Jackdaw or Twinkle Toes

All knowledge I had regarding the Jackdaw, was the german diminuitive “Hupfdohle”, which I translated (possibly wrong) as Twinkle Toes, although that seems far to nice and tame in regards to the german word.

It never occured to me that the jackdaw is actually a very intelligent bird from the family of crows and if this would be the new edition of my WWF funded happy go lucky duh stuff about meh animals, then i would write what I initially intended to. But as I didn’t continue to write the text, as I really couldn’t think of a remotely funny connection between jackdaws and twinkle toes, I took a break and came back to it and to my senses a bit later.

So don’t worry, you are not going to learn about the incredibly intelligent jackdaw, nor will i indulge us in a prolongued discourse about the similarities of twinkle toes and “Hupfdohle”.

During the time I spent in Berleburg, I wrote quite a lot, but nothing that would remotely qualify as a blog post, bar the small rant on radio alarm clocks. The other texts were sort of self reflections in a personal journal fashion. I did however note down some things that seemed interesting enough to be developed into posts.

On the day I encountered the jackdaws there were 2 words on that list, one being the stupid bird, the other casemates and a speech impaired tour guide.

Now the latter will be definitly covered in post, being the highlight of that day. The birds? Uhm…..errr…I am still not sure how those birds made the list and the only explanation I have is …. dizziness.

Those little f******s made their home in the old castle wall drainage holes (hundreds) and looking up there, watching the fowl shooting into and out of those wall holes really made me dizzy.

Thinking back to that day in Dillenburg, there definitly were other memorable moments, excluding birds and the fabulous casemates.

Here is a short list of stuff concerning our Dillenburg trip, that are way cooler than flying shitters.

The magic of numbers ending in 2 :

The trips we did before consisted of five people filling 1 car and therefore making planning and car pooling a no-brainer. For this trip the number of people interested in tagging along, rose to 7 and even as many as 9, hinting for the need of a second car. Funnily enough, 10 minutes past departure time that saturday morning, Peter and I were standing alone in the parking lot. The otheres nowhere to be seen. Made us the 2-guy-road-trip (we still had a lot of fun).

Dillenburg:

Historic carcass timber framed city center, around 10-15 houses with a historic protestant church which made me loose faith in christianity a little bit. Why do you have your church closed in plain daylight? On a sunday?? Really??? A Tower in honour of William the Silent, Prince of Orange, who lived in one of the largest fortifications in middle europe in, yes you guessed it, Dillenburg. Castle gone, Tower built on the hill, now decorated with a nice statue and tulips, planted by her majesty, the dutch queen Trixie, herself. Nothing else.

William the Silent:

He was dutch, orange, had two lions for a short time, married to Anna van Egmont and wasn’t fond of the spanish and Jan Rubens at all.

Jan Rubens:

Father of Peter Paul Rubens, lover of Anna van Egmont and tennant of a prison cell near William the Silents lions.

Siegerländer Krüstchen:

Tasty verbal challenge for english native speakers, consisting out of a  famous Schnitzel on toast with a fried egg on top and paired with chips, mmmhmmm yummy.

Imperial eagle wine:

Wine bottles with an eagle on the lable looking very much like the eagle being used in germany for 12 years in the last century. Arian grape juice? I was gobsmacked.

So with this variety of attractions, that made the visit to Dillenburg a memorable one, I don’t have the slightest clue, why the jackdaw stuck in my mind.

Reading: The gunslinger – Stephen King

Music Suggestion: Weekend Rapture – Bright White Lightning

The radio alarm clock of evil

Ok, to start with, I am not a morning person, never was, never will be.

But, when I have to get up at a pre-defined time, there are certain factors, which have to be taken into consideration.

One –Don’t set the clock to a time prior to the designated wake up time and then snooze your way to the finish line … This Isn’t cool in any book.

Two – Don’t choose a terrifying sound as your wake up tone. Nobody will have the slightest rest of good humor, will or mood in its body, if woken up with a 120db fire horn or the screeching sound of a metal grinder.

Three – On the other hand, a soothing, mellow and unintrusive sound won’t help you either. While this will most certainly ease your oozing daytime day time tiredness, plaguing you lately, it also will most definitely be bad for your blood pressure, because there is going to be a lot of rushing, once you wake up not because the alarm clock told you too, but because you just drifted out of late morning dreamland. Huh? Alarm?

