A London-based graphic designer has created a series of maps depicting Europe according to the national stereotypes in the minds of various peoples. Yanko Tsvetkov, a Bulgarian living in Great Britain, created the first one in 2009 in the midst of the energy dispute between Russia and the Ukraine. Russia was labelled “Paranoid Oil Empire”, the Ukraine “Gas Stealers”, and the E.U. as “Union of Subsidized Farmers”. Switzerland was simply “Bank”.

“I created the first one in 2009 because at that time there was an energy crisis in Europe,” Mr. Tsvetkov said. “I just created it to amuse my friends but when I put it up on my website so many people liked it that I decided to really focus on the project of mapping the stereotypes based on different places in Europe. I was surprised by the reaction because I never really expected it to take off like this.” (more…)

What are the best ways of following the Pope’s visit to Great Britain? The official website is offering a live webcast of all events, with highlights from the day interspersed between events. The Daily Telegraph is live-blogging the papal events each day, with frequent updates; today can be found here. The Catholic Herald is also live-blogging the Papal Visit, and updates on today’s events can be found here.

Check catholicherald.co.uk and telegraph.co.uk for more throughout the visit.

(more…)

President is Welcomed at Afrikaners-Only Enclave in Northern Cape

President Zuma yesterday paid a ‘goodwill visit’ to the whites-only Afrikaner enclave of Orania in the Northern Cape. The trip was prompted when Pres. Zuma received word that the town’s founded Prof. Carel Boshoff IV, was in poor health. Orania was founded in 1990, some months after whites voted to dismantle apartheid, as a place where Afrikaner self-reliance could be practiced and cultural heritage preserved. The town has pioneered various agricultural and ecological projects, and in 2004 started its own local currency, the Ora, which is equal to ten rand. (more…)

In his latest column for the Mail on Sunday, the commentator and Orwell Prize winner Peter Hitchens shares his thoughts on the Blitz — the Luftwaffe’s bombing campaign over London that commenced sixty years ago this month. His comments have special relevance given the previous posts on andrewcusack.com regarding the immorality of the Hiroshima & Nagasaki bombings, and likewise of the intentional and deliberate targeting of civilian non-combatants. (more…)

Art Gallery in the Heart of the Hague Unveils Expansion Plans

WELL, NOT THAT deep, really. The Mauritshuis museum in the Hague recently unveiled its plans to expand underground and across the street into a neighbouring building. The square-footage of the museum will double after the completion of the new project, which will include a new entrance, exhibition hall, café, and lecture theatre. The entrance to the museum, currently accessed from the side street, will return to the front of the Mauritshuis but underground rather than through the main doorway on the ground floor.

The building was originally constructed between 1636 and 1641 for Johan Maurits, Prince of Nassau-Siegen next to the Binnenhof palace. At the time, Prince Johan Maurits (a cousin of the stadtholder Frederik Henrik, Prince of Orange) was governor of the New Holland, the Dutch colony in Brazil. In 1820, the palace was purchased by the government to house the Royal Cabinet of Paintings. The Mauritshuis art museum was separated from the state by being transformed into a private foundation which enjoys the use of the building and the art collection on long-loan from the government. (more…)

Over at afrikaans.be, Anton Raath posts a verbal snapshot of Stellenbosch in 1819 from ‘The Cyclopædia: or universal dictionary of arts, sciences, and literature’:

STELLENBOSCH, in Geography, a small town of Southern Africa, near the Cape of Good Hope. It consists of three long straight streets, running parallel to each other, and several cross streets intercepting these at right angles. The houses are all spacious, and substantially built, though only thatched with straw.

Each street resembles an avenue, since, on both sides before the houses, are large sturdy oaks, which are almost as old as the place itself, which was built at the beginning of the former century, though it was wholly burnt down in 1710. In December, 1803, a similar accident happened, when the number of houses left standing was about 80. The church was built in 1722, and though not equal in size to the churches of Roodezant and Paarl, it is no way inferior to them in point of architecture.

The number of inhabitants at Stellenbosch, including slaves and Hottentots, is estimated at 1000. Every person in this town carries on, with his trade, some portion of agriculture and horticulture; and as there are none who can be called actually poor, who labour for hire, they are obliged to have slaves, who do not pay the expence of keeping them.

