Season of mists...

One of my favourite poems by a classical poet, Keats, and since referring to the second of the seasons I particularly like, the first being spring, a suitable title for a blog on the joys of autumn, or as the American flavour of English would have it - fall. (Even though I am a tad against things American, so many of them not having contributed anything at all to civilisation's forward march, there are many features of American life, and American English that I admire, and that I would prefer to see used in British English as well. Fall is one such word, since it better, in my opinion, describes the most vivid expression of fall - the leaves falling.)

We're now in the middle of the fall season in Middle Europe, the leaves all turned in colour, the half of them fallen, the cycle of life and death clearly striding onwards. This is the time of year when I start putting out hedgehog feed, and bird feed, and get around to cleaning up the garden, and getting ready for the 'short death' that is winter. The coal tits and robins, red-tails and even an occasional black European squirrel, have all visited the feeding spots and are sounding out the possibilities of making this their breakfast diner of choice. Evenings I put out the leftover cat food, since hedgehogs and stoats will take carrion readily, and there are one or two feline strays happy to snap a bite or two.

Two of the outside walls of the house have been covered in wood; cut, split and stacked up six feet high (or about two meters, if you wax metrically), to make sure I don't get cold until spring; a mix of pine and beech, with a smattering of oak and fir, if my nose didn't fool me; bought off a local farmer in the normal middle european style - a meter long and split, the cutting-down to oven size left to the buyer, who thereby saves a few Euros on the costs. So I spent a few evenings after work getting sweated up, feeling good about the sheer physical feel of it all, the smell of the wood, the high-pitched whine of the saw, the taste of the beer straight from the neck of the bottle. The one thing missing would have been a cigarette, but I gave them up about half a year ago now, and don't really intend starting again.

The next steps are the garden work - raking up the leaves, and spreading them as anti-frost protection on the flowerbeds, weighed down with matting. I've to cut back some shrubs, and see about putting down some poison in the garden shed - the mice ate every single organic material they could fine the last two winters, and their urine transmits some very nasty diseases indeed, so sorry, lads, it's stay out or get put down, I'm afraid. The cheap Chinese greenhouse (a plastic sheeting-covered wire frame) turned out to be a no-go - the plastic sheeting hasn't held even a year, and is decomposing, leaving just the supporting net structure, and a very wet and cold greenhouse - I'll probably throw the whole thing away next year and invest in something more stable.

The crop of apples from my one tree has been harvested, the spoiled and dodgy bits excised, and the rest turned into apple jelly, about ten jars of it, all told. Made yesterday, and tried out this morning on toast - splendid. I've flavoured some of the jars with cinnamon, or ginger, or cloves, and will see how they turn out.

Sitting evenings in front of the log-fired Swedish oven, a glass of single-malt and a good book at hand, listening to the spitting of the logs and some cool jazz - how on earth might one not like this time of year?

Sláinte

My first life was as a dustbin or something similar

I'm watching a most awful programme on German telly at the moment - 'My First Life' on RTL. The premise is simple: a hypnotiser investigates whether people have lived in a past life or not, and attempts to find out where and when.

Now, stories of people believing they've lived in an earlier era have coursed around the ether since oodles of years, and none of them are in any way designed to convince me of the existence of an afterlife, oder of re-incarnation. The purely philosophical approaches used by Buddhism or other Eastern religions appear to me to be much more designed to convince me of reincarnation than these poor misguided fools, and their colourful phantasies...

What takes the biscuit, in my opinion, is that TV is instrumentalising the belief of many misguided souls, and making such a balls-up, and what a fucking awful balls-up it is, of doing so. At least the 'reporter' in this series, a blond-bangled dimwit with a speech impediment (where do they find them, by the way? - does someone turn over stones, while a second holds the net...?), uses leading questions, (as does the hypnotiser, too), suggestive completions, and other tricks, to get the victim to say what they want to hear (or what the plot demands).

One of the questions just asked was: "where are you from?", to which the reply is " Scotland. In the west." which sounds really concrete and all, coming from someone who in the fifteenth century was supposed to have lived there, and is answering the questions out of the persona being interviewed. Sound convincing?

For most of us it probably would be.

