The dark stranger - #1204

Scotland has some good traditions.

Whisky drinking, for one.

Another one that's appropriate for this time of year is "First footing"

To ensure good luck for the house, the "first foot" (in the house after midnight) should be male, dark (believed to be a throwback to the Viking days when blond strangers arriving on your doorstep meant trouble) and should bring symbolic coal, shortbread, salt, black bun and whisky.

Whisky's good enough, thanks all the same.

Talisker. Or Lagavulin.

I'm not fussy.......

Home for the holidays - #1203

I've known Lena since she was about 3.

I took her on her first date (suitably chaperoned by Mrs jb's niece, I hasten to add) when she was about 10.

Little white socks and sandals and a blue checked dress that supposedly took hours to select from her wardrobe.

She's now studying law in Berlin (I'd say it's better than nothing, but it's not, because she's going to end up as a bloody lawyer...), having done a stint as Lena from the Bosporus , and she's home for the holidays.

It's just so nice to see a light in her bedroom window again.

(It's Christmas. Just let me get a bit emotional and teary, OK?)

Not very often....#1202

...that you find kids who's prefer to be at school than elsewhere.

These 2 young flossies accosted me on the Christmas market and said "we'refromtheMartunusschoolandwe'recollectingforUNCEFwouldyouliketo makeadonation?"

Being half-deaf, a bit dim and a foreigner to boot, I gradually decrypted the message (lip-reading's a big help...) and deduced that they were collecting for a Good Cause.

You have to have sympathy with anyone collecting for UNICEF in Germany - it was run by a REAL bunch of hand-in-the-till ratbags a couple of years ago and it's been an uphill struggle since.

Plus that fact that "it'ssoooooocoldIwishwewerebackinclass".....

I was under-sided....#1201

...whether to post this utterly un-composed image.

It actually came out better than I'd perspectived....

A different angel...-#1200

Early successes, spoiled the creation,
Hills, ridges reddish tomorrow
all creation, - pollen of the flowering godhead,
Joints of the light, corridors, stairways, thrones,
Rooms from essence, shields made of ecstasy, riots
stormy ecstatic feeling and suddenly, single,
Mirrors which emanated from its own beauty
draw back in their own faces.

The folks who run Haus Ritzinger, the village church community centre, sent out calls for angels to populate their Christmas exhibition.

Hundreds of the darn things, the majority being angelic candlesticks et al. 

The poem actually kicks off with

Jeder Engel ist schrecklich (Every angel is terrible)

I have NO idea why they left that line out... 

Not terrible were one from 1620 (learned later, sadly anonymous due to appalling (i.e. total lack of) signage, Famous Journalist B. Schenk's and Mrs jb's contributions:

Alena Lorencova's angel. Probably on weed or speed - just look at the dilated pupils....

A tiny church weathervane from New England

Didn't trust them with Steve Fullmer's "Angel".

It's featured in Naomi O'Connor's " New Zealand art and culture" as "an example of the more innovative, purely decorative 'pots' made in recent years."


Can't imagine that it would have been a snug fit....

Wait until next week -#1199

They're bound to be cheaper.

Delightful tea-lights in an NMKOP shop in the Kirschgarten

Because it's Christmas.....#1198a

....Mrs jb thought a second post might be in order...

[Enough of this rampant sentimentalism. Ed]

Following yonder star.. - #1198

..all the way down the Augustinerstrasse.

A traditional air to accompany your Christmas pud

When it gets this bright....#1197

...and the smoke detectors start going off regularly, it must be getting close to Christmas.

Pagan rituals - #1196

Now isn't this just soooo FestivewithacapitalF?

AND the reflections of the Advent wreath board in the window...

I would have straightened the candle, but I'm sure it's more artistic this way.

What do I know....?

The Great Pavlova Bake-off -#1195

The origins of the Pavlova are hotly disputed.

Supposedly created in the honour of Anna Pavlova, a Russian ballerina who toured Australia and New Zealand in the 1920s, it's a cultural icon in both countries and Australia JUST WON'T ACCEPT that it's a New Zealand invention.

I used to work with an IT consultant by the name of Rob Jamieson, who - like all Aussies - reckoned they could bake the True Pav.

So I'd bake one from Mum's (Isabel's, actually)

recipe, he'd bake one from HIS Mum's recipe and the folks in the office would say "This is REALLY nice, but last week's one was a TAD better"

We'd go back into this endless loop until we twigged that they weren't really connoisseurs at all - they just wanted free Pav.

