w o r d s

As of yesterday, days will be getting longer again on this side of the globe. Of course here, in the Old North State that’s not that big a deal, anyway. But I did start paying more attention to sunrise/sunset this fall. When I bike to work and back home, I prefer to avoid the bad light conditions at dawn and at dusk.

Considering that the shortest day of the year is still 9 hours and 42 Minutes long here, I am amazed at the seemingly overpowering desire of our neighbors to string hundreds of lights, and thousands of lights in some cases, all over their houses, trees and shrubs, all over the yards and even on a vehicle (in one case). But it ’s probably not so much deprivation of sunlight around here, as it is the spirit of the holiday season taking possession of their brains and compelling them decorate their yards with, for example, a 10-foot/3-meter illuminated, inflatable nativity. Or maybe it’s just mall-Christmas-muzak and eggnog induced temporary insanity?!

I wonder how popular this Christmas-lights-craze is in places that are much darker this time of year, like Reykjavik, Iceland (4 hours), or Point Lay, Alaska (0 hours)? In Freiburg, Germany (8h 22m) days are shorter than here, but folks are much more restrained when it comes to decorations, at least the electrical flavor (maybe because of their power bills?). And what about, say, Honolulu (10h 50m)? Do the Hawai’ians who celebrate Christmas decorate their houses with lights? I’ll have to ask John next week … when we see him in Charlotte, Michigan (9h 02m).

In Togo I never saw any electrical Christmas lights. Probably because the village has no electricity. And when folks said they were going to “light the tree” they meant it quite literally, and set fire to it. December it the driest time of year in Togo, and so most farmers burn their fields to get them ready for the next growing season. That means there are huge bush fires all over, and on Christmas eve we’d sit on the porch, drink some palmwine and watch the festive glow of the fires all over the mountains around us.

So, Happy Winter Solstice to all, especially those of you who need UV-light treatment this time of year!

With three stokes of his wooden mallet, the Mayor of Munich tapped a 224-Liter beer barrel today - the first of many beer barrels to be drained at this year’s Oktoberfest in Munich. He poured the first Mass for the Ministerpräsident (governor) of Bavaria.

Organizers expect to sell 6 Million Mass (Liters) at €7.90, as well as half a million grilled chicken and the meat of 90 oxen.

… accidentally. In the night from Wednesday to Thursday, 170 armed Swiss troops crossed into the tiny neighboring Principality of Liechtenstein. They got lost in bad weather in the Alps during a training exercise and strayed a mile into the unarmed principalities sovereign territory. Scrambling to prevent any escalation, both countries immediately launched diplomatic efforts and were able to peacefully resolve this incident.

Oh boy - that was a close one! :)

BTW: Liechtenstein is the only country left with direct historical continuity back to the Holy Roman Empire of the German Nation (The First Reich).

Boy - Bill Gates is so not funny! Even Jon Stewart has a hard time being funny with the Über-geek in the studio. “What does the F12 button do?” ??? This is a bit of an awkward interview, especially for Stewart, who is usually pretty good at it.

Last night we watched the DVD of Andy Kaufman doing the Midnight Special in 1981. I would give a lot to see Andy Kaufman have Gates on his show. Wow - that would have been just out of this world! Of course Kaufman died in 1984 - way too young - before the age of the geek.

The funniest moment with Gates was when he left without waiting for Stewarts queue …

The Dakar Rally has always fascinated me, even though, over the years, I became increasingly aware of its questionable ethics regarding the communities it touches, and the waste of resources on a vain, more-or-less useless sporting event. Motorsports are basically pretty stupid, but still, I cannot totally escape the fascination of a race across the Sahara.

I wish they’d work more to produce support for the communities they cross, and I wish they’d use renewable fuels, like biodiesel or ethanol. Still, of all motorsports, this is the one I find pretty interesting. Formula One is a huge circus of primadonnas in big cars, and NASCAR should be called NASnore. I mean, how long can one watch cars making left turns?

After crossing the Sahara many years ago in shitty, banged-up Peugeots, I always dreamed of going back there with decent equipment, four-wheel drive trucks, and a decent camera, to really enjoy this amazing, tough place. At the time, we were so focused on just making it, that we wasted very little thought on how awesome a place the Sahara is.

So, once again, the Dakar is under way, and the first stages in Portugal apparently were dominated by the Portugese. It appears that the Volkwagen team is doing well (places 1-4 in the first stage). The trucks look cool, OMG. Anyway, I hope that there are no major accidents, and that they don’t run over too many chickens in the villages in Africa.

Today’s Word of the Day was invented (I think) by my boss: picobuckets. We got a good chuckle out of this one during the staff meeting, when he tried to illustrate his consternation at some of the strange measurements of one of his fellow researchers.

President Bush is visiting (de) Angela Merkel’s home district in the eastern state of Mecklenburg-Vorpommern. The cute, historic town of Stralsund is under siege: all cars had to be removed to lots outside the town, gutters are welded shut, mailboxes sealed, stores cannot open, and residents are even prohibited from opening their WINDOWS in July! (Remember very few German houses have A/C). And to top it off, no one knows who will foot the 20-million-Euro bill for the visit.

