If you didn't go to their site - its a joke.

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If you can avoid a trip to the US Embassy in Tel Aviv to renew your passport - avoid it! Most adults can renew by mail. The problem is the under 21 crowd. You can get all the relevant details on the US Embassy Website, except for this one:

Nothing is allowed into the embassy. Cellphone, food, reading material - absolutely nothing. Just the passport and related documents. It has become their business model - food is sold at 3x prices and checking cellphone, etc. is a pain.

SO, leave everything in the car and have a good meal before. Bring your spouse, not only because you must, but because with no book to read - you may find the quality time valuable.

If you can postpone the trip until after Jan 20, 2009 you will not have to look at George Bush's picture.

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Genre

Action/Adventure

Format

TGC, PC, PS2, Xb

Players

One

The Plot

Hello Kitty lives in Sanrio Town, a place full of happy inhabitants. Nothing bad has ever happened there, until now!

The nasty King Block and his evil yet clumsy troops have invaded and want to take over.

It is up to you and our heroine to save the day with the help of her friends and a pair of pink roller boots.

Playability

As you delve further into the game you are offered the chance to have a side-kick whenever you start a new level.

You can collect money which can be used to buy new clothes and weapons, it can also unlock short animations to entertain you when you feel like a break.

Make sure you hit everything that is left lying around because you never know what might be inside.

Hit or miss?

This game is really cute and the graphics are excellent but it takes a while for it to get challenging.

There is little freedom within the game as you have to stick to a specific route within each level.

If you are a massive Hello Kitty fan you will love the chance to bring her to life and ultimately save her hometown from evil destruction.

This review is now closed for comments. Check the Reviews page for other reviews.

NR rating:

Have YOU played this game?

Very good and very funny. A good laugh
Abi, 13, Northamptonshire

i think Hello Kitty Roller Rescue is fun, exciting and funny to play.
Hannah, 9, Blairgowrie

I think this game is excellant. I played it once and the graphics are brilliant.
Aaron, 7, Belfast
]]> http://tlv2jfk.wordpress.com/?p=46 Wed, 30 Apr 2008 08:31:23 +0000 chava http://tlv2jfk.wordpress.com/?p=46 I usually stay in Manhattan and getting to Newark or Kennedy is easy (max 30 minutes from Penn Station).

This trip - I had to be in LGA at 7am (for an AirTran flight). Cab would probably be at least $40. Israeli car service $30 + tips and tolls. Public transportation is almost non-existent.

This trip - I used Supershuttle. Call 1-800-BLUE-VAN or www.supershuttle.com and they book you a 15 minute slot in a shared van. Time to airport is about 45-60 minutes from Manhattan. Its $18 (including tip) and when you get to the airport your fellow passengers will wish you a good trip. Pass it on.

Price is per person - so if you are not alone - take a cab or Israeli car service.
AND BEWARE - LGA is a really bad airport - lots of delays. Non Existent service in the terminal.

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Please don't read this if you plan to eat in the next 3 hours.

First bad sign - its anonymous. No marking of the supplier, caterer or even the exterminator. Not on all the wrappings, tapes, plastics. Its not like they forgot - they remembered a tri-language statement of kashrut by 2 French Rabbi's (do Ashkenazic people really not trust a Sephardic Rabbi (and vice versa)). I am sure the French version advised them not to eat it.

Next bad sign - 2 round metal cans. First glance at the can and it looks just like Tuna fish. Second glance - it is Basque Tuna - a dish which is basically (no offense to the Basque who, were it not for the tuna disaster might have my support for an independent homeland some day), cat-food quality tuna with a little rice filler and warmed up. Do not try this at home!

A can of tuna is best at room temperature (not Jet engine blasted). Luckily, the heat of the can (and the thought of the contents) distracted me as I turned to the second can, which was for sheer variety - Salmon Pate.

After a trial forkful (I would not have dared this if I was not helpless, extraterrestial and starving 37,000 feet in the air) both cans were trashed. I apologize to Mr. Chicken or Beef next to me for the horrible dead fish smell coming from my meal (and later from under the seat where I stuffed it).

If all else fails - desert should be edible. Not even close. Lets just say this mysterious French company does NOT have a non-compete with GERBERS. Desert was a mushed banana and apple dish. Its been a while, but I recall gerbers being tastier.

I am sure you have deep sympathy for my experience, but it gets worse. Finally, I fall asleep on my empty stomach and wake up to Breakfast. Kosher. Guess what?

