Where is this bridge, by the way? It looks way cool! "Once in awhile we get shown the light, in the strangest of places, if we look at it right" - Hunter/Garcia
I was in Mostar in 1985, and walked across this bridge. It was chock-full of tourists, and for athletic local boys, a great source of income was Western tourists paying for them to jump from the bridge into the river. When they did it, three-four at a time. It was done like, every half an hour.
BTW, the valley of the Neretva upriver from Mostar was an extremely beautiful canyon, with mountains rising above 2000 m on its sides. Both the railroad and the road to Sarajevo went through it. Both were destroyed at several places by the ethnic fronts, today rebuilt in much worse hape, and a lot of rubbish and litter was dumped along the river... *Lunatic*, n. One whose delusions are out of fashion.
The bridge has been there for almost 500 years, I think, with goldsmiths/jewellers occupying the shops on the bridge for much of that time. I think the corridor on the top was added to connect the Uffizi on one side with a palace on the other: it is now a gallery.
The story goes that late in WWII, the retreating German commander was ordered to blow up all five Arno bridges, but decided that he could not destroy Ponte Vecchio. A victory for civilisation?
Here you can see it via webcam.
However, as this is about bridges let me add this photo of Øresundsbroen (between Denmark and Sweden) which opened in 2000 - making a ferry-free connection between the Scandinavian peninsula and mainland Europe possible (save the big detour through Finland and Russia).
If someone knows how to post the picture of this, I would be really grateful! Those who can make you believe absurdities can make you commit atrocities. -Voltaire
[To post an image, say in an article as where yours were from: i) Right click on the image - select "View Image", this will give you the image url on top in your browser; ii) Write this code: < img src="" > except no space after '<' and before '>'; iii) Paste the url of the image between the quotation marks of the code. Voila!]
I actually know how to post it that way, but I am always hearing about how you are not supposed to link directly to photos on other websites because of bandwidth or something.
I went to the EuroTrib user's guide and it said to save the pic as a file, then upload it to "Your files" at EuroTrib. But I couldn't find a "Your files" link... Those who can make you believe absurdities can make you commit atrocities. -Voltaire
I wouldn't worry too much in a diary on EuroTrib at this stage, but in principle you should upload the image to one of the free image hosts that are available around the place.
I'm not able to recommend any as I can either upload to Eurotrib or host the image on a site I'm paying for. Soj had some recommendations in one of the other threads though, but I can't find it. This may help you find somewhere relevant.
In theory it's copyright infringement to upload copyright images to these sites, so you probably shouldn't do that with people who might get stroppy.
(except where the () are, put <> )
and this will keep bandwidth low "Once in awhile we get shown the light, in the strangest of places, if we look at it right" - Hunter/Garcia
"Once in awhile we get shown the light, in the strangest of places, if we look at it right" - Hunter/Garcia
When I saw the diary title though I immediately thought of Acol, Blue Club, Inverted Blackwood, Stayman and contracts in 3 No Trumps.
As my old friend Geoff would have said "3 No Trumps? Boring!" Eats cheroots and leaves.
Here is my favourite bridge:
This incredible monster, or three monsters (it looks like three dinosaurs in a row to me) stands near Edinburgh in Scotland, it is the famous Forth (Rail) Bridge. It was built this massive to reassure passangers, after another long bridge nearby over the Firth of Tay collapsed under a train in severe weather - then thought to have been due to wind pressure*.
I visited this bridge (near the same vantage point as this photo had) late during a long summer sunset, and in the setting Sun's light the view was dramatic. (If I ever get near a good scanner, I might re-start this thread and post some of my own photos.)
* It took decades until engineering science discovered the phenomenon that was also identified as the real culprit of this disaster: the successive wind gusts caused oscillations along the narrow but high multi-pillar bridge, sort of like a curtain in a breeze but upside down, and the train with its weight and momentum pushed the oscillation beyond the limit. (I got this from a relative who studied engineering.) *Lunatic*, n. One whose delusions are out of fashion.
"Ich komme vom Norden her." "Und ich vom Süden." 0; &# 160; "Und ich vom Meer."
"Hei, das gibt einen Ringelreihn, Und die Brücke muß in den Grund hinein."
"Und der Zug, der in die Brücke tritt Um die siebente Stund'?" 0; &# 160; "Ei, der muß mit." "Muß mit"
"Tand, Tand Ist das Gebilde von Menschenhand!"
Sorry school days - one of the poems I had to learn
Hah! Me too, when I went to school there... *Lunatic*, n. One whose delusions are out of fashion.
Those who can make you believe absurdities can make you commit atrocities. -Voltaire
Can there be any comparison?
This pair of railway bridges is at Biatorbágy, just west of Budapest, on the Vienna-Budapest mainline. This bridge has a story that is the Hungarian parallel to the Kennedy assassination - except there certainly was a conspiracy of some sort.
On the 12th September 1931, at late night, the rails were blown up in front of the Orient Express as it crossed the bridge - the train fell into the abyss, 23 dead.
The culprit was Sylvester Matuschka (or, with Hungarian spelling, Szilveszter Matuska - he was a typical multilingual, multi-identity subject of the Habsburg monarchy), a mine owner then with residence in Vienna, who served in a railway sabotage unit in Hungary during WWI - i.e., plenty of explosives experience. He mingled among the injured passengers, and boarded a train home unharrassed - but in Vienna he was arrested: Austrian police was already looking for him, in connection with two previous derailing attacks which were his 'exercises' for the big one (the last day of 1930 at Anzbach near Vienna, and August 1931 between Jüterbog and Kloster Zinna near Berlin).
And from here it gets strange. In Hungary, the government announced the state of emergency, and implemented a pre-planned crack-down on the communists (helped by the fact that Matuschka - or, in more tinfoil-hat versions, police conspirators - left behind misleading anonymous letters praising a 'revolution'). They held a communist suspect, and even while the trial of the real culprit went on in Austria, executed the two leaders of the communist party as the brains behind that communist. Eyewitnesses were listened to only in a second trial.
There are speculations based on some pecularities that Matuschka had cover from the authorities and was allowed to escape - at any rate, he was the member of a far-right ex-officers' association. Likewise, from the right-wing press of the time, new theories were spun forth that Matuschka was a super-secret communist agent, planted by the Soviets into a right-wing background years earlier (a bit incoherent: if so, why leave letters behind that make the communist motivation explicit?...).
In the trial itself, Matuschka behaved in a very eccentric way, and after originally confessing to the crime, he even began to blame an imaginary friend. The expert conclusion then and now was that he was not insane, he was acting over-the-top. In the end he got life inprisonment - and things get even more mysterious at this point.
Matuschka disappeared during WWII. There are two versions of what happened to him - and both with documentary evidence and testimonies! One has him staying in prison until the Russians came, when he'd welcome the soldiers as the last inmate, then disappears. But the other has him offering his bombing expertise to the army in November 1942, when the Russians began to push back the fascist invaders - and disappearing or getting killed on the Eastern Front two years later. At any rate, some people claim that they met him in the seventies when he re-visited Hungary, of course under false name - while others speculate that he was taken by the Russians and made to work for them.
The viaduct itself was disused two-three decades ago, when the railway line was realigned - but in 1982, they were used in a spectacular re-creation of the trainwreck for the US-West German-Hungarian movie The Train Killer (Der Fall MatuschkaViadukt), starring Michael Sarrazin. *Lunatic*, n. One whose delusions are out of fashion.
http://www.clifton-suspension-bridge.org.uk/
