My New Home -

Wiki:

The Waldspirale is a residential building complex in Darmstadt, Germany, built in the 1990s. The name translates into English as forest spiral, reflecting both the general plan of the building and the fact that it has a green roof. It was designed by Viennese artist Friedensreich Hundertwasser, planned and implemented by architect Heinz M. Springmann, and constructed by the Bauverein Darmstadt company. The building was completed in 2000.

The Waldspirale apartment building is located in Darmstadt's Bürgerparkviertel. It contains 105 apartments, a parking garage, a kiosk as well as a café and a bar (the last two being located at the top of the spiral). The inner courtyard contains a playground for the children of the residents and a small artificial lake. Peculiarities of the U-shaped building are the unique facade, which does not follow a regular grid organization, and the windows, which appear as if they were "aus der Reihe tanzen," (dancing out of line)^[1] everywhere different and appearing out of order, often with 'tree tenants' - trees growing out from the windows. The diagonal roof, planted with grass, shrubs, flowers and trees, rises like a ramp along the U-form. At its highest point, the building has 12 floors.

The windows of the Waldspirale, which number over 1000, are all unique: no two windows are the same. Similarly, different handles are attached in each apartment to the doors and windows. Some of the apartments are decorated in Friedensreich Hundertwasser's personal style and exhibit the colourful tiles in the bath and kitchen that are characteristic of his work. Furthermore, all the corners are rounded off in these apartments along the roof and walls in an application of Hundertwasser's dogma "gegen die gerade Linie" or "against the straight line." For cost reasons, only a few of the apartments' interiors were designed individually.

From the outside, the typical elements of Hundertwasser's personal style attract attention: the gilded onion domes, the absence of straight lines and sharp corners, the multicoloured painting of the building in earth tones and the colourful ceramic columns.

The Death Of Blackhawk

There are almost-lost treasures out there, all-but-forgotten wonders, which is why s.a. and I started MKF: to share those treasures, those wonders. One of those almost-forgotten things we've been looking for was Errol McCarthy' magnificent Death of Blackhawk from the pages of the underground comic Slow Death. Thanks to a treasure himself, Mr. Door Tree and his Golden Age Comic Book Stories blog, here it is.

Weirdsville On The Cud

Here is something very special: the great folks at the Aussie site The Cud asked me to write them something unique, just for them - always a great way to get me to do anything - and the piece, on Friedrich Wilhelm I and his very, very, very big Potsdam Grenadiers, just went up.


If you're going to dream, the old saying goes, then you might as well dream big. But Friedrich Wilhelm I did more than dream because, as another expression says all too well: It's good to be the King.

Friedrich, born in 1688, was just one in a series of notable Prussian leaders. Friedrich, though, unlike his father, Frederick I -- who achieved much during his reign, including wearing the crown for the first time, or Friedrich's son -- Frederick II, who was a reformer and fervent supporter of reason and the arts – Friedrich, to put it mildly, loved a man in uniform … in a secularly big way.

Friedrich, you see, had this thing about the military. Oh, sure, he did, during his reign, improve his then-tiny country's defenses, and carefully – almost pathologically – controlled Prussia's economy to the point when he finally passed away he left behind an awesome surplus. But Friedrich's military obsession wasn't really about keeping his people safe, or even about acquiring new territories: Friedrich liked – really liked -- a grand spit and polish display.

How big? How grand? Well, Friedrich's all-consuming passion was for his grenadiers, a Regiment hand-picked not for their skill in battle, their heroic abilities, but for being tall.

In a time when the average height was probably around five foot something, the grenadiers – which quickly became known by the Prussians as the "Lange Kerls" (Big Guys) – began at six feet and went up up from there.

The Big Guys – and some of them were very big, coming in around seven feet – were the king's all-consuming passion, to the point where it became common for foreign dignitaries to use 'gifts' of very tall men to curry favor with Friedrich. But even these presents, many of them with little say in the matter, weren't enough to satisfy Friedrich's obsession: his agents, promised huge rewards, were dispatched to the far corners of Europe to get, by any means necessary, the tallest people they could find.

To say these agents were zealous would be an understatement: there are tales of them kidnapping farmers from their fields, innkeepers from their taverns, an Irish priest in the middle of a sermon, and they even had the audacity to try to grab a Austrian diplomat. There's even the story of one poor soul who was snatched off the streets of some foreign city and shipped back to Prussia, but who arrived stiff and cold because the agents forgot to punch air-holes in the crate.

Friedrich was so determined to fill the ranks of his grenadiers he even began his own program of selective breeding, offering tall women and men rewards to produce even taller children – and heaven help you if you knew someone nice and tall and didn't tell the king about it.

