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You would expect that I, growing up in Germany, would be very much into soccer, or better Fussball, but that was just not so. We even had a long-term renter in our house who played soccer – made no difference.

The only time I was ‘interested’ in soccer was when I had a girl friend who was a Schalke-fan (you know, one of these teams in the national league). I always had the strange notion that you do sports instead of watching them – what do I know?

But then it happened, many many years and thousands of miles away, in Far-Away-Land California. All this ignorance I will describe is probably not good for my reputation but I hope it will have a soul-cleaning effect on me, so it will be worth it.

I was, at that time, heavily involved in my son’s school,  in the parent part of the parent-teacher organization. One of the activities was to send out emails to the parents to make them do things. Not an easy thing to do as they had already paid a high tuition so they had done enough already for the kids upbringing.

Once I got an email back (that did not happen often) asking me if I spoke German. I guess my German accent had peaked through my writing. ‘Sure,’ I said, after which I was asked if I could help with the lyrics to some music. Having always been involved with music through friends who made it, I was delighted to oblige.

I had seen this other parent in school but never interacted with him, but we talked on the phone and arranged for me to come over to his house where we would be working on that song. So far my past musician-friends had always been either students or just starting out on their career, so I was expecting to help somebody out to get started. But I was surprised when I got to the address to find a big, beautiful house, and was led to a dedicated music room with a grand piano.

Cool, I thought and asked what this music, we would be working on, was all about. Placido, this parent’s name, told me that he was competing to write the anthem for the soccer world cup that would be in Germany this year (2006) and his plan was to make this a multi-lingual song to express the idea that people from all over the world would gather peacefully, forgetting all differences. I had never been to a soccer match so how would I know how much peace there would be between the fans of two teams, one of which would lose.

The music was already composed and the text for the English and Spanish part was pretty much there, so we sat on the piano and hammered out lyrics for the German part of the anthem. It all felt rather bizarre. I f you ever get a chance to see the movie Ishtar, you will enjoy a scene where Dustin Hoffman and Warren Beatty compose and text a song on the piano – and that is how I felt – and extremely enjoyed it.

When our allotted time was up, we rescheduled for another meeting and on the way out I asked the obvious question how somebody in a Southern California suburb gets to write, or at least compete to write, the anthem for the soccer world cup on the other side of the planet. At that time I still thought that the chances to actually get his song in there were at least slim. His answer was something like that it helps if you are the son of Placido Domingo. Hmm, I thought, must be an important person.

Later that day I told my friend Maria about my Ishtar-experience and mentioned the name of the musician in passing. Hold on! she said, what’s the name? ‘Not sure, Placido, junior – domingo, ???’

So Maria then eradicated some of my ignorance – Placido Domingo, one of  The Three Tenors!  World famous singers!

Isn’t that amazing how you stumble into these kind of things if you are not in awe?

With this information at hand, now it looked more likely that this song would make it to the top of the competition and in our second meeting Placido, jr. confirmed that it was pretty certain that it would be his song that his dad would sing at the conclusion of the word cup.

And so it was. I later bought the CD on Amazon, checking if I was in the credits…

Moments of Passion

If you have not read Bradbury’s novel Fahrenheit 451 please skip this post…

OK, so you know his frightening vision of the future, where firemen don’t put out fires but instead start them in order to burn books.

We are not there yet and we might never get there because who would let any fireman burn his or her Kindle, right? Book are on the way out anyways, so his vision might never come to pass, or in a different, much easier way by censoring the web.

But I am digressing. What I wanted to report on is today and right here. Our current fire department is still in the business of putting out fires and also tasked by our masters to prevent them. One of the ways to do this is to publish rules about, for example, how far away from your house scrubs, trees and flowers have to be. To go and check every house is a big task and they are not quite equipped for that. So instead of charging us $13 to come out and make sure you comply, we have the option of studying the rules and then self-assess our property and send in an affidavit that we did indeed comply.

I did this to save the $13 and to keep them away from the house as they would probably find something that is not right. I needed to download something from the country assessor to describe the property (we are talking about LA County here) and get some photos of the property. Thanks to Google street view I actually did not have to crank out the camera but let Google take the photos for me (will see if this is accepted.)