So when one of Ms jb's tenants turned up the other day with a plate (this is ours from Viv Ross) of Christmas cookies, I got an idea.

Given that the above-mentioned patissiere is Portuguese and the fact that there's another evidently talented Portuguese baker, blogger and budding scientist in the v. near vicinity, I'm proposing a Portuguese Christmas Goodies Bake-off.

Taster, judge and jury being me.....

I know it doesn't fit in my Christmas stocking...#1194

...but I want need one of these thingies...

My uncle had something better.

He was Senior Technical Officer at an RAF Strike Force base at the height of the Cold War in the 1960s with 2 aircraft on Quick Reaction Alert (hit the starter and go).

He got hold of a jet engine, bolted it down on a trolley and ran it up and down the runways in winter.

Come to think of it, I think I'd rather have one of those...

Not your average war memorial - #1193

 The Nagelsäule - Nail Pillar - has stood on the Liebfrauenplatz on the eastern side of the cathedral since 1916 and - as far as research tells me - is the only of its kind remaining intact in Germany.

The history's interesting, if not gripping.

As the allied blockade of Germany in the first world war started to take grip, the Mayor of Mainz, Karl Emil Göttelmann, called on his fellow citizens in a burst of jingoism to show their solidarity with the troops and flash the cash for a Good Cause.

The 7 metre high pillar, crowned with the Iron Cross and the inscription "In Kriegsnot helf uns Gott" ("God help us in times of war") and designed by the city's Master Mason, Adolf Gelius, and the sculptor Ludwig Lipp was dedicated on 1 July 1916.

The column was decorated in four discrete rings - at the top, War (no big surprise) below it The State (again, no big surprise) then Brotherly Love and finishing with an area to be decorated with nails representing the donations

Citizens could buy nails ranging from simple iron one for 1 Mark (about €5 these days) to a gold-headed one for 20 Marks and hammer them into the oak stem.

All in all, they collected  170,00 Marks (€800,000-ish) which went to provide children from socially disadvantaged backgrounds with vacations in the country and to organisations supporting soldiers' spouses.

You'll also find symbols of more significant donations - either corporate from the many SMEs in Mombach, the industrial powerhouse of Mainz, or elsewhere, and plaques donated by the Kastel Choral Society (below) or the Hoteliers Association (bottom)

Years (and other wars) passed it by until people started noticed in the late 1980s that it rather swayed in the wind.

People looked at it, measured it, thought about and decided in 2006 that there was a fair risk that the family of the chappy who sells honey in its shadow on Tuesday, Friday and Saturday might have to call in his life insurance in the very near future.

Down it came and away it went into storage.

Fast forward to 2010. (If my memory serves me well, the city decided they had no money to restore it and figured that it if they kept quiet, no-one would miss it.)

Fat chance of that.

A fund was set up and kicked off with $60,000 from Gerhard Heiter, a Meenzer Bub who emigrated to America in 1956 and what with the generosity of the general public and some tax money thrown in its general direction, Michael Recker, a restoration expert from Mombach, was called in to oversee the job.

And what a lovely man he is.

You (well, I don't anyway, but maybe that's just me...) don't meet many people who you like from the minute you start talking.

He's one of them.

I asked him what stage of the restoration he was at, so he told me in detail (coating the metal stays with anti-corrosive stuff), invited me inside the fence for a closer look and showed me all sorts of interesting plaques and their history.

Including one that gives me the willies/heebie-jeebies/whathaveyous.

The plaque that I picked at random in the post a couple of weeks back was one marking the death a mere 4 weeks before Armistice Day of a Leutnant Karl Gelius, a possible relative of the Master Mason who designed the memorial.

Google the name and you're taken straight to a passage from Carl Zuckmayer's "Als war's ein Stuck von Mir" (A Part of Myself) describing volunteering for service on the day that war was declared:

"Ich weiß noch heute den Namen jedes einzelnen, der da mit mir ging: Karl Gelius, Franz Klum, Leopold Wagner, Max Neuhoff, Heinz Römheld, Geo Hamm, Richard Schuster, Franz Pertzborn, Erich Hahn -, ich sehe ihre siebzehnjährigen Gesichter, wie sie damals waren, jung und frisch, ich könnte sie nie anders sehen, denn sie sind nicht gealtert. Sie sind alle tot, kriegsgefallen, jeder der hier Genannten"


"I remember to this day the name of each of them who was there with me: Karl Gelius, Franz Klum, Leopold Wagner, Max Neuhaus, Heinz Römheld, Geo Hamm, Richard Schuster, Franz Pertzborn, Eric Hahn - I see their seventeen year old faces as they were then, young and fresh, I could never see them any other way, because they have not aged. They are all dead, fallen in the war, every single one of them."

