Gate of peaceI thought, when I first caught site of this structure in York’s Rowntree Park, that it must have been moved here from elsewhere. It looked old, with its silvered oak timbers and melllow bricks – certainly older than the date of 1919–21, when Rowntree and Company donated the park to the city as a memorial to its workers who fell in World War I. The structure’s similarity to a church lychgate, and the fact that it does not stand at the entrance to the park but within it, added to my…

Mein Lesesommer 2026: fünf Bücher, die ich gelesen oder gehört habe Fünf Bücher haben mich durch den Sommer 2026 begleitet. Von queerer erster Liebe über melancholische Erinnerungen bis zum Thriller: meine persönlichen Ratings zu „Restsommer“, „Daisy“, „Im Wasser sind wir schwerelos“, „Damals im Sommer“ und „Laute Nächte“. Der Sommer ist vorbei. Zumindest kalendarisch. Und als ich mir überlegt habe, welche Bücher mich in den vergangenen Monaten begleitet haben, ist mir etwas aufgefallen, was…

The Acts of St Phileas record the events of 305 AD during the Great Persecution under Diocletian. An ancient Latin translation exists, but in the 20th century two Greek versions of the Acts were discovered. These are in the Bodmer papyrus 20 (= Bo), and a different version in the Chester Beatty papyrus 15 (= Be). The Bodmer version Bo begins as follows. The translation us by H. Musurillo, The Acts of the Christian Martyrs (1972), pp. 330-1: 1. The defence speech of Phileas, bishop of Thmuis and…

For five summers running, a working farm turned nudist resort outside a small town in southern Ontario pulled off something genuinely strange. Every July, thousands of people, clothed spectators included, drove out to watch a naked beauty pageant that got more press coverage in its first year than a visit from the sitting Prime Minister. It was called Miss Nude World, and between 1970 and 1975 it turned Freelton, Ontario, a place most Canadians had never heard of, into an unlikely fixture of...

On August 23, 1939, Hitler and Stalin agreed to the secret non-aggression Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact. The Germans invaded Poland from the west nine days later, on September 1, 1939. On September 17, the Soviet Union invaded from the east. The battle was over, Poland subdued, by October 6. The Soviets were driven out of Poland by the Germans in 1941, and the Germans were driven out in turn by the Red Army three years later. In one of those curious historical coincidences, on September 2, 1939,…

I said in my original blog on Kilpeck I should return and learn more. Well a year after my original visit and 8 months since I wrote the original blog, I thought it was time. That, however isn't the only reason; Fresh from our visit to the Templar church of Welsh Newton where Mrs Yunzi has relations buried, it appears as if she has family in all the amazing churches of Herefordshire, after her brother casually informed us about past generations of her family in the graveyard of Kilpeck. Back to…

On the morning of 8 May 1902, a Caribbean city of roughly 28,000 people was wiped off the map in under three minutes. The eruption of Mount Pelée remains the deadliest volcanic disaster of the twentieth century, and by most tallies only two or three people inside the city survived it directly. One of them owed his life entirely to a drunken brawl. A local troublemaker named Ludger Sylbaris had been thrown into a windowless stone cell the night before, as punishment for a fight. The same walls...

I had lomo saltado at Rosario’s Peruvian Restaurant in Longmont, Colorado.

Een literaire memoire van Connie Palmen‘s wording. N.a.v. wat Palmen er in een interview in de Volkskrant over zei had ik heel veel zin in dit boek. Wellicht omdat ik op zoek was naar wat haar werk 30 jaren geleden voor me deed maar geen enkel boek van haar daarna (al kocht en las ik ze allemaal). Nooit eerder annoteerde ik een roman zo heftig met potlood als De Vriendschap. Johnnie Walker las lekker weg in één zitting gisteren aan het eind van de dag, stevige zinnen, interessante schetsen.…

A Phoenician bireme on a relief from the South-West Palace at Nineveh, now in the British Museum. Wikimedia Commons, licensed CC-SA-3.0 Recently I have been reading two online debates about the role of naval force in the 21st century. Over on his blog, Australian economist John Quiggin has been chatting about the Australian navy with commentators like MarkL since 2008. That debate brought up a helpful reading list on strategic theory. Over on his blog, Bret Devereaux has been talking naval…

