Author: kenritley

Continuing the series, this shows that the clockface on the main gate to the  medieval  village of the North Central Swiss Neuenkirch is also blue,

“I don’t like mysteries – they give me a bellyache, and right now I’ve got a beaute.” That was Capt. Kirk, but I am the same way. It drives me nuts that almost 100% of the more modern clockfaces on medieval Swiss churches – and there are dozens of them – are the same blue; whereas the somewhat older clockfaces are an orange-red. Presumably, there was a movement (no pun) to refurbish the clocks – but until now I could find no historical record of this.

Continuing the series, here’s a shot looking down the long street towards the main medival gate,

The timing and location of the sun were almost perfect, as the shadow very neatly runs exactly down the line of buildings!

It’s not Winterthur – sorry about that – but one of the dozens and dozens of small villages that surround Winterthur and whose names are too numerous to mention: Elsau, Seuzach, Rätterchen . . . I’ve been to all of them so many times that their names and their sights blend into homogenous obscurity. Some of them were named in a time when people had no education – such as the Swiss Dorf named, appropriately enough, Dorf . And some of them dating back eons, when Switzerland was home to enclaves of Neanderthal humans with their massive jaws and presumably unique language, and the names of the villages are linguistic remnants of that pre-paleolithic time gone by – such as the village named Thaa.

This one is a bit different:

It’s different because the clockface on the church is red, not blue. I have a theory – unconfirmed until now – that the overwhelming majority of churches in North Central Switzerland were outfitted with new – and blue – clockfaces at about the same time. Clockfaces on churches that are demonstrably older are universally orange-red in color.

I call it the Gort head, because it reminds me of the head of the famous robot, Gort. What the artist calls it, I don’t know.

An artistic a snap as I thought I could take of the Gort-Head, in the north central Swiss village near Romanshorn,

I live in an area that has been surrounded by dozens if not hundreds of acres of open fields.

Today there is nary a field that does not have a large construction project, as this snap shows:

As artistic a snap I thought I could take of an ivy-covered lamppost in Zürich,

If you look closely, you’ll see the new shoots all growing to one side!

I don’t know if it is or it isn’t – by volume?  By height?  By number of fish killed as they spill over and are crushed in the turbulence?

But regardless it is something nice to look at!

As artistic a snap as I thought I could take of some violent, angry storm clouds threatening Europe’s largest waterfall,

Continuing the series, I spotted this sundial at exactly 10.58 AM in the medieval walled village of Neuenkirch,

The date listed as 1863, but I wonder if the current sundial really dates back to that time?

Although there are probably other countrie in Germany that have more, nevertheless Switzerland has its fair share. Here is a snap of the medeival walled village of Neuenkirch, just a few miles from where I live:

This is what it looks like when you peer through one of the gates to the village, and here is a plaque that shows the gate was built about a generation before Christopher Columbus ever set out for America: