rewboss

Write no evil

2012-03-08T18:44:00.000+01:00

This boy is Ignorance. This girl is Want. Beware them both, and all of their degree, but most of all beware this boy, for on his brow I see that written which is Doom, unless the writing be erased.
Charles Dickens, A Christmas Carol

After all these years, Adolf Hitler continues to exert a strange and hypnotic force on the German psyche. A weekly periodical called Zeitungszeugen has been denied permission to reprint heavily annotated excerpts from Mein Kampf, on the grounds that they couldn’t guarantee that readers would read the annotations. This would expose them, apparently, to the full, undiluted power of Hitler’s words, and they would all go out and start declaring war on Poland. I myself, in doing a bit of research for this post, accidentally allowed myself to catch sight of a picture of the front cover of the book, and am now seized with the desire to shout antisemitic slogans at random passers-by, so I know how dangerous this can be.

Well, obviously not: that was deliberate hyperbole in order to make a point. But the Munich Regional Court’s decision is enough to make you believe that that was what they were afraid of. The problem, according to the court, is that Zeitungszeugen had no plans to interweave the original with the annotations; they were to be separated.

That the courts were involved should not be construed as official censorship, as that would be undemocratic. This is a copyright dispute. Because Hitler died childless and nobody else claimed ownership (his great-nephew, unsurprisingly, wanted nothing to do with it), the copyright passed to the State of Bavaria. It’s due to expire in 2016, and the Bavarian government is, ahem, slightly concerned about what will happen then. It’s not illegal to buy or own copies of Mein Kampf. It’s not unconstitutional because it was written long before the German Basic Law was. It’s all a bit of a headache, really.

To put it into perspective, we are talking about a two-volume work that Mussolini described as “boring”. It’s very antisemitic, yes, but its controversial status — apart from the fact that it was written by a man who made Beelzebub look like a primary school teacher — derives from a single sentence about how many problems could be solved by murdering a few thousand Jews. There’s a lot of other stuff in there, like Hitler’s plan to form an alliance with Italy and (get this) the British Empire to hold back the insidious and (according to Hitler) Jewish influence of Marxism. A plan which, famously, didn’t quite work out.

The stated aim is to prevent such stirring stuff from getting into the hands of neonazis, but to be honest, I think you’ll find that extremist groups will write their own scripts. Most other Germans — most other people, in fact — are perfectly well aware that Hitler was a nasty man and that slaughtering millions of people is at the “really atrociously evil” end of the scale, and their opinions won’t be swayed by reading Mein Kampf, or little bits of it, without the helpful notes about what a rotten cad Hitler is, or whatever is supposed to go in these annotations.

Worse than too much information (and this brings me to my clever Dickens quote) is not enough information. As a collective whole, Germany is very serious about the need to ensure that This Never Happens Again, but being kept in the dark about the man who started it all and what motivated him is hardly helping. If anything, it’s helping to deify him, possibly the worst thing that can happen, as his Almighty Word is being treated as sacred. It’s not the most violent book ever written (the Old Testament beats Mein Kampf hands down), and the only reason it’s treated with such care is the identity of its author.

In any case, this being 2012, I just found the complete, unabridged and unannotated text of Mein Kampf online in PDF format, fully accessible without any tricks, proxies, anonymizer or other devious methods short of a quick Google search. I can’t link to it — I’m allowed to read the book, but I’m not allowed to disseminate it — but I can tell you one thing: Mussolini was right.

Toto, I’ve a feeling we’re not in Berlin any more

2012-03-06T22:24:00.000+01:00

So the former President of the Federal Republic of Germany, Christian Wulff, forced to resign (as you doubtless recall) as his fondness for the jet-setting high life came to light, just never quite manages to leave the newspapers. He may have been moved off the front page in favour of more important stories (like the Queen of England’s Diamond Jubilee), but he still takes up too many column inches for a man in his position.

He’s not willing to forego his €199,000 pension. He insists on his right to have a staffed office for the rest, it seems, of his natural life, costing the taxpayer another €280,000 a year. Now he wants a big send-off.

Apparently, he’s entitled to a Zapfenstreich, a word which can refer either to Last Post, or a full military tattoo. Since he’s not dead (and so still costing the taxpayer €479,000 annually), we’re talking about the tattoo: the sort where a military band plays a selection of songs by torchlight.

Wulff is entitled to choose three songs he’d like to have, and so he chose four. At this point, even his closest allies are starting to shuffle their feet in embarrassment. He’s chosen a march, a hymn, Beethoven’s Ode to Joy, and…

…Over the Rainbow.

Nobody’s quite sure what to make of that, but a song that is indelibly associated with a flight of fancy into a faraway world populated by talking lions and flying monkeys is an odd choice to say the least. I’ll leave you to ponder on what it says about the emotional state of the man, but it strikes me that there must be other songs more suited to politicians than the usual pompous church music.

ABBA’s hit Money, Money, Money, for example, might do for most politicians, including Wulff. Also appropriate for Wulff, and any politician forced to leave in disgrace, might be Ray Charles singing Hit the Road, Jack. The obvious choice for any politician caught out in the more lurid sort of scandal would be It Wasn’t Me by Shaggy. And so on; you get the general idea.

We can only hope that we never have to use Sympathy for the Devil.

Me making money from a scandal

2012-03-05T21:43:00.000+01:00

Yes, this is me making money from a political scandal by uploading and monetizing a video on the subject. And in fact, since I made this video, another politician has got himself into a bit of a pickle: as happened to Karl Theodor Maria Nikolaus Johann Jacob Philipp Franz Joseph Sylvester Freiherr von und zu Guttenberg (or Karl-Theodor zu Guttenberg, as his friends get to call him), it has been discovered that Bijan Djir-Sarai plagiarised his thesis and so has been stripped of his doctorate. How the mighty are fallen.

Vlogger of the flies

2012-03-03T20:24:00.000+01:00

Well, it’s a blog, and pretty self-explanatory, so I won’t bother trying to explain it. Although, it is going to be interesting to see what guesses about the mysterious project my wife and I have ahead of us this year. Who would like to have a go?

See no evil...

2012-03-01T22:33:00.000+01:00

Multiculturalism is a topic that raises emotions, especially in Germany, as it is a subject that inevitably sparks violent arguments in which accusations of racism feature prominently. Start trying to investigate the causes of social unease, and whichever side of the argument you come down on, the other side will act as if you had just instituted Satanism as the official national religion. Sit on the fence, or disagree with both sides and come up with some new idea, and nobody will ever speak to you again. So better not to talk about it at all.

Now, let me make one thing clear at the outset. I am an immigrant. I think I have integrated quite well, all things considered, into German society and culture, although I must also point out that my own culture is not far removed from German culture so the transition was quite easy. Although not really relevant to what follows, I personally think that while immigration is generally a good thing, I think it has been mismanaged and the ideal of multiculturalism perverted in a way that in some areas has contributed to a ghettoisation of society.

The background is this: by far the greatest number of immigrants to German are Turkish. There are more Turks living in Berlin than live in any city in Turkey except Istanbul and Ankara — getting off the U-Bahn at Kottbusser Tor is enough to convince you of that (in fact, line U1 is locally known as the “Orient Express”). Mostly, everything seems to go remarkably smoothly, and the kind of race riots that flared up in Britian in the 1980s, or that flare up in Paris every now and again, are pretty much unknown here. Nevertheless, the Turkish community, like most immigrant communities anywhere in the world, features elevated levels of poverty and therefore also crime; and when I was living in Berlin, so-called “honour killings” — young men murdering their sisters for dating Germans — were semi-regularly reported in that sensationalist manner the tabloids have (so such reports have to be taken with a certain amount of salt).

So we have a prominent immigrant community with the typical challenges you’d expect, although you wish you didn’t. But recently, something new has arrived into the mix: the fear of Islamic terrorism. In particular, the fear that young men are being radicalised, a hatred of the West being instilled into them.

It’s easy to imagine how this happens. The children or grandchildren of immigrants, born in Germany to Turkish parents, may experience a sort of identity crisis: expected to be Turkish at home but German outside of the home, and not properly brought up in either culture, form their own identity, based on badly misunderstood Turkish values. Wait for these people to reach hormonal age, make them feel insecure about their identity, give them the beginnings of a persecution complex, and that seed will grow.

So, obviously, if you were the Interior Minister of Germany, you’d probably want to investigate this. Is it true? How much of it is true? Should we be worried? If it is true, what can be done about it? If it isn’t true, what can be done to reassure the general public? You’d probably start by commissioning a report. That’s exactly what Interior Minister Hans-Peter Friedrich did.

It didn’t go down well at all. It probably wasn’t a wise decision to publish it in the Bild, Germany’s biggest tabloid newspaper, but let’s gloss over that. Friedrich’s study — in fact, not just the study itself, but Friedrich’s decision to even commission it — was roundly criticized by the opposition parties.

The Socialist Party’s Integration Representative, Aydan Özoguz, was quoted as saying:

Anyone who is serious about tackling the ghettoisation and violent tendencies of young people should not do so with the obvious intention without abandoning entire religious communities to populist sentiments.

Remember that bit about “entire religious communities”. This will be important later.

But criticism came from the governing coalition itself. The Integration Policy Spokesman of the Free Democrats, the junior coalition partner, a certain Serkan Tören, complained that:

…once more, taxpayers’ money is being used to finance a study to produce headlines but no new knowledge.

And the Justice Minister, who rejoices in the name of Sabine Leutheusser-Schnarrenberger, gave us this pearl of wisdom:

We do not need a debate which conveys a distorted image of the country of immigration, Germany.

Now, this is true, in the sense that any debate should result, in the end, in an accurate picture. That’s what a debate is for. The study may be seriously flawed, it may be completely wrong; but if so, that should come out of the debate. You conduct a study, then you debate it, then you see what conclusions you come to. What you don’t do — and if she doesn’t grasp this fundamental point, she has no business being Justice Minister — is look at the study and then refuse to debate it on the grounds that it conflicts with your beliefs. If it conflicts with your beliefs, either it is wrong, or your beliefs are wrong, or, more likely, both are flawed.

By now, you may be wondering what on earth this study said that was so awful. Well, according to the Spiegel, the study found that about a quarter of young (between the ages of 14 and 32) Turks living in Germany with Turkish passports, and about 15% of those with German passports, were strongly religious, had strong aversions to the west, tended to be violent and tended not to have any wish to integrate.

Remember that bit of Özoguz’s statement I asked you to remember, the bit about “entire religious communities”? Would you say that the study concluded that all Muslims were unwilling to integrate? Özoguz apparently things so. As does Leutheusser-Schnarrenberger, since she felt it necessary to point out that “citizens of Islamic faith live in Germany today, quite naturally, and are at home here”.