Oh, how the king loved his grenadiers: he would lovingly paint their portraits from memory, or order them to march for hours and hours around his palace courtyard just so he relish in their military tallness, and, if the king was feeling under the weather, he would even have them thunderously circle his bed until he got better. As he told the French ambassador: "The most beautiful girl or woman in the world would be a matter of indifference to me, but tall soldiers -- they are my weakness."

Yes, it was very good to be the king – but, alas, it was not so grand to be one of his grenadiers. Even though Friedrich doted over them, many of his giants were in agony from diseases related to their gigantism, were painfully depressed after finding themselves in a unfamiliar land and unable to speak a word of German, or who -- again as a tragic effect of their great height – were mentally the age of a young child. Desertions were common, but since the giants were, well, 'gigantic' they were quickly caught and subsequently, and brutally, punished. Some, sadly, made the ultimate escape – but even suicides didn't dissuade the king from begging, borrowing, or out-and-out stealing tall men for his grenadiers. At its (excuse me) 'height' the flamboyant regiment numbered over 3,000 men.

Not surprising, considering how incredibly infatuated Friedrich was with them, the grenadiers were never sent into battle.

Eventually, though, the king died, and with his death the kingdom, and Friedrich's beloved Potsdam Grenadiers, were passed down to his son, Frederick II. But while his father adored brass fittings, a good uniform, and everything else stern and military, the son – having been raised by a stern and military father -- absolutely did not. Ironically, though, Frederick II did attack neighboring Austria, putting into practice some of his father's teachings. He also, after a time, put into actual combat what few of Friedrich's grenadiers remained.

There was one problem, though. Because they were considerably taller – very considerably taller – than their fellow soldiers, these surviving grenadiers didn't survive very long: they were too much of a perfect targets.

Absolutely, if you’re going to dream you should dream big. But if you're lucky -- and you're a king -- you don't have to settle for only dreams: you too, like Friedrich, can have your own marching, thundering fantasy brought to remarkably, and legendarily, tall life.

Whatever Happened To The Future?

Yum yum yum (and ewwwwwww)

Wiki:

Charles Domery (c. 1778 – after 1800), also known as Charles Domerz was a Polish soldier, noted for his unusually large appetite. While serving in the Prussian Army against France during the War of the First Coalition, he found that the rations of the Prussians were insufficient and deserted to the French Revolutionary Army in return for food. While generally healthy, he was voraciously hungry during his time in the French army, and ate any available food. While stationed near Paris he was recorded as having eaten 174 cats in a year, and although he disliked vegetables he would eat 4 to 5 pounds (1.8 to 2.3 kg) of grass each day if he was unable to find other food. During service on the French frigate Hoche, he attempted to eat the severed leg of a crew member hit by cannon fire, before other members of the crew wrestled it from him.

In February 1799 the Hoche was captured by British forces and the crew, including Domery, interned in Liverpool. Domery shocked his captors with his voracious appetite, and despite being put on ten times the rations of other inmates remained ravenous, eating the prison cat, at least 20 rats which had come into his cell, and regularly eating the prison candles. Domery's case was brought to the attention of The Commissioners for taking Care of Sick and Wounded Seamen and for the Care and Treatment of Prisoners of War, who performed an experiment to test his eating capacity. Over the course of a day Domery was fed a total of 16 pounds (7.3 kg) of raw cow's udder, raw beef and tallow candles and four bottles of porter, all of which he ate and drank without defecating, urinating or vomiting at any point.

By the age of 13 Domery had enlisted in the Prussian Army and was part of an army besieging Thionville during the War of the First Coalition. The Prussian army was suffering from food shortages which Domery found intolerable; he entered the town and surrendered to the French commander who rewarded him with a large melon, which Domery immediately ate, including the rind. He was then given a wide variety of other foodstuffs by the French General, all of which he ate straight away.

Domery then enlisted with the French Revolutionary Army. He shocked his new comrades with his unusual eating habits and voracious appetite. Granted double rations, and using his pay to buy additional food whenever possible, he nonetheless remained voraciously hungry; while based in an army camp near Paris, Domery ate 174 cats, leaving only the skins and bones, in a single year, and ate between 4 to 5 pounds (1.8 to 2.3 kg) of grass each day if other food was unavailable.

He preferred raw meat to cooked; while his favourite dish was a raw bullock's liver, he would eat any available meat. While in service on board the French frigate Hoche a sailor's leg was shot off by cannon fire, and Domery grabbed the severed limb and began to eat it until a crew member wrestled it from him and threw it into the sea ...

