ōmisoka

Having adopted the Western solar system of timekeeping as its official civil calendar at the beginning of the Meiji dynasty in 1873, Japanese new year’s customs are a rich fusion of traditional and adopted customs and rituals.
In addition to purification rites and sharing a bowl of long noodles with neighbours that symbolically bridge the span between new and old, areas with a Buddhist temple will ring their bells to atone for the one-hundred and eight earthly temptations that are the cause of human suffering. These enumerated kleshas (煩悩) are mental states (greed, sloth, pulverbatching, being hangry, irusu,  Vemödalen, and so forth) that are the mind-killers and manifest in poor decisions and destructive behaviour, and are in the broadest sense ignorance, attachment and aversion. Though it’s far beyond my cursory familiarity to wade further into the subject, it’s nonetheless comforting to know that the bonshō are tolling for us.

kirchenburg im flammen

H and I joined some friends last night and went into the nearby market town of Ostheim vor der Rhön to once again enjoy the spectacle of the fortified church illuminated by hundreds of torches and candles.
Unlike last year, there was no great and thunderous volley of the fire of hand-cannons from the tower but a very talented fire dancer who worked herself into a frenzy and gave quite a captivating performance.

starstudded

Our thanks to Weird Universe for the introduction to the perhaps unfairly maligned 1979 Italo-German space opera Starcrash—written and directed by Lugui Cozzi—accused of being derivative of the wildly successful Star Wars saga that premiered in 1977—dismissed like this later homage, but actually produced in parallel, with Lucas’ film only coming to audiences overseas in December 1978. I suppose we all owe debts of inspiration—and that’s not say the two movies don’t share some common ancestry.
The film, which includes a soundtrack scored by John Barry, stars Caroline Munroe as the protagonist with Christopher Plummer as a benevolent Emperor of the Universe and David Hasselhoff as his rebellious son and heir apparent, was quite a serious undertaking and rather than exactly campy seems like the franchise from an alternate reality. Here is the trailer below and with a little effort, one can find the full feature online, should one be so taken.

jahrgang xxmviii

As this year draws to a close, we again take time to reflect on a selection of things that took place in 2018. Thanks as always for visiting. We've made it through another wild year together.

january: Turkey enters the Syrian conflict in attempts to wrest control in the north from Kurdish rebels.  The US government experiences a partial shutdown over a lapse in funding due to a stand-off regarding the status of immigrants that were brought to the US as children by their parents.  We had to say goodbye to science-fiction and fantasy writer Ursula Le Guin.

february: There are further advances in private-sector rocketry that seem primed to usher in a new age of exploration.  Another school shooting in America fails to get the country to open up to a dialogue on gun-control. The US Federal Communications Commission repeals net neutrality consumer protections.

march: A former Russian double-agent and his daughter are poisoned in Salisbury, England.  In China, term limits for the office of president and general secretary of the Communist party are eliminated.  In the US, a nation-wide school walk-out occurs to protest gun-violence and weak gun-control laws.  Vladimir Putin is re-elected to a fourth consecutive term as president of Russia.  We bid farewell to scientist Stephen Hawking.

april: France, the UK, and the US launch airstrikes on Syria bases following a government sanctioned chemical weapons attack that killed over seventy civilians.

may: The European Union’s General Data Protection Regulation goes into effect in an attempt to wrest back some modicum of control over individuals’ digital dossiers. Donald Trump precipitates a trade war by imposing punitive steel tariff on exporters with other countries responding in kind.

june: At the G-7 summit in Toronto Donald Trump pushes for the reinstatement of Russia before embarking to meet with the leader of North Korea in Singapore for talks on denuclearisation. 

july: A series of climate-change driven heat-waves devastate North America and Europe, causing many deaths and torrents of forest fires.  A boys’ football team and their coach are rescued from a cave in Thailand after a harrow, seventeen-day ordeal.  Researchers confirm the existence of a subglacial lake of liquid water on Mars.  

august: The market value of Apple surpasses one trillion dollars.  The US reimposes sanctions on Iran over its nuclear programme (having announced its intention to withdraw from the deal in May) while maintaining support to Saudi Arabia in its retaliatory attack on the Yemen.

september: The National Museum of Brazil in Rio de Janeiro is engulfed in flames.  The Supreme Court of India decriminalises homosexuality.  Following a contentious hearing, a controversial justice is appointed to the US Supreme Court, altering its composition.

october: A dissident journalist is kidnapped, murdered and spirited away in pieces at the Saudi consulate in Istanbul. Canada legalises cannabis possession and use nation-wide.  Trump deploys soldiers to the Mexican border to fend off an approaching caravan of asylum-seekers. While visiting his native China, the chief of INTERPOL goes missing and presumed assassinated. The US signals its intent to leave the International Postal Union and shutters its diplomatic outreach offices for Palestine.

november: Democrats take control of the US House of Representative with Republicans retaining control of the Senate.  The InSight probe lands on Mars, beginning a mission to pierce the surface of the Red Planet. We had to bid farewell to SpongeBob SquarePants creator Stephen Hillenburg and social justice warrior Harry Leslie Smith.  US ex-president George Herbert Walker Bush passed away, rejoining Barbara Bush, his life partner of seventy-three years, who died in April.

december: The shambles of Brexit and the investigation into the Trump campaign and administration to Russia are ongoing.  US forces withdraw from Syria with plans to also do so for Afghanistan and the country’s defence secretary resigns in protest.  We had to bid farewell to actor and director Penny Marshall.   The US government enters another partial shutdown over Border Wall funding. 

in the land of the silver birch

One forgets how easy it is to access a memory sometimes. I was bopping along to some tune the other day and had a distinct memory of a classmate “Sunshine” Savage (her actual name, I wonder what happened to her) singing with me “Dip, dip and swing them back, flashing with SILVER” quite archly (in Dorian mode it turns out no less, I –♭VI, like Eleanor Rigby) and became curious all of a sudden about what public domain songbook that that was drawn from. I discovered to my delight that it’s considered a traditional Canadian folk staple:

My paddle’s keen and bright
Flashing with silver
Follow the wild goose flight
Dip, dip and swing

Though somewhat disavowed as kind of racist in Canadian school districts of late, apparently it is still a standard part of an American elementary school Thanksgiving pageant. I never experienced that personally but do recall other audience favourites, like the prodigal Señor Don Gato. Meow, meow, meow.

intercalary days

As the calendar winds down and makes ready to welcome a new year, we pause to take a look at a few non-standard dates, evoked for neat calculation and exceptional circumstances. 0 January is the manner for referencing the coordinates of astral bodies—used in tables for stellar navigation and astrology—the day before the start of a calendar year while still keeping the annual ephemeris inclusive.
Furthermore, for practical purposes, the epoch of computing and programming only reaches back to 1900—and though they had intended the starting point of 0 January to be New Year’s Eve 1899, because the year 1900 was erroneous reckoned as a Leap Year (it is a Common Year under the Gregorian Calendar but a Leap Year under the Julian system, in use in some jurisdictions until 1923) 0 January 1900 is actually the penultimate 30 December 1899. While most of Western Europe transitioned from the Julian to Gregorian calendars by excising a week of Sundays—not at all in a coordinated effort either—the Swedish Empire, seeing hardship elsewhere, announced it would gradually catch up, by phasing out leaps days over the following four decades—from 1700 to 1740. Conflict and conquest, however, made keeping an accurate count of cheat days difficult and at one point—in 1712—Sweden observed 30 February. Ultimately, in 1753, and despite the earnest efforts of civil servants calendar synchronisation was complete, by fast-forwarding from 17 February to 1 March.