Its the exact same thing again. And this time - I was beaten - I ate it. I will never touch tuna, salmon, banana or apples again. The Basque can forget their country (stick with Boise, ID) and the entire country of France should lose all their Michelin stars for allowing this to happen.

I think in general Kosher food out of Europe is bad. Out of Israel, at least you get something reasonably fresh (besides airport security and airline safety). In US the field is competitive and no one wants an in-flight death (or worse - a lawsuit) on their hands. But Europe - forget it.

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Plane was a brand new A330-200. Individual screens (Rain Main, The Fugitive) and electric outlets - so you can keep the laptop powered up the whole flight. I had 4 seats all to myself, which might explain why they are undercutting the competition ($1175 TLV to JFK). Great service. Delicious Cherry juice. Airport security was tight. Horrible Kosher meal on IST-JFK segment (next post). Short layover in Istanbul - there is a new airport there which is super-modern looking (almost Dubai level). Unfortunately, not long enough to hop into town and see the tourist attractions. And miles on United Airlines (they were with American Airlines)

And I got to read the Turkish Times. Anyone know that their entire government is in the process of being declared illegal and the President, Prime Minister and loads of elected representatives are about to be banned from politics?

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More than any other airline, Elal seems to have a completely uneven seat distribution in their coach section. Some seats seem to have all the room (pitchwise) in the world and some wouldn't hold my seven year old comfortably. I always seem to get the squished ones! Where are the good ones and how do you get them??

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British-born sculptor Tony Cragg (°1949, Liverpool) left his native land in 1977 to work on the Continent. He now resides in Wuppertal, Germany. This work, entitled ‘Britain Seen From the North’ (1981), is typical of a period when Cragg made floor and wall reliefs out of broken pieces of found rubbish.

It features the shape of Great Britain, oriented so that east is up, north is left. At that left is the figure of a person, possibly the artist himself, ‘seeing’ Britain from the north. Because of its components, the work has often been interpreted as a comment on the state of the nation at that time, when it went through considerable economic hardship – especially in the north.

Cragg was British representative at the (43rd) Venice Biennale (in 1988), where he earned a menzione speciale. In the same year, he won the Turner Prize. In 1994, he joined the Royal Academy and in 2002 he received a CBE. In 2007, he won the Praemium Imperiale. Not bad at all for a bloke who started out as a lab technician at the British National Rubber Producers Research Association.

Jantien van der Vet alerted me to the existence of Cragg’s strange wall map, acquired by and exhibited at the Tate Modern in London.

As early as 1534, king Charles V of Spain suggested a canal in Panama across the Central American isthmus. Even with the primitive state of cartography of the day, it wasn’t hard to see how such a canal would facilitate trade and travel by eliminating the lengthy, dangerous shipping route rounding Cape Horn.

One of the last acts of the independent Kingdom of Scotland was the ill-fated Darien Scheme, an attempt at setting up a colony on the isthmus, that would live off the overland trade route between Panama’s Pacific and Atlantic shores. Thousands died and the scheme’s collapse in 1700 is thought to have contributed to the Act of Union (1707), establishing the United Kingdom.

The Panama Railway, opened in 1855, was a more successful reprise of the same idea, and eventually led to the creation of the Panama Canal. The initially French scheme, headed by Ferdinand de Lesseps (of later Suez Canal fame) was quite literally plagued by malaria and yellow fever, to such an extent that it was abandoned in 1893, after 13 arduous, lethal years. Some 22.000 workers died.

The US undertook a second, more successful attempt at canal-digging from 1904 to 1914, completing the canal two years ahead of schedule and at a greatly smaller cost in human lives (‘only’ 5.600 died). The US retained sovereignty and control of the Panama Canal Zone – incidentally, Guantanamo Bay was ‘leased in perpetuity’ from Cuba to protect the trade routes to and from the Canal. By a 1977 treaty with the US, Panama gained control over the Canal Zone on New Year’s Eve, 1999. Some facts about the Panama Canal:

• A ship sailing from New York to San Francisco would have had to travel 22.500 km (14.000 mi) before 1914. The Canal more than halved the journey, to 9.500 km (6.000 mi).

• The Canal is 77 km (48 mi) long.

• Each year, more than 14.000 ships pass through the Canal, carrying more than 200 million tonnes of cargo.

• An average passage through the Canal takes about 9 hours.

• Due to the curling of the isthmus, the Canal counterintuitively runs from the northwest (Atlantic) to the southeast (Pacific).

• The canal consists of 2 sets of locks, several artifical channels and 17 artifical lakes.

