your daily demon: eligos

This fifteenth spirit on the demonological calendar is this infernal grand duke that presents in the form of a handsome knight armed with a lance, ensign and sceptre. With a smattering of strategy, Eligor knows the outcome of future wars and the encounters of armies. Depicted sometimes sat a gee, his ride (going by the variant name the Steed of Abigor) is a gift of Beelzebub and is reconstituted from one of the horses of the Garden of Eden after the Fall. Governing from today through 5 June, Eligos contols sixty legion and is opposed by the cherubim Hariel.

afn gasthaus

Via Slashdot we are referred to one dedicated individual and his quest to collect public service announcements and other video artefacts from the Armed Forces Network and its predecessor the Armed Forces Radio and Television Service (AFN / AFRTS) which broadcast US news, programming and sports to American service members and the their families stationed abroad.  Filling the interstitial spaces normally reserved for advertising with spots and pauses for station identification, educational opportunities, legal and tax advice, jobs postings, community calendars produced by local or theatre military, this dead air time made for a strangely nostalgic and niche time-capsule of Cold War anxieties and propaganda especially in Germany where until 2010, the programming was broadcast and could be received on any terrestrial antenna near an army installation. A lot of these are before my time but I do remember Kay’s Kitchen and using your Commissary benefit, the weather spots, exchange rates, country-quizzes and think about the jingle to “Whatcha gonna do about Appropriated Funds?” nearly every day. I think that one has not be added yet, but the below short about the difference between a special and general power-of-attorney is pretty memorable as well. There are thousands of shorts and vintage news reels to explore—an interesting piece of history whether or not one shares that background.

my soul doth magnify the lord

Celebrated as a minor feast day in the Catholic and Anglican rite, the Visitation marks the episode in the Life of the Virgin when Mary, pregnant with Jesus, leaves Nazareth to see her cousin Elizabeth, pregnant with John the Baptist and help with when she went into labour. The traditional day of 2 July is retained in Slovakia and Germany (Mariä Heimsuchnung) for historical reasons and associated pilgrimmage opportunities. Upon their initial encounter, Elizabeth and John in the womb experience and inflowing of divine grace—prompting Elizabeth to praise her cousin, the experience also new to her—for her faith, forming some of the rubric of the Hail Mary, to which Mary gives in response what’s now referred to as the Magnficat, the canticle that is taken from the exchange as recorded by the Gospel of Luke.

lipps inc

The lead single off of their debut album Mouth to Mouth, released earlier in the year in March, first began to top the charts on this day in 1980, reaching number one in the USA, Canada, West Germany, the Netherlands and numerous other places following. The monumental One-Hit Wonder was inspired by the band’s ambitions to expand from Minneapolis and stake their claim in New York City. The band was originally to be called Lip Sync but that name was already taken. Here they are performing the song in 1982 on the show TopPop.

noordzee

The always intriguing and enlightening Maps Mania refers us to a suite of tools and tracers to help us visualise the huge among of marine traffic that passes in and out of the North Sea bordered by the Low Countries and Scandinavia, the waters off Belgium far exceeding the throughput of either of the shipping industry’s great corridors and potential bottlenecks, the Panama and Suez canals. Especially interesting is the data-driven scrollytelling from the financial daily De Tidj (pictured) which shows the activity and congestion of navigable routes along with the dredgers that keep the trade routes open to traffic.

small barnstar

Despite having not seen another contending example of a table of contents that I can recall lending outsized credence or interest to an otherwise dull article about an Italian-cuisine-inspired restaurant chain (other franchises aren’t so elevated—just with a section In Popular Culture, Litigation or Controversies—even more of a furore could be made of it, like with one Charles Entertainment Cheese and rebranding under bandmate Pasqually P. Pieplate), I am confident that there is a category dedicated to just that—likely contained herein. We wonder if they might mandate that the sensationalism be toned-down a notch.

sunday drive: wasserschloss roßrieth and walldorfer-kirchenburg

For what was the first time in a long time, H and I took advantage of the fine and sunny weather and visited a few sights from outdoors on either side of Mellrichtstadt and Meiningen first with the moated castle located within a small farming village of the same name. Existing as the seat of a lordship since the twelfth century before being destroyed for harbouring highwaymen in 1401, the rebuilt sixteenth century compound was in the ownership of the rulers of Ost- and Nordheim until the mediatisation of imperial immediacy at the beginning of the nineteenth century (die Reichsdeputationhauptschluss von 1803) when transferred to the Free State of Bavaria. 

The castle is in private hands and cannot be visited by the surround grounds and agricultural outbuildings were nice to explore. Next we came to the fortified church (see links above) of the town of Walldorf, now a suburb of Meiningen. Originally a medieval defensive Höhenberg (a hill castle) along the old trade route from Frankfurt to Erfurt—a good vantage point to monitor for smugglers and other potential disruptions, the complex on the promontory has been an episcopal fort since 1008 when the archbishopric of Würzburg took over the area. 

The high keep with residential structures and a garden was used as a protected farmyard through the ages as it is today, restored after reunification and a fire in 2012 that caused extensive damage. Beyond its historical value as a monument, designs for restoration undertaken and achieved have made it moreover a “biotope church” with a replacement roof optimised for nesting kestrels, a colony of jackdaws (Dohlen), bats, bees that visit the old cottage gardens plus a nesting stork with a young brood.

ws3

Via Waxy, taking some numbingly tedious (low-stakes) annual training and always failing to recall the difference between nuanced jargon—plus not paying close attention to the presentation before the post-test, I’ve encountered such flash cards and drills that promise the right answers if one types in the question verbatim but I never expected peers to help out one another (eyes on your own test) with the same crib notes for the safety and security of nuclear armaments. Responsibly redacted in the exposé, the practises and protocols of US weapons stockpiles overseas were breached through these tutorials, and while the existence of this forward operating bases and their host nations was somewhat of an open secret, spillage of alert procedures, security norms and panic words strikes as pretty grave and just as embarrassing as being outed by one’s pedometer.