My favorite Greek relative celebrated his 50th birthday today. I still remember how he fascinated me when we first met, back in 1987. How he sparked my interest in all things binary. He will always remain my digital superhero. The man who taught me my first three-and-a-half lines of code. And there was not even a “hello world” in them…
10 for i = 1 to 100
20 print i
30 next i
run
Thank you. Thank you very much.
Lillimarleen links to “pro-gun” tirade by Rachel Lucas called just like this entry. Rachel furiously tries to point out why previous cases of civil strife, ethnic persecution, or class warfare are valid arguments in favour of uninhibited gun ownership in general, and specifically in the USA –
“If you make self-defense illegal, or even problematic, you’re making life easier for criminals and tyrants.”
Well, if I were living in a Hobbesian state of nature I would probably have to subscribe to the strict version of that theory, too. But, luckily, I am not. Maybe she is – she lives in Texas, according to her webpage – that would explain her position.
In the real world however, it just doesn’t make much sense. But just like I am, Rachel and everybody else is entitled to tell the world about his or her opinions.
So when there’s nothing to argue, what am I doing here? Well, I am not really concerned with the substance of her rant, but rather with the style.
Unfortunately, Rachel (although she’s far from the worst) seemingly believes in the bizarre discourse theory a lot of bloggers, in my experience predominantly American right-wing bloggers, are spreading these days – that calling people who don’t share their opinions “idiots” as frequently as possible is making their points more convincing. Generally, they seem to follow the rule “the more aggressive, and insulting, the better.”
Rachel herself admits this practice on her FAQ page
“Q: ‘How does Rachel expect to make her point by insulting people she disagrees with?’
A: Easy. I don’t expect to make my point to people who can’t see past the insults. Also, this is just a blog, not the New York Times op-ed page.”
Don’t get me wrong here, there are instances for the application of “idiot”. But the word’s inflationary use is a kind of verbal pollution, is simply annoying, and possibly preventing a good deal of the debate theoretically made possible by advances in communication technologies – who likes to talk to people who begin the discussion by saying “shut up, you idiot”? In Rachel’s words – why should they want to see past the insults?
I wonder if some phd student is already trying to capture the early changes personal publishing is making to the style of written opinion in general – can anyone imagine a NY Times op-ed headline that reads “Stupid, stupid, stupid idiots”? Probably not – for the time being. But who knows what the future, and the effects of personal publishing will have on other forms of media?
Deutsche Welle reviews the European newspapers’ reaction to Israel’s endorsement of the latest plan for peace in the Middle East. For one, The Independent wryly notes that “[p]eace may be on the horizon, but it is not yet around the corner.”
A personal note – in early 1993, I interviewed the late Ignatz Bubis, then head of the Central Council of Jews in Germany, for a school paper I had to write about the Middle East conflict. To my question what he thinks would be the outcome of the rumours about the “Oslo process” that were emerging at the time he said something like “there will be peace eventually … in 25 years or so.” The horizon may well be some 15 years down the road (map). Does *anyone* believe there will be a Palestinian state in 2005?
Gentry Lane reminds me that football might be more than a game sometimes. But it will never be one of the more important things in life. She has decided to take a break from blogging to care for her possibly terminally ill fluffy cat Kipper.
I will clearly miss her almost daily injections of superficially shallow wit. But she is right to remind her readers that there is a backlog of 1242 episodes – equivalent to two volumes of “In Search Of Lost Time” – for all those who tuned in later.
Although browsing Freud’s Fave’s adventures probably won’t be lost time for you. I for one certainly enjoyed it.
On Sunday, the definition of “tragedy” was rewritten. Mainz 05, the local football team lost the race for the third promotion spot to Germany’s premier league, Bundesliga, by a single goal, and a single second, to local rival Eintracht Frankfurt. Both teams had scored 59 points in 33 games. Befor the last, and decisive, game, they were separated only by goal difference: Eintracht Frankfurt’s was one goal better.
The race was too close to call. At half-time, Frankfurt led 3:1 and Mainz led 2:0 against their respective opponents. Nothing had changed. But then Mainz scored twice while Frankfurt got two goals. Frankfurt would have to score four goals now – or three, should Mainz get one. A rather improbable scenario 80 minutes into the games.
Nonetheless, this is what happened. After Mainz got the 4:1 Frankfurt scored three goals in seven minutes, the 6:3 literally in the last second of the game’s extension leaving Mainz’ players and supporters (like myself) in a numbed state somewhere between disbelief and denial.
It was heart-breaking to see so many people burst into tears – again. Pretty much the same thing happened about a year ago in Berlin. It just was not fair.