But of course, they’re falling into the classic trap of thinking that if all potential terrorists are Muslim, then all Muslims must be potential terrorists. It’s difficult to explain the fallacy to anyone who doesn’t get it, without drawing a Venn diagram, but Friedrich had a shot at it:

The bigger picture shows that Muslims in Germany categorically reject terrorism.

In other words, Friedrich is accusing his critics of concentrating on the sensationalist headlines instead of looking at the report properly. Which does rather make me wonder why he chose a sensationalist tabloid to publish his study, but politicians aren’t always known for their expert handling of the press.

Really, there needs to be a better way of dealing with the situation. It strikes me that either the study is accurate, or it is not accurate. If it is accurate, it must be taken seriously and acted on; if it is not accurate, we need to know exactly what isn’t accurate about it. Either way, refusing to debate, or even read, it properly is utterly counter-productive.

German patriotism

2012-02-29T22:34:00.000+01:00

There’s very little to say about my latest video, except that it is remarkably accurate (if I do say so myself). There was nothing particularly exciting about the production or the editing: all very boringly straightforward.

The song I parody is of course the German national anthem, which is universally (and incorrectly) known as Deutschland, Deutschland über alles; it is properly known as das Deutschlandlied (“the Germany song”). The first stanza, of course, does begin “Deutschland, Deutschland über alles, / über alles der Welt” (“Germany, Germany above all, above all the world”). The problem is that while the song was originally intended as a call to unity — it was written at the time when the patchwork of tiny warring states I refer to was being dragged, kicking and screaming, into the 19th century — the Nazis conveniently misinterpreted it to mean Germany was supreme. As a result, only the third verse actually constitutes the modern German national anthem: “Einigkeit und Recht und Freiheit” it calls for; unity and justice and freedom.

The map showing the patchwork of little states is real: it’s a map of the Holy Roman Empire, around 1400. It was a bit saner by the time Bismarck unified Germany in 1871, but still a sight to behold.

Finally, in case you’re wondering, the preview thumbnail shows me against the Bavarian flag (or one variant of it: the “lozenge” variant). Just to drive home the point about “regional pride”.

Over Unison’s dead body

2012-02-25T21:39:00.000+01:00

The Daily Telegraph reports on government interest in a scheme to use the heat from crematoria to heat swimming pools or generate electricity. What a good idea, I think; it won’t make a dent in the country’s carbon footprint, of course, but it’s a start and will certainly save local councils a few useful thousands of pounds every year. Definitely, you would have thought, worth a try in this age of austerity measures and government cuts.

But about half of the way down, the following sentence intrudes, as if escaped from some other article:

Unison, the trade union, has previously described the cost-saving proposals as “sick and an insult to local residents”.

After that, the article returns to the gushing tone it started in, although it does quote the leader of Redditch Council as saying that she recognised “some people might not like it”.

Well, call me Mr Slow-on-the-Uptake, but whilst I understand that people generally are a bit squeamish about dead bodies in general, I can’t work out what could possibly be objectionable. Who’s being insulted? Is there something sacred about the heat generated by incinerating a corpse? Something that makes it necessary for the heat to be allowed to ascend to the heavens? If it ever gets that far, of course; what happens if the fumes get sucked into the engines of a passing jet airliner, do we have to exorcise it? Treat the passengers and crew for trauma?

Do people’s souls perhaps get trapped in the heat and fumes? Will they be released from their mortal coils, eager to go to their eternal rest, only to discover that they are doomed to push turbines round for the rest of time? Will our swimming pools become haunted? Or contaminated somehow? Who’re you gonna call, Ghostbusters?

Anyhow, if anyone from Unison knows just what it is that is so insulting about the idea of using hot air to heat stuff, please do let me know.

I feel sick

2012-02-24T21:31:00.000+01:00

The budget for this video was €1.55. Guess what I lavishly, and ill-advisedly, spent it on, to my eternal regret.

Those “Super Dickmann’s” really are as gooey and hyper-sweet as they look. And my idea to eat one during the end credits seemed like a good one at first, but by the third take I was suffering. Needlessly, as it turns out, because I ended up using the first take after all.

The worst of it is, they come in boxes of nine. Three down, six to go.

Passwords: You’re doing it wrong

2012-02-23T21:37:00.000+01:00

People get their accounts “hacked” all the time. Most of the time (in my limited experience) it seems that the victims were just incredibly lax with their security or simply naive, unthinkingly giving away their passwords to phishers and other scam artists. I’ve even seen people asking for help on the YouTube forums and giving their username and password so somebody could look at their account settings for them.

Sometimes, though, people’s accounts are hacked by brute force, often by the simplest technique imaginable: guessing the password.

An insight into why this would work was unwittingly given by one of the biggest porn sites on the web, which suffered a serious breach of security exposing members’ e-mail addresses and passwords. The site itself did what they could to contain the damage, but aside from the profound embarrassment suffered by those who probably didn’t want the world to know that they enjoy watching naked people doing naughty things, there was also the issue that many people use the same password for everything, so who knows what else might be compromised?

But the most interesting and, frankly, unsettling revelations comes to us thanks to a certain Ashkan Soltani, who created a word cloud of the most frequently used passwords for that site.

Especially popular are sequences of letters and numbers, most often in the order they appear on a computer keyboard: “qwerty123”, “qwerty123456” and “asdfgh123” feature prominently. The site’s name (with and without a sequence of numbers) was another choice, as was, incredibly, “password”. Several passwords were obscenities relating to sex, also obvious passwords for a would-be hacker to try; one of those, interestingly, was in German and actually has a very specific meaning (unlike the more general terms apparently favoured by English-speakers). Female names also seem quite popular, and I’m guessing that they are names of famous porn stars (unless an inordinate number of connoiseurs of erotica happen to be married to women called Melinda and are crass enough to use that name as a password to a porn site).

What do we learn from this? Well, for one, we learn that entrusting your data to any website is always taking a risk. Most importantly, though, we learn that anyone who thinks they’re safe choosing “qwerty123” as a password on the grounds that everybody knows you shouldn’t and so nobody would suspect that you would is deluding themselves.

Use secure passwords, folks.

Dinosaurs have feelings, too

2012-02-20T22:56:00.000+01:00

It’s the height of Carnival at the moment, which in some parts of Germany (the Catholic parts, anyway) means dressing up in costumes, whatever age you happen to be. The effect is a bit like a sort of less spooky Halloween, with clowns instead of ghouls; in fact, Halloween didn’t really get started in Germany until 1991, when Carnival was cancelled due to the outbreak of the first Gulf War and, by the time October came around, people were wondering what to do with their costumes.

So now Germans dress up twice a year, just to prove they know as much as anyone about the art of letting their hair down, and today there were jesters, scarecrows and random members of the rock band Kiss aplenty.

Sometimes, though, you learn something new. Today, for example, I learned that dinosaurs have feelings, too.

The dinosaur I saw was about four years old, and was clutching a Spongebob Squarepants toy. She was green, with a long tail that dragged along the ground behind her and so was looking a bit grubby. The blood of her last victim (which apparently wasn’t Spongebob Squarepants) was dribbling down her chin, and she was walking reluctantly about three feet behind her parents, who unaccountably weren’t dinosaurs at all.

It seemed that this dinosaur’s feelings had been hurt, and so was scowling in a manner that suggested a recent tantrum. It was the type of four-year-old scowl which, even though her eyes were fixed at a spot about six inches in front of her toes, was clearly directed at the back of her parents’ necks and conveyed the message: “You are dessert.”

I was glad I was on the other side of the street. Dinosaurs do indeed have feelings, but it would be an act of folly to try to pacify one. Especially a green one.

This is an ex president

2012-02-18T19:40:00.001+01:00

In all of yesterday’s excitement with getting my video finished and uploaded, I didn’t have time to mention the German president’s resignation in the face of a series of scandals. If Iran invaded Germany now, there would be nobody to declare a State of Defence, although this being Germany, I’m sure they have some sort of back-up plan. After all, somebody would have to be on hand to declare a State of Defence if Iran invaded while the president was laid up with flu or holidaying on a tropical island as the guest of a businessman, so that base is surely covered.

But uncharacteristically, what the Germans didn’t foresee was what, under these circumstances, would happen to the president’s pension. He’s entitled to a cool €199,000 annually if he serves one or two full terms, or if he is forced from office “for political reasons”, but nowhere does it define what reasons might or might not count as “political”. All the scandals relate to indiscretions he is alleged to have made before he became president. They weren’t political indiscretions, they were personal indiscretions. But they made his position politically untenable.

Had he, for example, resigned because actually being president wasn’t that much fun really and besides he’d met a pole dancer in Las Vegas and decided he preferred her company to that of his wife and assorted government officials and so had to leave because the pole dancer, like everything else that “happens” in Vegas, was staying in Vegas… well, then it would be clear: No pension for you, matey.

But this isn’t like that. Neither is it anything like being forced out of office because the Bundestag had an election and the new government refused to work with the president. He’s not been forced out for political reasons, exactly… but he hasn’t been forced out for completely non-political reasons either. It’s a bit of a grey area, one that wasn’t foreseen by the architects of post-war Germany.

So, cue the next bitter argument. Wulff is a member of the CDU, the senior partner in the governing coalition and a close ally of the Chancellor, Angela Merkel, who moved heaven and earth to get him voted in over the more popular choice of the independent Joachim Gauck. Predictably, then, the CDU thinks that Wulff should get his pension; everyone else in the Bundestag thinks he shouldn’t.

Not only that, of course, but the CDU can’t really put Gauck forward as Wulff’s successor, as that would be to admit that they’d made a mistake in insisting on Wulff in the first place; everyone else in the Bundestag thinks that Gauck would be perfect. It isn’t helping matters much that so far (as I write this), two of the top candidates for the job have declined this particular poisoned chalice.

Say what you like about a monarchy (and I am not exactly an out-and-out royalist), at least the British government doesn’t get embroiled in this sort of dilemma. You get the head of state that fate has given you, and then you’re stuck with them, end of discussion. And when the head of state stops being head of state, whether by virtue of eloping with an American divorcee or by virtue of no longer breathing, the next head of state is already lined up. And if the next head of state is called Charles, the chances are he’s been lined up for sixty or seventy years, so everyone knows well in advance what they’re getting and has had plenty of time to prepare.

Of course, if the head of state turns out to have delusions of grandeur and starts trying to rule the country by himself, you have to cut his head off, which is an obvious downside, but at least then everyone knows where they stand.

Vote me!