Arthur Schopenhauer (1788-1860), Parerga and Paralipomena, Vol. II, Chapter 21, § 254 (tr. Adrian Del Caro and Christopher Janaway): How bad things would be for human knowledge if it weren't for writing and printing! Therefore the libraries alone are the certain and enduring memory of the human race, whose individual members all have only a very limited and imperfect memory. Wie schlecht würde es also um das menschliche Wissen stehn, wenn Schrift und Druck nicht wären. Daher sind die…

From Empire of the Winds: The Global Role of Asia’s Great Archipelago, by Philip Bowring (I.B. Tauris, 2018), Kindle p. 224: Melaka did not just become a renowned commercial centre. It also saw the flowering of Malay law, governance and literature. Long after the sultanate had ceased to exist, it remained the embodiment of all that was noble in the Malay world. This was the product both of its own Palembang-Melayu origins and of the multi-ethnic character of a city where Tamils, Gujaratis,…

My wife and I spent our summer vacation this year on the Polish Baltic coast. It was a welcome relief from the unbearable heat in Central Europe. As the 8-hour drive seemed a bit too long for us, we stopped off for two days on the way up in Potsdam, the former royal residence of the Prussian kings, foremost among them Frederick the Great, who shaped the country like no other. The city is right on the doorstep of the mega-city of Berlin, but has largely retained its old charm, which is no doubt…

Blick über die Halde Hoheward zwischen Herten und Recklinghausen Die Halde Hoheward ist meine liebste Halde im Ruhrgebiet. Ich nehme euch mit auf meine Runde von der Zeche Ewald bis zum Horizontobservatorium und zur Sonnenuhr, inklusive weiter Aussichten, überraschend viel Natur und Sonnenuntergang. Ein ♥ für Hoheward Ich habe im Ruhrgebiet inzwischen einige Halden gesehen. Aber wenn mich jemand fragt, welche ich am liebsten mag, muss ich nicht lange überlegen: die Halde Hoheward zwischen…

Robert Burton (1577-1640), Anatomy of Melancholy ("Democritus Junior to the Reader," vol. 1, pp. 18-19 of the Everyman edition): I hear new news every day, and those ordinary rumours of war, plagues, fires, inundations, thefts, murders, massacres, meteors, comets, spectrums, prodigies, apparitions, of towns taken, cities besieged in France, Germany, Turkey, Persia, Poland, etc., daily musters and preparations, and such-like, which these tempestuous times afford, battles fought, so many men…

Ravenna, in the far north coast of Italy on the Adriatic, was the capital city of the Ostrogoths. Capturing it could bring the Gothic Wars to a happy conclusion for the Byzantines, whose emperor, Justinian, wanted to reunite the Western and Eastern halves of the old Roman Empire, with him as the ruler.General Belisarius also needed a victory, especially after the disaster in Mediolanum (Milan). At least that outcome caused the recall of General Narses to Constantinople, so Belisarius no longer…

The Strangest House in the World : George Daynor Fights (the) Depression. New Jersey resident George Daynor stands before his muck house in 1939. Press photograph with caption on reverse. Some "outsider" artists who build environments are shy, but Daynor was Howard Finster with an even bigger bent for attention. An early fame whore. He used his junk-made Vineland environment to attract visitors and fame. Here is an excerpt from Wiki: "George Daynor claims that he was guided to New Jersey by an…

, The Bank of England as the Old Lady of Threadneedle Street in a John Bull cartoon from 1903 I referred to The Old Lady of Threadneedle Street, the Bank of England’s staff magazine, a while back and the old dear has cropped up again in a 1903 cartoon from John Bull. John Bull and his bulldog stand between three men on the left and a woman standing below a Threadneedle St sign. The men are John Pierpont Morgan, the most powerful financier in the US whose name lives on as JP Morgan bank; Charles…