Four – Use simple beeping sounds … you know? Those minimalistic analogue dial clocks, black body, white dials, light and yes, a snooze function, you can use by pressing down the whole clock, are great little wake up helpers. I, myself own one of those. Or simple and short instrumental riffs, should you be part of the mobile phone alarm clock crowd… (da dada da dum da dum da dumusuallydoesthetrick).

Five – Don’t, really don’t, under any circumstance , I really beg of you .. don’t use radio alarm clocks.

Why, you ask? I’ll tell you why.

They are shit.Pure evil. Honestly. Not your regular awwwww, look, a radio alarm clock … they are a bit silly, aren’t they?

Nooo, as innocent as they may seem, thy really are the big shit. They provoke anger, aggression and hatred within everyone indirectly affected. They really do.

If there would be anything, you could compare them to, it would be the malevolence of conscious snoring! Yup, snoring on purpose to piss other people off. That’s how bad they are.

Why you ask? I’ll tell you why.

Too many variables, that’s why.

For further clarification and to prove this is not just some random ranting from my side, let me give you this little example. I didn’t make this up or just overheard it somewhere. No, Sir. First hand experience ftw.

Let me first state, that the baddie in this story, aka the owner of the radioalarm clock, is a really nice guy and in every other aspect a really polite person. Secondly, I snore, sometimes more sometimes less, but mostly I do  and am profoundly sorry for doing it.

Currently I find myself in the situation, having to share my room with a person I don’t know. We will have to share this room for several weeks (and before you get any stupid ideas ….I am in a hospital not prison).

In this hospital, there are rules, one of them being, you don’t go to bed when you are tired, you go to bed at 10.30 … no questions asked. Before we dive into the matter at hand, lets meet the contestants.

Right Corner, me, big guy, 45, good natured with a knack for alternative rock, armed with one of those design classic Braun alarm clocks. In the right corner, well, the other guy, 58, sales man, football (soccer) enthusiast armed with the radio clock of evil.

Variable 1 : Musical preference

There are different tastes out there and when two people of the same age meet there is quite a big chance, while sharing the same age, they don’t share the same taste in music. When two people from different generations meet (13 years difference is a considerable amount of time), it is even more unlikely, that they like the same music.

Variable 2 : Daily rhythm

Wandering around on this planet for some years, doing the job you do, doing the things you like, will lead to a distinctive daily rhythm and as you get older, the individual variance gets bigger, totally normal.

Variable 3 : Sleeping preference

Some need to wind down before they sleep …others are so wound down they don’t need to. Something similar is true for waking up. Some get up at the first beep, some snooze once and others have the thing going for hours, while playing dead.

If you take those 3 together and mix in the 2 contestants, it either results in murder or separation.

The latter happened to us. I got a single room after 3 weeks of audible torture and we managed to stay friends.

So do yourself a favor and just smash that thing in the trash before it sparks actual violence directed at you!

Music suggestion:  Sixteen Saltines – Jack White

Reading at the moment ; The Gunslinger – Stephen King

I’m on a break from everything

I will take an extended break from everything and will be back insome weeks. I won’t have any online access at least for the first 4 weeks, but I will be taking pictures and writing offline in that time and start posting once I am back.

See you soon (End of April)

1992, random thoughts from the former area adjacent to the Soviet Zone (english/german)

As I am not sure, how or if I am going to write about my visit to Bad Berleburg last week, here’s a little joke from the past.

After my studies of medicine ended prematurely , I started to learn Information Technology at the Uni in Fulda.

It was supposed to be a temporary stepping stone and I never planned to finish the course. That plan was executed to perfection with my move to the UK.

At the time though, 3 1/2 years after the german re-unification, this area, which in the good old times of the cold war and the shadow of the former iron curtain still visible in our thoughts, was, despite actually bordering on former east germany, rather more like the forgotten outskirts of germany, than the epicenter of hippness.

I found myself stranded there, 200 km away from the cozyness of my parents and grandparents places and had this small recording device, my girlfriend gave me to capture random thoughts and ideas for a story (Can’t remember in which order).

While cleaning up my study, I stumbled on this little microcassette recorder, I used at a time, before the internet, mp3, facebook and Iphones.