2012-02-17T22:59:00.000+01:00

This video was surprisingly not as difficult to make as I thought it would be, although in preparation I had to watch political campaign ads from three different countries — the most bring twelve minutes of my life (I couldn’t bring myself to do any more).

I was fretting about the images to use for the American ad (the good old “attack ad”) — I don’t have a video editor capable of magnificent swirly graphics and stuff — but then I remembered that I had all that footage from California that I could use. Turn down the colour saturation, make it slow motion, and bingo. I had considered accompanying the mountain with an arrow pointing to the “secret base” and cartoon graphics of a missile and a cat popping up, but that would have been a step too far. It’s supposed to look like a genuine, but failed, attempt at an attack ad, not a caricature.

Incidentally, if, like me, you have ever wondered why American politicians always say, “I’m Dwight Hackenbacker III, and I approve this message,” the answer is that it’s a legal requirement designed to discourage negative advertising campaigns. The thinking is that while you can’t stop candidates from rubbishing the opposition (First Amendment and all that), you can force them to personally identify themselves with their own campaign ads. Overdo the negativity, and in theory voters will punish you.

I was originally going to go for a more polished, professional look for the British ad, but then I saw a party political broadcast featuring Dave in his pre-Prime Minister state (and shirtsleeves) with his back to the Thames wittering on about the National Health Service with all the panache and charisma of a bored goat. The corresponding Labour broadcast was a bit classier, showing scenes of Gordon Brown visiting some factory somewhere, while his disembodied voice said something about how the only way to save money was to spend money. But who could forget that famous video when Gordon was pushed in front of a camera and unwisely told to smile? So obviously, that had to go in, too.

The lion’s share of the tedium I experienced researching this was occasioned by watching German campaign ads, and the thing that struck me was that they all had pretty pictures, but revealed absolutely nothing about the parties or their manifestos. I shouldn’t have been surprised, really: the agendas of all the main political parties are so similar, you simply cannot tell them apart, and besides the German economy is actually doing quite well, so there’s not a great deal to campaign on, except who has the best pictures.

So there it is. In America, you bash your opponent, In Britain, you bore your voters into submission. And in Germany, you hypnotise them.

The fast food scandal

2012-02-15T18:12:00.000+01:00

The discussion about the German President’s alleged corruption continues unabated, and now there are accusations of double standards. I’m right now reading an article in the Spiegel about how lower-ranking officials are being persecuted for the tiniest of indiscretions, such as teachers accepting a Christmas present from parents as a mark of gratitude.

The rules are really strict: any gift with a value of more than €10 cannot be accepted at all; even the smallest of gifts has to be declared to the appropriate authority.

A case illustrating the apparent problem is discussed more fully. In one town in Lower Saxony, police officers calling in at the local McDonald’s just before closing time would routinely find an extra burger or two, which would otherwise just have had to be thrown away. Hardly a crime in anyone’s eyes, but the authorities got wind of it and launched a massive investigation. In the end, the officers were sensibly found not guilty of any offence (surprisingly, the one place you’re most likely to find common sense in Germany is in the courtroom), but not before a hugely expensive operation.

However, there is one small piece of information, a chicken nugget of pure gold, that made reading the whole article worth every boring subordinate clause. In Germany, there’s no watchdog or ombudsman for the police, no equivalent of the British Independent Police Complaints Commission. If a complaint is made against police officers, this has to be investigated by the police. To avoid the obvious conflict of interests here, the investigating officers are brought in from another state.

In this case, the officers spending taxpayers’ money spying on other officers ordering their calories from a fast-food restaurant came from the Free and Hanseatic City of Hamburg.

Ah, I see you were ahead of me on that one. Well done.

Not quite got the hang of it

2012-02-14T21:10:00.000+01:00

It’s Valentine’s Day, in case you haven’t noticed; not a festival that has a great or long tradition in Germany.

Not that Germans always live up to the stereotype of the cold, calculating Teuton who woos his beloved by convincing her that according to paragraph 4763.1, sub-paragraph 7, item B(iv) of the Cohabitation and Marriage Tax Allowance Calculation Tables Act of 1967 as amended by the 2004 Appendix 4c they would be better off by €1.64 per month if they lived together. Germans are in fact quite capable of romance, with sales of wine, chocolate and fluffy teddy-bears peaking noticeably in the first two weeks of February.

It’s just that where Valentine’s Day is concerned, they don’t seem to have quite got the hang of it, as proven in today’s local paper, which had a page dedicated to Valentine’s Day small ads. The majority, it is fair to say, had understood what was expected of them, with messages being addressed to “Liebling”, “Schatz” and “Schmusebär” (and if you don’t speak German, you probably don’t need me to tell you that these are all terms of endearment, which makes this parenthesis somewhat superfluous).

Some of the others, though, were slightly off the mark. I suppose it’s quite sweet that some messages were signed not just by the spouse, but the children as well. Not quite right — it’s romantic love, not family ties, we’re celebrating — but both German and English only have one word each for “love” to stand in for what the Greeks had something like forty-six words (or three, I can never quite remember), and we do hope that children love their parents (just not in a romantic way). All the same, the message addressed to an unidentified female and signed by two anonymous males does leave me with the burning question: was it written by her husband and son, or is it evidence of the most improbably romantic ménage à trois I have ever encountered? (Not, I hasten to add, that I have experienced very many. I haven’t experienced any first hand, at any rate.)

But in amongst all the gooey promises of undying love and eternal adoration, some of them employing multiple exclamation marks, I noticed at least three birthday greetings. Decorated with images of Cupid. Two of them were addressed to grandmothers; one to a grandfather.

Snow and social cohesion

2012-02-13T21:45:00.000+01:00

We had some snow today. An inch or two of light, fluffy, powdery snow, which gave me the chance to do a bit of physical exercise and catch up with some of the neighbours. This is probably the most valuable aspect of this tradition, practiced most years, as Germans emerge from their homes clad in Warm Jackets and Proper Boots (the most dedicated may even don Ear Muffs or Woolly Hats), wield their Snow Shovels and have a bit of a natter.

The great thing about this custom is that you always have a conversation opener right at your fingertips. “Well, the forecast was right for a change” is usually a good one; or “I expect it will start snowing again the moment we finish, ha ha” for those who like to share a wry chuckle. I opted for: “It’s interesting to see where the cats have been.” That one never gets old.

The evolution of debate

2012-02-12T17:00:00.001+01:00

Today is the 203rd anniversary of the birth of Charles Darwin, the man widely held responsible for the theory of evolution. Actually, his ideas weren’t all that revolutionary even for the time: the idea of evolution (at the time called “transmutation”) had been knocking around for a bit; basically all he did was to pull together ideas from various sources, add his own observations to the mix, and come up with a mechanism by which new species could evolve naturally. In other words: “Here’s how I think evolution could have happened.”

All the more regrettable, then, that Darwin should now be the epicentre of the mother of all debates, although “debate” is a far too gentle word to describe what is actually happening on the fringes of religious fundamentalism and militant atheism, magnified by the magic of Web 2.0 and a classic case of “giving the rest a bad name” on both sides. There can hardly be a debate more polarized than the religion/science argument, which has now reached “shouting match” status.

All was well, in that mainstream religion either accepted, or elected to keep its nose out of, evolutionary theory, while science considered religion to be not something that science even needs to acknowledge (except for certain branches of science like anthropology, which considers religion as something interesting to study but still doesn’t need even to ask whether any kind deity exists).

The internet ended all that with its ability to give a voice to minorities whose screams then drown out saner arguments. Suddenly, everyone was exposed to religious fundamentalism and, at the same time, rampant materialism. And each side decided they had something to say about the other. While real scientists and real theologians, who are sensible enough to understand that they’re answering different questions, left the room clamping their hands over their ears in a vain attempt to shut out the din, anyone remaining was forced to take up one of two extremist positions. Religious fundamentalists, trying to make their ideas sound respectable, came up with a Frankenstein’s monster of philosophy, the infamous “Intelligent Design” hypothesis, which manages the rare trick of being both bad science and bad theology. This was in part a response to the atheist fundamentalists’ use of Charles Darwin and evolution as a stick to beat religious people with.

This is probably the most horrifically ironic part of the whole phenomenon. Anyone foolish enough to take part in the debate must choose which extremist position they prefer to take up, lest they be shouted down and villified by both sides simulteneously (and I have had that dubious pleasure myself). It seems that you cannot accept the theory of evolution as fact without rejecting every single religious or spiritual belief you have ever held (one of the rare points of agreement between the two extremes). This has the effect that atheism — as practiced by those extremist fundamentalists who make sensible atheists weep for humanity and consider living in a cave — seeks to convert with a missionary zeal that makes the Jehovah’s Witnesses look like Buddhists. Those who don’t wish to convert are thus pushed to the other fundamentalist extreme, thus swelling their numbers more efficiently than any mass baptisms ever did.

Worse, it also means that a large number of these atheists are former religious fundamentalists who converted. The problem is not actually what you believe; the problem is how you believe it. To the outsider who knows nothing of the existence of vast numbers of thoughtful and sensible people, atheism is beginning to look more and more like a religion.

Both fundamentalist positions share the same characteristics. They have their sacred texts (the Bible versus On the Origin of Species). They have their Messiahs (Jesus versus Charles Darwin). They have their Apostles (St Paul and Richard Dawkins). They have their favourite phrases to be trotted out at every opportunity (“All scripture is God-breathed” and “Extraordinary claims require extraordinary proof”). They have their favourite arguments to fall back on when other arguments fail. When that fails, they use straw-man arguments. When that fails, they resort to personal insults. Each side characterizes as “deluded” anyone who does not agree with them, and accuses the other side of all kinds of moral shortcomings. Religious fundamentalists believe anyone who isn’t one of them is going to hell. Atheist fundamentalists take as gospel truth Dawkins’s opinion that even the most benign form of religious belief is a poison that threatens the very fabric of society (ironically pretty much how critics viewed Darwin’s work).

But the person whose reputation has really taken a hit is Darwin. An eminent scientist whose meticulous observations and flash of insight advanced our understanding of the natural world, he is now claimed by both sides as one of theirs, as if each has a hold on one of his ghost’s arms and is refusing to let go. “Atheists” claim, with very little evidence, that he suffered a crisis of belief and died an atheist. “Christians” believe, with no evidence at all, that he had a deathbed reconversion. The truth is that Darwin’s experiences did cause him to re-examine his faith; what conclusion, if any, he came to about that is a secret he and anyone he confided in apparently took with them to the grave.

There can be no greater illustration of the ridiculousness of the situation than that. Darwin certainly never deserved this. He spent a lifetime simply trying to apply a little common sense to evidence and so shed some light on why things are the way they are. It nearly cost him his health, it may or may not have cost him his faith; and all his work is good for, it seems, is to set off two groups of equally ignorant and bigoted people against each other.