• The smallest vessels (up to 50 ft) pay a toll of US$500, while the most expensive toll ever was charged to the container ship Maersk Dellys, paying US$249.165. The least expensive toll was paid by Richard Halliburton, who paid 36 cents to swim the Canal in 1928.

• A 1934 estimate of the maximum capacity was 80 million tonnes per year, while traffic in 2005 consisted of 279 million tonnes.

• Close to 50% of the vessels in the Canal are using its full width (‘Panamax’). By 2011, 37% of the world’s container ships will be too large for the Canal. These ‘post-Panamax’ ships can only be accomodated by major expansion works. An expansion proposal was approved by referendum in Panama at the end of 2006. The project, estimated to cost over US$5 billion, started on Sept. 3, 2007 with an explosion blowing the side off a mountain at Paraíso.

This postcard map, apparently dating from around the time of the canal's completion in 1914, was found here at cardcow.com.

One of the mainstays of speculative history (together with “What if the South had won the US Civil War?”) is: What would the world have looked like if the Nazis had won the Second World War? And yet I’ve never seen a map showing what the Nazis’ post-war plans (for Europe of for the world) were, neither from their own files or reconstructed by war historians.

Which is very strange, considering that the Second World War is one of the most studied conflicts in world history. Maybe that’s because the Nazis didn’t have any concrete plans for after their victory – not because they didn’t believe in it themselves, but because of the chaotic nature of Nazi governance. The institutional overlap, competition and resulting chaos in the Third Reich is a well-established historical fact that contradicts the traditional notion of Germans as careful and thorough planners and which may well have prevented a German victory.

How the world would have looked like if such a victory had occurred, is a question that has been answered often in fiction, for example in the (passable) Robert Harris novel ‘Fatherland’ and the (brilliant) Philip K. Dick book ‘The Man in the High Castle’. Harris’ book includes a map, of a 1960s Europe dominated by Germany. This Nazi state, greatly expanded towards the East, doesn’t include Alsace-Lorraine. This rather puts a dent in the map’s credibility: it’s quite unthinkable that a victorious Nazi state would not annex these territories on the Rhine’s left bank, for so long disputed between France and Germany. Dick’s book, which focuses on the Japan-dominated West Coast of the (former) USA, sadly isn’t illustrated with a map. Not my copy at least.

This map does give what seems to be a well-considered vision of a Europe-wide Nazi state as it might have emerged after a German victory. German supremacy is ‘concealed’ by the construct of Neuropa ('New Europe'), a sort of evil twin of the European Union in this universe.

• Linchpin of Neuropa is the Greater German Empire (Grossdeutsches Reich), consisting of Germany in its 1937 borders, plus Alsace-Lorraine (from France), the entire Grand Duchy of Luxembourg, the Belgian German-speaking area of Eupen-Malmédy (from Belgium), all of Austria (Ostmark in Nazi parlance), a large part of present-day Slovenia, the Sudeten areas of former Czechoslovakia, and large parts of pre-war Poland.
• Some areas are not part of the Reich, but nonetheless under direct ‘Protectorate’: Bohemia-Moravia and the Polish ‘General-Gouvernement’.
• So far, nothing deviates from the situation as it was at the height of Nazi power in Europe. Different are two Reich exclaves in the East, implying Germany won the war with Soviet Russia: Gotenland (on the Krim peninsula) and St Petersburg.
• Presumably outside the Reich in a technical sense, but still administered civilly by the NSDAP (Hitler’s National Socialist party) are large areas in the East: Estonia and Latvia, both enlarged by annexing parts of Russia, Lithuania, and Belarus.
• There are also three autonomous NSDAP areas in the west: the Netherlands, Flanders and Wallonia (those two successor-states to Belgium also gaining territory, in this case to the detriment of France).
• So far the areas under direct German control (either under the Reich or under the Party). Next in the map legend are other European states, major allies of the Nazis and “instigators of the New European Union”: Greater Finland (almost doubling in size by grabbing parts of Norway and Russia) and the Italian Social Republic, covering just the northern half of Italy but gaining the Savoy and Nice areas of France and the environs of Istria from Slovenia.
• This is where the map’s colour scheme gets a bit confusing: the states signing up to the European Declaration in 1946 and later are indicated in one of several shades of brown and green used in the legend. To the best of my visual abilities, the 1946 ones are: Norway, Denmark, France, Slovakia, (Greater) Hungary, (Greater) Croatia, (Greater) Romania and (Greater) Bulgaria – those last four Balkan states enlarged at the expense their neighbours (sometimes including each other).
• A second wave of member states signing the European Declaration in 1951 are (again, as far as I can see): Spain (also holding on to its possessions in Morocco), (Little) Serbia, Greece (losing part of Macedonia to Bulgaria and also some territory to Albania, but retaining an enclave at the Turkish border) and Ukraine, which, having lost some land to Romania and the General-Gouvernement, is extended eastward all the way to Saratov.
• Later in the 1950s, Albania (enlarged also with a good part of Kosovo) joins the European Declaration.
• A third wave of Neuropa members joins in the 1960s: Portugal, Montenegro, and several formerly Soviet areas in or near the Caucasus: Kuban, Kalmykia, Georgia (enlarged with North Ossetia), Armenia and Azerbaijan.
• In the 1970s, three new states join: Dagestan in the Caucasus, and Udmurtia and Volga-Tatarstan further north.
• Incorporated in Neuropa, but without voting rights are the areas of Moskova and an area in the Caucasus, somewhat conforming to where Chechnya is now (maybe corresponding with the former, larger Soviet autonomous area of Chechnya-Ingushetia).