But life often isn’t – despite our Hollywood inspired tendency to believe in happy ends. In life, we have to fight the obstacles without guaranteed success. But if we’re lucky, we have someone who fights with us. And I suppose the team of Mainz 05 is lucky.
They will never walk alone.
My sister is doing a masters degree in journalism these days. You know, masters programmes are the hype at German universities these days. It doesn’t matter that there have never been any other degrees offered by German universities, except for the name, of course. The programme she’s doing has been taught since 1993 and was previously described as an “journalistic add-on” programme. Surely, it sound a lot better to bet teaching and studying a “masters” programme, especially as pretty much no human resources department in Germany is able to tell the difference between one kind of masters or the other. Yup, it’s all about bullshitting these days, long gone the days when people strove to follow the idea of “mehr sein als schein” – to be more than one appears to be.
Well, her programme is not that bad, to be fair. It might be a tad bit boring for people with some media experience, as far as I can tell, but for others it compiles an interesting range of common sense knowledge about publishing that would nonetheless take quite a while to acquire left on one’s one devices.
So I had dinner with my sister tonight and she told me about this online publishing project she’s doing and asked for a hand with the coding bit.
While I have continuously followed the internet’s development since I saw the first hypertext pages in a gopher-browser, and then Mosaic 1.0, back in 1994 and even do have some knowledge of web coding, I would never dare to call myself an “expert” in any meaningful sense of that word – knowing that a lot of people are not as cautious when it comes to slef-ascribing said status.
And one of the latter group of people might well be the person teaching online publishing for my sister’s class. On the assignment paper the person unmistakably wrote that she would, until the next class, “check if the server [on which the project is going to be published] supports Cascading Style Sheets”.
Did I miss something?
Thanks for all your nice wishes! Well, so I did run. And I am still alive – well, I never actually questioned that ;-). Although some people did drop out and had to get treated by paramedics, which is not the most pleasant thing to see while running.
However, things did not go as smoothly as I had hoped for, which is why I had to call it a day after a half-marathon – and therefore did not get anywhere near a runner’s-high today… actually, it was more like a runner’s-low for two major reasons:
Firstly, after about two kilometers into the course, I suddenly felt sick for no apparent reason and had to force myself to empty my stomach in a movable loo. I already thought about giving up, but strangely enough, my stomach apparently had second thoughts and behaved like a good boy afterwards.
Secondly, when I was in Paris at the end of March, I apparently enjoyed running au bord de la Seine a little too much, for as a result I developed a
bone-skin infection in my left shin in recent weeks. This, in turn, significantly reduced the amount of training I had envisaged. But I thought it would be best to be really careful, given a previous knee-injury and the fact that I had been running a lot all throughout the winter and was thus not too concerned about my overall condition, even though I was sure to be slower than I had hoped I could be. So the big question was, would the shin hurt too much to go all the way?
Unfortunately, it did. So hopefully, I’ll be able to answer the runner’s high question after the Frankfurt Marathon in October…
In a few hours, I’ll be on the run.
If I’m still alive afterwards, I’ll let you know ;-)
By the way, reader AL had an interesting comment regarding the unintended consequences of the Wal*Mart-Taleban story below:
“Part of this has to do with when Wal-Mart got big enough to move into a rural area and put all of the local small businesses out. In some western states, local businesses went with all nude female sales staffs to stay in business. Wal-Mart was blamed for destroying the local economy and the morals of the areas they opened up in.”
Brad DeLong always finds a new twist to inquire about the fundamentals of human civilisation – here’s what he writes today:
“By what right is Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony so damn good?
Why do we like it so much?”
The 4th movement was my first hit-single, believe it or not. And deaf Ludwig van B. was my first pop-star, when I was six (it never mattered that much that the words are actually Schiller’s). I even got the orchestral score as a Christmas present once – although I would not recommend trying to play it on solo-piano. It just doesn’t sound like it does in the Berlin philharmony, if you know what I mean.
I largeley quit classic music as a teenager, for obvious reasons. But one of the few pieces I voluntarily listened to (as opposed to being forced to listen to by well-meaning parents) even during that period was Beethoven’s ninth.
So why do “we” like it that much? Maybe because it is an ode to joy written by a man whose will was strong enough to cope with the hardest of all fates for a composer – deafness. Maybe because it reassures us that whatever seemingly insurmountable problem may appear one day, there is always hope. [author off to look for CD]
I am sure, that you, my gentle readers, will be thrilled to hear that this little page from now on has a second home. One with its very own diskspace and domain. Ladies & gentlemen, “tschwarz.blogspot.com” is now also “www.almostadiary.de“.
You don’t have to update your links yet as I will continue using blogspot for the time being. But I thought I let you know that it feels good to be a homeowner – who, as Denise DiPasquale and Edward L. Glaeser found out some time ago, might well be the better citizens ;-).