Going slightly mad

2012-02-11T17:54:00.000+01:00

It’s been a while since I last made a video, and surprisingly difficult, after a few weeks, to get back into the swing of things. So this is a vlog, explaining a bit about why I haven’t made one recently. And actually, what I say in the video isn’t far off the truth.

In addition, winter is always very difficult to film in because I am so reliant on natural light. This is actually a real handicap, but maybe one day I’ll have something sorted out.

Scraping the bottom of the barrel

2012-02-10T20:51:00.000+01:00

The scandal surrounding the German President has reached the point at which things are beginning to look just slightly ridiculous.

The scandal that started the whole thing, the one about the loan, was somewhat concerning, but not the end of the world until other scandals surfaced onto the tabloids’ front pages: the extravagant parties, the exotic holidays paid for by “friends” in industry, the free flights, and so on. Not exactly corruption on a grand scale, but a potential conflict of interests and against the rules.

Just lately, though, the bottom of the barrel has been well and truly scraped. Every last indescretion, irregularity and mistake is being fished out, scrutinized, polished and presented to the public. It was probably when they got to the car that Wulff on slightly cheaper terms than most people would have done that the journalists should probably have taken the moment to pause and reflect on whether the public interest was really being served here.

Obviously, they didn’t, because we now have what may possibly go down in history as Nokiagate. Which can be summed up as follows: Friend lends President (long, long before he becomes President) mobile phone. President (long, long before he becomes President) pays for phone charges.

This is being reported by the press in a sort of smug schadenfreude, even by the otherwise perfectly respectable weekly publication Der Spiegel. That publication at least admitts that there was no question of any impropriety, but nevertheless maintains that the case “raises questions”. And proceeds to list all the questions it raises — all one of them: Why did he borrow a phone from a businessman? It then cites Wulff’s lawyer as saying it was a “purely private matter”, and that’s where the cutting-edge investigative journalism comes to an end. Instead of exploring the question further and explaining why anyone should even care, the article simply reiterates all the scandals that have come to light so far (as if keen to keep a running total, lest we momentarily forget the score). Finally, there is that damning statement to the effect that Wulff hasn’t returned the Spiegel’s calls, but does have the grace to suggest that the fact that he isn’t in the country right now may have some bearing on that.

You have to wonder what they’re going to come up with next. At this rate, it will be the news that he once accidentally put a plastic wrapper in the paper recycling bin.

You mean I won?

2012-02-09T21:03:00.000+01:00

I’ve often wondered what happens if you click on one of those Twitter spam links. You know, where you get a tweet from a complete stranger that goes, “@rewboss shortlink.com/di85m”. You look at the person’s profile and discover that their profile is full of these tweets, so you report them for spam and retire in the certain knowledge that you have, in a small way, contributed to the sum total of happiness.

Well, emboldened by the fact that I happened to be working with my Chromebook (which Google assures us is completely immune to any kind of malware), I decided to try one of these links, just to see what would happen. The good news is that I am still working with my Chromebook and nothing seems to have blown up just yet.

I suppose I shouldn’t have expected much. If you’re going to click on a spammy link like that, you’d probably fall for almost anything, so the creators of the site I ended up at hadn’t really put a great deal of effort into making it look even slightly plausible, which was faintly disappointing — like watching a movie with half-hearted special effects: you know it’s all CGI, you just want to be able to make believe it isn’t.

Basically, I won an iPad. Or I won the chance to test an iPad — it wasn’t entirely clear which. A JavaScript counter informed me I had five minutes to sign up. No — four minutes fifty. Four minutes forty-five. And so on. If I didn’t sign up fast enough, my iPad would go to somebody else in Berlin, which is only about three hundred miles out.

The best thing was the testimonials. There were three, all in English (the entire page was in English), all raving about how they thought it was a joke but filled out the forms and now have shiny new iPads to play with, and all accompanied by pictures of the proud owners holding their iPads to the camera. There was Miss Vaguely-Mexican-Name from Berlin, Mr Anglo-Saxon-Name from Hamburg and Mr Probably-Scandinavian-Name from Munich.

Ah no, my mistake: “Muenchen”, not “Munich”. Very easily confused; after all, “Muenchen” is the German name for Munich, although normally spelled with an umlaut: “München”. Helpfully, Mr Probably-Scandinavian-Name had supplied a photo taken outside his home, which revealed that his home town was not, as you might imagine knowing that the offer was specifically for Germans, Munich, Upper Bavaria; but Muenchen, California.

Unbelievably, the well-known metropolis of Muenchen, California has been completely left out of the Google Maps database. Such an oversight is not the kind of thing Google is usually prone to, but I’m sure the good citizens of Muenchen will launch an appeal to get their city back on the map.

Anyhow, I decided not to take up the offer. I already have a Chromebook; I really don’t need an iPad as well.

Neighbours, everybody needs good neighbours

2012-02-08T22:49:00.000+01:00

A little while back, I blogged about the Squealing Wheels Problem of the little railway that connects our valley to civilisation (even if it is Hanau, which I am told technically counts as civilisation). The problem was no so much the squealing wheels and a host of other problems, but the unforgivable fact that the railway is run by the Hessians.

This morning, the newspaper reported that the man in charge of running our little line had been summoned to Munich to answer a few awkward questions regarding the reliability of the line. If you read only the headline and the first couple of paragraphs, you’d be forgiven for thinking that criminal proceedings and possibly a public hanging were in the offing. At the very least, the CEO of the company would be tarred, feathered and hauled over hot coals. Finally, retribution. Even Amnesty International, normally so squeamish about torture, would turn a blind eye to this one.

Anyone who actually read the entire article, though, would come away with a slightly different impression. While it is true that, of the dozen or so privately run railways in Bavaria, ours is the worst rated, the verdict of the commission looking into the issue was that the situation was “bad, but by no means catastrophic”. To the chagrin of those who believe the Hessians are rank somewhere between Neanderthal and chimp, half the problems that beset the railway are not the operator’s fault at all, but the fault of the company responsible for the infrastructure — a Bavarian company. And as for the commonest complaint, that since the Hessians took over the trains have always been late, our railway is the most punctual of the Bavarian private railways, with 98% of trains running on time, about the same rate as it was when the Bavarians were in charge.

It’s one of those strange facts in life that it is our immediate neighbours we despise the most. This is just further proof of that.

Feline update

2012-02-07T21:36:00.000+01:00

As I privately predicted, I failed relatively early on in my bid to blog every day in February, but I’d had a slightly fraught day and didn’t get home until 9.30pm. And I had a bottle of Scotch to open (a classy one, too, with a cork stopper instead of a metal screw top).

Allow me, therefore, to update everyone on Bonnie and Clyde, our fine furry feline friends. As some of you who have been with me for some time know, Bonnie and Clyde are brother and sister and used to be pretty much inseparable.

That changed last autumn, though, when they had a bit of a falling out. The Middle East was playing out right there in our living room, and eventually we had to separate them. This actually didn’t prove all that difficult: Bonnie, who values her freedom, could go upstairs in my office with 24/7 access to the stairs and the cellar and from there to the cats’ secret exit to the outside world; Clyde, who is philosophical enough to stand being incarcerated for several hours at a time, could go downstairs and resign himself to sleeping indoors at night. It worked surprisingly well, although at first some sleight-of-door was required, and my wife and I had to communicate via Skype as we had to make sure only one cat at a time went out into the garden. (We relaxed that rule a bit later.)

It seems that this sort of thing is a common problem with cats of their age, and what you need in these situations is a nervous system of steel and a whole lot of patience. It takes, in our experience, months, but eventually you may, if you’re lucky, discover that things start to improve.

Now we’ve reached the point where Bonnie seems to have got Clyde where she wants him, which is cowering at the other end of the room. Basically, Clyde is a well-meaning gentle sort of cat, but much bigger than Bonnie and would get carried away playing with her, sometimes hurting her unintentionally. Bonnie had to first overcome her fear of him, then assert her authority over him, which is what she appears almost to have accomplished. She needs to know he won’t pin her to the ground. He needs to know he mustn’t run after her all the time.

Bonnie has been working to her own timetable. She’s now started coming in downstairs, and this afternoon even dozed off in the living room, just to prove how relaxed she’s become.

We still can’t have the cats in the same room. But things are moving in the right direction.

Try, try again

2012-02-05T18:40:00.000+01:00

It’s an exhausting business, writing stuff. Any writer will tell you this, and I don’t even count myself as a writer (although I’m on Day Five of my Let’s-See-If-I-Can-Blog-Daily-For-A-Whole-Month experiment): it’s not just a simple process of typing a few well-chosen words in the correct order. It’s about realising that most of the stuff you do get around to writing probably won’t be seen by anybody who hasn’t taken up residence in your wastepaper basket.

Earlier today, one the ultra-sensationalist free papers that get thrust at us whether we want them or not carried a story about some residents who were “up in arms” and “about to man the barricades” having received the news that a funeral parlour was setting up business in their street. Clearly, this was a failed tabloid journalist’s attempt to make a scandal out of molehill, but I found there was no way of writing about it in a humorous fashion without making it seem as if I was making fun of people who found dead bodies a bit creepy. For me, humour can be as black and as morbid as you like, but not cruel.

I could have written about the cold weather, and especially about how Britain has gone into panic mode again, but I’ve flogged that horse to the point where even a German would wave me to silence and say, “Okay, we’ve got the joke now, try something else.” There’s nothing much to be mined comedy-wise from the fact that we’ve been doing our taxes this weekend; and the fact that Clyde twice walked into the house covered in so much dust that great clouds of it flew up when I tried to pet him is one of those “you had to be there” moments and not enough for an entire blog post.

So instead, I am writing about the difficulty of writing (and the same goes for videomaking) and emphasising the golden rule which is: Most of what you write (or film) will be garbage, but that’s no reason not to do it. Write, write, write and write (or film, film, film and film) and eventually, you’ll strike gold. Maybe not much, but enough.

Not that everyone is a born writer, of course. But I get a bit testy when I see somebody posting to the YouTube Creator’s Corner forum disappointed that success doesn’t come instantly and gloomily concluding that they’re no good at videomaking. A lot of them post this because, in their Eeyore-like view of the world, they have at some point decided that the only thing they can do is post illegal music videos and have just been dinged for copyright infringement. “I’m no good at videos,” they say; but usually, if they have tried, they gave up too quickly.