Way to win the “hearts and minds” of the folks in Stralsund …

The word of the day, on this day - 6/6/06, I guess, is hexakosioihexekontahexaphobia:

Hexakosioihexekontahexaphobia is a fear which originates in the belief that the Biblical verse, Revelation 13:18, indicates that the number 666 is linked to Satan or the Anti-Christ. Outside the Christian faith, the phobia has been further popularized as a leitmotif in various horror films.

Hexakosioihexekontahexaphobes avoid things related to the number 666, such as a building in which the number is prominently displayed.
Wikipedia

So if you’re freaking out over today’s date, or maybe even feel like participating in prayer marathon, this one’s for you. You may think you know the number of the beast, but we now do know the name of your illness.

PS: I guess the word for this affliction would be Hexakosioihexekontahexaphilia?!

The BBC reports on a weird trend of people taking their mobile phone to their grave. The origin of this idea was fear of being buried alive, according to Martin Raymond, director of international trend-spotting think-tank, The Future Laboratory. However, that does not explain cremations with cell phones:

“We came across this in places like South Carolina in the US - people were being burned but unknown to the crematorium, they had left the phones in their jackets,” Mr Raymond said.
“If you heat a mobile phone battery, it tends to explode, and the first reports were about explosions, and that’s how they started noticing this trend.”
BBC NEWS | Handsets get taken to the grave, Wednesday, 29 March 2006.

Besides the exploding crematorium, wouldn’t it be weird if you were walking alone in a graveyard past a fresh grave, and you’d start hearing the beeps or a chirp or ring-a-ling of a phone from the general direction of that grave?

The NY Times has a story about an odd bit of information from pre-invasion Iraq: apparently German spies in Baghdad provided pretty important information about the Iraqi defenses to the US-led invasion forces.

Two German intelligence agents in Baghdad obtained a copy of Saddam Hussein’s plan to defend the Iraqi capital, which a German official passed on to American commanders a month before the invasion, according to a classified study by the United States military.

In providing the Iraqi document, German intelligence officials offered more significant assistance to the United States than their government has publicly acknowledged. The plan gave the American military an extraordinary window into Iraq’s top-level deliberations, including where and how Mr. Hussein planned to deploy his most loyal troops.
German Intelligence Gave U.S. Iraqi Defense Plan, Report Says, by Michael Gordon, NY Times, Feb. 26, 2006.

Although Germany’s then-chancellor Schröder vigorously argued against the invasion, German troops did perform duties that directly, and controversially, supported the war: they manned AWACS planes and checked for possible effects of nuclear, chemical and biological weapons in Kuwait. Germany was, and is, a major logistics hub for the US military, and German troops provide security at those facilities. So Germany was hardly neutral in this conflict, despite all the political rhetoric. Of course, now we know that Chancellor Schröder was angling for his Gazprom job, so he may have already been working for his new boss Putin.

Morally, the invasion was wrong, I think. For Germany it would have been better to stay neutral. But that would have created a major confrontation with the US, and no one in the German government then had the stomach for that. So now we’re all so “schockiert” that German spooks supplied plans to the US? I mean, once these guys had the plans for the defense of Baghdad, what were they going to do with them? Return them to Saddam’s guys? “Hey look what I found in my fax machine! I think this belongs to you guys ….” Sure, they went to General Tommy with that. Big deal. At that point, the invasion was going to happen anyway. So making it easier for the Americans to oust Saddam was not an unreasonable moral choice.

A politician winning an award for speaking? About himself? That’s pretty impressive …

U.S. Sen. Barack Obama (D-Ill.) won a Grammy award Wednesday evening in a category rarely made for a politician: the best spoken word.

As the awards were announced at the ceremony in downtown Los Angeles, Obama was finishing his work day in Washington. He accepted the honor with humility and humor.

“While it is rare for a politician to speak for hours on end and be given an actual award, it is very flattering to win a Grammy,” Obama said in a statement. “But, I can assure you I’m not thinking about quitting my day job.”

Obama painstakingly recorded his autobiography, “Dreams From My Father,” over a combined stretch of about 15 hours in the sound booth.
Sen. Obama wins Grammy for words, Chicago Tribune, February 8, 2006

Barack Obama is a rising star in the Democratic party, and with his oratory talent he made a name for himself during 2004 election. His campaign for one of Illinois’ Senate seats beat first Jack Ryan and then Ryan’s replacement Alan Keyes easily, and Obama received 70 percent of the votes.

Lately I have found myself staring at this. It’s mesmerizing and it makes me wonder about the quality we call “random” (as opposed to the mathematical concept). I think our brain is just really wired to try very hard to extract meaning out of visual stimuli and it is very hard to get it not to try, even when you turn off the ominous soundtrack:

Flickeur (pronounced like Voyeur) randomly retrieves images from Flickr.com and creates an infinite film with a style that can vary between stream-of-consciousness, documentary or video clip. All the blends, motions, zooms or timeleaps are completely random. Flickeur works like a looped magnetic tape where incoming images will merge with older materials and be influenced by the older recordings’ magnetic memory.