It was an Olympus Pearlcorder S926. Don’t ask me about the specifications, but it had a cassette in it and after inserting 2 AA Batteries it sprang to life and gave an insight to my younger selfs midnight ramblings, beginning of the 90s.

Please be kind in judging them, as I was young and terribly bored.

I am typing these as spoken on the tape, in German. So here is the transcript of my unedited ramblings from the former Zonenrandgebiet:

Entry#1 –

Wenn das Tun das Handeln bestimmt und das Handeln vom Tun bestimmt wird, warum wird dann heute noch mit Thunfisch gehandelt?

Entry#2 –

Welch merkwürdige Verflechtungen ergeben sich. Man drückt den einen Knopf und ist der festen Überzeugung, dass es funktioniert, doch wenn man es später genauer unter die Lupe nimmt, stellt man fest, dass man grossen Mist gebaut hat und nämlich gar nichts funktioniert hat. Eigentlich wollte ich die Geschichte von kleinen Leuten und ihren Einlegesohlen erzählen, äh, wenn man dieses Thema eingehender betrachtet, könnte es einen stundenlang beschäftigen, denn kleine Leute wirken dann nur gross wenn sie Schuhe anhaben und tragen sie diese Schuhe immer und überall. Und sind, äh, solche Schuhe nicht wahnsinnig unbequem? Solche Schuhe müssen ja innerlich tiefergelegt sein, damit man es von aussen nicht sieht.

Entry#3 –

Eine ganz andere Sache sieht man bei Uhren. Uhren, unglaubliche Betrüger, die einem nie die genaue Zeit anzeigen, d.h. sie zeigen sie schon an, man sieht sie aber nicht. Es ist eigentlich die reine Zeitverschwendung auf ein Uhr zu schauen, da die Zeit die man auf einer Uhr sieht, in diesem Moment vorbei ist, d.h. sie liegt in der Vergangenheit. Uhren zeigen einem nur, wie spät es war und nicht wie spät es ist. Um die genaue Zeit zu sehen, müsste man eine Uhr haben, die ständig vorgeht, so dass wenn man auf die Uhr schaut, im Moment des Wegsehens, die Zeit eintritt, die man auf der Uhr gesehen hat. Dann hätte man aber eine Uhr, die nie die richtige Zeit anzeigt. Ein verzwickte Problem…..gibt es eine Lösung?

Entry#4 –

Es gibt Tage da glaubt man an Weihnachten, und zwar in dem Moment an dem einem auffällt, dass man nicht genug Zigaretten gekauft hat. Normalerweise, wenn so etwas passiert, fängt man an seine Taschen zu durchsuchen und findet natürlich überhaupt nichts. Dann muss man raus in die Kälte, den nächsten funktionierenden Zigarettenautomaten finden, was nicht unbedingt so einfach ist. Doch manchmal gibt es Tage, da schaut man sich einfach um und sieht so ein halb angebrochenes Päckchen, welches wer weiss wie lange schon vergessen dort herumgelegen ist, da man die ganze Zeit immer genug Zigaretten hatte und wartet eigentlich nur darauf, angeraucht zu werden. Das ist auch genau dass, was ich jetzt in diesem Moment tun werde.

Entry#5 –

Mir ist auch aufgefallen…..aaaah…Mir ist auch aufgefallen, dass…..ahhhhhhhmmm … Faden verloren

Entry#6-

Wenn ich mich anstrenge, beim Sprechen auf das Band nicht Äh zu sagen, verliere ich andauernd den Faden…….Äh…..mein Gott es gibt Schlimmeres

Entry#7-

Oh, blasser Schimmer, es ist 20 vor 6…. wie konnte das so schnell gehen? Schon wieder bin ich älter geworden.

To be continued……

Reading at the moment: Vladimir Nabokov – Pale Fire

Musical suggestion: Don’t stop – Foster the people

Yes I Flickr

This post is a bit of a cheat, as I wrote this for a picture I posted on Flickr today, but as I wasn’t quoting anyone, I guess it’s fair game. So if you already stopped by my Flickr stream, turn away! This isn’t the blog post you are looking for.