I got my paperwork all done and got ready to write the address on the envelope when I noticed this…

Is this funny, or what!? Just curious if this is really a coincidence or if there is somebody in the fire department with a type of visionary humor.

In my inbox I found the following video, promoting to always wear your seat-belt…

This reminded me of my own experience with seat-belts and what effect the government had on my usage.

Up to the time of my first cars. back in the old days in Germany, there were no seat-belts. Surprisingly I am still alive despite the fact that I, even as a kid, mostly rode in the passenger seat next to dad while mom and little sis were in the back.

So I grew up without seat-belts but when seat-belts went on sale, during my second or third junk car, I thought they were so cool that I actually retro-fitted my old clunker with them – at very high expenses relativ to my meager money supply as a student. And believe me, I wore them all the time – no trip without strapping in. I would have preferred those race-car 4-point belts, but could not afford them. This was the time when those belts actually saved my life when I had a tire blow on the freeway at 140 kmh (about 90 mph for all you imperialists.)

Then the well-meaning government stepped in with the attempt to save us all and made use of seat-belts mandatory. And what happened? I, young and full of opposition to anything exerting authority, suddenly stopped to use them.

I know, it’s silly, they had saved my life before, but it’s not an uncommon behavior. Try it yourself when you get a chance: find somebody doing something he or she likes and order them to do it. Guess what will happen?

I finally got over that and now wear seat-belts whenever I believe it’s the right thing to do to protect me from harm. The biggest harm these days, I believe, would be suffering at the hand of a cop who catches me not using the belts and presenting me with an invitation to the local court house; but, hey, that’s a harm and so wearing the belt protects me from that harm.

But I also know that in a crash of only 30 miles I would not have the arm strength to keep me from flying through or at least into the wind shield, and that also effects my decision to click it.

This reminds me of this cute slogan you see on free and high ways

Click it or ticket!

Am I the only one being appalled by our masters to now package their threat to do violence against us in cuteness? You wonder – what violence? Just try to play it through:

1. you don’t click it
2. you get a ticket
3. you throw it away because you have harmed nobody
4. a warrant for your arrest is issued
5. you ignore that because you have not harmed anybody
6. cops try to arrest you
7. you resist because nobody has been harmed by your actions
8. you get shot

I know, you can avoid all that by just doing what the master tells you – and enjoy the cuteness of “click it or ticket” without thinking of the implied “and then I kill you if you don’t do as I tell you to…”

Back to the beginning – wouldn’t it be much better if companies would just offer the belts and make them so good and comfortable that you just want to wear them?

Have you ever wondered where Google got its name from. There are some of these companies that have become household names and nobody really considers any more where their names come from – Amazon, Yahoo, et al.

But somebody must have sad down and really thought about it. It is rare that something is materializing out of thin air. Often we get an inspiration from something that passes by – even if only fleeting.

Google, after being known around the world and even becoming a verb now could not possibly admit that its name would not reflect deep thought (pun intended) and consideration, so the official version is that Google comes from the mathematical term “googol”, to equal 10¹⁰⁰, a number much larger than even the atoms in this universe.

But here I now have for you the  real source of the  name:

Today I re-read, for the xth time, Douglas Adam’s “Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy” and there it was – plain and simple:

In the story of this (must read) book where the two programmers Lunkwill and Fook talk to the computer Deep Thought the first time after its completion to find out if it will indeed be able to compute an easy answer to all the questions about life, the universe and everything, and this computer classifies itself as only the second most powerful computer in the universe, the following dialog pursues:

“There must be a mistake,” he [Lunkwill] said, “are you not a greater computer than the Millard Gigantubrain at Maximegalon which can count all the atoms in a star in a millisecond?”

“The Millard Gigantubrain?” Said Deep Thought with unconcealed contempt. “A mere abacus – mention it not.”

“And are you not,” said Fook leaning anxiously forward, ” a greater analyst than the Googleplex Star Thinker in the Seventh  Galaxy of Light and Ingenuity which can calculate the trajectory of every single dust particle throughout a five-week Dangrabat Beta sand blizzard?”