My advice: Make original videos anyway. Post them. Then watch them over and over again, and identify as many mistakes as you can. Then make more videos, avoiding the mistakes you identified. Then watch those… and so on. Keep doing that, and eventually (if you do it right) you’ll have a video that’s actually halfway good.

And then anything’s possible.

Not quite Siberia

2012-02-04T20:37:00.002+01:00

It’s cold. One newspaper reporting on the cold weather explained that this was due to cold air coming in from Siberia, before helpfully adding: “It is, however, not actually as cold here as it is in Siberia.” Or, indeed, Romania, where it’s almost at the stage that if you sneeze, it hits the ground with a thud.

The weather here can be summed up as “cold, but not that cold”. It is, of course, colder than in Britain where, as is the custom every year, the emergency services are on high alert and the tabloids full of horror stories involving “patches of ice” and “up to two inches of snow”, but I have written enough on that particular subject in one form or another that I really don’t need to bang on about it now.

It’s cold enough that even Bonnie is reluctant to go outside. This is a problem, because she has far too much energy for a cat her size (Einstein, had he known her, would have been in serious doubt as to whether E=mc² could come close to describing the number of ergs represented by her mass), and so she’s constantly begging me to play with her. I wouldn’t mind, but “Sorry I couldn’t meet the deadline, I had to teach my cat to juggle toy mice” doesn’t really cut it.

But at least I have a warm jacket. My wife bought it for me some time ago, and at last I have had a chance to try it out. It’s a nice jacket, and very warm, but includes a whole range of mysterious features. Like a digital camera that has too many software menus for you to memorize, this jacket, once you have removed all the tags (itself a daunting task, and there’s always one you don’t notice and so it dangles down your back to the amusement of passers-by), boasts a range of zips, velcro strips, toggles and studs to put the flight deck of a 747 to shame. Putting it on is like donning a spacesuit, except that in a spacesuit, there’s less chance of getting tangled up in what turns out to be a removable lining.

Don’t get me wrong, I like it. It’s just that in the 21st century, you shouldn’t be spending more time putting on and taking off an item of clothing than you do actually wearing it.

But still, I do appreciate it, because the weather is cold. Not quite Siberia, but cold.

A nation of animal-lovers

2012-02-03T19:16:00.000+01:00

Traditionally, it’s us Brits who get the reputation for going all sentimental about animals. It is sometimes said of British drivers that they would rather swerve into a lamp-post than risk hitting a squirrel. The National Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Children, it is regularly pointed out, was originally formed as an offshoot of the Royal Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals. And note that the former never received the honour of being allowed to call itself a “royal” society.

But the British love of animals is as nothing compared to the German obsession with all creatures great and small. Only the Germans could really make a media sensation out of a polar bear, for example. When Knut died, I almost expected there to be calls for a state funeral, so great was the outpouring of grief.

But Knut was soon forgotten, because along came Heidi, the cross-eyed opossum. I don’t know how many opossums there are in German zoos at the moment (the results of the latest opossum census are not currently available to me, chiefly because I can’t be bothered to look for them), but I’m guessing that it’s a few. None of them ever get any attention (they’re the sort of animals you politely look at on your way to the lion enclosure), except for this one Heidi, on the grounds that she looks — or rather, looked — as if she was trying to look up her own nostrils.

She was put down last September, suffering from the effects of old age, and at the time Leipzig Zoo promised that she would be stuffed and mounted so that — get this — members of the public could “express their grief”. Maybe that’s the difference between a dictatorship and a democracy: a dictatorship is where a deceased leader lies in state so that people can shuffle past and pay their last respects; in a democracy, it’s the same, but with marsupials.

But now comes heart-breaking news: the announcement that the zoo has now given up trying to stuff the ex-opossum. It wasn’t just the “technical scale” of the project, but that the zoo wanted to “preserve positive memories” of the creature.

The mind boggles. Was the taxidermist really that bad?

Border control

2012-02-02T18:20:00.000+01:00

There’s an article in today’s paper about how badly run the little railway is that goes through our valley. The rot set in, apparently, when a company from Hesse took over. Never mind that half the problems catalogued existed before the takeover. Never mind either that half the remaining problems aren’t the operator’s fault at all. The important thing is that the operator is from Hesse, and so is responsible for everything that goes wrong, including the stuff it’s not responsible for, in stark contrast to the pre-takeover days when any problems that did occur were part of the rich tapestry of life. The Squealing Wheels Problem used to be just one of those things, and since there are no trains at night there was no point in getting worked up about it. Now that the Hessians are in charge, the Squealing Wheels Problem is an unbearable assault on everyone’s ears and mental health.

You see, we’re in Bavaria, but only just. We are right at the most northwesterly corner of the most northwesterly part of Bavaria, and everything to the north and west is Hesse. The attitude of the locals to all things Hesse is best summed up in this joke:

The local train (the same one that now has the Squealing Wheels Problem) derails. A local journalist interviews the driver. “There was a Hessian on the track,” says the driver. “Then why,” asks the journalist, “didn’t you just run him over?” The driver looks at him and says, “Well, he jumped off the tracks, so I derailed the train and I still missed.”

Talk to anyone from around here, and you quickly get the impression that the Hessians are bad at everything: they’re badly educated, badly behaved, bad at driving (especially the ones from Offenbach), bad dressers, bad lovers and bad at building houses. Their cities are dirtier and noisier, their police ruder and more violent, their speed traps more plentiful and less forgiving.

The local dialect, incidentally, is continually confused with that of Hesse. It’s an easy mistake to make, of course: the dialect is most definitely Franconian, despite the fact that it sounds completely different to the Franconian spoken in other parts of Franconia. Under no circumstances whatsoever can it ever be described as “Hessian”, because it is a completely different dialect with absolutely no features in common. The fact that it sounds exactly the same is just one of those great, unsolved mysteries of life (there’s a rumour that the Higgs Boson may yield an explanation).

One linguist tried to make a point some years ago by placing a large stone monument at the place where the Hessian pronunciation of the German word for “apple” gave way to the Franconian pronunciation. This stone is several miles east of here, roughly halfway between Aschaffenburg and Würzburg. This was reported in all the local media as the border between two subtly different variants of the Franconian dialect.

I am not a morning person

2012-02-01T21:05:00.001+01:00

Comedy writer and tutor Sally Holloway has some advice for people who want to write comedy. According to her, the trick is to get up an hour earlier than normal and, before you do anything else, use “your morning energy, your first flush, your get out of bed and face the world vigour”.

Dear Ms Holloway: What is this “get out of bed and face the world vigour” of which you speak? This is a concept as alien to me as fact-checking is to a tabloid journalist. It’s all I can do, first thing in the morning, to prise my eyelids apart, much less string a coherent sentence together, as my wife will unhappily confirm. My first flush is the one that sends the former contents of my bladder into the sewers; after that, the only flush I can expect to experience before lunchtime is the hot one that comes with the realization that I have blearily trashed the mail and mailed the trash.

My wife has long since given up talking to me before I have at least had one coffee, and even then she takes care never to tell me anything important. Not for fear of destroying my creativity, you understand. At that time of day, I don’t have any creativity, which is why my wife knows better than to engage me in conversation.

Perhaps, Ms Holloway, you’re a morning person; and all I can say is, I envy you. It must be bliss to wake up to glorious sunshine, sweet birdsong and Bill Withers singing Lovely Day, to throw off the fluffy duvet like people do in adverts for low-fat yoghurt, throw open the windows and greet the day with the kind of carefree smile that the rest of us can only hope to achieve by smoking something illegal. We in the rest of the human race aren’t like that.

The most creative morning I had was the one after my cat Clyde had woken me up in the middle of the night and tried to persuade me to get up, which wasn’t like him at all. I successfully ignored him until he gave up, but when six o’clock came round, I found out why he’d been so keen to get me out of bed when I put my hand into a cold puddle of cat sick. There was comedy gold right there, Ms Holloway, but I was too busy using up my creative energy stripping the bed to actually write about it. I believe I may have tweeted the event, but like most things that happen a.m., it’s all a bit of a blur.

Also, I don’t know what kind of e-mails you write, but mine don’t use up any creative energy. They usually say things like, “Please find invoice attached.” Unless I write them less than hour after getting up, in which case they are far more likely to read, “Plesdr find innvoice attacked.”

By all means, give the masses the benefit of your get-out-of-bed-and-face-the-world-vigour. I think the masses would appreciate it if I didn’t give them mine.

It’s not that cryptic, honestly.

2012-01-24T13:54:00.000+01:00

Remember Vanessa Paradis? You know, the little girl who went on Top of the Pops to sing about Joe le Taxi in a very ill-advised outfit that left very little to the imagination? The one who grew up to become Johnny Depp’s long-term girlfriend?

It seems that the press have now got hold of a rumour that Paradis and Depp are about to split, or have split, and have been baffled by her response. “In the winter I separate,” she is quoted as saying, “in the summer I marry.” Perhaps it’s because Eric Cantona has recently been in the news again that the papers (at least the ones I’ve read) are calling this “cryptic”: yet another French celebrity being philosophically obtuse.

Perhaps we should take the entire quote, not just that one sentence. Here it is:

You know, when I eat three peas, I’m pregnant. When I’m visiting a city, I’m buying a house. In the winter I separate, in the summer I marry. It’s been 15 years since I’ve been getting married every year.

We have to remember that English is not her native language, so if the grammar is sometimes a little unusual, we have to forgive her that. But the quote is actually very easy to understand: Vanessa Paradis is complaining about the way the press turn non-stories into front-page news.

And lo and behold: she gets a bit sarky, and suddenly she’s not only splitting from Depp, she’s making mysterious and cryptic comments.

Oh, what a tangled web we weave

2012-01-14T14:59:00.000+01:00

It’s quite likely that not many people outside of Germany are aware that there is such a thing as a German President, a largely ceremonial role a bit like a sort of temporary king. Currently, this is Christian Wulff, a man elected by members of the government to obediently sign things into law and generally be the head of state (as opposed to the much better-known Angela Merkel, the Chancellor, and head of government). And right now, Christian Wulff is in even more trouble than the euro, an achievement that will, whatever the outcome, assure him a sort of dubious immortality.

Before you get too excited, though, it’s nothing as exciting as Clinton’s cigar-based fun-and-games, or Berlusconi’s bunga-bunga parties. This is the German President we’re talking about. This scandal involves a loan.

Basically, the President is supposed to be a person of impeccable moral principles: squeaky-clean and boring enough to be the perfect choice to smilingly support charities and meet visiting royalty. And so it was a bit of a shock when the press reported that they had evidence to show that, during his time as Minister President of Lower Saxony, he had lied to the Lower Saxon parliament. He’d been asked if he had had any business connections to a certain Egon Geerkens. He’d said no. Now it transpires, according to Germany’s biggest tabloid Bild, that he had, in fact, borrowed about half a million euros from Egon Geerkens at a vastly reduced interest rate. Guess that had just slipped his mind.