This picture was taken last summer at the medieval fair in Silves, Portugal.
We went there at a time when there still was light and being mid August it was very hot with the fair spreading out through the old town up the hill to the castle.
For this reason I wanted to go light and didn’t take lenses to change with me, as I learned from a “non-photography” experiment I did 2 years ago it can be great fun to limit yourself to one lens and make do with what you got.
That evening I decided to go with the 24-105 to be able to zoom but also allowing for wide angle capture. As it is a F4 lens, i knew I would get in trouble later at night, but we didn’t plan to stay too long … wrong, we stayed much longer and I was stuck with that lens in the middle of the night, when we encountered these brilliant firedancers.
So out of desperation, I got this unique picture in my collection. The only ISO5000 picture I shot with my 5DMk2 so far.

Not too shabby.

Reading at the moment: The flying sorcerers – David Gerrold

Musical suggestion: Life’s a beach – Django Django

Oi Papi, que rico…

The trip to the UK somehow messed up my post-at-the weekend-schedule.  At the moment I have to really control myself to not let this blog become my personal whining or self therapy platform, because I am tackling quite a lot of issues in my personal life at the moment and this blog, as I am a blog amateur, of course consists of personal stories. But this is not my intention.

I had quite some things lined up, I wanted to write about, but as always and described in the thought post, they are gone. Only seldom I am able to sit down and write them down right at the time or they are so omni present that I remember them later (very rare occasions). most times I remember them at some other inappropriate point of time.

One of those topics that I want to talk about is honesty, about what i would love to see, hear and experience and about how almost everything we do to organize our lives, is based on or heavily uses deceipt and lies. I probably won’t be able to tackle this topic in one post and it will be a sort of recurring series. And actually, I won’t write about it now. It definitly is something I want to write about, but I am not sure in which form and how, as this is quite a big subject. So file this under ‘coming soon’ (whenever tat might be).

When I still was playing World of Warcraft (yeah I know, but hey, I was a closed beta kinda guy and am off MMOs now), one day, I got a mail that my account had been banned for 3 days due to illegal trading and suspicious transfers were logged on my account (sounds spooky and dangerous … in a nerdy kind of way). I actually hadn’t been playing at that time and when I was able to log in again, I found my main character, completely naked and without any belongings next to the bank in Ironforge. My account had been hacked and someone took advantage of my carefully nurtured In-Game alter ego and took all gold and stuff.

For the non computer gamers among you, don’t worry, this is not going to be a game post, for the ones that know what I am talking about…..my heart broke a little. But thanks to Blizzard Support, 2 1/2 hours later, I had all my stuff back, changed my password and was off playing again. It was just a computer game, but It gave me a scare, because someone just got my password and stole my online game identity.

Since then I usually change my passwords at least 2 a year and have several password groups, depending on what I want to do with the associated login/account.

As we are getting more and more connected and facebook, kraken-like, edges its way into almost every login (do you want to login using you facebook login?), I didn’t realize how vulnerable my online identity has become.

So on friday I returned to my computer to find quite a lot of mails from friends in my Inbox, asking what was going on with my facebook chat.

I logged in and witnessed 1st hand how a bot had hijacked my facebook chat and posed there as a horny girl named Gabby, posting rude profanities and trying to lure my contacts into clicking some, probably porn or virus or both, links.

I instantly changed my password, but the bot just kept on offering his and therefore my hotness to everybody in my friendslist.That was the moment I started to panic a little….did I say a little…actually quite heavily.

The good thing was, that most of my contacts instantly relized what was going on and alertet me, the frightening thing was….some didn’t!

And that was in  hindsight the thing that threw me off the most, not that my facebook chat got hijacked and not that I had to kill all apps and connections to Facebook to make it stop. Not even that it actually took me 4 hours to regain complete control over my account, no, all of that was annoying, yes, a bit frightening, but the thought that people in my friendlist actually think I would address them with sentences like ‘oi papi, que rico’ or ‘me so h***y, how about you?’.

Now that left me completely baffled!!

In that spirit I leave you with: Que passo baby?

Reading: Metamorphoses Ovid (done with book 1, taking a break now)

Music suggestion : Levels – Avicii

Blinking lights and random thoughts

So this is the first time I am writing on the ipad, auto correction turned off, civil wars playing from my playlist and me, ten thousand meters bove the english channel.

