You may heard that Isreali Defense Forces (the IDF) occupied the ancient Beaufort Castle in Lebanon. I like castles so I go looking for pics. I quickly realize what I want is a 3D view of the place. Google Maps used to deliver that, but that facility (ability) has now been shunted over to Google Earth and response time on Google Earth is abysmal. The 3D view on Google Maps was great, you could pan and tilt to your heart's content and the view on the screen would pretty much keep up with you. 3D view on Google Earth is like that ol' hound dog from Saturday morning cartoons who can't be bother to get up much less fetch anything. What was his name? Droopy?
How about a video? Ask YouTube for Beaufort Castle and all you get is news reports about the Israelis and the only information about the castle is what you get is in the first line of the Wikipedia page.
The IDF has a video which gives you a good view of the castle. Parts of this video have been borrowed (stolen?) by everyone and their mother including Hezbollah, which I thought was pretty weird, but maybe that's just the world today.
Anyway, I looked around and I think I found four views of the castle from the four cardinal directions. Put that together with the video and you might get an idea of how this place is laid out.
I tried to logon to United Health Care and it couldn't, so it suggested I delete some cookies from my browser. I did that and now all my pictures and links are screwed up, I so I don't even know what these pics are anymore.
Google Map's Streetview is notably lacking in Lebanon. This Streetview Map of the castle is only about a quarter mile across. There are no other Streetviews of Lebanon except for one road near the coast.
This castle was built in the middle of the 19th century, maybe twenty-five years before King Ludwig II built his fairytale castle in Bavaria. Pena Palace was built for King Ferdinand's amusement, so it was never a fortress. It was built on top of the ruins of a monastery that was built in 1493, the year after Columbus discovered America. Wikipedia page here.
Ask Google Map for this place and it shows up on the east coast of France. Yes, France does have an east coast on the Mediterranean. The castle is just a few miles north of the Spanish border.
Google has removed the 3D feature from Google Maps, now you can only get it on Google Earth and it's really slow. Using the 3D view on Google Maps you turn your view any which way and it would faithfully follow your mouse. Google Earth takes its own sweet time about responding to mouse inputs, and keeps moving after you have released the mouse. Maybe I need to add a zillion bytes of RAM to my two buck machine. I'm sure Google had a good reason for this change. Maybe my next two buck machine will have the requisite amount of RAM.
Tenczyn Castle is about 16 miles west of Krakow in south central Poland. Original built in the 14th century, rebuilt in the 16th and the curtain wall added in the 17th. Burned in the 18th century after a lightning strike. Wikipedia has a floor plan and several images.
MAD White has the story about the artist's concept. They also have several images with sliders that allow you to compare the artist's renditions with older images and the with the current building. Very cool.
Ray Castle is in Tehran. It it not to be confused with Rayen Castle which is 500 miles to the southeast.
Rey Castle was an ancient fortification that dates back to the Median kingdom, over 2,300 years ago, although the settlement of Rey itself has archaeological evidence of continuous habitation since as early as 6000 BCE.
Another ruined castle on another tiny island. This one is in Scotland. Google tried to tell me that this is Castle Stalker, but it's not. The water and beach looks like the Caribbean, but the Inner Hebrides area off the west coast of Scotland also appears to have some white sandy beaches. Plus the title on the puzzle says Scotland.
The island's original castle was built in the thirteenth century; it became a stronghold of the Clan Mackenzie and their allies, the Clan MacRae. In response to the Mackenzies' involvement in the Jacobite rebellions against the newly United Kingdom, Royal Naval ships destroyed the castle in 1719. The present-day castle is Lieutenant-Colonel John Macrae-Gilstrap's 20th-century reconstruction of the old castle.
Bannerman started a military surplus business after the the American Civil War. He bought the island in 1900 to use as a place to store his growing inventory of munitions. He built the castle to use as a warehouse. Wikipedia has the story. Bannerman Castle Trust offers tours of the place.
There is an I-84 that runs north of the castle. It goes west as far as Scranton, New York. There is also an I-84 that runs east out of Portland, Oregon to Salt Lake City, Utah. The two are separated by 1900 miles.
The Alcázar of Segovia is a medieval castle located in the city of Segovia, in Castile and León, Spain. It has existed since at least the 12th century, and is one of the most renowned medieval castles globally and one of the most visited landmarks in Spain.
. . .