But if one stops to think for a while, all sorts of discrepancies occur:

- the concept of Scotland existed in the fifteenth century at about the same level as the concept of Germany, namely - not at all

- ask a person even today where they come from, and the answer is likely to be much more regional than you'd expect - "I'm from Bavaria", or "I'm from Dublin" is much more likely than "I'm from Scotland", especially if the concept of 'Scotland' is still new, or not even yet born.

- Christopher Lambert, in Highlander, gave a much more convincing presentation, and one that I can imagine would be the method used at the times: "My name is Conor McCloud, of the Clan McCloud, of XYZ (wherever it was - can't remember at the moment)...". Any samurai in medieval Japan would have introduced himself roughly as follows: " My name is Hiroda Yamamoto, of the lien of Honto, Lord of the Seven Plains, Lord of ABC" and so on. The point I'm trying to make, should it not have dawned on you yet is: people traditionally identify themselves from the level of family upwards - who's my father, who did he owe his allegiance to, which village/town did he or I live in? and so on and so on.

- these candidates, whether from this TV-programme, or from other sources, are annoyingly all sons or daughters of earls, kings, queens, important personages at the courts of unimaginably important rulers; live in palaces, wear the finest clothes and jewels, were betrothed to princes, lords of the realms and so on and so on and so on....

Where are the swineherds, the makers of leather, the outlaws, the lepers, the scum and the dirt of the face of the earth? I've yet to read a 'born-again' story that deals with the other end of the spectrum, let alone with the middle reaches.

And what of truth, I can almost hear you say - well, I can't quote Scripture on this, but many of the people who claim to have lived fulfilled and exciting lives way back when can be proven to have seen a film about the era, or to have read enough books about the time, or ... or ... or ...

This might explain why it's always the famous or rich or prominent or important people who are/were the first lives of these people - they are more likely to be mentioned in literature or film than the ordinary people.

By the way: if I remember rightly, the lowlands of Scotland weren't peopled by 'knights in shining armour living in castles' as is portrayed in this programme, but were divided up into clan domains, led by clan chiefs or local leaders who didn't actually use armour....

So, RTL - you've got to be kidding, don't you?

Shame on you for this rubbish!

Who do they think they're kidding

First off - my heartfelt sympathies for those unfortunates who have lost a loved one in this most avoidable tragedy - it needn't have happened.

For those readers who might have spent the last couple of days on the Matto Grosso, or who just returned from Outer Mongolia: a panic occurred during the latest 'raver' Love Parade in Duisburg, resulting in, at the latest count, 21 dead, and over 500 injured. A party venue suitable for about 250,000 visitors, according to experts asked, was forced to try to take anything up to 1,400,000, depending on whose figures you might trust. When kids going into the venue came up against kids trying to leave it (both entrance and exit were the same) it came to a jam-up and people panicked.

What really pisses me off are the attempts to transfer guilt and responsibility from different responsible institutions to anyone and everyone - main thing is: it weren't us!

One of the first ones I heard was an expert in panicking, how it occurs ,how to avoid it, and so on. He was one of the ones who developed the security measures used for the occasion. In a television interview he said, paraphrased: " if people had stuck to the rules developed for this occasion, the emergency security plan would have worked"... I listened to this with increasing incredulity - what on earth are emergency security plans supposed to be for? Certainly not for the law-abiding, calm, reasonable citizens - they don't need emergency plans - where they are the plans are superfluous. Emergency and contingency plans should be about how to help those unfortunates who don't abide by the rules when the going gets tough. If that's the attitude of an expert to the job, then I consider it weak.

Next up was the local police force, who argued that they had warned the organizers that their contingency plans were insufficient; that the escape routes were too narrow, that the venue was unsuitable, and so on and so on. They blamed the organizers for what happened. Again, I almost couldn't believe what I was hearing - who, if not the police, or other authorities, would be in a position to ban the event if they were of the opinion that security wasn't up to scratch.