It is somewhere around six or seven depending on the timezone you want to be in, the origin or the destination,  anglian or teutonic. In the end it doesn’t matter. Taking off at dusk has a special charm. If you squint, you can still make out some things, but lights are already lit and details just blend into the background of a common evening haze. You can see London stretching below, a sea of lights, suddenly thinning and then almost completely disappearing, the only ones left, are the lights from the ferries carrying heaps of people over to Dover. The channel a breather before the lights of Calais and Oostende signal the shore of the european mainland, funny expression that is, mainland Europe…like if England is a side dish. The flight time is really negligible, just over an hour, but this night view of our old continent is always stunning.

As this was a midweek business trip, i didnt have much choice and flew to london on tuesday morning, just had one night stay at the Heathrow Hilton and tonight i am going to be back to Germany. And although it was a lot of work and almost no downtime apart from the lovely dinner in windsor and the time at the airport today, it felt like a breather. There were the short encounters, carried by genuine, and now there is such a big choice of possible descriptive words that i think i just pick friendliness, genuine friendliness, sometimes affection or just spending time together, that was refreshing.

It is odd, none of the physical annoyances i am fighting with, suddenly disappeared….they are all still present and annoying as always, but…. They just matter a bit less. and do you know why?Not because they are less annoying or not as frequent, no, they didnt change, but my perception changed. Rather than fighting them and seeing no end, fearing that this is how it is going to be from now on, which is a frightening thought, i think, yes i have to fight them and things are going to change for the better. There is going to something else and it is going to be better, or not, but different.
I had a really good talk with Christian about writing the blog and of course he hinted at things that instantly set me off….damn you, man.
It is so odd, I hinted at it in the past articles, when i was writing about thoughts and dreams, in a certain sense I am having more and more the feeling of waking up in regards to a lot of things. I still am always tired, but my brain is sparking all the time, so many things to think about. It tends to get really overwhelming and i guess my recent sleep troubles also are linked to this. It is totally uncontrollable at the moment and there is also quite a wide emotional range to all of this, but that is something i might pick up on later. At the moment there is no real direction to it, and definitly no utter brilliance envolved, but somehow i’m changing back …from cosumerism to productivity. I dont know if it is going to be something of general interest, if i manage to channel it or even keep it up or if it is just my private pleasure, but it is sort of exciting. I am not going to edit this and do this midweek post as i am descending to frankfurt now.

Goodbye England and guten Abend Deutschland.

Reading: you guessed it ,still metarmorphoses from ovid
Musical suggestion: From this valley – The Civil Wars

Sent from my iPad
Addendum: I planned to post this yesterday evening, but couldn’t, because things just happened that showed me how volatile and unstable my current states of being are.

Or in other words, here is yesterdays post and I am glad I had this period of positiveness yesterday.

The criminally vulgar way to allot stupidity in small doses

When I started to write this blog a month ago, I spent a considerable amount of time, thinking about its title.

So after mind-numbing twenty minutes I came up with Bilingual Randomness.

One of the possible titles I didn’t pick was ‘random rants’. I didn’t pick it because of the same reason, I don’t take many pictures of flowers … it was just to common. When you google ‘random rant’, 17300000 search results pop up. So random rant was a no-no. Bilingual randomness renders around 1900000 results, but the first four entries are from my blog.

Cool?

Not really … after a few moments, the heavy scented perfume called self praise, lifts its heavy curtain clouding your senses and it becomes quite obvious, even to me, that nobody in his/her right mind would google  for bilingual randomness … ‘Hold on, what do you call it, when somebody promises to write random stuff in two languages but then doesn’t and nobody knows why ….wait, let my google bilingual randomness…. whoa 1900000 matches …and the blog on top’ …

Nope, guess not.

But that isn’t what I wanted to write about today. I have this strong feeling that I am satisfying the second part of this blogs title completely today and alienate anyone who thought this was all fun and laughter.

‘CAUSE IT ISN’T!

Well at least not totally. I actually wanted to write about touch rugby, bubbleT (again), Enid Blyton and UV-Filter flares, but guess what… not happening.

Why?

Because of german public broadcasting, that’s why.

People who know me, know that I like the UK a lot. I really do. I love a lot of things from that island, where I had the chance to spend a good part of the 90s. I am not gloryfying it, but public broadcasting in the UK is what social welfare and car manufacturing is in Germany.