This map was sent to me by Bruno De Cordier and is taken here from the Finnish site valtakunta.eu, dedicated to illustrating the parallel universe in which the Nazis have won the war.

Unfortunately mainly in Finnish, it's impossible (for a non-Finnophone like me, anyway) to determine which is the POD (point of divergence) of this timeline: what was the turning point allowing the Nazis to win the war?

A follow-up on map #176, portraying the end of Belgium via the drowning of Flanders. Considering that Belgium is a slightly surreal construction at the heart of Europe (Western Europe anyway), the other option to its utter annihilation can only be its expansion to superpower-size. As is done on this map, showing a Europe dominated by a ballooning Belgian superstate.

* Belgium occupies most of the European mainland, its usually tiny coastline expanded to cover the whole north of the continent, from De Panne to Knokke. Medium-sized Belgian towns such as Ghent, Leuven, Charleroi and Antwerp are portrayed as European megacities. South of Brussels (located near Munich in the real world) begin the Ardennes, the undulating hill country in the south of Belgium that is here identified with the Alps.

* Thus, Switzerland is the ‘Swiss Ardennes’, northern Italy is the ‘Italian Ardennes’ and of course there are also the ‘Austrian Ardennes’.

* The Netherlands, in real life slightly bigger than Belgium, has shrunk to a small, northern appendage that ‘speaks a dialect of Flemish’. Similarly, France ‘speaks a dialect of Walloon’, and West Germany (‘speaks dialect of Luxembourgeois’) – which is all sort of true, come to think of it.

* The Grand Duchy of Luxembourg, in contrast to the relative shrinkage of the Netherlands, has grown together with Belgium, dominating South-Eastern Europe.

* The North Sea henceforth is called the ‘North Belgian Sea’ and the English Channel is renamed the ‘Belgian Channel’; the only locality named in England is the ‘Village of London’.

* Spain, finally, is labelled ‘Summer Belgium’, its Mediterranean coast called ‘Costa del Belges’.

This delightfully Belgocentric map of Europe was sent to me by Sarah Ratayczak, who is partially of Belgian descent. “I saw the map attached on the door of a Poli Sci professor’s office when I was an undergrad at Wisconsin about 10 years a go. I asked for a copy – its Belgocentric view of the world appealed to me because my mom’s family is from Belgium (long long ago).”

On the night of April 17th in 1906, the world-famous tenor Enrico Caruso wowed San Franciscans at the Tivoli Opera House with his performance in Carmen. The next day would – unfortunately – prove much more memorable for San Francisco. That Wednesday morning, at twelve minutes past five, an earthquake with a magnitude of 7,8 on the Richter scale struck the Bay Area.

The quake lasted 42 seconds, causing severe damage. Ruptured gas lines (and the scarcity of water due to ruptures in those lines) caused city-wide fires that eventually were responsible for up to 90% of the total destruction. Additionally, since the insurance companies didn’t refund the actual quake damage, many people set fire to their own homes. The fires raged for four days and nights. By that time, 80% of the city was destroyed. Estimates of the damage range from $500 million to as high as $1 billion (equivalent to as much as $300 billion in 2005 money).

The army was brought in to control the fires (which they did with dynamite and even artillery barrages) and stop the looting. In all, 500 presumed looters were shot. Some destruction and loss of life occurred outside San Francisco, but the bulk of the 3.000 casualties were to be regretted in the Golden Gate city itself. Three quarters of its population of 400.000 were made homeless. Half of those fled across the Bay to Oakland and Berkeley, others took up residence in massive camps of shacks and tents at Golden Gate Park and the Presidio, among other places.