He might have gotten away with it, though, if it hadn’t been for those pesky kids at the Frankfurter Allgemeine, who reported at the beginning of the year that Wulff had phoned the editor-in-chief of Bild, Kai Diekmann, and had threatened the paper with legal action if they printed the story.

Now, there’s a strategy that’s doomed to failure right from the start. For a politician to threaten to sue a paper for publishing unflattering stories is pretty much the stupidest move since Napoleon said, “You know what? I reckon if we took half a million troops and marched them through eastern Europe for three months, we could knock seven kinds of hell out of the Russians.” The effect is pretty much the same: utter defeat at the hands of a vastly superior enemy and a humiliating march back through the frozen wastes as your political life ebbs away.

And it didn’t help that Wulff later “explained” that what he had asked for was not a retraction, but a delay in publication on the grounds that was on his way to meet an emir. It turns out, however, that Wulff had spoken on Diekmann’s answering machine. The Bild asked Wulff if they could publish the transcript. Wulff said no. The Bild sent Wulff a copy of the transcript. Wulff said, basically, he didn’t really care what the Bild did with that damn transcript.

And at this point, in stepped a small, Berlin-based paper called the taz and decided that they wanted to join in the fun. There’s no love lost between the Bild and the taz, and in fact although their relationship is often described as “love-hate”, it would be more accurate to describe it as “come one step closer and I might just gouge your eyes out”. Why, the taz wants to know, did Bild journalists decide to send other papers extracts from the transcript before Wulff had given his consent?

Diekmann’s answer was prompt and to the point: “Good question, but could you delay publication for now? I’m off to Ludwigshafen to visit Helmut Kohl.”

Turns out, he was joking. He actually does intend to answer the taz’s questions by the deadline they set, which is Monday afternoon. Then again, Wulff did promise that he would himself publish documents and so on which would explain all, and so far that hasn’t happened either.

Bring out the old, ring in the new

2012-01-09T19:13:00.000+01:00

Yesterday, my wife made me take the paper out for recycling. Well, what she actually did was to drag the bin out to the road, come back in and remind me that the next day — today — was collection day for paper. This meant I had to drag the paper out of the house and down the drive to the street in order to put the paper in the bin she’d just dragged… you get the picture.

I can’t remember if I’ve ever mentioned this on this blog before, but Germany, ever the eco-conscious nation, has a complicated system of colour-coded bins and bags for different types of waste, so that it can all be correctly sorted and categorized and recycled. It’s broadly a national thing but with regional variations. A friend of mine, recently moved to rural Rhineland-Palatinate, tells me she has a monthly glass collection. We have to take our glass to the bottle bank.

As a result, of course, knowing when each collection is due isn’t easy; fortunately, municipal councils print calendars telling you exactly which collection to expect when. And when my wife told me the paper collection was due today, that’s because the calendar had told her so, and what German would doubt anything printed by a local council official?

This evening, the paper still hadn’t been collected. I checked the calendar. I looked for the paper collection dates. Once a month, always on a Monday. The January collection was scheduled for Monday, 10th.

Which sounds about right… but today’s not the 10th, today’s the 9th. Strange, I thought: must be a misprint. Unless…

I looked again.

I then threw away last year’s schedule, and replaced it with this year’s schedule, which had somehow managed to bury itself under some paperwork.

My one consolation is that most of our neighbours appear to have made the same mistake.

My wife will be livid when she sees this

2012-01-05T14:16:00.000+01:00

The aftermath of Storm Andrea. It wasn’t a particularly violent storm and it didn’t affect our sheltered little valley as much as it has affected other parts of the country, but it did prove to be the final straw for one part of the garden my wife had spent countless hours and several euros on.

It’s been a rough few days.

Lots of little storms, testing its strength to the limit.

Finally, it snapped.

Films you really don’t want to watch

2012-01-03T22:03:00.000+01:00

Here is a list of some films that really, you would never want to watch:

Star Warts
The Curious Case of Benjamin’s Butt
The Booze Brothers
The King’s Peach
The Gnus of Navarone
Star Trek: Generators
Rash of the Titans
Goon With the Wind
Mudsucker
Pretty much anything that has either James Cameron or Roland Emmerich in the credits.

My solution to the New Year’s Resolution problem

2012-01-01T19:59:00.000+01:00

It’s a strange tradition, when you think about it: when the New Year begins, we make little promises to ourselves about how we are going to change ourselves for the better — give up smoking, take up regular exercise, learn not to despise people who decide to learn Esperanto — but of course most such attempts are doomed to failure. Those that do succeed are rare enough that many actually make news headlines.

So YouTube announced a little contest to help out a little. The idea is that you watch an inspirational video about how to stick to your resolutions, then make and upload a video telling the world what your resolutions are so you can’t go back on your word.

Well, there’s only one answer to that.

Predicting the future is a mug’s game

2011-12-28T19:20:00.000+01:00

Despite that, however, it is quite fun. Behold my predictions for 2012.

Let the festivites begin!

2011-12-22T20:42:00.000+01:00

Contrary to popular belief (i.e., my wife’s belief), I actually quite like Christmas. What I don’t like is all the commercial razzmatazz associated with it, and the fact that it drags on from somewhere in the middle of September until coming to an abrupt end as soon as Christmas dinner has been completely digested.

But anyway, obviously I’m going to make a video about Christmas in Germany, and so here it is. And most of what I say in the video is not far from the truth. The dreadful singing in church is the thing that really makes me wish I hadn’t been born: German churchgoers have a special knack for taking all the joy out of, well, everything. It’s not so much that the organists are all incompetent (although many of them are), but that there’s a strange, unshakable belief that singing in Church has to be dignified, or something. Happy songs are for TV shows. Hymns sung in church, even if the words might naturally suggest something different, must sound like funeral dirges.

The storm that wasn’t

2011-12-18T13:11:00.000+01:00

A couple of days ago, Germany was about to be battered by gale-force winds as a windstorm swept across central Europe, leaving destruction and mayhem in its wake. This I had to document, so I set up my camera for some awesome timelapse photography.

In the event, of course, the storm had petered out by the time it got here, and while it was wet and blustery, it wasn’t anything like on the scale we’d been promised.

The first sign of madness

2011-12-15T17:10:00.000+01:00

This is a video I just did more-or-less on the spur of the moment, and it involves me talking to myself. Which you can do in a video, of course.

It’s a simple enough video to make, and I even decided not to bother with a costume change. Already, one viewer congratulated me on a great parody of an interview given by a the politician Karl-Theodor Freiherr zu Guttenberg, but I have to admit that this was furthest from my mind when I wrote the script. I suppose you could analyse the hell out of this one, but really… it’s just a bit of fun.

Why I want to learn Humpback Whale

2011-12-10T13:43:00.000+01:00

Sometimes, it’s difficult to know what to make a video about, and this is one of those times. Thankfully, I have my faithful viewers and subscribers on hand to help me think of stuff to talk about.

It’s that time of year again

2011-12-03T22:30:00.000+01:00

With a certain inevitability, the calendar creeps towards that special holiday where we all have to be fun-loving and jolly and yet peaceful and with goodwill to all men in our hearts (“goodwill to all people” would be more in keeping with our more egalitarian times, but doesn’t really sound right).

All of this is fine with me as far as it goes, but if you really want to put me off a festival, you only have to impose on me the sort of enforced jollity over a period of several weeks that makes me feel I’m somehow letting the side down if I have a bad morning. Suddenly, I go all cynical to the point where it’s fun to pointedly refuse to join in the fun.

Around here, people go slightly insane from the first Sunday in Advent, although it all begins as early as September when the first chocolate Santas appear in the stores. Suddenly, people are draping their houses in LEDs, inflatable snowmen and dummy Santas hilariously hanging onto rope ladders (if you want to burgle a house in Germany between Halloween and New Year’s, just get a Santa costume and practice moving like a lethargic sloth). Oh, and relentless Christmas music, most of it almost as old as me, is played at you everywhere (and while we’re on the subject, Last Christmas by Wham! is not a jolly Christmas tune, it’s a song about the break-up of a dysfunctional relationship).

Of course, it’s not Christmas itself I object to, but all the stuff leading up to it and the stuff you’re expected to do. My ideal Christmas would start on Christmas Eve, the house would be simply and tastefully decorated, there would be a nice meal, an exchange of small but meaningful gifts, and the next twelve days would be full of slightly more alcohol than usual, visits to and from friends and relatives I actually like and punctuated by a big party on New Year’s Eve.

Call me a killjoy if you will, but an even bigger killjoy is the Catholic Church in Germany. Every year in the run-up to Christmas (the new word for Advent), the Catholic Church has a campaign to ban Santa Claus. You see, Santa is an American tradition which has usurped the much more venerable tradition of St Nicholas, whose day is 6th December. The original German tradition is that St Nicholas brings small gifts for children on that day, while the big Christmas gifts are brought by the Christ Child on Christmas Eve, rather in the manner (we are led to believe) that someone having a birthday is expected to buy everyone a round of drinks.

Glossing over the fact that the Christ Child dispensing gifts in Germany is almost universally associated with a pubescent girl in a nightie and sporting angel wings, the Church sort of has a point here: Santa did get here from America. Having got to America from the Netherlands, and getting a bit confused with Father Christmas from Britain.

But how mean-spirited do you have to be to actually launch a campaign banning Santa from Germany? Demanding that shops remove their chocolate Santas and replace them with chocolate St Nicks (the only difference being that St Nick, being a bishop, wears a mitre) seems like a pointless gesture. Putting up posters with the face of Santa with a red diagonal stripe through it (“Say No to Santa”) is just spiteful.

So what if five-year-olds imagine their gifts are delivered not by a winged girl pretending to be a baby boy, but by a jolly fat man in red? Seriously.

Beer mugs: untold possibilities

2011-11-30T20:49:00.000+01:00

Now, here’s a video that caused me more trouble than I’d expected. The actual filming and editing went smoothly: it’s not difficult, just me talking in front of a green screen with some small amount of technical wizardry. It’s just that when I uploaded it… closed captions weren’t showing up. Well, that’s sort of what happened; it’s more accurate to say that English captions were sometimes showing up in the track list in the video settings (at one point three copies), but not on the video at all, only to vanish again and then reappear. Eventually, the system got its act together and I was able to let the video go public.

But anyhow: the news report that inspired this video is typical of the sort of little article that finds its way into our local paper, and this being the sort of place it is, the police take this very seriously. It’s probably the most interesting case they’ve had to deal with in months.

