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For the first eight summers we have been following what modern parents do – send kids to camps and have them entertained, offer them programs and generally take away from them the opportunity to create their own summer.

That is so different to the way I grew up. OK, it might have been once or twice that the whole family went on some vacation trip, but that was for maybe two weeks while the summer vacation from school was at least six weeks. So I did have the need and opportunity to invent my own summer, and I don’t remember ever being bored.

I had kept some of my sanity when I became a parent myself to a degree and did not cover all corners with padding, and my general idea about child safety was that if the damage was not permanent then it was OK. But we did make the mistake of not giving the kid time  to explore on his own, there was always a class to go to and a program to be in.

Lately there are more and more things coming into my life that indicate that the situation is being restored to proper working. One of them is Lenore Skenazy’s Free Range Kids. Ms. Skenazy gained notoriety by letting her son take the subway all by himself to get home – and talk about it. Her blog has become a center for parents, who want to let their kids gain confidence by doing things themselves,  to congregate and share their experiences. There is also Ms. Skenazy’s book Free Range Kids available at Amazon, but I have to admit that I did not read it yet myself.

Today I ran into a TED talk by the founder of the Tinkering School, Gever Tulley, demonstrating that it is OK to have kids work with power tools. This talk was just the last drop that made me think about writing this all up.

Yes, it is a camp, but I believe it is different enough to set a good example of not over protecting our children.

Now, what do I do about all this? This year, at the age of nearly ten, we did not sign our son up for any summer camp. Instead we are up there in the mountains in a little cabin and the junior has to find something to do while I work. Fortunately I do work from the house, otherwise I don’t think it would be possible without going straight to jail.

What is the experience so far? There were a few upsets and mis-emotions, and we are not quite there yet where junior uses his time wisely (by my irrelevant standards), but he has gone beyond the initial mostly playing computer games to learning how to get videos of those game plays onto YouTube, and just today, probably in response to my teasing that after the summer he will be the proud owner of a big butt, he started to exercise without any prompting.

So, yeah, I think we are going in the right direction here. Any other experiences with summers without camps that I can learn from?

Here is a little presentation that explains in detail how you can become happy. There are not too many steps necessary reach this goal but all of them are essential and you can’t leave out a single one – so you better watch this little piece of wisdom carefully…

Please enable Javascript and Flash to view this Flash video.

Thanks, Kathie, for sending me the story of this Wise Old Man.

During my first semesters at the University of Dortmund a break-through in album sales happened. While at the regular record store you had to shell out over DM 20 (that’s Deutsch Marks for all you young kids, the currency they had in Germany before the Euro) for a 30cm album, some entrepreneurial students started to sell those same albums for DM 14.95 or less in the entry hall of the cafeteria (mensa in latin-german).

This is where I got pretty much the whole collection of my albums I still have after so many years. Some of the early and important items in this collection are records from the Doors. Sure, we knew Jim Morrison by name but the other members of the band were more or less face and name-less.

Until today, when I found the great video site called L-Studio. L must be standing for Lexus as this site is hosted on a subdomain of Lexus.com. And why not – BMW sponsors TED, why should Lexus not have it’s own video site with – I have to say – excellent video.

Some of these videos are with and about Ray Manzarek, the creator of the Door’s characteristic keyboard sound. Hear him tell about the Door’s beginnings …

… and then look through the other video for more Ray Manzarek and try not to miss the series of Web Therapie with Lisa Kudrow.

UPDATE: just ran into the new video of Weird Al Yankovic – ‘Craigs List’ – were he pays homage to the doors – in his own special way. And the great thing is that Ray Manzarek actually plays the keyboards in this spoof of the doors! No wonder that Yankovic version sounds so authentic…

I have to admit, some 8+ years ago I was happy that Mr. Bush won over Al Gore and I actually had gone to the polls and voted for him. Still don’t know if it would have been better if Mr. Gore would have made it, and I believe we will never know, right?

