Remember the scene in one Harry Potter film where the wizards in training are taught to face their biggest fear? The trick was to stand up to the fearsome thing and yell out “Ridiculous!” I try to teach this also to my son when he is afraid of something, for example in a dream, or if he accidentally sees something really scary on TV and any monsters follow him into his bedroom.

Now, politics, especially before an election, can be very scary - especially when you read and understand some of the things Larken Rose tries to tell us. But we can look beyond the scary part and actually see how ridiculous the whole business of campaigning is and I am glad to report that there are some out there who can still say a hearty RIDICULOUS!

Posted by Merlin - October 3rd, 2008

This is an amazing work of cinematrography. I can imagine the hours on hours of observations, waiting for just the right moment to get the high speed cameras rolling.

Fascinating also to be introduced to the totally different world, a world that to our eye seems to be so peaceful, but is in reality a jungle.

You really want to see this in the highest quality as possible - I found a good version on the water shrew website.

Posted by Merlin - September 22nd, 2008

Today on the lighter side - I have to share this picture that landed in my mail box.

I enjoy to thoroughly and did not want to keep it for myself. So, no politics and anarchism this time, just good honest revenge-thoughts from a nerd…

… and you have to admit, these pretties are really pretty, aren’t they?

And here for a cheap plug - would they be even prettier, if they were wearing tie-dye?

Posted by Merlin - September 17th, 2008

There are some of these many cute emails you get that you can’t just put in the trash can. You really might look at this later and enjoy it again. If they are in an email archive you will never find them again but if they are on a web site then there is a chance that you run into them again at a later time.

Here is one such email that is fortunately published on a web site - if you have a son … with quite some scary pictures like this …

and good information like

If you hook a dog leash over a ceiling fan, the motor is not strong enough to rotate a 42 pound Boy wearing Batman underwear and a Superman cape. It is strong enough, however, if tied to a paint can, to spread paint on all four walls of a 20×20 ft. room.

Posted by Merlin - August 22nd, 2008

(sing this headline to the song “What a difference a day makes, 24 little hours…)

Found this on my quest to read the web every day:

In Seminole County, Florida, kids who get all A’s and B’s, have a good attendance record, or receive good marks for behavior can get a free Happy Meal at their local McDonald’s.

There is additional interesting trivia to this story, like the fact that the envelopes the report cards are sent in have this offer printed on - have to say, a probably very good and inexpensive ad campaign for McDonalds, probably just printing the envelopes for the school and maybe even paying the postage.

But that’s not really the point - what I find so fascinating is that the kids that have good grades, probably because their parents keep them away from junk food are now directly targeted to lower their grades. It is probably true that a Big Mac once in a while will not kill a kid, but why get them started in the first place. There is so much good food around actually nourishing a body that there is no need for Big Macs.

And want to see what happens if the exposure is increased and made permanent? Look at this guy who was loaned out to the the US for just a few years…

and what happened to him when he moved back to Italy a few years later after a diet of good American junk food…

PS: sorry for the little bug that I got onto your screen up there at the top of the article - it’s totally harmless, so don’t worry.

Posted by Merlin - August 20th, 2008

I just browsed through some comic strips of Calvin and Hobbes and found one that was very interesting when compared to my experience with the government in general and the IRS in particular.

I would love to post the whole strip here but I am afraid the copyright owner would not like that, so I leave it to your imagination and just give you the text.

Dialog between Calvin and the bully in the school yard:

Bully: I want that truck, Twinky

Calvin: It’s mine, Moe. I brought it from home.

Bully: I said, give me the truck.

Calvin: Moe, you can’t just take things from people because you’re bigger!

Bully: I’m not taking it. You’re giving it to me because we’ll be so much happier that way. (grabbing Calvin’s collar and clenching his first.)

Calvin (by himself): How touching…

Calvin (a bit later): Moe, give me my truck back. It’s not yours.

Bully: It’s now. You gave it to me.

Calvin: I didn’t have much choice, didn’t I!? It was either give up the truck or get punched!