I am not going to start a detailed comparison between the two ways of doing public broadcasting, but just recently I watched BBC Horizons and while not all of the covered topics were ‘up my street’, I really enjoyed watching each episode and thought they were really informative.

This afternoon I had 15 minutes to kill, so I switched on the TV set and was greeted by a TV show called TerraXpress on the 2nd german public broadcasting channel, ZDF. Their website claims this to be a workshop of knowledge that directly connects to the life experience of its viewers. Now that is a bold claim. Lets see….

Todays general topic was waste and its prevention. More to the point the pressing issue of toothpaste waste in Germany.

The whole story goes something like this: If you squeeze toothpaste out of its packaging in one go, you get a line of 280cm of freshness (we, of course, all know toothpaste tubes are infinite and as long as you increase squezzing pressure exponentially (which I can’t), you will always be able to get something out of the tube).

According to this TV show version of the well of knowledge, you will find 3cm of toothpaste left in the tube, if you cut it open (eeeeuuugh, babaric). Now those 3cm of toothpaste represent the appropriate amount for two lush mouth foamications and generous tooth treatments!

So instead of having brushed your teeth 186,667 times with one tube of toothpaste, you could have done it 188,667 times. And before you put the stamp of insignificance on this fact,follow the ignorant TV presenter nerd to his conclusion …. if you put this together for all germans and one whole year, you get a line of succulent toothpaste 6 times the length of the german border, more than once around the equator.

HA!

Where is all your arrogant insignificance now?

I have to admit that it instantly sounded wrong to me, so nerdy me started to calculate (sort of). By my rough estimates (estimate and self-excitation are actually the same german word, now here is some knowledge for you that is equally  useless), the equator measures around 40000km, Germany has 6000km of borders * 6 = 36000km. If I round generously and use the TV show numbers, one person uses 4 tubes of toothpaste a year by brushing twice a day.That would sum up to a wasted toothpaste line of 9720km as a result.

It is late as I am writing this and I haven’t calculated it properly, and I won’t, don’t worry, but thats just taking the piss in my book.

But as conscious germans nevert let things go to waste and of course are a nation of brilliant engineers with a will of steal and hearts of political correct eco greenishness, they went off and invented stuff (according to professorXpress).

They came up with machines that would dose the toothpaste in equal servings and squeeze at least 1 1/2 additional centimeters out of each tube and with tha,t help reduce the waste produced in Germany. The next project was looking to reduce the amount of milk staying in cartons when they seem empty. I am not going to verify their 90 swimming pools of milk calculation now, actually probably never, as at that point, it passed the line of utter stupidity to ‘get the f**k out of my brain’.

Say goodnight to proper science explained in an adequate fashion.

Ok, let me finish this with one last calculation in regards to the toothpaste thing.

If we assume the average household size is 4 people and every household in germany would need one squeezing machine, we would need 20250000 squeezing machines. Each household would save 24 centimeters of toothpaste (WoW) with an average value of 20 euro cents by using a machine that cost 75 Euros in materials alone and consumes electricity while operating .

So we would save a material toothpaste value of 4 050 000 Euro by spending 1 518 750 000 Euros (neglecting operating costs) … Great Job!!!

To top this insanity off, they didn’t mention in this highly educational show, that these machines were student projects at a university, not meant for comercial use, but simply results of a course that aimed at motivating people to solve a given problem with a defined amount of resources (because nobody would be so stupid and think that you actually could tip the eco balance in your favor by doing this whole crap).

This was written in one hour and is so random, it probably even convinces Christian that I am not editing 🙂

This is madness!

Madness?

THIS IS GERMANY!

On this note, I am off to London this week, hopefully seeing more than Heathrow, the Hilton and SAP.

Reading: Metamorphoses from Ovid (endless, it’s endless)

Musical suggestion: Teenage Dreams – King Cannons

Futile peeling and disappointment

It is an odd thing with dreams. They are something that is a part of us, sometimes they wake us in the middle of the night, sometimes we wake up in the morning with just some fragments hanging around and with every minute we are awake, we forget more of what we dreamed that night. Don’t worry, I am not going to rant about dreams the way I did about thoughts last week and I am definitly not going to ramble on and on or even do perform dream interpretations (hate that …useless).