Strangers, who in their long voyages make any stay at the Cape, never fail to visit Stellenbosch; and people of property at the Cape Town also, in the fine season of the year, often make parties of pleasure to this fertile spot. Hence houses are fitted up here for the accommodation and entertainment of strangers.

“Hoe meer dinge verander…” Mnr Raath comments.

The Most Ancient and Most Noble Order of the Thistle

In accordance with tradition, knights are appointed to the Order of the Thistle on the feast of Scotland’s patron saint, the Apostle Andrew, but they are not formally installed until the following summer when the Queen is in residence at the Palace of Holyroodhouse. And so this past July, the ‘Thistle Service’ took place at St. Giles’, the High Kirk of Edinburgh, and two new knights were inducted into Scotland’s highest honour and most exalted order of chivalry.

The knights, dames, and officers, dressed in their flowing velvet mantles of green along with their hats and collars, gather across Parliament Square in the Library of the Society of Writers to Her Majesty’s Signet (Scotland’s professional body of solicitors), part of the Parliament House complex that long ago housed the kingdom’s legislature, and is now home to her courts. In Parliament Square itself, the Royal Company of Archers (the Queen’s Body Guard for Scotland) forms a guard of honour and is accompanied by the band of the Royal Regiment of Scotland. (more…)

Six of South Africa’s thirteen monarchies are to be mediatised, the country’s president announced in July. A report by the Commission on Traditional Leadership Disputes and Claims of the South African government concluded that the six dynasties had been raised from chiefdoms to monarchies by the apartheid government for purely political reasons and suggested that their government funding and recognition be ended. President Zuma said the aim of the move was to correct “the wrongs of the past” but that no one was being accused of collaboration with the apartheid authorities. The six incumbent rulers will retain their styles and dignities while their successors will revert to the rank of princely chiefs.

“We have been waiting for this decision for a long time,” Khosi Fhumulani Kutama, the Chairman of the National House of Traditional Leaders told the media. “It is important that people accept it not only for the institution of traditional leadership but for the whole country.”

But the indications so far are that the six monarchies will take the government to court in an attempt to forestall the demotion.

Up to this point, the most significant spate of mediatisation was during the Napoleonic era, when Talleyrand arranged the demotion and reorganisation of conquered German lands.

The slightly camp Old Etonian atheist neo-con Douglas Murray got himself into a bit of trouble recently when he and Baroness Deech unleashed a splenetic rant against Scotland and the Scots on BBC Radio 4. As head of the HFEA, Baroness Deech presided over the deaths of an untold number of humans in the embryonic stage of development, but it turns out that Mr. Murray (who is Scottish-born, curiously) has advocated hypothetical wholesale slaughter.

In 2007, Mr. Murray helped compose Towards a Grand Strategy for an Uncertain World: Renewing Transatlantic Partnership ostensibly written by Gen. Dr. Klaus Naumann (former Bundeswehr Chief of Staff), Gen. Prince John Salikashvili (Georgian prince and former U.S. Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff), Field Marshal the Lord Inge (former U.K. Chief of the General Staff), Adm. Jacques Lanxade (former Chief of the French Navy), and Gen. Henk van den Breemen (accomplished organist and former Chief of Staff of the Dutch military).

This interesting document made a number of recommendations, the most intriguing of which is the suggestion that NATO should be prepared to make a pre-emptive nuclear strike… in order to prevent the use of weapons of mass destruction (“WMDs”) such as, er, nuclear weapons. You read that correctly: in order to prevent the use of WMDs, NATO should be prepared to use WMDs. You couldn’t make it up!

The vanished lands and failed alliances of the Modern Olympiad

THE GAMES OF THE Modern Olympiad are events which are meant to bring the peoples of the world together in peace and harmony and all those good and heartening things, but from the very beginning they have gotten bogged down in the petty particularities of rival nations, which altogether makes them rather more fun and interesting, if perhaps a touch less high-minded. The story of the ancient gathering’s revival in 1896 through the efforts of Pierre Frédy, Baron de Coubertin is well-known. Athletes from at least fourteen countries participated in those first modern games in Athens over a century ago, though the concept of national teams was not introduced until the 1906 games (the Intercalated Games, which have since been de-recognised by the IOC). But since those first games towards the end of the nineteenth century, the fortunes of many lands have waxed and waned, and likewise the spirit of unity amongst various peoples vied with the spirit of distinctiveness. Here, then, are but a small sample of Olympic teams which once vied for gold but which can no longer be found among the Olympic competitors of today. (more…)

VISITORS TO CAPE TOWN may be surprised that, given the beauty and multiplicity of animals in the vicinity, the ‘Mother City’ has no zoo. There is actually a popular zoo at Tygerberg, twenty-four miles from Cape Town and less than ten miles from Stellenbosch, which is the only zoo in the province. But centuries ago — around 1700 — a ‘menagerie’ was founded in the Company’s Gardens in Cape Town which survived for over a hundred years.