Gefüllte Teigtaschen und Beilagen im dagestanischen Restaurant The Kurze The Kurze in Tallinn ist kein Restaurant, an dem man einfach achtlos vorbeigeht. Ich habe es zufällig in Kalamaja entdeckt und dort zum ersten Mal dagestanische Küche probiert. Mit bunten Teigtaschen, Hauslimonade, einem überraschend großen Garten und einer Bedienung, die mir konsequent eine Gabel verweigerte. 2–3 Stunden Dagestan Mit Dagestan verband ich bis zu unserer Reise nach Tallinn vor allem einen ziemlich…

From Empire of the Winds: The Global Role of Asia’s Great Archipelago, by Philip Bowring (I.B. Tauris, 2018), Kindle p. 214: The commercial merit of large Javanese junks was immediately apparent to the Portuguese. Assuming stable ratios of length to beam to depth, a 30-metre junk would have had a tonnage of about 150 tonnes, while one with 1,000 tonnes would have a length of about 55 metres. For their first commercial voyages after seizing Melaka, the Portuguese collaborated with an important…

The insubordination of John the Sanguinary that led to the division in the Byzantine army between the divisions commanded by Belisarius and those commanded by Narses created further problems. The Siege of Milan was one example.Then called Mediolanum, it was the second wealthiest city in Italy after Rome. Archbishop Dainties of Milan sent messages to Belisarius, welcoming him to come and free them from Ostrogothic rule. Belisarius sent a force of 1000 men to secure it under a man named Mundilas.…

In a follow-up to Tuesday’s post on USCG Grumman (G-38) JRF-5G Goose amphibians, how about the rest of the story of the type’s journey in Indochina? Twelve ex-USN JRF-5s were sold to France in 1952 and delivered to Escadrille 8.S based at Cat-Lai (later a big Brown Water Navy base) close to Saigon (Indochina). Viet Minh War, 1954, a French Grumman Goose (JRF-5) aids the gunboats patrolling the inland waters of Indo-China. NH 79370 They were mainly used for medevac, transport, and liaison, but…

When I was a kid living in Pennsyltucky, I used to daydream about a place with soaring green mountains, rice paddies, and snaking rivers that I could move to someday, far away from teachers who gave lectures about how not … Continue reading →

Ursus Hypatos was the third doge of Venice, likely the first chosen locally, but we have almost no sources for him.

In my previous post “The Army as Lottery“, we saw how according to Adam Smith in Paragraph 30 of Chapter 10 of Book I of The Wealth of Nations, “romantic hopes” of heroism and glory are what motivate many young men to enlist in the army. But for Smith, enlisting in the army is like buying a lottery ticket: the “prize” or jackpot could be a beneficial one — since you could win “honour and distinction” — but it could also be a detrimental one — you could be killed or maimed! (WN, I.x.30)…

Contrasting life history in the diminutive Dimetrodon species from North America and Germany Arore Caonville, Philipp L. Knaus, Lorenzo Marchetti & Jörg Fröbisch Scientific Reports volume 16, Article number: 16279 (2026) PDF

Baustelle Herner Straße zwischen Kortländer und Nordring. Situation im Juni 2026: Durchfahrt für Radfahrer verboten. Es gab eine umständliche Umleitung. Die gleiche Situation im August 2026. Freie Fahrt für den Radverkehr. P.S.: Ohne den bisherigen Radfahrstreifen ist auch die Gefahr durch den fehlenden Sicherheitstrennstreifen gebannt.

Libonectes atlasense / Andy Chua Collection A beautifully preserved mandible of Libonectes atlasense, an elasmosaurid plesiosaur from early Turonian, Upper Cretaceous, deposits of the Akrabou Formation near Asfla Village, Goulmima, Errachidia Province in eastern central Morocco. The collecting area is in the region of Drâa-Tafilalet. You may know Errachidia as Ksar Souk. It was

Ziel war ein persönlicher Rekord: Die Radreise durch Deutschland und Polen sollte die längste meines Lebens werden. Drei Jahre vorher war der erste Versuch dazu, eine Radreise durch Frankreich entlang der Atlantikküste noch an einem Beinbruch nach einem Sturz an der Loire gescheitert. Diesmal hat es geklappt: 5656 km in sechsundfünfzig und einem halben Tag. Nur mit Zelt, Schlafsack und Isomatte, jeden Tag woanders übernachtet. 100 km pro Tag, aber ohne Hotels, Pensionen oder auch nur…