 
As I said - not your average war memorial....

Blackbird... - #1192

 

....singing in the dead of night

Take these broken wings and learn to fly

All your life

You were only waiting for this moment to arise

Road Pavementkill at the top of the Gaustrasse

Can't be malnutrition.

My bagel still hasn't been touched....

Punch-up....#1191

 

I do rate Interieur 251, the restaurant at the Arp Museum in (NQM) Rolandseck, but their prices sometimes make my eyes water.

0.15l of their (admittedly quite excellent) apple punch for €6.80.

Stroll on...

Easy enough to make your own, though (from one of Mrs jb's Living@Home in the Country with Landlust lifestyle rags magazines)

1 litre of unfiltered apple juice from Appel Happel for €2

1 cinnamon stick

A couple of star anise

A couple of slices of ginger

A few slices of lime

Warm it through, strain it into a couple of beakers (Hans Fischer and Pim van Huisseling from left to right), bang in a decent glug of Calvados and you're away.

Clear profit of around €43.........

Talk about ungrateful...#1190

I get talked out of half a sesame bagel at breakfast, Ms jb spends GOOD MONEY on a totally unnecessary tin umbrella thingie, even ties a RIBBON around the handle and the bloody birds stay away in their DROVES.

Or flocks.

Not good enough, I suppose.

Probably want it buttered.

With jam, too....

The next best thing to a brewery...#1189

 

If it can't still be a brewery (which it used to be), it might as well be a kiddies shop.

Stumbled over Zippilotta one evening on the way to Heinrichs for dinner and charged back the next day to buy something for Mrs jb's great-niece.

Just the nicest people (that be Grace above, folding aforementioned great-niece's Christmas pressie) and the coolest stuff.

They're primarily on-line and - having hired office space generously - put some stock in the front to see how it went.

Like a rocket, as far as I can work out.

So if you need some cute kiddy stuff and speak German, zip on over to their website and splurge.

Advent reloaded - #1191

All a bit...-#1188

 

pointsettialess if you ask me.

Spend all that time raising these things in hothouses, giving them a carbon footprint the size of Alaska, and then - schwoooop - they're in the rubbish collection as soon as you can say €7.99.

AND they're not properly red.

Oh.

I'm told they're meant to be like that.....

Spontaneous combustion - #1187

Our Christmas Stollen each contain a lump of butter about the size of a baby's head.

And they're guaranteed polybrominated diphenyl ether-free, which is more than you can say for American versions, which have a fair chance of being laced with the above substance which happens to be a flame retardant.

So if you're on our Christmas Stollen list and suffer from a tendency towards spontaneous combustion, just let me know and I'll get Kate or Virginia to send me some tainted supplies.

And talking of combustion...

We got our recipe from Reinhilde's Mum who used to bake by the hundred and sell them for a good cause.

Usual list of ingredients (at the moment, you could wake me up in the middle of the night and I'd be able to recite them without a mistake....) and then...

"Set the oven at 250ºC"

Thought it was a bit high (on reflection, perhaps she was using American butter...), but away we went.

Smoke POURS out of the oven within minutes, smoke alarms go off, paramedics transport baking staff to local hospital suffering from smoke inhalation.

After recovering from my lung transplant, I broached the subject with Frau Eckert

"Oh, you have to turn the oven down to 180ºC after you've put the Stollen in... Didn't I write that? Oh my goodness"

Bright lights..... #1186

...big city medium-sized market town.

We are a state capital, mind you.

Seen on the Christmas market.

Mexican, I think.

Quality cocaine they had, too...

And talking of booze..- #1185

Even Ms jb is stumped by this.

And that's saying something.

Scotch - the fashion brand - appears to be from the Netherlands and "Scotch Shrunk" - kiddie-sized kit - would thus be for yer yoof market.

All Double-Dutch to me....

Make mine....#1184

...an Eiswein.

Another NQM moment.

The Eiswein monument is a mere hsaaj down river in Bingen, opposite the Niederwalddenkmal (in the far distance, commemorating the creation of the German empire at the end of the Franco-Prussian war).

Here's the story.

1829 was a shocking year for vintners. The grapes were so sour that the farners left them hanging on the vines. A hard winter, too, and things became so desperate (11 Feb 1830) that the farmers starting picking the dried bunches for cattle fodder.

