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...all over the dastardly Froschfresser.

They are both solidly made (in the traditional manner - sadly a dying art) and surprisingly comfortable when worn with suitably thick socks (being custom made to fit my huge webbed feet helps of course). I expected to be slipping over a lot with dozens of nails in each sole and whopping great heel irons, but was pleasantly surprised to find how good they actually are on paved surfaces. How exactly 'my' division coped whilst at home in Dresden however is quite beyond me - as visitors to the Elbflorenz of the Wettin Kings will know well, the centre of the Saxon capital has whopping great cobblestones everywhere...

I now have all the absolutely vital elements of my uniform together, and am visually fit to represent 'my' regiment at re-enactment events. Everything from here on out will just be a matter of improvements and embellishments - filling out my dogtags and ID documents properly, making a carrying strap for my gasmask tin (which is packed away in its carrying bag on my belt here), and getting hold of a steel helmet and bayonet (I have the frog and decorative Troddel for the latter already).

( More photos - courtesy of Mister Keef )

Heartfelt thanks are due to DJ Merrick at Aural Apocalypse for giving Kindermord our first airplay ever, and for enthusiastically plugging our stage debut on 14th November.

You can download the relevant show as a huge mp3 'podcast' or download the relevant playlist here.

Under construction here.

Embarrassed to be represented internationally by this?

Then please sign this.

It's been fun seeing it mushroom to the top slot on the site. I'm sure we can hit 100,000.

A special Christmas card for family, friends and allies.

( Read more )

To the Fallen of the War to End All Wars

To those who died in the field in Europe, Asia and Africa
And To those who died at sea and under it
To those who were shot, blasted, burned, gassed and crushed
To those who lost their sight and those who lost their minds
To those who lost their faces and could never leave the hospital
And those who survived to preserve the memory of their friends

To those bombed and shelled in their homes and those shot as hostages
To those starved by the hunger blockade and those drowned by torpedoes
To those whose lives were blighted by the loss of loved ones
And those swept away by plague and hunger in the wake of war

To the peoples cursed by the borders of peace to war, and again war
To the peoples exterminated in their homelands by Islamic barbarians
To the peoples destined for future exterminations by gun, gas and famine
To the peoples broken by the wreck of crowns and the scourge of revolution
To the peoples doomed to decades of slavery by blood-crazed ideologues

To our great-grandparents who endured the unendurable and whose hopes are all dust
To the lost future of Europe that was buried before our grandparents were born

We shall not forget

Treue um Treue - Providentiae Memor

Anyone going to Detling at any point this weekend and able to offer me a lift from Croydon in return for petrol money? My housemates are elsewhere and public transport is really not feasible, Detling being the proverbial middle of nowhere.

Some encouraging news - my arms are responding to chiropractic treatment. This morning my right forearm was bombarded with ultrasound, a bizarre experience as the sound can neither be heard (by humans or penguins) nor felt.

In order to finance my trips to the chiropractor and my entry this year into the wonderful (if that's the word, the tone tends to be suitably solemn) world of WW1 living history, I'm going to be selling a bunch of stuff. This will involve eBay, but anyone especially interested is welcome to enquire privately as well.

I intend to shift:

- A lot of Transformers, including rare vintage items back to G1 / early 80s.
- Such of the vintage Star Wars etc. stuff from my childhood that has not already been traded away / sold off.
- Repro WW2 German uniform / equipment items.
- A few CDs that neither I nor my housemates are likely to listen to again.

There's also a bunch of old servers (6+ yrs old) in the office here that Jim wants to flog.

Listings available on request - I'm putting together a big spreadsheet of descriptions for eBay at the moment.

Only just realised the date, one close to my heart...63 years ago today the last, and most nearly successful, attempt on Hitler's life took place - carried out by the one available man who was both able to get close enough to the tyrant and willing to kill him. Unfortunately of course, he was missing one eye and most of his fingers (a crippled war hero who was above suspicion, at least to the guards he had to pass), only one of the two charges could be placed and the meeting had been moved from an underground bunker (which would have contained and concentrated the blast) to a wooden hut on the surface. In addition, someone apparently moved the case containing the bomb to the other side of one of the table's thick legs for reasons of comfort.

More unfortunately still, Stauffenberg had departed prior to the explosion, as he was also indispensable for the coup in Berlin - and therefore Operation Valkyrie (the seizure of power in the capital, modified from a plan for troop deployments to protect the government in the event of a feared uprising by foreign slave labourers) kicked off, bringing the German conservative resistance into the open....with Hitler in fact still alive and enraged, albeit deafened and with an arse full of shrapnel.

Thousands perished horribly in the subsequent purge, as they knew they would in the event of failure. Luckily my great-grandfather was not one of them, having successfully concealed his own involvement (via Goerdeler, the co-ordinator of civilian and military resistants). Had he not, he would probably have been hanged with piano wire in a death camp as many others did, and his family would have been persecuted.

"Es lebe unser heiliges Deutschland!" ("Long live our sacred Germany!")
- last words of Claus Schenk, Graf von Stauffenberg

Knifeladder, Siebenn and Naevus live

Nearest tube is Old Street - looks like we could make it back even in the wee hours if need be.

Having been less than wholly surprised that this hasn't had a wider showing in the media (here, anyway - it's been on French telly), I give you:

Gordon Brown digging for and consuming nose oysters on the front bench while Blair is at the dispatch box (notice how even Prescott turns and stares when Brown wipes his fingers on his tie).