Bully: So?

Calvin: So I only ‘gave’ it to you because you are bigger and meaner than me!

Bully: Yeah? So?

Calvin: The forensic marvel has reduced my logic to shambles.

Bully: You’re saying you changed your mind about getting punched?

So, honestly, does that remind you of any interactions with the Infernal Revenue Service?

I am working on some spiritual solution for that problem at a site that will help to get rid of fear of the IRS. Join me there and help spread the word. The site and program are still in the construction phase but you can help getting it off the ground and - - - be a guinea pig.

Posted by Merlin - August 18th, 2008

If you don’t know who Douglas Adams is you will probably not appreciate the following quotes by him. But if you do know him and love his ‘Hitchhikers to the Galaxy’ books and other writings, I think you will enjoy them…

• A common mistake that people make when trying to design something completely foolproof is to underestimate the ingenuity of complete fools.
• Flying is learning how to throw yourself at the ground and miss.
• For a moment, nothing happened.Then, after a second or so, nothing continued to happen.
• He hoped and prayed that there wasn’t an afterlife. Then he realized there was a contradiction involved here and merely hoped that there wasn’t an afterlife.
• He was a dreamer, a thinker, a speculative philosopher… or, as his wife would have it, an idiot.
• Human beings, who are almost unique in having the ability to learn from the experience of others, are also remarkable for their apparent disinclination to do so.
• I don’t believe it. Prove it to me and I still won’t believe it.
• I love deadlines. I like the whooshing sound they make as they fly by.
• I may not have gone where I intended to go, but I think I have ended up where I intended to be.
• I seldom end up where I wanted to go, but almost always end up where I need to be.
• I think fish is nice, but then I think that rain is wet, so who am I to judge?
• I’m spending a year dead for tax reasons.
• If it looks like a duck, and quacks like a duck, we have at least to consider the possibility that we have a small aquatic bird of the family anatidae on our hands.
• If somebody thinks they’re a hedgehog, presumably you just give ‘em a mirror and a few pictures of hedgehogs and tell them to sort it out for themselves.
• In the beginning the Universe was created. This has made a lot of people very angry and has been widely regarded as a bad move.
• Isn’t it enough to see that a garden is beautiful without having to believe that there are fairies at the bottom of it too?
• It is a mistake to think you can solve any major problems just with potatoes.
• It is a rare mind indeed that can render the hitherto non-existent blindingly obvious. The cry ‘I could have thought of that’ is a very popular and misleading one, for the fact is that they didn’t, and a very significant and revealing fact it is too.
• It is a well-known fact that those people who must want to rule people are, ipso facto, those least suited to do it… anyone who is capable of getting themselves made President should on no account be allowed to do the job.
• Life is wasted on the living.
• Space is big. You just won’t believe how vastly, hugely, mind-bogglingly big it is. I mean, you may think it’s a long way down the road to the drug store, but that’s just peanuts to space.
• The difficulty with this conversation is that it’s very different from most of the ones I’ve had of late. Which, as I explained, have mostly been with trees.
• The Guide is definitive. Reality is frequently inaccurate.
• The impossible often has a kind of integrity which the merely improbable lacks.
• The major difference between a thing that might go wrong and a thing that cannot possibly go wrong is that when a thing that cannot possibly go wrong goes wrong it usually turns out to be impossible to get at and repair.
• The mere thought hadn’t even begun to speculate about the merest possibility of crossing my mind.
• There is a theory which states that if ever anyone discovers exactly what the Universe is for and why it is here, it will instantly disappear and be replaced by something even more bizarre and inexplicable.There is another theory which states that this has already happened.
• This must be Thursday. I never could get the hang of Thursdays.
• Time is an illusion. Lunchtime doubly so.
• Time is bunk.
• To give real service you must add something which cannot be bought or measured with money, and that is sincerity and integrity.
• We have normality. I repeat, we have normality. Anything you still can’t cope with is therefore your own problem.
• You live and learn. At any rate, you live.