Some of those camps were still open in 1908, indicating the slowness of the rebuilding effort (the city wouldn’t be considered ‘rebuilt’ until the Exposition of 1915). Up until then, San Francisco had been the undisputed economic centre of the West Coast. Los Angeles profited from the diversion of trade, industry and population, and eventually overtook its rival to the north.

This map (found here) was drawn by H.M. Pettit for Leslie’s Weekly, a famous American illustrated news magazine founded in 1852 and operating well into the 20th century, when some of its covers were drawn by Norman Rockwell. As befits a news weekly founded by an engraver, (Frank) Leslie’s Weekly featured a fair share of maps, illuminating a contemporary news story. This map’s title and subtitle are of a charming, old school length and descriptiveness:
Destruction of One of the Greatest Modern Cities. Bird’s-Eye view of Stricken San Francisco, Showing the Burned District, Covering Twenty-Five Square Miles, With the Most Prominent Places and Buildings Carefully Indicated.

Oriented to the southwest, the map surrounds the Burned District with a dotted line, from the Union Iron Works at the left side of the map up to Twin Peaks in the centre of the peninsula, and then along Van Ness Avenue almost to the Bay, taking a right on Greenwich Street via Telegraph Hill to the water, sparing the area around Fisherman’s Wharf. In total, about 500 city blocks were destroyed. Some significant locations are spelled out on the map:

• Examiner Building. Collapsed.
• Call Building. Badly Damaged.
• Valencia Hotel. Collapsed, 17 Killed.
• Mechanics Pavillion. Used As Morgue and Refuge for Injured. Building Burned, Injured Removed, 200 Bodies Left Were Cremated.
• Presidio Reservation. Where 50.000 people Are Encamped.
• South San Francisco. Burning In Spots.

The Wikipedia entry for the Great San Francisco Quake of 1906, on which much of this article was based, mentions Caruso’s traumatic exit from San Francisco: “Clutching an autographed photo of President Theodore Roosevelt, (he) made an effort to get out of the city, first by boat and then by train, and vowed never to return to San Francisco. He kept his word.”

There´s a certain type of children´s literature that just positively requires a map at the end paper of the book. The map is there either to show an itinerary that is crucial to the story, or to enhance the ´piratesque´quality of the work – or both. This map is an example from a children´s book called ´Really, Miss Henderson´ from 1945. As you can see, the War had cost the lives of many, many good illustrators (unless this was an active attempt at creating a ´naive´-style map). I have never heard of the book, so if I had to surmise the story from this map alone, I´d guess that:

• a group of British eccentrics (women and men, most of whom in the military) was shipwrecked in a small, isolated archipelago in the South Seas called the Pongawabu Islands.
• One island is important because it has a freshwater well, but also dangerous because there are cannibals and at least one serpent – deadly, one supposes. This situation generates much of the tension and action in the story:
• Major Crick and Miss Henderson are stuck on Cod Island, together with a rather large mouse. Imagine the hilarious and semi-romantic storylines one could come up with, using only these ingredients.
• An unnamed island holds a cask of brandy and may thus be partially responsible for the sightings of mermaids by Colonel Farquhar, not to mention the flying pig.
• On an outlying island, there is a case of sardines. The shipwreck survivors have to get over their differences and band together to obtain the food that will sustain them during their ordeal.
• The lady in distress is very mysterious because of her immodest dress sense. She might be a native maiden, but then a very pale one. Surely,she can´t be English! Maybe she´s French?This map was found here at fulltable.com, a site that collects some interesting examples of end paper maps in books.

This remarkable painting was made by the Norwegian artist Rolf Groven as a poster proposal for Norway’s pavilion at the World Exhibition in Seville (Spain) in 1992. The title is ‘Den Norske Dråpen', which I guess can be translated as 'The Norwegian Drop'.

Water is very significant indeed for Norwegians, as hydroelectric power produces 98,5% of the electric power generated in Norway – this in spite of Norway’s huge North Sea oil reserves, which consequently must be exploited mainly for export.

“This painting is aimed at visualizing how this energy source is entirely renewable and is a result of Norway’s distinct geography,” Mr Groven states on his website. And it does just that:

Steinstücken is the southernmost part of the Berlin Ortsteil (borough) of Wannsee, almost adjacent to the UFA film studios. From east to west, it’s no more than 500 metres wide, north to south: 300 metres. About 200 people call Steinstücken home. Before 1972, it was completely isolated inside the territory of Potsdam, the capital of the neigbouring Land (state) of Brandenburg. This sleepy hamlet was a focal point of East-West tension, as it was one of the exclaves of West Berlin inside East Germany.

