ultragoth

Thanks to a clever member of the Twitterati, we learn to our delight that there was a sixth century consort of the king of the Neustrain Franks of the Merovingian dynasty (previously here, here and here), wife of Chodebert I who ruled Paris and the western part of Gaul, called Ultragoth.
Charitably, Childebert is credited for bringing Roman Catholicism to Spain, at the request of his sister Chlortilde who claimed she was being berated and abused for her faith by King Amalaric of the Visigoths (an attested follower of Arius), who brought an army to settle this domestic dispute and invaded the peninsula, ousting the heretical Visigoths in favour of a dynasty more closely aligned with the Church.  Childebert also plundered some relics from Spain, including the dalmatic vestments of Saint Vincent of Saragossa, which Ultragoth found suitable homes for. Likely spelt Ultrogothe (or Vulthrogotha, which is also cool) in Franconian, not to be a spoil-sport, there’s no indication of frequency or popularity for the name but other female regnants and consorts (which seem to never be repeated) included Ermengarde, Himiltrude, Chimnechild, Radegund, Amalberga, Bilichild, Waldrada, Fulberte, Wulfegundis and Wisigard. Nothing else is known of Childebert’s wife other than that she, having failed to produce sons and therefore heirs, and her daughters, Chrodoberge and Chrodesinde, were sent into exile after the king’s death—as was their custom, and his share of the kingdom reverted to his younger brother, Chlothar.

split-screen

As former Trump attorney Michael Cohen pled guilty to eight charges levied against him including silencing two women that Trump had affairs with (implicating Trump in the deed in violation of campaign finance rules) in a federal courthouse in Manhattan, nearly simultaneous a jury in Washington, DC announced its verdicts for Paul Manafort, finding the former campaign chairman guilty on eight of eighteen counts.
Declaring mistrial on some of the accusations—those he was found guilty for include tax evasion, obtaining lines of credit on false pretences and bank fraud—speaks to the fairness of the court proceedings and impartiality of the jurors. Next on the docket for Manafort, he will stand trial next month for failure to declare himself as acting on behalf of a foreign agent when he lobbied for Ukrainian president Viktor Yanukovych, ousted by the Orange Revolution of 2014 and wanted in the country for crimes of high treason, malversation and murder. While the later had less to do with Trump than the former, the outcome does confer more protections on the Special Council’s investigation into ties between the Trump campaign and Russia against interference on the part of Republicans who would like to see the matter closed by demonstrating conspiracy and the charges materialised and were substantiated directly as a result of the Special Council’s work.

rolling stock

Via Londonist, we are treated to the handiwork of Matthew Sommerville who has made a real-time map of the trains moving through the London Underground. Each yellow dot represents a carriage winding its way from station to station, drawing its telemetry from the same public data sets that inform time-tables and station information boards, and will at a click reveal more information about its route and one can toggle between geographic and schematic projections.

seaplane

Financed during the inter-war period by the Germany Ministry of Transportation partially to circumvent peace treaty conditions which limited the range and speed of aircraft produced and to captivate the public—who were impressed with this feat of engineering but it never proved commercially viable—the prototype Dornier Do X had its first test-flight in July of 1929 on the Swiss part of Lake Constance (die Bodensee). The largest and heaviest flying boat (Flugschiff) ever built, it was designed to accommodate a compliment of fourteen crew members and between sixty-six (long-haul) and one hundred (short-haul) passengers and after trials that achieved the requisite altitude for a trans-Atlantic crossing, the craft began a tour of Europe with the aim being to introduce the flying boat to North American markets.
A series of accidents and mishaps instead diverted the plane to meandering course to Brazil via the Azores and Cape Verde and north to Puerto Rico and finally landing ten months later in New York City and Newfoundland before a return flight to Berlin. Public jubilation could not overcome financing hurdles (made all the more difficult to secure due to the burgeoning Great Depression) and further botched excursions, though the Dornier Do X concept demonstrated what could be done with amphibious aircraft and opened up business to the idea of international passenger service.

punky brewster

While there’s no definitive link between the stereotypical image of a witch and the business attire, signpost and shingle of the medieval alewives (braciatrix, brewess, brewster) that dominated beer brewing as a cottage industry from Antiquity to the early Middle Ages does certainly seem to inform the Western world’s conception with the distinguishing calling-cards of a tall, pointy hat, cauldron, broomstick and a feline familiar.
Despite inconclusive scholarship and myriad neighbourhood jealousies that can set off a flurry of accusations, that men—seeing a business opportunity and wanting to dispose of the competition, would resort to calling their established counterparts enchantresses and in league with the Devil does not surprise. The first outbreaks of the Plague across Europe caused significant shifts in the production of beer and spirits, taking it out of the home and making it a larger scale enterprise, often under the charter of the Church and a venture for monasteries to make beer to standard and making independent women entrepreneurs more and more marginalised. An empowered beer wench could certainly push a man to behave below his station, driving him to make poor choices and spend all his money on drink, and once women were forced to abandon their craft brew, they maintained their treacherous wiles by more unnatural means.

pražská jar

Fifty years ago, the reform efforts of the government of Czechoslovakia were brought to a standstill and reversed with the invasion of the Soviet Union with the materiel support from three other Warsaw Pact nations, with some two-hundred thousand troops and two thousand tanks and the arrest of First Secretary Alexander Dubček, with many more fleeing into exile, who spearheaded the movement known as the Prague Spring.
Over time, a half a million troops would occupy the country, advancing from beyond the country’s borders after an ostensibly successful round of negotiations concluded earlier in the month, coming an unexpected shock to the people of Czechoslovakia who believed that their interpretation of socialism, a mixed system that held protections for individual freedoms of expression might be the way forward. The Soviets saw the push for political liberalisation and move towards decentralisation of economic and foreign policy as a threat to the Eastern Bloc’s cohesion as a unified front against bourgeois values.

baby’s on fire

Duck Soup directs our attention to an interesting meta-study whose aim is to explore the notion of a winning-streak and whether or not there’s something to idea of success having momentum.
I’ve been wondering myself about the more accustomed inertia of regression and how much of a boost one win can give one to persevere—which to a degree makes sense as a universal truth but research inserts factor chance back into the equation, demonstrating that perhaps counterintuitively that successes come at random intervals. Surveying the careers of thousands through the lens of one of the biggest winning-streaks of science, Albert Einstein’s prolific Annus Mirabilis (previously here, here and here), researchers found that despite the overarching random nature of when fortune visits, back-to-back triumphs do indeed seem to occur and accrue in all fields.

canonical consent

Though possibly polyandrous on the actress’ part in light of her earlier, coerced nuptials with Betelgeuse, we learn that the co-stars of the 1992 Francis Ford Coppula adaptation of Bram Stoker’s Dracula—Keanu Reeves and Winona Ryder—might have actually been married during the movie’s production.  Shot in Romania, the ceremony was reportedly presided over by an authentic priest who may or may not have understood his role on set. While the likelihood of a marriage considered legal and binding without the backing of substantiating documents strikes one as the stuff of sitcom tropes, it’s nonetheless a fun bit of trivia to consider and speculate if there are instances of fictional matrimony having legal consequence.