Someone tried a grape out of curiosity, got bowled by the concentrated sweetness and thought "Sod the cows, I'm keeping this for myself"

To make Eiswein you need:

Grapes left on the vine
Temperatures down to -7ºC and below
People willing to get up at stupid o'clock and pick grapes.
People willing to get up at stupid o'clock and press grapes in unheated cellars.

The trick is that the grapes have shrivelled to raisin-like dimensions, concentrating the flavours and the frost does the rest by turning any remaining fluid into ice crystals.

If you're lucky (and quick), you'll be able to press the grapes before the ice turns to water and you're left with pure nectar that's then magically turned into a wine that's both hens'-teeth-rare and pricey.

The Americans, of course, do it differently.

They just whack the stuff in a commercial freezer and pump the stuff out by the hectolitre.

Or hectogallon

Crikey... - #1183

Almost like Chicago....

Strolling back from the Christmas market on Saturday night when all of a sudden 4 (FOUR) police cars with sirens a-wailing and blue lights a-flashing come flying around various corners, pounce on a bendy-bus in the Ludwigstrasse and surround it.

Out leap a horde of police people and enter the bus at speed.

I thought someone had just watched Pelham 1-2-3 and had at least hijacked our local public transport at gunpoint.

No such luck.

As far as I could work out, 4 female Mainz 05 fans had been stepping out of line, annoying bus driver and fellow passengers.

They'll doubtless be in court on Monday morning, charged with celebrating without due cause (we lost to Frankfurt via a VERY dubious penalty in the 81st minute..) and singing Humba Humba Humba Täterä without a license.

"There's rosemary......#1182

...that's for remembrance." 
Hamlet, IV, 5


So do you think that if I were to wrap a rosemary wreath around my cranium, it would do away with CRS syndrome?

And then there were....#1181

...two.

Take one beam left over from a half-timbered house from around 1600, 4 saucer-type thingies by Frank the Potter plus 4 candles and you're all set for Advent.

Not to forget the tin Christmas trees, of course.

Numbered, so that the senile members of the family don't neeed to work out which candle neds lighting when.

Almost like painting by numbers....

The Weck-Dixon line....#1180

..just doesn't have that .....RING.... to it....

What the Mason jar is to American housewives, the Weck jar is to German Hausfrauen. Or French ménagère for that matter.

Johann Carl Weck didn't invent the process for preserving fruit in glass jars in an autoclave - that was a chemist by the name of Dr Rudolf Rempel - but Weck supposedly bought the patent in 1900 primarily because he was a wowser and didn't care for the use of alcohol in preserving fruit.

He must have suffered from ADHS too, because he shot through to France the following year to carry on with the crusade.

But at this time of year, don't they just make a very festive lantern.

Don't know who invented the American version.

Perry Mason, probably...

Ramparts - #1179

 

Looking up at the fortifications that are the Mainz Rathaus (town hall), one could be excused for thinking that at any moment boiling oil or similar could be released from above the portcullises (portcullii?) and that phalanxes of archers are just waiting for the chance to turn intruders into a fair imitation of a porcupine.

If you DO happen to get sprayed with anything against the acoustic background of a muffled explosion, though, it's likely to be the air-conditioning imploding and distributing its contents over the city.

The Rathaus was designed by Danish architects Arne Jacobsen and Otto Weitling, was built in 1973 and according to the Mainzer Allgemeine Zeitung (local rag) leaked like a sieve from Day 1.

Unlike most sensible people, the city has invariably neglected to put money away for a rainy day, instead running up debts that cumulate to close on €1bn ($1.34bn) and resulting in not having 2 cents ($0.028) to rub together.

Unfortunate, then, that they don't have the financial resources to at least perform normal maintenance on the place (go into the foyer and you think you're in a building site...), let alone making the place energy efficient and reducing the annual power bill from €600,000 (2009 values) to something more manageable.

Unfortunate, too, that the cost for bringing the place up to scratch is around €60m. Or more than it cost to build.

So if I were you, I'd definitely carry an umbrella if you're anywhere near the place.

Especially if you go inside....

The Invisible Strings....#1178

..and other Festive Illusions.

It's all going to be my fault, of course.

We rocked on down into the Big Smoke last night for a Christmas concert in the cathedral in the tradition of Years Past and my expectations were pretty much fixed - Cathedral choir, Cathedral brass ensemble, Cathedral organ and some heavy duty classical stuff.

Not that I'd researched it extensively, because yesterday was pretty much the only free slot until sometime in 2011. (This oversight will come back to haunt me for years...)