But it had gotten pretty bad, most will agree. Then the next election – Savior Obama made it against all objections – and many people were happy. I can’t say this time around that I was happy with the outcome as in the meantime I had definitely understood that either way would have been worse. I know, this does not work grammatically, but we are talking politicians and so it does not need any resemblance of logic or reason.

Nevertheless I tended more towards him than the alternative, after the real alternative – Ron Paul – had been kicked out of the game by the puppet masters behind the smoke screen. Now I start to believe that this preference might have been as misguided as my preference of Bush over Gore after being lead to the following video of Mr. Obama’s speech…

Synchronicity can be a scary thing.

Having just finished the Iron Web by Larken Rose I ran into a short excerpt from one of Douglas Adam’s Hitchhiker’s Guide books…

[An extraterrestrial robot and spaceship has just landed on earth. The robot steps out of the spaceship...]

“I come in peace,” it said, adding after a long moment of further grinding, “take me to your Lizard.”

Ford Prefect, of course, had an explanation for this, as he sat with Arthur and watched the nonstop frenetic news reports on television, none of which had anything to say other than to record that the thing had done this amount of damage which was valued at that amount of billions of pounds and had killed this totally other number of people, and then say it again, because the robot was doing nothing more than standing there, swaying very slightly, and emitting short incomprehensible error messages.

“It comes from a very ancient democracy, you see…”

“You mean, it comes from a world of lizards?”

“No,” said Ford, who by this time was a little more rational and coherent than he had been, having finally had the coffee forced down him, “nothing so simple. Nothing anything like to straightforward. On its world, the people are people. The leaders are lizards. The people hate the lizards and the lizards rule the people.”

“Odd,” said Arthur, “I thought you said it was a democracy.”

“I did,” said ford. “It is.”

“So,” said Arthur, hoping he wasn’t sounding ridiculously obtuse, “why don’t the people get rid of the lizards?”

“It honestly doesn’t occur to them,” said Ford. “They’ve all got the vote, so they all pretty much assume that the government they’ve voted in more or less approximates to the government they want.”

“You mean they actually vote for the lizards?”

“Oh yes,” said Ford with a shrug, “of course.”

“But,” said Arthur, going for the big one again, “why?”

“Because if they didn’t vote for a lizard,” said Ford, “the wrong lizard might get in. Got any gin?”

“What?”

“I said,” said Ford, with an increasing air of urgency creeping into his voice, “have you got any gin?”

“I’ll look. Tell me about the lizards.”

Ford shrugged again.

“Some people say that the lizards are the best thing that ever happened to them,” he said. “They’re completely wrong of course, completely and utterly wrong, but someone’s got to say it.”

This great picture of today’s world of rulers and ruled finally prompts me to verbalize my thoughts on Mr. Adams. I do not want in any way diminish his accomplishments, but I think he was a medium channeling all these great pieces of wisdom packed into his books.

I watched, many years ago, after I was already totally enthralled by Mr. Adams nuggets of wisdom, a BBC show with and about Douglas Adams. It presented, amongst many other great info about the Hitchhiker’s Guide and it’s beginnings, some interviews with Mr. Adams. From his statements in these interviews there was no other possibility than that of external influence. The man being interviewed just did not seem to have the capacity to come up with mind-boggling wise answers to the question on how to learn to fly, which is, as any Douglas Adams reader knows,  “You throw yourself to the ground – - – and miss.”

As said earlier, my intention is not to take away from Mr. Adams accomplishments, it just is in a little bit different arena. He was the man who picked up these gems of insight from all over the space-time continuum and packaged them in a form that is – and there is no other more fitting word – mind-boggling.

Just take the quote above – is there still anybody who does not see – at least for a moment – how ridiculous it is that we accept, without revolting, our political system of governmental  lizards that everybody hates but votes for every few years nevertheless?

Back to the scary synchronicities I mentioned in the beginning – for me, finding this parable and reading the Iron Web, all within a few short day, is like an 11:11 event that breaks open the solidity of the universe and slapps the fact into my face that things can be seen very differently.