Posted by Merlin - July 23rd, 2008

When I ran into this video of an interview of Billy Graham by Woody Allen I thought that this can be very interesting - and that turned out to be the case indeed.

From the introduction:

Woody Allen: “I don’t agree with him on a great many subjects. There are a few that we do agree on. But he is certainly the best in the world in what he does - Mr. Billy Graham!”

Billy Graham: “It’s very nice to be with you Woody, and I’d like to say that there is some things that I don’t agree with you on.”

Woody Allen: “The question is which one of us will be converted…”

But see for yourself…

and the second part…

I really liked Woody Allen’s little stab: “If you could have faith in me…”

or the little exchange…

Billy Graham: “O no, God is perfect!”

Woody Allen: “You know when I look in the mirror in the morning, it’s hard for me to believe that.”

Posted by Merlin - July 19th, 2008

I had heard about the Wim Wenders movie “Paris, Texas” but never attempted to see it. It came out in a time when I had been very busy moving my life around and there never was time enough to sit down for two hours and spend them on a movie. It took me many years for it to sink in that the title actually referred to a town of Paris in Texas. Never nurtured the idea that there was any other than THE Paris, the capital of the country right over there.

But now that I have seen these two pictures…

Paris, Texas, and …

Paris, France

… maybe I should see the movie.

Joking! - Obviously the movie has nothing to do with the subjects of these images (just a cheap hook), but it’s about Travis, an amnesiac who has been lost for four years and is taken in by his brother. He later tries to put his life back together and understand what happened between him, his wife Jane (Nastassja Kinski), and his son Hunter - I mean, it’s a Wim Wenders film!

Posted by Merlin Silk - April 24th, 2008

With little kids there is no difference between boys and girls. OK, I know about those differences, but look at the title of the post, here, as in law, it’s context, context, context. To make it clear for everybody, for small kids there is no difference between the sexes when sitting on the thrown is involved.

But when the boy gets a bit bigger he wants to be like papa and ventures into standing up while peeing. This is handed down from generation to generation and never questioned - men stand up while peeing!

In the initial training phases it creates a mess around the toilet, but even mama does not mind because junior is so cute as he wants to be like papa. Over time a percentage of male adults develop a skill to deposit their waste into the container they are aiming for, but take note of my formulation - not all succeed in that laudable skill.

The first time I encountered that this law of nature can be questioned was at a friends house. Very progressive guy, married when we were still in high school, driving his VW to school without a driver’s license (a very serious offense in Germany) and being altogether very cool.

He and his wife had their own appartment and so all of us who still lived with the parents certainly loved to hang out there. And he was so progressive that it might have been him and and not his wife to clean the house, including the toilet. He must have gotten tired of cleaning after all those buddies of his because there was suddenly the sign in the bathroom:

I don’t want to clean and have a fit,
therefore please, all men do sit!

The German version was similarly rough in terms of metric, obviously using different words. But imagine the impact. I don’t remember if it actually had the impact on me abandoning my training and actually sitting down - I tend to think that I did not - but I have not forgotten in so many years.

I don’t know why, but over the years I had turned into a sitter-downer and when our son joined us, we brought him up as a sitter-downer as well - there was no dad role model to show him otherwise. But he certainly tried all this when the peer pressure in school kicked in.

And then there were his buddies visiting - all stander-uppers. How do we handle this? As we asked politely, the universe gave us an answer in form of a low resolution jpeg image that attempted to educate in a funny way. The resolution was so low that it was not usable to be printed and used as a sign in the bathroom. It took me considerable time to get my act together and design a new document with appropriate resolution and I hereby offer the world this work. I am deeply indebted to the person who had the idea and made the first graphic - unfortunately I don’t know his identity, I would love to give him - or her - credit.

Here is a low-res preview version, but you can click the image to get a high resolution pdf version of the graphic to laminate (!) and hang in your bathroom.

Posted by Merlin Silk - April 19th, 2008

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