Who Is He?

Wiki:

Frédéric Bourdin (born 1974 in Nanterre, Hauts-de-Seine) is a French serial impostor the press has nicknamed "The Chameleon".

According to himself, his lawyer and the press reports, Bourdin was raised by his grandparents in Paris and was later put into a children's home. He says that he never knew his father, that his mother intended to have an abortion and eventually abandoned him and that he was sexually abused. In an interview with the New Yorker, his mother said that Bourdin's father was an Algerian immigrant named Kaci. He began his impostures as soon as he left the children's home and as of 2005^[update] had assumed at least 39 false identities, three of which have been actual teenage missing persons.

In 1997 Bourdin took the identity of Nicholas Barclay, a lost son of a family in San Antonio, Texas. He invited his would-be-parents to the US embassy in Spain to meet him. Even though Bourdin had brown eyes and a French accent, he convinced the family that he was their blue-eyed son who had disappeared three years previously. He said that he had escaped from a child prostitution ring.

Bourdin lived with the family for three months before a local private investigator exposed him and his real identity was confirmed by a DNA test. He was imprisoned for 6 years.

When Bourdin returned from the USA in 2003, he moved to Grenoble, assumed the name Leo Balley and claimed that he was a teenager who had been missing since 1996. DNA test proved otherwise.

In August 2004 he was in Spain, claiming to be adolescent Ruben Sanchez Espinoza and said that his mother had been killed in the Madrid bomb attacks. When the police found out the truth, they deported him to France.

In June 2005 Bourdin passed himself off as Francisco Hernandes-Fernandez, a 15-year-old Spanish orphan and spent a month in the College Jean Monnet in Pau, France. He claimed that his parents had been killed in a car accident. He dressed as a teenager, adopted a proper walking style, covered his bald patch with a baseball cap and used depilatory face creams. On June 12 a teacher unmasked him after he saw a TV program about his exploits. On September 16 he was sentenced to four months in prison for possessing and using the previous false identity of Leo Balley.

According to his 2005 interviews, Bourdin has been looking for "love and affection" and attention he never received as a child. He has pretended to be an orphan several times. He has also appeared in French and American TV shows but has continued his impostures.

In 2007, Bourdin married a French woman named Isabelle after a yearlong courtship. Isabelle recently gave birth to Bourdin's daughter, Athena. The three currently reside in an apartment outside of Pau in France.

Bourdin was interviewed in 2008 by David Grann, a columnist for The New Yorker. After Isabelle gave birth, Bourdin contacted Grann and told him it was a girl. Grann then asked if Bourdin had become a new person now that he was a father and a husband, to which Bourdin replied, "No, this is who I am."

Yum!

Wiki:

The Kindlifresserbrunnen (German for Child Eater Fountain) is a fountain at the Kornhausplatz (Granary Place) in Bern, Switzerland. It is one of the Old City of Bern's fountains from the 16th century.

It was created in 1545/46 by Hans Gieng in place of a wooden fountain from the 15th century. The new fountain's original name was Platzbrunnen (Place Fountain); the current name was used first in 1666. Kindli is a Swiss German diminutive for the German word Kind, meaning child. A literal translation of the name Kindlifresserbrunnen therefore would be "Fountain of the Eater of Little Children".

The fountain sculpture is a sitting ogre devouring a naked child. Placed at his side is a bag containing more children. Because the ogre is wearing a pointed hat resembling a Jewish hat, it has been speculated about the possibility of the ogre being the depiction of a Jew as an expression of blood libel against Jews. According to other theories it is a depiction of the Greek god Cronus. Probably, however, it is just a carnival character intended to frighten disobedient children.

Around the fountain's base runs a frieze showing armed bears going to war, including a piper and a drummer. The frieze was designed by Hans Rudolf Manuel.

Old Gangsters Never Die By Alan Moore

Musical Interlude: "Happy Boy" By The Beat Farmers

Monet's unknown masterpiece, Dogs At Cards.

Wiki:

Dogs Playing Poker refers collectively to a series of sixteen oil paintings by C. M. Coolidge, commissioned in 1903 by Brown & Bigelow to advertise cigars. All the paintings in the series feature anthropomorphized dogs, but the nine in which dogs are seated around a card table have become derisively well-known in the United States as examples of mainly working-class taste in home decoration. Critic Annette Ferrara describes Dogs Playing Poker as "indelibly burned into ... the American collective-schlock subconscious ... through incessant reproduction on all manner of pop ephemera."

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Detective Michael McCann: Monet's unknown masterpiece, Dogs At Cards.