Its history begins in the 12th or early 13th century when the royal family of Castile had quarters in the Alcázar, known as the "major palace". In the Homage tower, the treasure of the Crown of Castile was stored, from which funds were secured to finance Christopher Columbus's first voyage.
Came across this on The Feral Irishmanand my first reaction was that it is some AI* fantasy, but it's not, it's a real place, though it doesn't seem to be much of a building. The tower is hollow with a spiral staircase in one of the corner protrusions. Wikipedia calls it a 'folly', which I surmise just means it has no practical purpose. Also from Wikipedia:
Castillo de La Calahorra is located in La Calahorra, in the province of Granada, Spain. It is situated in the Sierra Nevada foothills. Built between 1509 and 1512, it was one of the first Italian Renaissance castles to be built outside Italy. - Wikipedia
Liz Hinds went "to Mumbles in the evening for the beacon lighting ceremony, part of the D-Day 80th anniversary commemorations. . . . The event was held in the Castle Field. Swansea Yarnbombers had made a cascade of poppies."
Part of the problem is that most of what the characters do doesn't make any sense. Nobody trusts anybody else, and for good reason, they can't be trusted. Alliances are formed and reformed so quickly that it's hard to tell if they are for real or fake. Even if they are heart felt at the moment, the heart is fickle so they may change at any moment.
Then you realize this is war-torn Sicily where we have bands of criminals roaming the countryside and it's the 19th Century so the drink of choice is red, red wine, so they're basically all drunk all the time, so it's actually pretty realistic. But that's not what we want. We want a nice story with honest heroes and brave damsals, but what we've got is reality TV.
This castle shows up as a prison. It is actually Castello Alfonsino in Brindisi, Italy, which is in the boot heel of Italy a couple hundred miles from Sicily.
I picked this up at Powell's City of Books a couple of weeks ago. I was looking for something I could read. I browsed the Science Fiction section for a while, but nothing grabbed me, so I figured I'd pick up a couple of Murder Mysteries from authors I knew. Elmore Leonard usually writes pretty good, hard-boiled murder mysteries. A bunch of shows were based on his books. These four I remember clearly:
Cuba Libre isn't one of them. It's more of a historical adventure story. It opens in 1898 right after the USS Maine got blown up, which triggers the Spanish-American War. It's pretty great. We have heroes, villains, a pretty girl, guns and a sprinkling of factoids that make it seem very real.
Characters:
Ben Tyler - our hero
Charlie Burke - Ben's partner
Roland 'Rollie' Boudreaux - sugar plantation owner, polo player
Amelia Brown - our girl and Rollie's mistress
Victor Fuentes - Rollie's factotum
Novis Crowe - Rollie's bodyguard
Palenzuela - Havana Chief of Police
Rudy Calvo - investigator for Palenzuela
Lorraine - Amelia's friend and the Chief's mistress
Neely Tucker - reporter page 12
Paulina Gonzales
Gomez
Osma - former slave and slave hunter
Dr. Henriques - San Lazaro hospital for lepers page 330
Mary Lou Jones - San Lazaro hospital for lepers page 330
Chapter 17, page 260, the cowboy and the marine set off to collect a debt from the owner of a sugar cane plantation. Naturally there are guns involved:
Minute of Mae: S&W No.3 Russian 3rd Model
C&Rsenal
Page 301. In 1898, trains and horses were the primary means of transportation. Sometimes you carried your horses on a train, which meant you had to raise the horse four feet off of the ground to get into the stock car. For that you need a ramp:
I was able to find most of the places mentioned in the book. I marked them on a Google Map. The Cluster of blue markers are around Havana, the green ones are around Matanzas and yellow ones have to do with the war.
Ljubljana is the capital of Slovenia. The hill was likely the site of a Roman fortress back when Rome ruled the Earth. Since then it has been rebuilt a couple of times. Wikipedia page. Reminds me Orvieto.
The outcrop on which the castle stands had been occupied in Roman times, and twelfth century timber fortifications were replaced by a stone fortress in the thirteenth century, when it was occupied by the dukes of Carinthia, and the surrounding settlement gained city rights. Over successive centuries the castle was extensively enlarged for use by provincial governors but by the eighteenth century it became redundant and there were proposals for its demolition. After occupation by French soldiers at the start of the nineteenth century it was put to use as a prison, and during the first half of the twentieth century it provided housing for disadvantaged citizens, following its purchase by the city from the state in 1905.
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