Archiv der Kategorie: almost a diary

almost a diary, oddly enough, Science

The Rose Wars or The End Of Vegetarianism.

I’m still laughing at the thought of half of my female friends’ denial to eat anything but chemically engineered, synthetic food…

Why would they do that, you ask?

Well, it’s simple enough. They are vegetarians – some more, some less. But about half of the women I know (while hardly any men) voluntarily renounce to eating meat on a regular basis. Some claim to do it “because it’s healthier”, but whatever they say, in most cases it is fairly obvious that it is only the thought of personal responsibility for the suffering and eventual death of a creature with a nervous system that was only bred to be eaten which prevents them from enjoying this particular form of carnal pleasure.

There are some exceptions – I call them “fashion vegetarians” – to this rather fundamental rule, but to the benefit of all lobsters on this planet “nothing-with-a-face” aesthetic discrimination is actually rare these days. It’s just too un-pc.

On the other hand, the days of politically correct foodstuffs may be over for good. The Three-Toed Sloth calls our attention to a recently published study which presents “Evidence for complex, collective dynamics and emergent, distributed computation in plants“.

In other words, some scientists claim that plants can think.

So how long do you think will it take until we will see the first starved Vegetarians? Until men will be considered compassionate for forgetting to bring flowers for a date? Until we will see naked models fighting rose wars in front of flower shops, demonstrating for the rights of plants?

I don’t know. And probably this will never happen. But just the thought of my vegetarian friends being forced to decide between spacefood or starvation was worth writing this entry.

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almost a diary, photoblogging

White Christmas, 2003.

I’m a little bit disappointed. Usually, the pre-christmas shopping spree leads to at least a handful of interesting discoveries, with respect to shoppers or the products they bought. But this year? Hardly anything exciting to report from my ventures into consumer wonderland, maybe apart from the almost strange impression that the age of “Wham-christmas” seems to be over. I heard it only twice this year.

It’s not that people aren’t in holiday shopping mood anymore. But they, just as the marketers, don’t seem to be quite as willing to opt for experiments as they were in the past. There might be a correlation with the recently passed reform bills, which, in the expectation of stilll too many people are the official declaration that poverty, big time, looms over Germany now.

But lack of cristmassy enthusiasm could, on the other hand, simply be climatically induced, as this winter seems to become as cold as the summer was hot. I literally drove through a snow storm at Frankfurt Airport today. So at least we won’t have to listen to Bing Crosby dreaming of a White Christmas this year.

Speaking of orange trees in LA… I think there is an immediate lack of good new christmas carols these days. I wonder if EndeMol entertainment can’t find a way to create a tv show around this theme ;). Well, I think I will be able to find an hour or so for a final entry of 2003 during the upcoming festivities. But just in case I don’t…

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almost a diary, oddly enough

Less Almost, More Diary.

I have no idea what made me take the test Lillimarleen advertised on her page tonight, but there you go. I usually don’t take “personality tests”, certainly not personality tests that consist of eight questions.

No one has ever been able to pin me down and maybe it’s a good sign that the headhunters who tried to do that by playing a ten minute game have since gone out of business. Anyway, I thought it was time for another slightly more personal entry. So here we go.

Dear almost a diary,

today I did this eight questions personality test on the internet… here’s the result. What do you think?

holding hands

hand holding – you like to be in constant physical
contact with your special someone but you don’t want to take things too quickly.

Hey almost a diary, want to the test, too?

[ brought to you by Quizilla ]

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almost a diary

Happy Birthday! We’re moving!

My gentle readers, let me tell you that today, this blog is celebrating its first birthday. While you might or might not have been disappointed that I have been rather silent lately, the reason for this has been the preparation of a movable type installation over on www.almostadiary.de (no need to link, the auto-forward to blogspot is still working). The “tschwarz.blogspot.com” installation is going to stay in place for the moment.

Of course, MT offers a better functionality and having control over my archives is certainly worth a lot. But if you’re not happy with the MT templates, getting an MT installation (with a few bells and whistles) to work across just the most common browsers does take a lot of time and determination. If it had not been for my annual coding adventure, I likely wouldn’t have done it.

Especially importing your comments from reblogger to MT was a hazzle that involved creating a caif standard xml file from html through word’s search and replace functionality. Not a recommended method, but one that can work. However, while all comments have been atributed to the right posts in MT, Phil Ringnalda’s Yaccs comment import script wasn’t able to work with Reblogger’s timestamp, so don’t be surprised when comments seem to have been posted in 2005…

Also, many older posts still have headlines that are compiled from the first 5 words of the entry given the lack of a title tag in blogger’s free version, and I haven’t assigned categories yet. Neither have I installed the trackback feature.