(for earlier references to Berlin exclaves: see #99 on Erlengrund and Fichtewiese, #102 on Laßzinswiesen and #114 on the three Böttcherberg exclaves)

The Steinstücken exclave dates from 1787, when farmers from Stolpe acquired 12 hectares of land outside of their town, and in 1817 set up a farming colony there. In 1898, Stolpe was incorporated into Wannsee, including the exclave of Steinstücken. The exclave situation persisted when Wannsee was incorporated into Greater Berlin in 1920: Steinstücken was now an exclave of Berlin itself, in the Potsdam suburb of Babelsberg.

Exclaves not being uncommon between mere communes, the situation remained irrelevant to daily life until after 1945. At the end of the Second World War, Berlin’s city limits became the boundaries of Zones of Occupation of the four powers (UK, US, France and Soviet Union). Steinstücken thus was part of the US Zone (of Berlin), and became an island in the Soviet Zone (of Eastern Germany).

This wasn’t a problem until 1951, when the East German government tried to annex Steinstücken. The Volkspolizei ('People’s Police') physcally occupied the area. The inhabitants objected, the US protested, and the annexation was reversed four days later. But since then, Steinstücken was surrounded by a pole fence, preventing the exclave-dwellers from passing freely to Babelsberg and Potsdam. The only access was the Bernhard-Beyer-Strasse to Kohlhasenbrück in West-Berlin. This forested street lay on East German soil, so driving to Berlin involved passing two border crossings.

In 1952, East Germany restricted all West Berliners' acces to East Berlin only. Steinstücken’s inhabitants in theory no longer could visit their immediate surroundings, which were outside East Berlin. Road blocks were erected on the border between West Berlin and East Germany, also at Steinstücken. Entry to Steinstücken was possible only after reporting to police precinct 162 in Wannsee.

Especially after the building of the Berlin Wall (1961), Steinstücken became a popular target for East German Fluchtwilliger ('those willing to flee'), because the only real barrier was constituted by chevaux de frise – although it’s unclear to me where those who fled into the exclave could go from there, as access to West Berlin was controlled by East German border guards.

And yet, it happened, as after more than 20 those border guards 'switched sides' at Steinstücken, the GDR government constructed a separate wall around the exclave, making the border here equally impenetrable as at the 'proper' Berlin Wall.

In 1961, the Americans established a symbolic military outpost at Steinstücken consisting of three soldiers, choppering in and out of the exclave. A Hubschrauber-Denkmal ('Helicopter Memorial') erected in 1976 commemorates this air bridge. This situation was resolved with the exchange of territories between West and East Germany of 1972, establishing a corridor of 100 metres wide and 1,2 km long between Steinstücken and Kohlhasenbrück, in West Berlin. This corridor corresponded with the Bernhard-Beyer-Strasse. Steinstücken was no longer an exclave, and a steady stream of tourists towards the cartographic anomaly ensued. Bus line 118 connected Steinstücken to West Berlin, and water and power could now be derived from West Berlin.

One of Steinstücken’s inhabitants was a farmer who owned several fields in GDR territory. He received permission from the East German authorities to drive his tractor on the Autobahn towards his fields, which also included pastures in the Wüste Mark, another western 'island' in the communist 'sea'; this uninhabited farmland became East German in an exchange of territories in 1988.

The border between Berlin and Potsdam lost its geopolitical significance the year after, when the Berlin Wall fell. German reunification occurred in 1990, but at Steinstücken the border still follows the old pattern, including the Cold War corridor of 1972.

This 1950 map, showing Steinstücken and the Wüste Mark to the east, was found here, at this page, collecting maps and information about West Berlin's exclaves. The later corridor linking Steinstücken to West Berlin runs along the railway line.

In a place far from the geographic heart of German culture, on the lower reaches of the Volga River in the southern part of European Russia, there once existed a separate republic for Russia’s Germans. The story of how these Wolgadeutsche or Russlanddeutsche (Volga-Germans or Russian Germans) came to live in Russia and later leave it again, is a now largely forgotten part of European history.

That story starts with one of Russia’s most influential monarchs, Catherine II the Great (1729-1796), whose enlightened rule lasted for almost the entire last third of the 18^th century. Yekaterina, as she was known to her subjects, was born in Stettin as Sophie Fredericke Auguste von Anhalt-Zerbst, a German princess. In 1762, she invited Western Europeans to immigrate to Russia to farm and develop the sparsely inhabited parts of her Empire, promising them they could maintain their language and culture.