François Valentijn, in his visit of 1714, noted the menagerie boasted a pair of ‘rheen’ or ‘rheebokken’ (probably kudu), a black rhinoceros, an eland, a ‘rossen bok’ (possibly a hartebeest), a hippopotamus, two lions, and a zebra. In the 1770s, the Swede Anders Sparrman noted the presence of many springbok, a warthog, some ostriches, and even a cassowary. The selection varied widely through the years, and given Cape Town’s status as ‘The Tavern of the Seas’ central to the European route to the Indies and the Far East, the zoo included not only African beasts but also some (like the Papuan cassowary) brought from the Orient.

In 1777, the notorious rake William Hickey ventured to extoll it as “the finest menagerie in the world, in which are collected the most extraordinary animals and birds of every quarter of the globe”. Less than fifteen years later, however, Lt. George Tobin of the Royal Navy described it as “a menagerie of some extent. It was but poorly supplied, there being but a few ostriches and some different kinds of deer.” Decades later, in February 1825, a traveller noted the menagerie in the pages of the Montly Magazine of London:

At the end of the Grand Walk, which is nearly three-quarters of a mile long, is the Company’s Menagerie, which is worth seeing, on account of a good-natured old lion, supposed to be the largest ever taken into captivity, and a tiger of immense size and power; there are several other specimens of African animals: but those are infinitely the largest of their species I ever saw—we have nothing that comes near them in England.

A spiritually inclined passer-through, the Rev. Henry Martyn, Chaplain to the Honourable East India Company, stated in 1832 that the “lion and a lioness, amongst the beasts, and the ostrich, led my thoughts very strongly to admire and glorify the power of the great Creator.” It was around that time that Sir Benjamin d’Urban, Governor of the Cape, granted land next to the menagerie for the erection of a building for the South African College, the germ of what would become the University of Cape Town. This was the beginning of what is now called the Hiddingh campus of UCT, the institution’s first home which continues alongside the main campus built on the Rhodes estate on the slopes of Devil’s Peak. The menagerie was shut in 1838 and the first building of the proto-UCT went up the next year in an exotic Egyptian Revival style.

The lion gates, however, are from earlier. They were built in 1805, probably by Thibault, with the lions & lionesses sculpted by the architect’s frequent collaborator Anton Anreith, also responsible for the magnificent pulpit in the Groote Kerk. The lionesses on the UCT side are original but the lions on the other side, curiously, were removed in 1873. In 1958 they were restored when Ivan Mitford-Barberton — arguably South Africa’s greatest sculptor after Anreith — created new beasts for the old perches. The gates are still there if you walk up the Government Avenue that bisects the Company’s Gardens, beautiful in the eye of this beholder in their immaculate, white, classical elegance.

The Pentecost Paris-Chartres Pilgrimage 2010

PENTECOST commemorates the descent of the Holy Spirit, often considered the birthday of the Church. Each year, this great feast of the Church is marked by the pilgrimage from the Cathedral of Notre-Dame de Paris on the Île de la Cité (above) to Notre-Dame de Chartres in the Orléanais by pilgrims young and old devoted to the traditional form of the Latin rite. The pilgrimage, often a feast of flags and banners, takes three days beginning on the Saturday of Pentecost weekend, continuing through the great feast itself, and arriving in Chartres on Pentecost Monday (which is still a public holiday in France). This year, Cardinal Vingt-Trois, the Archbishop of Paris, graciously led Benediction on the second day of the pilgrimage, and met with and blessed individual pilgrims. (more…)

Since the decision by ICANN, the mysterious council of elders whose nomenclatory dominion spans, it seems, the entirety of the “world wide web”, to designate .cat as the “sponsored Top-Level Domain” of the Catalonian linguistic and cultural community, much speculation has arisen in various sub-statal lands throughout the world about future TLDs. In our favoured realm of Scotland, a campaign has arisen for .scot to be designated the TLD for Scotland. While I wholeheartedly support the campaign for a Scottish TLD, I have already expressed my reservations about the increasing size (not number) of TLDs. The traditional country-code TLDs are all two-letter combinations, and any new TLDs representing geographic entities ought to stick to this restraint.

