MV Liemba

According to Wikipedia the MV Liemba is a passenger and cargo ferry that runs along the eastern shore of Lake Tanganyika, and according to the BBC, she is in dire need of refurbishment. This is because the MV Liemba, was built in 1913, and was formerly the German warship Graf von Götzen.

Graf von Götzen's main armament was a 105mm gun

This remarkable ship was built in Germany then freighted to Africa in 5,000 crates and dragged over land to the lake where it served Germany's imperial interests in the first world war. The British did the same, only they dragged two gunboats to Lake Tanganyika, and the end result was the Germans scuttled Graf von Götzen in 1916. Some of the story behind the two British gun boats can be read here.

Graf von Götzen remained submerged until 1924 when a Royal Navy salvage team raised her and found she was still in excellent condition (thats German engineering for you). She was cleaned up and recommissioned as the Liemba and has been in service ever since. As far as I know, she is the only World War One era war ship still in use today. The people who own her are requesting from Germany. I think if I was Chancellor, I'd give them a new ship as a present.

MV Liemba as she is today

If I had the time and the space, I'd be tempted to make a card model of the vessel for a Rocketman campaign. She has those classic lines that inspire the pulp/noir genre, and she'd make a great platform for a gun fight game.

Pissing in the wind

Two of Denmarks televison channels raised 110 million kroner in the cause of starving Africans today and a lot of my family and friends on facebook have expressed pride and satisfaction. 110 million kroner is about $21 million US, or £13 million Sterling. Not bad for a small country like ours.

Unfortunately I cannot share the joy, because I no longer believe raising ever larger sums of money to give to the Horn of Africa is going to change anything at all. Denmark alone forks out 15 billion kroner a year on foreign aid and even this collosal amount of money hasn't prevented the people of that blighted region from waging non stop civil wars (with attendant genocides) or from having the planet's highest fertility rates.

If anything I am dejected that a quarter of a century after Live Aid, we still maintain the illusion that throwing alms to the poor is going to solve anything at all. It is especially galling that a significant proportion of the money and food sent to alleviate suffering in the third world, is stolen by corrupt officials in the recipient countries and in the UN, which has degenerated beyond the absurd as a means of solving geopolitical problems. In many cases aid money raised by charity in the west buys the very weaponry and ammunition which is a part of the cause of problems faced by the starving multitude.

The female of the species

By Sapper

The fifth Bulldog Drummond novel, originally published in 1928, is the first novel I have read, featuring Drummond, since the mid 1990's. For some reason, although I loved the interwar ambience of the first four (which I have gathered in a single volume), I never bothered to look for any sequels until now. Turns out there are fifteen of them, so I shall look forward to reading a few more, though more as a consequence of the first four than of this one.

'The female of the species' doesn't really live up to its predessesors, and this is almost certainly due to the fact that, unlike them, the story is narrated by a character in the book. The fact that the principle antagonist of the first books is missing (having been killed off) doesn't help either, nor does the fact that the premise of this story rests on a plan of revenge hatched by the dead man's insane lover. The story is incredibly parochial, even for a novel of this character, and the author's attempt at a serious femme fatale is laughably inept. Irma made for quite a sly and mysterious side kick in the previous novels and its rather a shame to see the character so poorly misused.
2/5

moifling soup

Here is an updated image of me and the children for any one who hasn't see this on FB. This picture was taken about six weeks ago.

Norman keep update 3

Another late night post squeezed in between multiple projects; the keep is still WIP but lives yet! Work is slow as applying lots of little cork bricks takes time, and I don't have that much spare time since I am bound by parental obligation to burn several hours a day entertaining the Snoos and playing 'Lego; Pirates of the Caribbean'. Not that I mind playing games with my daughter. I'm enjoying that all I can, whilst I can. She won't be six for ever.

The keep gets a few hours each evening, and slowly but surely it is taking on the appearance of a building. As you can see above, wall A has been fully clad and looks pretty good. The buttresses work more or less okay, though the central buttresses of level one are out of sync by a whole millimeter of the ground level so when the lighting is directly above, it casts some irritating shadows from the over lap. I'll rectify this later by removing the offending bricks and adjusting the buttress on the ground level.


Wall D with toilet, partially clad. There are small holes every where because sometimes the wood glue has to dry before I can add the last few bricks. Originally I was going to put two toilets on this side of the building, but I decided against this as a keep this size probably couldn't boast two toilets (even this one is fairly over sized, but this is due to the base size of my figures).



I've also begun tiling the roof and here I have run into another small dilemma. I want the model to look realistic, and the best way to do this is to add wear n tear, but the building is also supposed to look new and in use, so I can't have the raggedy roof tiles I usually resort to. Instead, I've cut nicer tiles, but added a few places where time has taken its toll. I'm hoping these will work well when the model is finally completed and painted.

The Phantom Ship

By Captain Marryat

The good thing about old books is that they seldom conform to formulaic modern ideas of story telling. The bad thing is, they often ramble down side tracks and go on about all manner of clap trap (just read '20,000 Leagues under the sea' for example). 'The Phantom Ship' was first published 172 years ago, so its pretty old, and it doesn't conform to any modern notion of story telling, though the blurb on the book insists it has inspired such authors as Conrad and Woolf. It also rambles, a lot!