Whether or not there was a special link between her country of birth and the direction of her plea, I do not know. Fact is, it was mainly Germans who responded to her offer – Germany suffering from large-scale poverty at the time, other European nationalities preferring emigration to America. Additionally appealing to religious communities such as the Mennonites was the promise of exclusion from military service – later revoked, causing an emigration wave of Volga-Germans to the Americas (where many settled in the Plains areas of the US and Canada, where they could practice agriculture in a similar way as in their ancestral areas).

The Nationalities Policy established after the Communist Revolution of 1917 provided for limited territorial autonomy for many of the 100-plus non-Russian peoples living in what was subsequently called the Russian Soviet Federative Socialist Republic (RSFSR). For the Volga-Germans, this meant the formation in 1924 of the Volga-German Autonomous Soviet Socialist Republic (VGASSR; in German Autonome Sozialistische Sowjetrepublik der Wolgadeutschen – ASSWD; in Russian Avtonomnaya Sovietskaya Sotsialisticheskaya Respublika Nyemtsev Povolzhaya – ASSRNP; Communists preferred their acronyms without too many vowels).

The capital of the Volga-German Republic was Pokrovsk (known in German as Kosakenstadt), renamed Engels (after the German Communist theoretician) in 1931. The area counted about 2 million inhabitants – Germans, Russians and others - at the turn of the 20th century. When the Volga-German Republic was formed, the population was at least 1/3 lower: the deeply religious Volga-Germans (mainly Lutherans) came into conflict with the anti-religious Bolsheviks. Many Volga-Germans sided with the ‘Whites’ during the Russian Civil War (1917-1922) which was won by the ‘Reds’. Pastors were sent off to Siberia, many Volga-German towns were fiercely attacked by the Reds, many civilians died in the famines of that period.

After the Civil War, a limited amnesty was declared by the Communist authorities, and German language was promoted officially. According to the 1939 census, the Volga-German ASSR counted just over 600.000 German-speaking inhabitants. The death-knell of ‘Germany-on-the-Volga’ was sounded by Nazi-Germany, when it invaded the USSR in 1941. The Volga-German ASSR was disbanded. All Germans living in the Soviet Union were declared enemies of the state, and exiled further from the potential front, mainly to Kazakhstan. Other nationalities, notably the Krim Tatars and the Chechens, suffered the same fate. After the war, many Volga-Germans had to sign declarations promising never to return to the Volga area.

The Stalinist decrees of banishment and cultural oppression were reversed in the 1950s and ‘60s, but the Volga-German ASSR was never re-established. After the fall of the Soviet Union in the early 1990s, many ethnic Germans took advantage of a German law allowing an easy ‘return’ to the Heimat of people of German descent (mainly in Eastern Europe and the former Soviet Union), thus effectively ending the brief speculation of re-establishing some sort of Volga-German autonomy, and more broadly, several centuries of German presence in Russia.

The map shows the 14 cantons of the Volga-German ASSR, 10 of them carrying Russian names (such as Fjodorowka, Krasny-Kut, Tonkoschurowka, Krasnojar, Pokrowsk, Kukkus, Staraja Poltawka, Pallasowka, Kamenka, Solotoje) and 4 of them German names (Marxstadt, Frank, Seelmann, Balzer).

The map legend indicates German towns with a red dot, Tatar towns with a crescent, Russian towns in the ASSR with a black and without it with a white dot. A separate dot colour, unfortunately indistinguishable from the Russian black on this map, indicates Estonian towns. The map legend further seems to indicate that each canton either had a Russian or a German capital city.

Some towns with unmistakably German names include: Frankreich, Alt Weimar and Strassburg (in Pallasowka canton), Friedenberg (in the mainly Russian Staraja Poltawka canton), Brunnental and Warenburg (in the apparently bilingual Seelmann canton), Unterdorf and Rosenberg (in the heavily German Kamenka canton),and Schöndorf, Schönfeld and Schöntal (in what must be the very picturesque Krasny Kut canton).

This map was found here (where it can be seen in a higher, slightly more legible resolution) at Arwela, a bilingual German-Russian website apparently mainly dedicated to architecture. The annoying sidebar to the right, blocking out much of the map, can be circumvented by clicking on the map itself.

The US state of Oklahoma almost entered the Union as two states – Oklahoma and Sequoyah. The latter is the name of a failed attempt in the early 20th century by Native Americans, who formed (and still form) a large part of the population in eastern Oklahoma, to constitute a state of their own.

