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📺 A 25-minute report by DW on the old Zaporozhets automobile, which still enjoys fans today: “Putin loved this car. Now it drives Ukraine’s resistance,” youtu.be…. 🇺🇦
📺 Anders Puck Nielsen offers clear, level-headed analysis of the U.S. administration’s changed posture toward Ukraine in a new 12-minute video called “Trump gives up on fast peace process” at youtu.be…. 🇺🇦
📺 I watched the first episode of “Masters of the Air” (Apple TV+, 2024), and that was enough. Its soundtrack, emotional arc, and flat characters made it feel cliched, predictable, inauthentic.
Sounds from Diana's Baths Walk
The brook before the falls
From the bottom of the falls
Next to some of the rushing water
Photo taken from about the same spot where I recorded the last, loudest sound
Echo Lake, North Conway, NH, on May 1, 2025. There were already a couple people in the water because the lake is small and relatively shallow.
The game just got bigger, did you?
– Helen Hunt playing Nancy Campbell in “A World On Fire” (PBS, 2020), s. 1, ep. 1.
Photo of 1909 Child Labor Protest
![Library of Congress summary: photograph shows half-length portrait of two girls wearing banners with slogan 'ABOLISH CH[ILD] SLAVERY!!' in English and Yiddish, one carrying American flag; spectators stand nearby. Probably taken during May 1, 1909 labor parade in New York City.](https://eu.uploads.micro.blog/166262/2025/8714c341f0.jpeg)
Child labor protest, probably in New York City on May 1, 1909. Note the U.S. flag that the girl wearing a sash in Yiddish is holding. The girl with a sash in English seems to be holding a flag, too, albeit one in a single color, perhaps socialist red. The message on the sashes is uncompromising: “ABOLISH CHILD SLAVERY!”
Bain News photograph, via Library of Congress, https://www.loc.gov/pictures/item/97519062.
August 2, 2019: I like the color of the Niagara River south of the falls.
Hot peppers at a market in Guiyang, China, July 13, 2015.
Various soy products at an outdoor market in Guiyang, China, July 13, 2015.
Visited extended family in another part of the state today. One of them will be the first in their family to attend college, starting this fall. I am so happy for this kid.
Bernard Clasen, “Trump und Selenskyj im Petersdom: Ein wundersamer Trump-Moment,” Die Tageszeitung, April 27, 2025.
Ein vertrautes Gespräch zwischen Trump und Selenskyj ist nur eine Momentaufnahme. Aber mehr Respekt ist in Zeiten von Krieg oder Frieden nicht wenig.
'Women and Children First' by Theo Matejko, ca. 1939
Source: "'Bombs Over Us': Prophetic Drawings by a German Artist," Life, September 11, 1939, pp. 27--28, via "a book … recently published in Germany," presumably Das Theo Matejko-Buch: Zeichnungen als Aufzeichnungen aus zweieinhalb Jahrzehnten (Berlin: Kommodore-Verlag, 1938).
This drawing imagining an air war coming to Berlin was one of a series that Theo Matejko conceived before Germany and the Soviet Union invaded Poland. It seems to convey antiwar sentiment, but the artist supported the Nazi regime, and he regularly contributed to the propaganda magazine, Die Wehrmacht. Given this context, his drawing and the following public explanation might be understood as projection instead.
An idea which came to me years ago with unholy force and persistence was the image of an air attack over a big city in some future war. I saw in this dreadful vision the merciless heavens pouring destruction upon peaceful people.… I offer these pictures in the deep and sincere hope that these nightmare visions may never become a reality.
The drawing doesn’t capture anywhere near the reality, but it offers up two powerful national symbols, the Brandenburg Gate and German motherhood. The choice of the latter was an effective way to underline the indiscriminate nature of this kind of warfare while portraying the Germans as innocent victims.
Congress was once the proud equal of the executive and judicial branches of our government. Now it stands drained of both power and respect, partly through abdication of its responsibilities and partly through the eager gathering of power by a burgeoning presidency. That phenomenon started with Franklin Roosevelt, and every President since has been unable to resist taking more decision-making responsibility on himself. The power to make war and to decide how our money is spent is no longer the unquestioned province of Congress …
– “Fresh Blood for a Sick Congress,” Life, November 17, 1972, p. 42.
The creatures out back are even louder tonight.
Powerful 13-minute short about a man who spoke up (and one who didn’t) during an unexpected ID check to filter out ostensible enemies on a train stopped by armed Serbs in Štrpci, Bosnia, on February 27, 1993: “The Man Who Could Not Remain Silent” (Croatia, 2024), youtu.be…. 📽️
Sounds of spring this evening (10 seconds)
📽️ I distracted myself from contemporary authoritarianism with the wonderful 1954 Italian film “Chronicle of Poor Lovers” (Cronache di poveri amanti). It takes place in Florence in the mid 1920s and focuses on the lives of people in the Via del Corno. Everybody seems to know everyone else’s business in this street, and life seems pretty normal, even good, despite material privations. But there are also the whispers and occasional off-key tones of a few fascists. Then comes a brutal beating and later the work of a death squad, with individual residents among the murderers and the murdered. The film’s title references the young couples that are broken up and formed in the course of this adversity.
📽️ “The Murderers Are Among Us” (Die Mörder sind unter uns), dir. Wolfgang Staudte (DEFA, 1946), is streaming on Arte. Filmed in the rubble of early postwar Berlin, it represents an important attempt to come to terms with Germany’s immediate past and to see a way through the present.
Hildegard Knef and Wilhelm Borchert
📽️ Watched a silly, but enjoyable comedy called “The Assassination Bureau” (Paramount, 1969), starring Diana Rigg, Oliver Reed, amd Telly Savalas.
Child Labor as 'Necessity' (1912 Cartoon)
“NEXT! From the Cradle to the Mill” Cartoon by Art Young for Puck, April 10, 1912, via Library of Congress, https://www.loc.gov/pictures/item/2011649137/.
Note the big shadowy black ghoul labeled “NECESSITY” leading a young girl out of a dark, impoverished room toward a factory on the right, where two other children are facing a sign at the entrance that reads, “Machinery Operated by Children” and “MEN NEED NOT APPLY.” The image of the little girl clutching her doll as she is forced to leave behind her book, paper, toys, and other small items on the floor usually a part of childhood flourishing makes this brutal uprooting from her home appear unnatural.
What’s more, the preference of the factory for cheaper children over more expensive men characterizes the practice of child labor as a vicious circle. If men are not welcome at the factory, if the lifeless woman at the table is unemployed, and if the children are not in school, the family will not be able to improve its lot, no matter how hard the children toil. This point is underlined by the cartoon’s subtitle, “From the Cradle to the Mill,” a play on the common phrase, “from the cradle to the grave.”