But then what would Scotland’s top-level domain be? .sl is taken by Sierra Leone, while .sc belongs to the Seychelles, and .st to São Tomé. We might hark back to the Gaelic with .al for Alba, except that it’s already occupied by Albania. Ah! Caledonia! How about .cd? Nope, that belongs to the Congo. Blast. It might be necessary to go to three letters then, which brings us either to .sco or .sct. Neither look all that attractive, though .sco has the advantage of being pronounceable. Actually, .sco is quite imaginable, when spoken: parliament.gov.sco, fifeherald.sco, glenfiddich.sco. It just doesn’t look right. .scot looks better, but the rhyming nature of “dot scot” is irritating to say aloud.

I do wish they’d make .gb available again. I’d much rather be a “gee-bee” than a “yoo-kay”. Great Britain is a natural entity, after all, whereas the United Kingdom is a government construct. Perhaps if the Union is re-negotiated, we might move from .uk to .gb, just as .yu was changed to .cs when Yugoslavia was renamed Serbia & Montenegro. (The two split not long afterwards, and went for .rs and .me).

With four letters, at least .scot is not the longest proposed top-level domain. Some ninny thinks there should be a .quebec — how cumbersome! .qu would be much better, and one can just imagine the Québécois pronouncing it. Other British proposals include .eng for England and .cym for Wales. “Norn Iron” loses out, as .ni belongs to Nicaragua, but .ul or .uls are conceivable for Ulster. Perhaps the Vatican could dole out .sre — Sancta Romana Ecclesia — for ecclesiastical domains.

A Selection of University Portraiture by the South African Painter

THE ART SCENE in South Africa is widely varied in both style and quality, and the individual artist who is devoted solely to a single school is almost rare. The works of Cyril Coetzee (born in 1959) vary from quasi-figurative explorations of colour dynamics to multi-layered, almost mythological narrative paintings. His academic research at Rhodes University, located in his Eastern Cape hometown of Grahamstown, explored anthroposophic colour theory, so it’s no surprise part of his further studies were undertaken at the Goetheanum in Dornach, Switzerland (one of the sites covered in Stephen Klimczuk & Gerald Warner of Craigenmaddie’s Secret Places, Hidden Sanctuaries). Coetzee’s corpus also include a number of purely figurative portraits, many of which were commissioned by places of learning in South Africa. (more…)

Travel Advertising from the Golden Age of Poster Design

FINLAND IS HIGH on my list of places to visit once I am re-situated across the pond, mainly because of the exceptional warmth and charm of the Finns I am blessed enough to call my friends. If the Finns themselves weren’t reason enough to visit the Land of the Midnight Sun, journalist & travel historian Magnus Londen has teamed up with copywriter Joakim Enegren and web operative Ant Simons to compile Come to Finland: Posters & Travel Tales 1851-1965. The art of poster design is one sadly neglected today, when advertising has developed into myriad other more pervasive yet less impressive forms. The book’s closing date, 1965, roughly marks the end of the golden years of poster design. Visitors to the book’s website can order postcards of the posters featured in the book, or copies of the posters themselves, more of which the dedicated poster-hunting authors are continually discovering. (more…)

Prof. Eugene Cloete and his colleagues at the Water Institute of the University of Stellenbosch have come up with a helpful solution to the problem of drinking water in developing countries. The professor invented an inexpensive, teabag-like sac of nano-fibres — each about one hundredth the width of a human hair — which is secured into the lid of a reusable vessel. The water then passes through the filter secured in the lid and is thereby purified and made much more potable for human consumption.

The importance of the breakthrough is not only in its ease, but in its cheapness. Prof. Cloete estimates it would cost just three cents a litre to produce water that is the same quality level as bottled water (If he means three ZAR cents, then that is about equivalent to half a U.S. dollar cent — half a penny). Numerous foundations have expressed interest in a major roll-out of the cheap and efficient new filter system invented at Stellenbosch University.

In the video above, Prof. Eugene Cloete and Dr. Marelizes Botes explain the use and the science of the teabag filter, though I’m afraid the science of it goes a bit beyond my layman’s knowledge. The professor does manage to work in a bit of Afrikaans at the end of the video though.

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