Absolutely amazing: high quality replica WW1 German kit!

I would dearly love one of those Uhlan (lancer) tunics.

They even do Austro-Hungarian uniform items as well...extraordinary.

Any advice on my current pet project would be handy - I'm trying to spec out a PC to be supplied by my company in part lieu of wages (with beneficial tax implications, besides the VAT concessions to IT companies). This is the machine I intend to make unpleasant industrial 'music' on in future.

At present I want to be able to:

• Run Soundforge
• Run Wavelab, which the German power electronics unit Sektion B recommended to me as an alternative to a sequencer for simply stringing WAV files together without any unnecessary beat / tempo functionality)
• Record vocals (or other sounds from a vocal mic) in real time without processor delay - I strongly suspect that to be able to apply vocal effects in real time as well I will need to scrounge an outboard (hardware) effects unit
• Possibly run some kind of sequencer app later (for different musical projects)

I'm looking for a processor, memory and sound card spec for all this, and will also need a DVD rewriter drive - I want the machine to cost no more than £700-800 (not including external FX unit which I will worry about at a later date).

If I can get this PC ASAP, I can finally get all my bits and pieces into actual complete tracks - my current machine is not up to the job and becomes horribly slow / unstable when trying to do this.

I have a few bits and bobs already - a USB MIDI interface and a couple of blagged vocal mics (not studio quality but adequate to start with).

Queik?

Oh yes! :)

A truly spiritual experience.

Pictures online once we get back...

Little Penguin and I landed safely at Athens airport yesterday morning after a grueling overnighter at Gatwick waiting for our 6am flight. The temperature on landing was 36c - a severe shock to the system, but fortunately the weather is calming down now.

Greece from the air is breathtaking, all crumpled mountains speckled with green and sea so clear you could see the bottom near the shore even from the plane windows. Up close the countryside outside the city is amazingly wild and hilly, covered in completely strange rugged foliage including the ubiquitous wild olive trees - the land looks romantic and untamed though humans have lived there since long before there was any recognisable settlement in our own little islands. Nea Smyrni (the suburb where Vasso's mum and sister live) is a frantic mass of buildings sprouting up all over in a confusing manner, with streets lined with orange and lemon trees and the odd friendly cat lounging in the sun.

So far we have had our hair cut courtesy of Vasso's mother and wandered around the neighbourhood (yesterday we were mainly asleep) - tomorrow should be a fine temperate day for going into Athens proper to see the many extraordinary ancient sites (and Greece's finest industrial record shop...). I'm going to try to master the digicam Jim lent us tonight - though pics will probably have to wait to be posted here until we get back to Purley.

Incidentally - excellent food. :) Naturally.

Queik!

It looks like the two major work projects (one with each job) that have kept me absurdly busy of late are being safely put to bed today at long last. Thus I can now take stock and catch up on all the stillborn entries I never managed to write.

On April 20th 1889, Adolf Hitler was born at Braunau am Inn (an otherwise unremarkable little town on the Austro-German border) to an ill-tempered alcoholic customs official and his meek, submissive wife. He grew up spoiled and rebellious - and possessed of delusions of grandeur regarding his (reasonable, but not amazing) artistic talent, only to become bitter and disillusioned as a failed art student and a down-and-out in Vienna. Reacting violently against the cosmopolitan society of the Hapsburg capital, he absorbed anti-semitic conspiracy theories from the gutter press and came to admire certain bigoted Catholic ultra-nationalist politicians of the day. However I have personally come to the strong conviction that it is the horrific experience of the First World War (in which he witnessed the slaughter of his immediate comrades on a vast scale in the massed German infantry assaults of 1914, endured years of trench warfare in the hideously dangerous role of runner (a courier who carried messages between different layers of command when the phone lines were shelled out), was repeatedly wounded and was finally hospitalised by a gas attack in 1918 suffering from temporary blindness - where he was reportedly described by a psychiatric specialist as "incompetent to command people" and "dangerously psychotic") that really defined him as the profoundly brutalised and brutalising man who came to afflict the German political scene and subsequently the world as a whole.

During my grandmother's childhood in Nazi Germany, April 20th was a public holiday. Living in Berlin and compulsorily enlisted in the BDM (Hitler Youth for girls), she witnessed the massive parades and state pomp associated with such occasions - at which she witnessed Hitler in person on numerous occasions.

On April 20th 1945 Hitler made his final public appearance, where he was famously filmed in rubble of the chancellery congratulating a group of Hitler Youth boys who had been decorated for bravery serving with the Volkssturm (German 'home guard') in the doomed defence of Berlin (a scene recreated in the excellent film Der Untergang / Downfall). Hollow-eyed, stooped and unable to control the (probably Parkinson's Disease related) violently shaking left hand concealed behind his back, he is a pathetic shadow of his pre-war public self - ravaged by quack medicine, the creeping onset of old age, the July 20th assassination attempt and the stress of total failure. I have always been fascinated by the images of this event - primarily from the point of view of those 12 and 14 year old boys. They had been born into (or at most been babies at the outset of) and raised under the Third Reich and its omnipresent personality cult of Adolf Hitler. What can they have thought on meeting this pathetic ghostly 5'8" figure shakily pinching their cheeks in the ruins of the state buildings of his empire, shrunk to no more than a single shattered city surrounded by Stalin's invincible hordes?

At 19:15 yesterday, Emily Rose Conner came into the world. :)

I haven't met her yet but have seen a photo.