Rambling isn't such a bad thing, only for much of the novel, Marryat rambles on about the religious fall out of the protagonist's quest and since the protagonist is a the son of the captain of the Flying Dutchman, and is set on saving his father, but is a Catholic, and married to a Muslim convert's daughter, and is often travelling in the company of a ghost, and is friends with two different religious nutters, and whose best friend is haunted by a were wolf's curse... well sometimes, it gets a bit tough to chew through.

I wouldn't mind the constant side tracking, except for the fact that the book was meant to be a maritime classic, and whilst its true enough that the characters do sometimes find themselves on ships, these vessels play no part in the story and are merely a means of moving from A to B. Several times the protagonist leaves Holland only to arrive at South Africa within the space of a single sentence. This is particularly disapointing as the author was an experienced sailor, and coupled with the religious navel gazing was too much for my patience to bear. I finished the book eventually, but I didn't care for it.

moif's bad Danish art rant

Most of the time, I ignore other Danish people's ideas regarding what constitutes good art, because if I didn't, I would almost certainly consume myself in an ungovernable rage. Sometimes however, usually when some eager politician or an individual-with-no-taste-and-too-much-money gets a bright idea with regards to 'smartening up' Aarhus, I am provoked to indignation. A decade or so ago some powerful members of Copenhagen's cultural elite did one of their own a favour and unloaded a pile of junk known as the 'Water Dragon' onto us. This leaking pile of expensive scrap metal (known to locals as 'the urinal') now dominates our central plaza and does a brilliant job of making us look even more provisional than we already do. At the time, public opinion was largely opposed to the sculpture with most locals (or at least those who had any opinion) preferring something by a local artist, of which there were several candidates. This opposition from the common herd made no impact on the cultural elite of Copenhagen.



Recently, Aros (an amazingly expensive art museum erected in the centre of the city around the same time as the 'Water Dragon' was being foisted upon us) forked out another vast quantity of money on a 'work of art' designed to bring international attention to Aarhus. In the image above you can see how Aros, the big brick cube looming behind the houses, manages to convey a subtle sense of the sublime... by looking like a big brick cube. Stuck on top, and looking like a misplaced multi-coloured halo, is the 'stunning work of art' designed to inspire foreign awe and exclamations of admiration. The big idea is, you walk around inside it and look at the view through the various shades of horribly expensive glass.



Now, Aarhus faces its latest artistic challenge in the shape of a 72 m tall abstract statue by the late Robert Jacobsen (an artist whose work has no relevance to modern Denmark what so ever and whose legacy is tediously guarded by his own, diminishing generation). Weighing in at 1,800 tons this monstrosity, named 'Big Robert' is almost as big as the statue of Liberty. No one seems to want it, indeed several other cities have already turned the horrible thing down, but if things go the way they usually do, this 'important work of art' will probably be dumped in Aarhus by the cultural elite in Copenhagen so that they can have a good laugh at our expensive.

I would like to take the time to publicly announce that in my opinion, the 'Water Dragon', Aros's technicolour crown, and 'Big Robert' are all perfect examples of the sort of bad art only large amounts of money in the hands of morons can buy. If I had the means, I would wage a clandestine campaign to erase these objects from existence and replace them with beautiful, imaginative works of art, probably something figurative, probably something which reflected the culture of Denmark and not the tedious thought processes of mediocre artists whose only recourse of expression is the abstract.

Artist of the Month; Archibald Knox

Archibald Knox is my favourite graphic artist of the Art Nouveau crowd, beating Mucha as a designer and calligrapher, though not as a painter. Knox's strength lies in his highly stylised texts, which use interlocking patterns to great effect. Often termed 'Celtic', they are far more Scandinavian in style and with their long loops and tight clusters, they look like the asymmetrical patterns found on many rune stones and the wooden carvings on Urnes stave church in Norway. Drawn by hand, and coloured with water based paints, Knox's texts have that beautiful raw quality which, despite having been copied a million times since, is really only ever found in Victorian illustration work.

I've copied Knox's style on several occaisions (example), and the thing I've noticed is that although I love the fact that you can hardly read what it says, most people find this rather annoying, and in the modern world, with the constant emphasis on speed and ease of communication, graphic design of this variation is unfortunately not often in demand.

Norman keep update 2

Oleg's probably going to tease me for my poor lighting, but never mind, its 2 am, I'm lazy and here are some more snaps of the model. The underlying structure is now finished and I've slowly begun adding cork to the exterior as I make the interlocking pieces that hold each level in place. Levels one and two have the structure of their internal walls completed, but I've not really started on levels three and four yet.

This is the first level (basement storage, or dungeon?). I added cork to the top of the walls but this wasn't really necessary. It just seemed to be more aesthetically pleasing. I'll probably add a stone staircase in the corner at some point.


