Author: kenritley

Then and Now – Bern – Vor dem Bundeshaus

kenritley

THEN: Vor dem Bundeshaus, 01.01.1915

NOW:

And in color

COMMENTS:

Very nearly the same after around 115 years!  The older lamppost was taller – it probably needed to illuminate more. And in the old photo you see a black metal attachment to the bottom of the wall. Since the doors are reset quite a distance I am assuming this is not a door stopper but a shit scraper, but probably officially called a show scraper (or in German, Schuhkratzer).

Then and Now – Bern – Bubenbergplatz? Hirschengraben?

kenritley

Then:

Now:

Now in color:

Comments:

I was first pretty pleased with myself that I took a modern snap and compared it with an historical one. 

But I was fooled!

It is TRUE that the building to the left has a so-called “pediment” (triangle) – it is TRUE that both snaps look similar – and it is TRUE that Tram 9 as shown in the old snap still exists and runs next to the statute today.  But in fact, the original snap shows the Bubenberg statue positioned on Bubenbergplatz, something that no longer really exists!  Apparently it was moved in 1930 to the Hirschengraben, where it is located today.

So this is just a complete coincidence that the old snap looks like the new snap!

In an upcoming blog I will show what Bubenbergplatz looks like today – and your eyeballs will EXPLODE!

Cirque de Navacelles

kenritley

I actually learned about this in the geology class I took at Ohlone College back in 1983 – a river meanders and then the meander cuts itself off. In this case there is a medieval village down below. It’s so far off the beaten track in south France that I think it would take anyone 3 hours to get here. And it is a damn scary drive: I spent over an hour driving on narrow switchback roads high in the French mountains – so narrow, if you’d run into another car, someone would have to back up nearly a kilometer!

Hohenstadt Elephant

kenritley

For reasons I don’t understand – and neither does ChatGPT – you’ll find a surprising number of pictures or statues of elephants in the Schwabian region of southern Germany. ChatGPT speculated that a large number of Schwabians participated in the Crusades, where they most likely encountered many elephants – so that’s the reason.

La Couvertoirade – A templar village in South France – Part 1

kenritley

Continuing the series, here is a snap of La Couvertoirade, a village in Southern France that dates back to the 1200’s.  The templars were a group of fighters first started in 1119 in Jerusalem, during the Crusades. After around 1300 the templars fell (well, they did not really fall, like falling on the ground – they “fell” in the sense of all getting slaughtered by King Philipp IV of France, for corruption and having too much power) – and a somewhat older group (a religious order called the Knights Hospitaller) took over the city. Believe it or not, it was not until the 1980’s that people got smart – and in this case “smart” means “let’s make the village pretty so we can sell souvenirs to hoards of tourists!”

Bolards: an elegant defense for more noble times

kenritley

OK, it is always a bad idea to paraphrase Obi Wan Kenobi, but during my recent trip to Marseille I thought for a bit how some things never change. In the middle ages, villages and cities used stone walls to protect the people inside against invaders — and, by the way, to more effectively and efficiently kill those who would try to invade. And today, bolards are used to protect the people inside against terrorists. Maybe we can define “progress” in this sense, because today we build infrastructure to keep the terrorists out, not to kill them.

As an IT guy, I am wondering if we could call this a design pattern?

Here is a barricade I spotted guarding the pedestrian area of the Vieux-Port in Marseille:

And here is a nice snap of the Barricade Man opening it, so a water spray truck can drive inside and spray water everywhere. The French really don’t feel comfortable unless the streets are sprayed with water on a regular basis.