Careful with the Flickeur. You might just find yourself staring at it for hours … until it eats up all your computer’s memory and the poor thing goes belly-up.

It is the year 2005 A.D. and a border dispute is brewing between Canada and Denmark over a 1.3 km² rock in the arctic. Both countries are members of NATO, but they had competing flag-raisings, flyovers by jets and even officials visiting Hans Island, an arctic island claimed by both countries. Hans Island is a barren rock in the center of the Kennedy Channel of Nares Strait, which is the strait that separates Ellesmere Island from northern Greenland and connects Baffin Bay with the Lincoln Sea. No one lives there, not even penguins.

Yet, this dispute is becoming a matter of national pride, and tempers flare:

For many years, the Canadian military has repeatedly invaded Danish territory, without any respect for international treaties or laws. Therefore, Canada must be excluded from NATO and the UN, and must be forced to give war reperations [sic] for the damages they have inflicted. Furthermore, the Canadian ministry of defence should be disbanded, and all Canadian military equipment should be handed over to Denmark.
Free Hans Island

Yeah, and check out Radio free Hans Island - they even post the “National Anthem” of an independent Hans Island.

The BBC carefully negotiates both points o view:

In 1984, a Danish minister, Tom Hoeyem, caused a stir when he visited the island and raised the Danish flag.

Mr Hoeyem also buried a bottle of brandy at the base of the flagpole and left a note saying welcome to Denmark.

The UPI news agency reported that Canadian troops landed on the island a week before Mr Graham’s visit, planted a Canadian flag and built an Inuit stone marker.

Reports say Canadian troops leave whiskey at the flagpole on their incursions.
Canada island visit angers Danes, BBC News, 25 July, 2005

Newsflash: the Danes now also claim the North Pole. They probably want to charge Santa Claus rent …

Boy - I am so glad they were able to straightened this out:

A bowl of Neolithic noodles has revealed that China was the most likely birthplace of this popular food.

For millennia, arguments have raged about whether the noodle was invented by the Chinese, Italians or Arabs.
(…)
The researchers discovered the 20 inch-long noodles inside an overturned, sealed bowl under 10 feet of floodplain sediment in Lajia, by the Yellow River in north-western China. The meal was probably left untouched because of an ancient disaster: the site harbours a settlement that was probably destroyed about 4,000 years ago by a major earthquake and flood.
Neolithic noodles were made in China, Telegraph (UK), 13/10/2005

I do think, though, that the Italians do get credit for the brilliant idea of mixing tomato sauce with noodles.

I like my cars with a hitch. I have a small utility trailer that I use to haul garbage, furniture, cinder blocks, firewood, and other stuff that I don’t want inside the car or that does not fit inside the car. Over the years I found the trailer-car combo much more efficient than owning a truck. However, it is not easy to find a place that will install a small Class I hitch to a car. “We don’t do cars” and “we don’t install hitches” is all you hear.

Well, I finally gave up and ordered a hitch for the Jetta from an etailer - eTrailer.com - and installed it myself. It cost me $150 for the parts and 2 hours last Sunday afternoon. Oh - and it gave me a great reason to buy a nice drill, because I had to drill 4 1/2-inch-holes into the body of the Jetta. The whole operation went well, and the hitch works great, now. And I also have a much better understanding of why no one wants to install these hitches.

(more…)

O’zapft is! at the mother of all beer orgies, the oohmpah fest to end all oohmpah fests. With two mighty strokes the mayor of Munich drove the tap into the barrel of beer and handed the first beer to the Ministerpräsident (Governor) of the Free State of Bavaria. The natives went wild! Especially the Japanese, American and Australians in lederhosen, rearing to go native in pools of beer and piles of greasy haxen.

The Munich Wiesn - aka Oktoberfest - is open for business, and business they mean. Last year 5.9 million visitors drank 5.5 million liters (1.45 million gallons) of beer and ate 89 oxen. The beer price is up, again, at over 7 Euro ($ 8.50) per liter! The Wiesn supports 8000 full-time employees and another 4000 temps.

Now, allow me to get this straight: The Cincinnati Oktoberfest is not anywhere near the second-largest Oktoberfest in the world. At roughly 500.000 visitors they get an honorable mention. And I seriously doubt that Uncle Al’s and Capt. Windy’s hokey pokey is the World’s most annoying performance either …

Which of Germany’s largest Volksfest events is the largest is a matter of great contention and serious dispute. The rivals Munich Wiesn and Cannstadter Wasen have been going head-to-head for as long as I can remember (not that I ever really cared). Years ago, when I lived in Stuttgart, neighbouring Cannstadt proudly claimed to beat Munich by a couple hundred thousand visitors, but both events only relied on estimates. When the Cannstadt organizers did an actual tally, they came out way below their estimates, and never published the figures. Currently, they claim 5 million visitors annually, independent estimates for last year were 3 million visitor in Cannstadt.