Level one. Possibly a kitchen or a guard room. The stair to the next level will be in the space directly behind the figure. This means the model is no longer architecturally accurate, but the lay out does mean defending elements will always be able to double against incoming elements, which means the defenders will always have an advantage, which I suppose is historically accurate. The hole in the floor will be the trap door to the cellar stairs. All the interior walls will be clad with cork, so its going to be a lot tighter than it looks now.


Level four, and here I've done some cork cladding experiments. Due to mistakes, two of the arched windows are slightly out of line with the lower windows and the buttresses, but not enough to be annoying. The window pictured above (wall B) is the prettiest of the two I've clad.

The top of the tower, showing the roof (as yet unglued), battlements and the turret. Some of the crenelations have been experimentally clad, but only on their outer faces. There will be enough room, for one element to stand on each the outer walls, except for wall C where two elements can stand side by side. This is the wall which will also have hoardings above the entrance. There is no specific architectural or historical reason why this one side of the building should be wider than the other three, but it seemed a good idea to be able to place two elements beside each other if I ever want to have roof top combat.


The model as it stands now is 14 inches tall. Thats 355mm. With additional cork on the turret battlements, it may reach to about 357mm. The archway over the entrance is an experiment and I think it looks wrong, so it will be replaced.

I've begun to design the gate house now. It will have three inner levels and a roof top battlement. It won't be as big as the keep, but it will still be a pretty imposing building. I've based my design on the gate house at Kalø Vig rather than Rochester because my model is closer in size to Kalø and because Oleg has already made a gate house with round towers and I want to do something different from his model.

Red Tails

I've been waiting for this movie for a while now. George Lucas better not fuck this one up!



Edited to add second trailer

Get More: Movie Trailers, Movies Blog

Viking Voyage

A documentry (in English) about 'Havhingsten'.

A British view of Denmark

'Havhingsten' at 09:35.

Norman keep; historical references

Rochester Castle. Having lived next door to it for two years, my primary source of inspiration has always been Rochester Castle. At the time, I didn't fully appreciate just how important the castle was, from a purely architectural perspective, and I regarded it as something of a typical Norman fortification. I later understood that by the standards of the period in which it was built, Rochester is quite a large castle.

~~~~~~

Hedingham Castle in Essex. Originally, very similar to Rochester, Hedingham has survived to this day as an intact, and functioning building. Although parts of the original keep have long since been scavaged for other buildings, and the rest of the castle is missing, Hedingham provides a very useful comparison to Rochester.

~~~~~~

Kalø Castle. Though it was built 247 years after the Norman invasion of England, Kalø still bears a lot of similarities to Norman designed castles. Its a relatively small castle but it was strategically effective, and it was the biggest motivating factor in my decision to start my model. For me the most important aspect of Kalø is it showed how a full scale castle, with multiple buildings and defensive positions, could be fitted on to a regular table top.

~~~~~~

Porchester Castle. It was from Porchester that I got the idea of adding so many buttresses to my model. These are meant to provide detail to the model to prevent it from becoming a mere dull box-with-battlements

~~~~~~

Other Norman castles of interest;
Colchester Castle. The largest keep ever built by the Normans. Today, only the ground floor remains, but this is in good condition.
Helmsley Castle. Not much is left of Helmsley's keep, but one wall still stands and gives a good idea of how a smaller Norman keep might have been laid out. It is deceptive however since the collapsed side did not mirror the remaining wall but was semi circular.


The Tower of London. One of the biggest and probably the best preserved Norman keep
Longtown Castle, Herefordshire.
Ludlow Castle. Shropshire.
Carisbrooke Castle. Isle of White.
Castle of Melfi. Basilicata.
Pickering Castle. One of William I's original Motte & Bailey castles, Pickering is a good example of a wooden fortification thatw as 'uparmoured' to stone.
Clitheroe Castle. Lancashire. One of the smallest Norman keep's in the UK
Trim Castle. County Meath. The largest Norman keep in Ireland.

Other interesting castles, similar in design to Norman castles;
Bolton Castle. Wensleydale.
Dolwyddelan Castle. Conwy.

See also;

Watch tower model by Oleg

This is Oleg's recently built, watch tower model. It was built over a period of a few weeks, in June and July and is destined to play a part (as far as I understand) in a fantasy role playing campaign. It is a dual purpose model, capable of representing both a well maintained tower, or a ruin. It has no direct historical reference, but the roof is inspired by various Eastern European buildings.

When I saw this model, unpainted but more or less complete, I realised that it demonstrated how to build my Norman style castle without the heavy use of polyfilla. Oleg had built a previous, far larger tower, but that was cylindrical and my mind didn't quite make the connection to a Norman fortification. As soon as I saw this model, the seed which had lain dormant in my mind was watered and began to grow! The image below shows the lower level wall which was my primary source of inspiration.

The basement level; Oleg uses a lot more sand in his models than I do and with this model, the inner walls have been given a coat of sand to provide texture.

All the various component parts, unpainted...

...and painted. Note the basement level features a well and the entrance level features a fire place. There is also a chimney that climbs up through each level.

The roof in progress with its double angle slope and belfry.

The tower in ruin mode; grounded...


...and painted.


Rear view. Note the wall beneath the arrow slot shows signs of having been repaired at some point

9 - The original version