Mike Stuchbery 💀🕯️
@mikestuchbery.bsky.social
Writer & Creator ‡ AU/UK/DE ‡ You can't say I didn't warn you.
Thinking of Mike Stuchbery today as Yaxley-Lennon/Robinson trial starts. No amount of 'blessing' from dubious priests can erase the harm he has done to others. www.huffingtonpost.co.uk/entry/tommy-...
‘Tommy Robinson Hounded Me Out Of My Home And Country’
Historian is suing the far-right activist, real name Stephen Yaxley-Lennon, after a campaign of harassment and intimidation at his home.
huffingtonpost.co.uk
You may be a hater, but you can only aspire to the level of Jakob, Freiherr von Ramsay. Leading the defence during of the Siege of Hanau, he sent the attacking commander, Guilliame de Lamboy a fat pig & asked for newspapers - he wanted to know whether rumours of the city being under siege were true.
A Beautiful Mind for tax purposes.
Harry Turtledove @hntdove.bsky.social · 4d agoSaving Private Ryan for Tax Purposes
Here in Germany, I keep encountering buildings and civic works built around 1590 - 1610, and I always picture the funders and builders beaming and saying to each other: 'How grand! What a great monument we've built! Truly, nothing will happen during to it during this golden age, this 17th century!'.
Immaculate drip from the 18th century canons of the Mainz cathedral.
Pretty sure there's a gene somehow now awakening in the DNA of many male American stars of the nineties, suddenly compelling them to play a WW2 general.
Today I learned about Paul Briscoe. His mother, a Nazi sympathiser (later convicted of wartime espionage), left him in Miltenberg, Bavaria during the Third Reich. He joined the Hitler Youth & participated in the pogroms. He considered it a great sin and spent his last years writing about it.
If you visit Fulda in Germany, don't skip the Michaelskirche next to the Dom. It's far, far older than the baroque cathedral and was built to serve as the cemetery chapel for the monks of the monastery in the 9th century. The church is supposedly modeled on the Holy Sepulchre in Jerusalem.
Down a short flight of stairs in Fulda's baroque cathedral lies the tomb of Bonifatius, the apostle to the Germans. Over three decades he helped strengthen Christianity across what is today Germany, before being killed sometime around 754 by pagan Frisians near Dokkum in the modern Netherlands.
Allow me to propose an idea. Stuchbery’s Law: The culture-war grifter must become ever more transgressive and absurd to remain an outlaw. But every escalation makes them less bankable, less influential and more marginal. Hate will eat itself.
Bring back tombstones with bloody great skulls, I say. (Jakobuskirche, Groß-Auheim, Hesse 🇩🇪)
For a truly striking mediaeval tower, you can't miss the Adolfsturm in Friedberg (Hesse), Germany. Built around 1347, and 58m tall, it was the most visible reminder that Burg Friedberg was *the* local power in the Wetterau region. It also held a dungeon beneath for prisoners.
Yesterday I found a conjunction of laneways in the German town of Friedberg called 'Five-Finger Square'. I'm aware there's another in Frankfurt. Extremely fantasy-author adjacent. Hell, it's giving Pratchett.
If you're wondering just how ridiculously fragmented the Holy Roman Empire could be, I walked across a former independent principality today. It was 300 metres wide. That was the longer axis.
My favourite local Renaissance oddball comes from the village that I live in. Johannes de Ingadine was the priest of Steinheim, but before that, he was an in-demand astrologer and dabbler in the occult, writing some classic texts on palmreading and phrenology.
I've said it before and I'll say it again: It's not so much some coked up thug live streaming from your doorstep, whether it be Tommy, Tate or Tommo. It's the legions of utterly cooked followers, with a deeply troubling parasocial relationship, that are the real threat.
I've never been interested in claiming any of the credit for exposing Tommy Robinson's grifting years ago. What does bother me is wondering how much hurt & suffering could have been avoided if people had taken what was obvious then seriously, rather than waiting until the damage was done.
It's been almost a decade since I started writing about Far Right extremists and the social media grift economy - and it's so, so much worse now. www.independent.co.uk/voices/tommy...
Opinion: A spike in far right radicalisation should terrify us – here's how to stop it in its tracks
The distraction of a chaotic and disruptive Brexit is a genuine risk to our ability to fight this brand of extremism
independent.co.uk
Alexander Graham Bell may have perfected the telephone, but Phillip Reis invented it. Here's his birthplace in Gelnhausen, Hesse. He may have also developed the roller skate we we know it. Fascinating bloke!
It's been great to get back into exploration mode, and hopefully I'll be back to telling stories again soon.
If you visit the Marienkirche in Gelnhausen in Hessen, don't leave until you've opened the door to the right of the altar and entered the sacristy, where two little known treasures are stored - two 15th century tapestries... (1/4)
Der Löwe in Gelnhausen, Hessen, is one of Germany’s oldest surviving inns. It was once the base of the real-life Dr Johannes Faust, who performed supposed magical feats there, until occult scholar & churchman Johannes Trithemius heard and alerted Faust’s creditors. Faust fled to the next town.
Tucked across a suburban street outside the walls of Gelnhausen in Hessen, is the Godobertuskapelle, a chapel which existed before Frederick Barbarossa turned up and made the city an imperial seat. That is to say, it's heading towards a millennia in age. These days, you can get married there.
Vale Tim Curry. He finally escaped to the one place not corrupted by capitalism.
Gelnhausen, in Hessen, where I've been lurking lately, was the birthplace of Hans Jakob Christoffel von Grimmelshausen. His response to the personal traumas of the Thirty Years' War was to write one of the most imaginative German novels ever written: The Adventurous Simplicissimus.
Real estate hot tip, if you’re in the market in the Holy Roman Empire, circa 1200–1803. This is the narrowest point of the Via Regia and Hohe Straße - important roads connecting Frankfurt to Leipzig, and among medieval Germany’s most important trade routes. You can find it in Gelnhausen, Hessen.
The 'Hexenturm' in Gelnhausen, Hessen, held around forty local men and women accused of witchcraft from 1584 to 1633. Of particular note is Elizabeth Strupp, executed in 1599. Her insistence on only naming those already executed broke the chain of accusations, ending the first panic.