“A five-week sand blizzard?” said Deep Thought laughingly. “You ask this of me who have contemplated the very vectors of the atoms in the Big Bang itself? Molest me not with this pocket calculator stuff.”

There you have it – modest Google does not (yet) compare itself with Deep Thought.

A little side note that other well know subjects have been inspired by Douglas Adams. Many of you will know the TIFF file format used to store image data. This format is a tagged format and one of the initial tags that identifies the file as a TIFF file has a value of 42 and the official comment was that this value was chosen for the deep meaning of this particular value. The drafters did not quite come out with the full credits for this value which took seven and a half million years to compute, but made this tongue in cheek choice for all those geeks who know TIFF and Douglas Adams.

Synchronicities are always surprising and can, at times, be outright scary. Here is one that is somewhat in the middle.

Sometime last week I talked to somebody and the subject of Washington came up. The drives or walks along the impressive buildings oozing history, statesmanship and greatness of this nation. Did not really think much more about it and actually had the thought that I should take my son there and show him the sights that document how great this nation is.

This thought did not fit quite in with my latest subjects of study, my journey into the philosophy and realization of anarchy (*) but then again, I just had a chat with a friend who told me how she took her daughter to DC to show her the sights.

But the universe, or whoever that might have been, could not just let that sit there, no, it had to rub my nose into my glibness regarding this display of of state power, built in a way so that the people who actually build these temples for their masters, were even proud of their accomplishment.

So what did the universe (et al) do? – It threw this video into my general direction , so that I could not look past the facts any more…

Germania would have been bombastic, I’m sure, probably similar to how Washington, DC feels today to all the school children visiting the cradle of this greatest nation of the world, looking at the wonders and temples build to honor our politicians. I guess, as Hitler was not really a politician and lawyer, he was a lot more honest at what he was doing – Heil, Hitler! – for helping me to see a bit better what is going on and confirming the words of my two favorite anarchists (yes, I have two now!) – Larken Rose and Stefan Molyneux.

(*) anarchy: this word has two main meanings, one, that is often used in emotionally charged arguments, is a synonym for chaos and lawlessness, but the other one is the more objective definition of

1. a state of society without government or law
2. a theory that regards the absence of all direct or coercive government as a political ideal and that proposes the cooperative and voluntary association of individuals and groups as the principal mode of organized society.

Got this very interesting and heart-warming story of Irena Sendler presented in an email today.

Here first the story, then I will tell what impressed me most:

There recently was a death of a 98 year old lady named Irena.

During WWII, Iliana, got permission to work in the Warsaw Ghetto, as a Plumbing/Sewer specialist.

She had an ulterior motive…

She KNEW what the Nazi’s plans were for the Jews, (being German). Iliana smuggled infants out in the bottom of her tool box she carried, and she carried in the back of her truck a Burlap sack, (for larger kids). She also had a dog in the back, that she trained to bark when the Nazi soldiers let her in, and out of the ghetto. The soldiers of course wanted nothing to do with the dog, and the barking covered the kids/infants noises. During her time and course of doing this, she managed to smuggle out and save 2500 kids/infants. She was caught, and the Nazi’s broke both her legs, and arms, and beat her severely. Iliana kept a record of the names of all the kids she smuggled out, and kept them in a glass jar, buried under a tree in her back yard. After the war, she tried to locate any parents that may have survived it, and reunited the family. Most of course had been gassed. Those kids she helped got placed into foster family homes, or adopted.

Last year Iliana was up for the Nobel Peace Prize….
She LOST.

Al Gore won, for a slide show on Global Warming.
Check it out: www.irenasendler.org

I will say nothing about the story itself as I have decided quite some time ago that it is not possible for me to decide what about all the atrocities during WWII is true and what’s not. There are indications that’s just the story the victors want to tell to look good, but there is also the other side which would indicate that there really is something to all this mass murder.

But the fact that I have no first hand information and no way to get them, combined with my solidifying conviction that there is no independent reality I have given up deciding what historical story might be true.