I could continue the litany, including the local politicos, such as burgomasters and the like, who also hurried to blame others, or exonerate themselves by pointing out that others had made fatal errors. If we get down to basics, in my opinion, then all have part of the blame, and all for ignominious reasons - the organizers for not reacting well enough to the warnings that did follow, the police for leaving it at warnings, the local politicians who might have put their desire for positive headlines before founded doubts as to the suitability of the venue, those institutions responsible for allowing this parade to take place in spite of the warning voices, and all this conglomerate led to: 'business as usual' and 21 people dead. A tragedy that, according to all appearances, was eminently avoidable. It's things like this that get me down, and shake my belief in the basic intelligence of us humans.

Instead of looking for a scapegoat, we'd all be better served if the responsible parties, regardless of who they, in the final judgement, are, joined together to analyze what went wrong, and how the lessons learned might serve to make guidelines for the future idiot-proof.

The deceased and their families should be in the prayers of those who believe in a God, and in the sympathy of those who don't

shepherd v. sheep dog

It just occurred to me that in Irish English, at least, we use different terms to describe those dogs that shepherds use to control sheep. Your typical Irish sheep dog is some hybrid Border Collie type of dog, normally black and white. And there's the nub - an Irish sheep dog is called a 'sheep dog'.

If I was to refer to an Alsatian, then I'd most likely call this a 'German shepherd'.

The question that occupies me, at the moment, is: why not a 'German sheep dog'?

Why German shepherd?

I'd love to get some answers to this question. An interesting aside, as it were - in German the dog is called "deutsche Schäferhund", which would roughly translate as German shepherd's dog - why this subtle difference?

Might turn out to be an interesting theme.

Will Paul land in the pot?

For those of you who aren't big football fans, especially big German national team fans, the name Paul, and the fact that he is an octopus, won't tell you a lot.

Octopuses are highly intelligent creatures, and in order to prevent them going bananas in captivity, their keepers have to keep on inventing new things to occupy them.

One of these things is to make it difficult to get food. A classic example of this is to put the food into a glass box, with a lid, in the tank, and leave the octopus to figure out how to get the food out again.

Well the zoo in Oberhausen, in the German Rührpott, decided to let the natural curiosity of the octopus, Paul, act as a tool in a football oracle - for each game that was to be played, the zoo-keepers put food in both of two glass boxes, which differed only in that each had the flag of one of the teams preparing to play in the game. The reasoning was - if Paul picks the right one more than once in a row, then he has an inspiration as to which team will win.

Amazingly Paul got every single choice correct. Imagine the disappointment then, when Paul picked Spain instead of Germany, leading up to the semifinal game yesterday? A world collapsed, and a spate of octopus-recipes flooded the german-speaking internet, for as we could all see, Germany did indeed lose, deservedly.

Now that tempers have cooled off somewhat, it appears that the 'mob' won't insist on slaughtering and eating Paul, so at least we can breathe a sigh of relief on that one, eh?

The pressure's mounting

I'm not, and never was, a fan of soccer. But around this time of the century, when the World Cups are going on, I can't avoid being aware that many, many others are. Germany at the moment is a sea of flags, with normal citizens vying to support Chinese plastics manufacturers by planting small flags on their cars. The cheers of supporters, or of opponents, of whoever happens to be playing, or the moans of grief when something goes on, can be heard even above the television in my living room.

It appears that most of the favourites have been eliminated from the games, either by arrogance, or by over-confidence, and this evening two of the rest will yet again meet in what some of them see as being a re-run of almost classic proportions: Germany will face England. Since all of this doesn't really interest me, I don't really care who wins (would be nice though if England finally got somewhat closer to the final than in the last oodles of years..), but I couldn't help thinking that it would a great thing if two no-names (at least in terms of international soccer - no offence meant) were to meet up, and not the usual handfull of candidates with their millionaire dancers - oops - players, of course. It would be so refreshing if New Zealand were to play South Korea, for example, letting small nations all over the world relive the dream of one day having a team of theirs up there winning (just as a German trainer managed to guide Greece to winning the European Championships, an unheard-of triumph).

I'm just afraid it ain't gonna happen.

and the word is ....

Well, this is it.

A first blog.

A first small step in the virtual universe, where millions of heads are posting daily on every possible theme, many impossible themes, and some that can only be described as improbable...

I'd like to post about things that interest me, things I find funny, ridiculous, sad.

But I don't want to post about things shocking, immoral, indecent, or whatever, because, well, there's enough shit out there already and if that's your medicine you're welcome to it.