to fend off minor annoyances and inconvenience (for that’s all it is, despite what the industry lobbyists would have one believe—plastic shopping bags have been all but banned for years and no one’s worse off for it) but a rigour public education campaign to be more mindful of our buying habits, alternatives and consequences of what we’re tossing away.

on the compositions of yards and perches

Looking to buy a new television, I tried to assay the difference between the German measurement of Zoll and inches across—if there was any and whether that distance mattered if measured diagonally as opposed to on a grid and there was a little more to the story than we expected. An inch (also statutorily three dry barley corn or fifteen poppy seeds across) was traditionally defined as the width of an adult’s thumb, a twelfth of a foot—give or take.
Although a Zoll as a unit has a bit more precision invested in it and is greater than an inch by an exacting but negligible amount—it’s also short for the informal and nebulous length of a “Stück Holz” or a piece of wood and is curiously the width of a Zollstock, one of those collapsible measuring sticks commonly found in Germany, more in use than a tape-measure to assess something’s size in exact terms. Although one will most likely only encounter the unit itself for screen-dimensions, it’s also present in contemporary pants sizes, bullet calibres and nuts and bolts. Twelve inches make a foot and three feet make a yard; five and a half yards make a perch and forty by four perches (also termed one chain by one furlong) make an acre, which was itself defined as the area of land that could be reasonably expected to be ploughed by a yoke (pair) of oxen in the space of a day. Before adopting the metric system in 1871, German conventional weights and measures were even more confusing and incongruent with a Landmeile (Land Mile) ranging in value from twenty-four thousand feet (Füß, itself ranging from nine to eighteen inches) in Bavaria and Württemberg to a thousand metres (three thousand two hundred eight one feet) in Wiesbaden. The above mentioned Zoll usually made one-twelfth part of a foot but in some places it was considered one-tenth.