While our own dreams are total immersion Cinemascope Imax 3D with a really weird but engaging plot, told dreams by and from others are boring as hell….so I am not going to bother. After all, this activity of cleaning the neural pathways in time of conscience leave, the brainy self purification to ensure smooth operations and sorting of clogged up old stuff is a very private experience after all.

Amazing though, is, how actual sensory information is integrated into the dream, to make sense in the current dream situation. Just one example…I am suffering from apnoea (used to be worse but got better due to an operation, so mostly it’s the annoying snoring without the dangerous suffocation instances) and when the breathing gets hard, suddenly in the dream a situation is created that involves something covering my mouth, falling or sitting on my chest.

As I said earlier, I am not going to bore you with dream details, but this one occurence must be the single most frustrating dream experience in my whole dream life.

Why? Because there is never a “dream conclusion” to whatever idea my brain comes up with, to justify the heavy breathing.

Why? Because the lack of breathing wakes me up….every single time this happens. Never is there a liberating dream moment of “here take this, villain” or “off you go, heavy crate”…not even a “ha, spit you out stupid cotton ball, that’s what I did!”.

Nope. Just the waking up, desperately breathing in, turning on the other side or getting up for a glass of water and back to bed. Falling asleep again, trying to get back into the dream I had before (if it was a cool one) or just drifting off.

Stupid thing, your brain, or at least mine… dreams don’t work on the principle of series and episodes, there is no “to be continued” and no matter how hard I try, I never am able to get back into that dream. If at all, I get back into a fragment of the former dream, which then takes a completely different direction and as it mostly happens with remakes, a quite stupid or boring one without the A-list actors as well. Damn this.

So up to now I only acknowledged the second part of the header, which is funny, as I didn’t want to write much about the whole dream thing and not honor it at all with some heading. But so far the really continuous thing happening to me while writing the blog is, that not a single article ended up to be about what I initially wanted to write about.

So with this smooth transition and because it is totally connected with dreams or their awful cousins the orange nightmares; lets talk about oranges.

Oranges can be heaven on earth, succulent, juicy, refreshing and sweet, all at the same time or they can be just awful shit, which you never wanted to get into you mouth and onto yout tastebuds in the first place.

In winter I really crave oranges (this all is also true for their little cousins, the tangerines). Hold on!!!

Ok, I am back. When I started to write about the tangerines, one of those ninja thoughts (I mentioned them last week) swooped in and demanded attention.

So oranges and grapefruit are clearly named in both german and english. So are the tangerine, the satsuma, lemon and lime. But in Germany there is another kind of citrus fruit for sale everywhere and I didn’t find an english description for it…. I am absolutely positive that this is not just another name for weird looking tangerines. I am talking about the “Clementine”, which is, as I read, a cross between the bitter orange and the tangerine and is sold quite a lot in Germany as it doesn’t contain seeds…..ever.

Anyway, so you grab one of those orange balls of fruity awesomeness and start peeling away, reeeeeeally looking forward to those delicious slices of juicy greatness and then fingers wound from ripping of that stubborn skin bite into it and if you are out of luck, one of two things happen. The first one is dry non-taste, which provokes this eeeughh sound or even worse….. juicy weird taste, as if the trees sucked up some sulfuric mineral shit with the roots and got acid rain showers once a week.

While not earth shattering bad or mind numbingly dangerous,  this usual happens with the last one (orange)  you have at home.This just is a perfect example of little, quite unimportant things which can frustrate you immensely and not only leave you not refreshed but stale mouthy.

Hooray for figs!

Reading: still Metamorphoses from Ovid (I know I am dragging)

Musical suggestion: Just a Creep – Dum Dum Girls

The Bootstrap Paradox and other Timey Wimey Stuff

I wanted to talk about time, or rather the lack of thereof that I am experiencing momentarily. But as usual something happens to me and always produces a similar result. I have to postpone something, in this case the writing of the blog article, but of course I don’t stop thinking about the topic. This topic starts to develop its own, given, shortlived life, where one thought builds up on the other, growing into a sort of mindmap of considerable size and suddenly, if not written down somewhere, disappearing, only to leave  unconnected fragments of the initial thought.