So there are still things to do, especially as I just decided against using the prepared autumn design for the moment for reasons of recognition and weather. This means I have to do some table adjustments which will take another half-an-hour or so. Despite almost complete reliance on CSS, I am still using tables for the main columns for the moment. With just CSS I couldn’t motivate Netscape to do what I wanted. As for 4th-generation browsers, I have decided against trying to support them.

But anyway, “almost a diary on MT” is going online tonight. Let’s celebrate!

But now I’m off to celebrate something else first.

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almost a diary, Iraq, media

Quality Journalism?

At least for the mo­ment, I am not real­ly com­men­ting the quar­rel bet­ween the Labour go­vern­ment and the BBC that very like­ly led to the tra­gic sui­cide of Dr. Da­vid Kel­ly, who was the ori­gi­nal sour­ce be­hind the BBC Radio 4’s de­fen­ce cor­res­pon­dent An­drew Gil­li­gan’s claim that the British go­vern­ment, most pro­mi­nent­ly Alas­tair Camp­bell, Tony Blair’s com­mu­ni­ca­tions ad­vi­sor, ‘sexed up’ the Bri­tish Iraq dos­sier to make a more con­vin­cing case for war.

But wha­tever you think of the go­vern­ment’s, or the BBC’s, or Dr. Kelly’s, or any indi­vidual jour­na­list’s res­ponsi­bili­ty for the tra­gedy, some peop­le in go­vern­ment ob­vious­ly for­got some ba­sic rules of po­li­ti­cal com­mu­ni­ca­tion. When some­one says “liar”, you don’t fuel that dis­cus­sion by sul­king­ly re­ply­ing “no, you are” when the only result will be that bad situ­ation be­comes an even wor­se one.

I just don’t un­der­stand why Mr Camp­bell felt the need to re­live Shell’s 1995 Brent Spar com­mu­ni­ca­tions disaster when there was no need what­so­ever?

Whatever the truth to his or An­drew Gil­ligan’s po­si­tion, tal­king about it cer­tain­ly made things worse at a time when the pub­lic dis­cour­se was “shame on you if you fool me once, shame on me if you fool me twice”. What­ever the truth to either side’s alligations, with­out fi­nal­ly fin­ding some buckets of poi­son some­where in the Iraqi de­sert, the only way for the British go­vern­ment to deal with the si­tu­ation would have been to shut up, not to hunt down an al­le­ged trai­tor or char­ging the BBC with jour­na­lis­tic mis­con­duct to ma­ke every­one be­lieve that there must be really some­thing to the story.

That’s all I’m going to say.

My for­mer em­plo­yer Ben Brad­shaw on the other hand, for­mer BBC jour­nalist and now Par­lia­men­tary Se­cre­tary in the Bri­tish Depart­ment for Envi­ron­ment, Food and Ru­ral Affairs, is very invol­ved in this row.

And, again, what­ever your opinion of all this: his re­cent de­plo­ring the lack of qua­lity jour­na­lism and sour­ce veri­fi­ca­tion seems to have some point when even “The Guar­dian“, even in a time­line of the affair publi­shed on July 19th, makes him a “For­eign Of­fice Mini­ster”, a po­si­tion he left in June 2002 when he was appoin­ted “De­puty Lea­der of the Hou­se of Com­mons”.

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almost a diary, cinema, filme

A Movie, With Me.

It might come as a shock to you, my gentle readers, but from time to time I do act in student short films. And as this week saw the premieres of two more recent productions, I thought to myself ‘why not experiment with streaming media and put an older one on the web?’
And so I did. Clicking on the image below takes you to a realmedia-encoded version of a largely improvised short film by Sebastian Linke called “49 degrees”, shot in English for and shown at the Hamburg International Film Festival in June 2002. The film was part of the category “thee minute quickie”. A category named after the length of the films shown rather than their content… As for the content, the theme the “quickies” had to deal with in 2002 was “thirst”.
For those who can’t remember what I look like – or have never seen me -, I am “Robbespierre aka the guy who doesn’t drink” ;).
Enjoy.

49 degrees

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almost a diary, oddly enough

Crime Scene Report

I’m just realising the following: It should be punishable by law to sell postcards but not stamps. As this problem persists all over the world, I suppose this crime would make a prime opportunity to test the efficiency of the International Criminal Court. Or am I the only one who suffers from stamp unavailability whenever I try to send postcards? I’m not kidding here. I just went through my “stuff” box and counted about 50 written and addressed postcards from all over the world which have never been sent for acute lack of local stamps. So if you ever expected to receive a postcard from me and never got one, this is probably why.

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