Sat on the marble staircase at the back of the cathedral to choruses of "My bum's going to be cold" and thoroughly enjoyed the Cathedral choir followed by the Cathedral brass ensemble.

By this stage, frostbite had affected the nether regions of other members of the party who proclaimed that her bum was indeed cold if she indeed still had one and she was going to find a possie slightly less arctic.

So when Johannes Kalpers started singing, I had no-one to consult with.

For example: Do they REALLY have castratos these days? And where did he hide the full string orchestra with angelic backing singers?

Penny drops.

It's a backing track.

So I do a quick research on the iPhone and stumble across names in the program that I've never heard of: Johannes Kalpers. Ingrid Peters.Marshall & Alexander.

They all look like bloody clones of the Osmonds or the Partridge Family.

Finally get a line of sight to Ms jb (relaxing under the palm trees) and express my critical verdict (subdued eye-rolling, throat-cutting motions - that sort of thing) with which she appears to concur.

A thumb motion in the direction of the exit is fairly conclusive

"What the hell was that?" I said.

"Well, YOU arranged it" sez Ms jb (cf Sentence #1) "and you MUST recognise the singer from those TV programs that you zap through"

"You mean the ones where the spectacularly lowbrow artist ends up in the vineyards, supposedly singing in the wild (but in studio quality) with the Invisible Strings?"

Other penny drops....

Good thing that we stopped at that stage to ensure that we had enough to afford our annual ration of saturated fat at the potato pancake stand.

I can feel my coronary arteries clogging up as I ty

Flying the flag -#1177

Two (benches) are company, three (flags) are a crowd.

No takers for seating opportunies at the Town Hall yesterday at a crisp -4ºC

Chock full of goodness - #1176

At Odile's Advent hoolie.

If you listen to Monika Granereau, this cake of Aleppo soap will add years to your life and strip away decades of ageing, with the result that they'll be IDing you in bars when you're 94....

Not quite, but it's chock full of goodness, just oozing olive oil and laurel oil and totally genuine, even says so here in Arabic.

I put on the most intelligent look I could muster (probably reaches about 75 on the IQ scale. Max.) and said "Well, I'm fluent in Arabic and it says here "Made in China"

"Nice try" she said "but there was an Iranian lady here just now, and she wouldn't believe you. And neither do I."

Oh.

But it really is excellent stuff and she's a very charming lady.

Not a big surprise if she's a friend of Odile's...

Just like a bad dream.....#1175

OK.

So I followed up on the sculptures in front of the Gutenberg Museum and actually got a response from one of the academic staff.

We now know that the panels are the work of Karl-Heinz Krause, a Berlin sculptor commissioned with creating gates for the museum and that they date back to the museum's re-opening in 1962 

And it was suggested "that I google for the rest of the details."

The "rest of the details" are: the panels were cast in bronze by a fine art foundry in Berlin.

That's it. 

There is NOTHING ELSE of relevance on the interweb. (And people say that I'm a really skilled researcher...)

• A total of 2 hits for a search on "Karl-Heinz Krause" AND "gates" ("tore", actually) AND "Gutenberg Museum". 
• A total of 18 (with 4 redundancies) for a less stringent search
• The work doesn't feature in various lists of Mainz's monuments, fountains and sculptures.
• The artist's Wikipedia page doesn't even REFERENCE the work.
• The foundry doesn't even list the artist as a reference

Which isn't a big surprise, because on the interweb you can only google for content that someone has actually made available in a searchable form.

Given that there are only 2 sources for knowledge on this sculpture - the artist and the museum (the former knowing everything, the latter knowing very little) -  might it not be an idea to create some content before the artist drops off the perch? 

He's 86, after all...

Something along he lines of  

"In 1961, the Berlin sculptor Karl-Heinz Krause was commissioned to create a work representing the gates of the newly re-opened museum. The 4 panels, each measuring wugga wugga wugga,  were cast in bronze by the renowned Berlin art foundry wugga wugga wugga and depict three dimensional positive and negative images of traditional printing plates wugga wugga wugga.

The individual plates are replicas of wugga wugga wugga

 Etc "

So if the new director of the museum (a breath of fresh air after her predecessor, btw) happens to be reading this -  I'm looking at you to fill in the gaps....

Update:
Commenter Jean Spitzer suggested "I think you just created the content and are now the best source in the world for info on this sculpture."

Not far off the truth probably.

Check out YMBFA in a couple of days for something definitive...

Monthly Theme Day - Time - #1174

About thyme it stopped snowing, if you ask me.....

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