So, nothing about saving Jewish kids, but what caught my attention was the tone of the writer in the last sentence, that Al Gore won the Nobel price for a slide show.

I just love it when politicians are finally seen for what they really are. And if the population starts to laugh about these guys for giving themselves prizes in self-adoration then I have high hopes for all of us that we will get over this celebritizing (hey, Oxford dictionary editors, this is a new word for you!) of our tyrants, kick them out and finally build a non-violent stateless society – one in which Irena would get acknowledged for her brave action.

There are jobs that make you grateful for your own job and I can imagine that being a deodorant tester in Germany might be just one of those jobs.

You don’t believe there is something like that?

Here is the picture to prove it…

You might say, full of disgust, ‘That Stinks!” and you might actually be right about that. But apparently somebody has to do the job and if this person knew my mom, he or she would enjoy doing it – - just because my mom was a very wise woman and tried to teach us that if you have to do something then it’s much better to just like it.

She is certainly right about that because we all know that we actually create the world in the way we decide to see it, right?

We all know that, yes?

Over at the Sandorian Grove we can finally find an honest and real Xmas Greeting – the so-called Xmas Spam.

Refreshing to find that everybody in the grove is just fine, and I appreciate the deeply felt compassion for the fellow human beings receiving this xmas message.

(Click the start button and then advance to next screen by clicking anywhere on the frame.)

When my son was born there were some concern about his being OK. Especially his aunt had some concerns about the head being flat on the back and when that turned out to be no problem another possible problem was found in the possibility of too short legs.

That also turned out not be a problem, so neither does he have a flat head nor dwarf legs, but instead it soon became apparent that he was a very good looking boy. Soon the word was that he will be a heart breaker and that the girls once will follow him in hordes.

All that turned out to be true and I have seen several females of all ages fall head over heal for him. On top of his looks he also has that James Dean gene in him that can be another nail in the coffin for any female with the matching gene. Just look at him…

From the very beginning I held, contrary to pretty much every body else’s belief, the opinion that these good looks are a curse rather than a virtue.  Why would that be? Everybody will love him, even if only for his looks, right? True, but for how long?

And additional element is that he will not learn basics form of human interaction. He will not have the need to learn to put his best side forward – because it’s already there. Just as somebody blind will develop a much sharper sense of hearing, so does an urgly person learn the skills to be accepted and/or liked by others.

But just as a person with very good vision does not have the need to develop good hearing, so does the very good looking person never develop the need to show interest in others, feel compassion and become a ‘nice’ person.

Now enter another deadly ingredient into the mix – shyness. This will cause a fallback onto the safest methods of being accepted – the looks. This will become more and more important. On the heels of the looks follow other forms of status, money, being popular and other totally irrelevant subject if you are looking for a goal of happiness and spiritual fulfillment.

This is a mechanism very similar to the dead ends of the path to enlightenment as described in the article Bad Enlightenment. A prime example for this deadliness of this mechanism is the big number of dead or messed up movie stars from Hollywood. They could (and do) have it all but then, as in the case of Marilyn Monroe, they leave the current plane because they can not stand their superficial existence any more.

But what can be done about all that?

Ran into this fascinating video by the film makers Phil Sansom and Olly Williams about suddenly appearing black holes you can fall or climb through…

If this happens to our clueless office worker right there at work, could it not also happen to a boy of 11 and his little sister?

And, indeed, it has. These events are cronicled in the “Underlander Chronicles” by Suzanne Collins, a series of book that I can only warmly recommend if you are a parent who likes to read to the off-spring. The first book, Gregor the Overlander, got into our hands at a second hand book store for a mere quarter – you just have to recognize a treasure when it finds you. We read this chapter by chapter as good night literature and had to continue with the second book immediately. Today we finished this one and now we have a problem how to quickly get the third one.

Just in case you are looking for this as well, here are all the five books in the series (wondering if there is a number 6 in the works)…

• The Underland Chronicles
  • Gregor the Overlander
  • Gregor and the Prophecy of Bane
  • Gregor and the Curse of the Warmbloods
  • Gregor and the Marks of Secret
  • Gregor and the Code of Claw

keep looking »