The US acquired most of Oklahoma from France in the Louisiana Purchase of 1803 (the Oklahoma Panhandle came into US possession only after the Mexican-American war of 1846-’48). The area was set aside as Indian Territory by the Indian Removal Act (1830), which provided for resettlement (voluntary and forced) of Native American tribes east of the Mississippi.

In 1866, the Indian Territory was roughly halved when the US government forced new treaties on the tribes living there. The western and central parts of Indian Territory became government land. From the 1870s onward, prospective settlers began to push for opening these lands for Euro-American settlement under the 1862 Homestead Act. Even though the government resisted (attempting to honour the 1866 treaties), the settlers’ pressure became too great to resist. In 1884, a court in Kansas ruled that settling on these lands wasn’t a crime.

Congress followed by authorising settlement by the Dawes (General Allotment) Act of 1887. In 1889, President Benjamin Harrison opened up 8.000 sq. km of so-called Unassigned Lands (in central Oklahoma) for settlement by Euro-Americans by means of a land run. This involved dividing up the land on a first-come basis. In total, there were five major land runs in Oklahoma, although most of the rushes after the one of 1889 involved a lottery to counter cheating (some of the settlers were calles ‘Sooners’, because they had already literally staked their claim before the land was opened for settlement).

In 1890, the 1866 treaty lands plus No Man’s Land (nowadays known as the Oklahoma Panhandle) were joined into the Oklahoma Territory. The eastern part of present-day Oklahoma remained Indian Territory. In a convention at Eufaula in 1902, representatives of the Five Civilized Tribes started a drive towards statehood for the Indian Territory. The name for their proposed state was Sequoyah, a prominent Cherokee – in fact, the man who devised the Cherokee alphabet. In 1903, the delegates met again to organise a constitutional convention.

This convention met at Muskogee in 1905, presided over by General Pleasant Porter, Principal Chief of the Creek Nation. Vice-presidents were the high representatives of each of the five ‘civilized tribes’: William C. Rogers (Cherokee), William H. Murray (Chickasaw), Green McCurtain (Choctaw), John Brown (Seminole) and Charles N. Haskell (Creek). If Sequoyah never achieved statehood, it wasn’t for the efforts of the Convention: it drafted a constitution, established county boundaries for the new state, elected delegates to petition the US Congress for statehood and saw its proposals overwhelmingly endorsed in a referendum held in Indian Territory.

However, Eastern politicians pressured then US President Theodore Roosevelt against admitting two Western states (Sequoyah and Oklahoma) into the Union, fearing this would disproportionally diminish Eastern states’ political influence. Roosevelt then decided both territories could only enter the Union as a single state. Having already laid the groundwork for their own state, Indian Territory representatives had a big influence in establishing Oklahoma. The constitution of Oklahoma, admitted as the 46th state in 1907, is based largely on that of Sequoyah.

The tantalising concept of an ‘Indian’ state of the Union was recycled by alternate history writer Harry Turtledove, in whose novel ‘How Few Remain’ the Indian Territory enters the Confederate States of America as the Confederate State of Sequoyah.

Nowadays, Oklahoma is the 20th-largest (181.196 sq. km), 28th-most populous (3.45 million) state of the Union. Its name, chosen by Chief Allen Wright of the Choctaw Nation during the 1866 treaty negotiations means Red People in his native language. That name applied at first only to the aforementioned Unassigned Lands, in central Oklahoma. Oklahoma today is a blend of Western and Native (or, to use the less-varnished phrase of bygone days ‘cowboy’ and ‘indian’) cultures. The state has the US’s second-largest Native American population, both percentage-wise (11,4% compared with Alaska’s 19%) and in absolute terms (about 400.000, compared with California’s 680.000). Additionally, a quarter of the state’s white and black populations have some Native American ancestry. Oklahoma is home to about 50 Native tribal headquarters, more than any other state. Ten of the Native languages spoken in Oklahoma have over 10.000 speakers. Tahlequah in eastern Oklahoma, where Native Americans still predominate, is the Capital of the Cherokee Nation.

This map of the 'State of Sequoyah' - complete with a proposed State Seal - was compiled from the USGS Map of Indian Territory (1902), revised to include the county divisions made under direction of Sequoyah Statehood Convention (1905), by D.W. Bolich, a civil engineer at Muskogee. It was found at this page of the McCasland Digital Collection of Early Oklahoma & Indian Territory Maps at the Oklahoma State University Library, where it can be seen in greater detail.