Taking humour seriously

2011-11-27T16:44:00.001+01:00

A while back, I made a video about German humour as it appears to non-Germans, especially Brits (since I am particularly qualified in that area). If you haven’t seen it yet, it’s this one.

Fascinatingly (if such a word exists), a great number of comments came from Germans pretty much proving my point by failing to notice the humour and talking it all too seriously. And then getting annoyed, thinking I’d just told them their humour sucked.

This is what prompted my latest video, a 16-minute run-down of just what it was I was trying to say. Which is quite the longest YouTube video I have ever made, so I hope everyone’s satisfied. I’m not upset, by the way; but I am very amused.

I have a new toy!

2011-11-25T19:30:00.000+01:00

It’s a Chromebook. Google nicely gave it to me ahead of its official launch in Germany in order to put it through its paces, and tell as many people as possible about it. And this is what I’m using right now to write this post.

For those who don’t know what a Chromebook is, it’s basically a netbook with an operating system consisting of a file manager and a browser. And that’s it. The idea is that most computers these days are pretty much exclusively used to connect to the internet, so all you really need is, well, a browser. And since pretty much everything these days is done on the web — e-mail, social networking, and even (thanks to Google Docs) word processing and spreadsheets — that’s all you need, most of the time.

I’m still finding my way around it, but it’s an interesting little tool. Some are skeptical about whether it’s really any better than a tablet PC or a smartphone, but I do appreciate having a proper keyboard (as “proper” as is possible on a netbook).

Since it hasn’t any need for a hard drive, or any drive at all, and the OS really is just a glorified browser, there’s precious little to boot up, a process that therefore takes a little under ten seconds. It’s also quite light — about the same as a medium-weight hardbound book.

I’ve been given the Samsung version (Acer also does a Chromebook). The version sold in the US comes with a Verizon chip for those times when you can’t get a wifi signal, but that’s illegal in Germany (it ties you down to a specific provider), so instead it has a slot for a SIM card, and it’s really difficult to get the SIM card in and out. There is a SIM card provided free with a German Chromebook, with free three months’ flatrate internet access, but the provider Google chose to team up with happens to have the worst HSUPA coverage in Germany, so in my village I can only connect via GPRS which is horribly, horribly slow. So thank you, German lawmakers: I can switch to a different provider (which I may do when my three months free trial is up).

But it is a nice gift from Google all the same. Thanks, fellas.

I was not alive in 1945

2011-08-15T21:31:00.001+02:00

I just thought I’d make that perfectly clear, just in case there was any lingering doubt. In other news, my trip to San Francisco grows ever nearer.

Germans are not calling for a ban on the workplace kiss.

2011-08-11T14:29:00.000+02:00

“German call to ban workplace kiss” popped up on the BBC News RSS feed, which sounded scary enough for me to make me want to take a look. Not that I am in any way particularly fond of kissing at work — unless, of course, the other party happens to be my wife — but it’s not the sort of thing you want to see regulated by law. All sorts of scenarios present themselves, up to and including people being convicted of sexual harrassment for all sorts of minor infractions. Or worse, perhaps sexual assault is more common in Germany than I thought, with female workers constantly having to fight off the unwanted advances of their male colleagues.

In fact, as the article itself makes clear, it’s nothing of the sort. What it actually is is a society, with no legal status at all, politely suggesting that because the social kiss, common in countries like France, is very uncommon in Germany, it tends to make people a bit uncomfortable and perhaps it would be wiser to greet each other with a more traditional handshake, unless you happen to know that the other person is fine with a kiss on the cheek.

The “Knigge Society”, as the BBC calls it, is actually not a fan of bans, rules and regulations at all; quite the reverse, in fact: they’re trying to dispel the myth that Knigge was all about rules of etiquette. And what is Knigge? The BBC says “Knigge” translates as “proper behaviour”, thus neatly demonstrating that even the BBC occasionally gets confused between a “translation” and a “synonym”.

In fact, the correct translation of “Knigge” is... “Knigge”. It’s a name: specifically, that of Baron Adolph Franz Friedrich Ludwig Knigge, who lived in the 18th century and wrote a book called Über den Umgang mit Menschen, which can loosely be translated as “on dealing with people”, but is usually simply referred to as “Knigge”. The Knigge Society is fighting tooth and nail against the false perception that this was a list of rules of etiquette: instead, it was a dissertation on the importance of tact, and Knigge himself could probably be described as a sort of prototype sociologist. The problem is that various publishers have, for more than 100 years, been churning out rules of etiquette and using the name Knigge on the front cover.

“Let us put an end to the proliferation of inflexible rules of etiquette!” declares the society’s website. And then, referring to some of the more modern rules invented by random publishers in Knigge’s name, adds: “Anyone who wants to can say ‘bon appetit’ or ‘bless you’ and reverse these ridiculous exaggerations.” The society is not helped by a BBC article stating that the society has previously “ruled on the correct way to end a relationship via text message, and how to deal with a runny nose in public”. The society has “ruled” on no such subjects. The society has given advice to people who don’t want to cause unnecessary offence.

There’s a certain note of desperation in the words of the society’s chairman as quoted by the BBC: “We can’t forbid it,” says Hans Michael-Klein, but in vain because the author of the article still sees fit to state that society is calling for “kissing to be banned” in the very first sentence.

So, a group of people with no legal status or authority tackles a thorny issue that it determines is the result of a culture clash and suggests how people might avoid accidentally giving offence by sticking to the German norm unless both parties happen to be comfortable with the new fashion. That hardly amounts to a call for a ban.

Open letter to unknown cat owners

2011-08-07T21:25:00.002+02:00

Dear unknown cat owners in Ortenberg,

I don’t know who you are, but my wife and I were in your lovely town today — although, if what we’ve heard has any truth in it, you probably don’t appreciate it as much as you probably should.

But I digress. The point is, walking through the old town, we met your two cats sitting on some steps with a blanket and a food dish. They were very friendly and clearly wanted to be petted, but when one of them — the little black one — stood up, we noticed that it had several nasty, suppurating open wounds on its back, where it can’t scratch. My wife reckons it must be a food allergy or, more likely, mites. I really don’t care, to be honest: the point is, it had untreated wounds and badly needed to see a vet. It did seem to be coping fairly well, under the circumstances, but it’s not nice to see and must be very unpleasant for the cat.

We were interrupted by the arrival of a little old lady: as it turned out, one of your neighbours. I’d describe her to you, but it’s unlikely you know her well enough. She told us to be careful with those cats, and explained why.

You see, the house on the steps of which these cats had been resting was her house, but they weren’t her cats: they’re yours. So how do they come to be in front of her door with a blanket and a food dish? You may well ask, but then, you know the answer to that, don’t you? It’s because you’re hardly ever home. Very occasionally, your little old lady neighbour sees your car, but normally she doesn’t see it, or you, from one day to the next.

She doesn’t want to take your cats in, for fear of catching something, and in any case she’s a little old lady and can’t really look after cats, especially when one of them clearly urgently needs the expensive attention of a vet. Although, to be honest, she’d be well within her moral rights to take the poor creature to the vet and get them to send the bill to you. But she’s a little old lady who lives on her own and wheezes when she walks: it’s really not her business.

Also, I’d say she has little experience of cats. She classes them as strays, which is why she won’t even touch them; but of course they’re not, because they’re far too friendly and affectionate. They were so clearly brought up in human company and belong in someone’s house and garden, not begging for food on an old lady’s doorstep.

And this little old lady, who doesn’t know the first thing about cats and who wheezes when she walks, feeds them. She feeds them not because it’s her job to do so, but because she has a spark of humanity in her and can’t bear to see them being left to their own devices, especially the little black one with the suppurating wounds. It’s a responsibility she can well do without, and there’s a reasonable chance the cats will outlive her, and then what?

It’s clear you don’t care one jot about them, because otherwise the little black one would have been to the vet’s and got the right treatment. If you’re almost never in Ortenberg, I can only assume it’s your second home, so it’s not as if you’re short of money. To be honest, if we didn’t already have cats, we’d have promised the little old lady who wheezes when she walks to come back next weekend and take the cats home with us. She’d thank us, and I doubt you’d even notice.

What happened, then? Did you acquire a couple of cute little kittens and not expect them to grow up? Did you honestly think that cats raised in human homes with humans would be able to look after themselves when they grew up? Or did you just get bored of them? What are they supposed to do in the winter? Do you know how bitter the winters up there in the Wetterau region are?

Not that you care (apparently), but I personally believe nobody should be allowed to have a pet cat (or dog, or anything) unless they know how to take care of it. There should probably be a test, like a driving test. Only if you pass it can you get your licence. Most importantly, if you do get a cute little kitten, you must be made aware that this is going to be a commitment for fifteen or twenty years. That’s comparable to the amount of time you can expect to have a child in the home if you add a baby to your family; only, unlike with children, you can’t get tax breaks and welfare benefit for cats. If you’re not absolutely certain you can sustain that level of commitment, I don’t think you deserve to have a pet at all.

I almost wish now I had instructed your neighbour to get somebody to drive the cats to the nearest animal shelter, where the black one will be treated by a vet and both given to a home that actually wants cats. But she’s a little old lady who wheezes when she walks, and I didn’t want to upset her, and I’m still too British to poke my nose into other people’s business.

Damn my Britishness.

Yours,

rewboss

rewboss in America

2011-07-31T20:30:00.000+02:00

I don’t mind telling you I’m very excited about this. I wasn’t sure I could justify extending my stay after the conference, but flying halfway around the world to within spitting distance of San Francisco and spending all the time in a hotel conference room would simply have been nuts, so it had to be done.

Actually, as well as doing some sightseeing, I will be able to visit the famous Googleplex, although for obvious reasons I’m not allowed to film inside the building. And meeting some YouTube friends, particularly fellow Top Contributors and some actual flesh-and-blood Google employees. With a little luck, I’ll also have time to meet in the flesh some online friends of mine.

There’s a lot of stuff to organize and paperwork to do, but unless something truly unfortunate happens, such as the complete collapse of the euro, I should be enjoying the California sun in just a few more weeks.

Well, as much sun as filters through the famous San Francisco fog, that is.

Fun with Google Street View

2011-07-24T07:59:00.001+02:00

Google Street View can sometimes be more entertaining than you think, which I have recently discovered. It seems that pretty much all of England, if not the entire UK, has now been covered by the service, which means you can virtually drive your computer just about anywhere. For example, you might start at the Cornish village of Tintagel and drive out north-east on the B3263, through Bossiney...

...where, apparently, a leaf got stuck to the camera (and, for the record, stays stuck for at least half a mile, after which I got bored).