Sounds like a waste of time…..why bother? If all is gone and by growing in your head out of proportion, not even leaving you with the initial thought to start fresh, because the remainders are tainted by the broken and twisted fragments of the once glorious patchwork built by the glorious Artiste called brain….what is the point?

Or, seen from a completely different angle……yes, you didn’t  share the thought  when it still was fresh, you also didn’t share the magnificent weave that subsequently evolved inside you, no tangible result is left in the aftermath and perhaps the initial thought and also the  full blown construct weren’t magnificent at all. Perhaps they were not brilliant, new or would save the world and all people from impending doom……..but was the initial thought amusing? Did it make you think, animate you to try out different approaches and………was it fun?

If the answer  to that is yes, then time surely wasn’t wasted. Look at it as if this was a little population of simple minded organisms…a little bit stupid, a little bit weird, but anxious to proliferate and funny. So, maybe without a given direction and method they developed and thrived, grew into a chaotic mob, all talking at the same time, so much at once, until at one point, they blew up in smoke and were gone.

Yeah those thoughts didn’t stand the test of time or the test of many minds, but perhaps they didn’t have to and as everything endsat one point, so did they.

Phew, sorry about that. I actually was trying to write about how I sleep more since a couple of months, don’t have enough time to do everything i want to, but accomplish more than at the times when I slept much less. This is not going to be a lifehacker best of, like “10 ways to maximize your wake and sleep pattern and increase your productivity by 300%”. 

Not at all.

Actually me trying to help with that issue, probably would make you look like this poor fellow in your wake periods. So I am not going to do that. Especially as that was how I looked some years ago…. every f****g day. And when I think today about how tired I feel, I guess I simply forgot about those times.

I always thought of myself as the creative guy and did a lot of stuff, but there was a time , when all that almost came to a standstill and I didn’t produce really anything creative. I was well on my way down on the path from creative production to couch potato-like consumerism. The funny thing is, I had more time, my job wasn’t as stressful as it is now, I was younger and more energetic, I had more time as I slept much less and a lot of other things, which don’t add up straight at the moment, weren’t a concern at the time.

Still I felt totally stressed out…on the edge of bearability, or so I thought. So i spent my days not reading anymore, watching movies and playing computer games all the time, when I wasn’t at work. Bear in mind that i was waaaaaaaay past 15 at the time and don’t get me wrong, I still watch movies and I still enjoy playing computer games, but, I also enjoy doing stuff and not just consuming things on top of the chores and the time I want to spend with close and not so close people.

So bear with me, if you managed to follow my chaotic self rant to this point. I will actually come to a conclusion today. YaY!!!!

I developed this reading scheme, which helped me find my way back to reading and is great fun and …. behold…..educational in alternating patterns and sometimes even at the same time. The idea is simple… I read a classic or important work and after that any trash that captures my attention (in my case probably SF or Fantasy). This helps me to fight through serious stuff even if it is not bang on thrilling at that moment and lets me enjoy even the most outragous space opera, knowing that more food for thought is acctually on its way.

There are of course books that are both, e.g. the works of Philip K. Dick, and my last cycle was the “read whatever you feel like part”, so I induldged myself with Robert Heinleins “The moon is a harsh mistress” which is a very interesting sociological story with a very witty thought construct about artificial, cognitive intelligence and self awareness and the short story “By his Bootstraps”.

The Synopsis of that short story and the definition of the Bootstrap paradox is:

Because of the possibility of influencing the past while time traveling, one way of explaining why history does not change is because these changes already are contained self-consistently in the past timeline. A time traveler attempting to alter the past in this model, intentionally or not, would only be fulfilling his or her role in creating history, not changing it (Wikipedia). 

So for me the conclusion is quite simple, creativity is not born out of itself, but from your experiences and how you reflect on the world around you. You can’t just sit around and stop evolving, interacting and learning. It isn’t self contained but a constant dialogue between you and the world around you. There is no “alter ego you”, which will suddenly appear and throw 2 stone slabs in you lap with the 10 creative commandments. I know that this thought isn’t new and of course has been thought before. It is quite basic and obvious, but I had to live through the whole process to truly understand this and find a way back to my own creativity. Step by step. It is a journey that hasn’t ended yet.

Music suggestion for today: The Civil Wars – Barton Hallow

Reading at the moment : Metamorphoses – Ovid