A much better game to play, though, is one I call “Now You See It, Now You Don’t”, which takes advantage of the fact that the Google Street View camera often returns days, weeks, possibly even months later to spots it’s already visited. This can have the effect that just by inching forwards or crossing to the other side of the road, you can experience time travel.

Here, for example, are two views from the market place in the town of Stow-on-the-Wold:

Not only was the second view — a single keystroke away from the first — taken on market day, but from the evidence of the trees, I’d say the two images are three or four months apart.

Germany is a bit trickier, because so far only major cities have been catalogued, but here’s some construction work on Friedrichstrasse in Berlin, just north of Friedrichstrasse station:

Rotten summer

2011-07-21T07:23:00.000+02:00

There’s very little to add to this video, except that I made it yesterday and today is looking just as awful weatherwise.

Trial by media

2011-07-06T21:53:00.000+02:00

A hot topic in the US, but pretty much nowhere else at the moment, is the end of the trial of Casey Anthony, which found her not guilty of murdering her daughter, but guilty of lying to police investigators.

The story is tragic, and easily told. A few years ago, Casey Anthony disappeared with her daughter Caylee. When Casey re-appeared, her mother Cindy wanted to see Caylee, but Caylee always seemed to be unavailable, usually with the nanny. Eventually, Cindy reported the child missing. A few months later, the badly decomposed remains of Caylee were found. The “nanny” did in fact, exist, but had apparently never met the child. Unsurprisingly, Casey was arrested and put on trial. She has now been acquitted of murder.

Now, here’s an important thing to consider as you read on: I do not know whether Casey is guilty or innocent. This is a very important point: I do not know. For all I know, she could have killed her daughter in cold blood. Or perhaps through negligence, and then panicked and tried to cover it up. Then again, for all I know, she could be innocent.

The disturbing thing, for me at least, is that pretty much all of America appears to be convinced that Casey Anthony is guilty, guilty, guilty; or (even more disturbingly) probably guilty, but deserves to be found guilty even if she isn’t. Right now, America is a nation of people choking on their breakfast cereals because a woman who obviously has blood on her hands is walking away a free woman, albeit with a stain on her character.

A representative tweet from a certain Igor Zag captures the mood of the nation: “So your [sic] saying in the state of Florida I can commit murder but can’t lie to the police?”

No, Mr Zag. “They” (whoever “they” are) are saying that the prosecution failed to prove beyond reasonable doubt that Ms Anthony murdered her daughter. You see, that’s how the justice system works in any democratic and civilized country: innocent until proven guilty. And that’s the principle that means you can’t get dragged off the street and imprisoned simply because you can’t account for your movements on the night in question. And it’s the same principle that saves you from lynch mobs.

In most other western democracies, this would be news, and it may be surprising news; but it wouldn’t cause such a display of public outrage. There’s a vague hope that the jury got it right, and that if they did, the person who actually did commit the murder can be found and brought to justice. And for the most part, that’s all you’d hear.

America is, as usual, a special case. This trial was given wall-to-wall coverage by the press. Everything about the trial, in true American style, was reported on and made public. And because America has no sub judice laws, the media could say what they liked about the whole affair. And the considered opinion of the media right from the start was that Casey Anthony is clearly guilty. And because Americans up and down the country have been obediently consuming the hyped-up sensationalised stories fed to them by media outlets vying for their attention, that is what America firmly believes. That the jury, shielded from everything the big news corporations, decided either that Ms Anthony is innocent, or at least that the evidence is not as clear-cut as the media would have us believe, speaks volumes. The evidence wasn’t convincing. What convinced most of America of the woman’s guilt clearly wasn’t in the evidence itself, no matter how many of them will protest otherwise.

The distasteful aspect of this — well, one of the most distasteful aspects — is that even if the accused is in fact guilty, a “not guilty” verdict is the best thing that could have happened for the media, which is looking more and more like a big reality show than a collection of responsible news outlets reporting, you know, the news. Already there are promises of interviews with jurors, interviews with lawyers involved in the case, and Fox News’s Geraldo Rivera is even boasting about how Ms Anthony’s ex-fiancé has told him who Caylee’s father is (but to find out, of course, you have to go to his blog and watch the video). TV stations and newspapers can be assured that the nation is incensed enough to hang on their every word and continue to consume. This tragedy is worth millions, perhaps even billions, to them, and this circus has just been handed the best free advertising it could have wished for. I predict they will spend the next few days or weeks, possibly even months if nothing new comes along, trying to out-scoop each other. They are, in fact, making a killing out of a killing, and that depresses me more than I can say.

So basically, Mr Zag, and all those threatening to throw darts at the jurors or cast Casey Anthony into a bottomless pit, you’re missing the point, mainly because you have been manipulated in the most obscene way. The jury reached the verdict not because they’re stupid or blind, but because, with all due respect, they have a much more intimate knowledge of the trial and everything that went on than you do or ever will; and because they were protected from the sensationalist and prejudiced reporting from the big media companies. It may be the “wrong” verdict in the sense that perhaps, after all, Ms Anthony is guilty; but the fact that the court came to a decision so at odds with public opinion is proof positive that the case was judged purely on the evidence presented to court and was not influenced by the baying mob, and that, America, is exactly how it was designed to function and exactly how it should be.

Old cars

2011-07-06T19:49:00.000+02:00

My latest video now on YouTube is a video about the “Kahlgrund-Classic” rallye, an annual event at which enthusiasts drive their vintage and classic cars around the local countryside. Because it’s fun. The video, by the way, is in the “Reportage” series and so in German; closed captions are available for those who need it.

This video was made at the pre-start meeting, where the participants gathered, had their vehicles and papers inspected and did all the necessary bureaucratic stuff. And it was a rotten day: wet, cold and totally uncharacteristic for the beginning of July. This really made it difficult to film, as I was basically dashing about between showers and trying not to get rain on the lens.

One thing I signally failed to do was to warm up my interviewee, but I didn’t think it would be necessary. Well, I know him personally, and just a moment before we were laughing and joking. I’d talked him through what I wanted to know, and everything was fine, until he was standing in front of a rolling camera and I asked him to explain the rules. Suddenly, he wasn’t the Achim I knew any more.

It wasn’t dreadful. He didn’t seize up totally. He knew what he wanted to say, and perhaps that was part of the problem: he seemed to be trying to remember his lines, rather than just talking to me. It was a snap decision to interview him, though — heck, it was a snap decision to go to the event — and perhaps, on balance, it would be best to do what I did with my last interview: film it a few days before the actual event, in the comfort of the subject’s own home.

How I know I’m nearly famous

2011-06-30T22:31:00.000+02:00

My wife often asks me when I’m going to get “rich and famous”, and today I was able to give her the good news: I’m still not rich, but well on the way to fame. I know this, because the name “rewboss” has been used for a scam.

One of things you should always do from time to time is to google yourself: not for reasons of vanity, but because it’s always prudent to know what, for example, a possible future employer might see when they speculatively plug your name into a search engine. That’s what I did this evening, and I was gratified to see that, for the first time I can remember, “rewboss” has made it into the exaulted realms of Google suggested search terms. Type “rewboss” into Google, and it suggests “rewboss YouTube”, “rewboss German” and, mysteriously, “rewboss manufacturing”. Which is odd, because I don’t manufacture anything, and as far as I know I am the only rewboss on the net.

Searching for “rewboss manufacturing” turns up some forum posts with titles like, “Has anyone ever had any dealings with Rewboss Manufacturing?” Well, I haven’t, so I looked, and apparently just a few months ago, Rewboss Manufacturing was a shady Malaysian company spamming forums with offers for TVs and smartphones at knock-down prices. The uninamous verdict of the experts is that this is a transparent scam and anyone who orders anything from them deserves whatever happens.

Well, I have nothing to do with Rewboss Manufacturing, so if you found this blog post looking for information about the company, I would advise you not to touch them with a bargepole (assuming you can find one long enough to reach Malaysia). This revelation leaves me simultaneously horrified, flattered and daunted. Horrified that people might think I’m a scam artist; flattered that I am obviously famous enough for people to stumble over me on the net and think my screen name worthy of pilfering; and daunted because there’s still a long way to go before I am so famous that using my name for a scam of this sort wouldn’t work.

It also explains why a few months ago I had a sudden flurry of new YouTube subscribers based in Malaysia.

Former Bond girl

2011-06-28T20:27:00.000+02:00

Actress Michelle Yeoh has been denied entry to Burma, also called Myanmar, and the speculation is that this has something to do with the fact that she is playing the part of Aung San Suu Kyi in a biopic called The Lady. Although this is probably not, on reflection, all that surprising, it is significant enough to be a news story: the shiny new, all-democratic civilian Burmese government, like the pigs at the end of Orwell’s Animal Farm, don’t look all that different from the old dictatorship.

Consequently, this has been widely reported, and for a while “Michelle Yeoh” trended on Twitter. But with a certain weary inevitability, many, if not most, reports of this event refer to her as “former Bond girl Michelle Yeoh”.

I suppose it could have been worse; she could have been remembered chiefly for the instantly forgettable The Mummy: Tomb of the Dragon Emperor. But still, I can’t help feeling that this is a bit rough on an actress who won a BAFTA for Best Actress in Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon, an achievement all the more remarkable when you consider that she doesn’t speak Chinese and had to learn her lines phonetically.

Of course, I realise I sound as if I’m denigrating the rôle of Bond girl, but it still somehow jars. We’re talking about an actress selected to play Aung San Suu Kyi, and it might for that reason be more apposite to mention in this context Crouching Tiger..., or indeed Memoirs of a Geisha, another film she had a prominent rôle in, and which won a modest sprinkling of Oscars and BAFTAs.

The only real reason for referencing her Bond past is so that we will all go, “Oh, that Michelle Yeoh!” But does that really add anything to our understanding of the story? Does it matter if we don’t actually recognise the name, or even if we have no idea of any of the films she’s starred in? A prominent actress cast in the rôle of Dr Suu Kyi, and who has met her frequently in the past, is denied entry to Burma. That’s the story, and reducing the prominent actress to a particularly feisty sidekick in a piece of light entertainment is a bit... unfair.

We don’t get thunderstorms

2011-06-22T22:16:00.000+02:00

Even if you don’t understand German, it’s clear what’s going on in this video. Taken today, it’s an unusual event: a full-blooded thunderstorm in our village.

Normally, thunderstorms tend to avoid us. Coming in from the west, they usually go up either the Kinzig valley, towards Fulda, or the Main valley, towards Aschaffenburg, completely missing our little vale. Armegeddon can come to everywhere else, while we swelter in hot, humid air, listening to the far-off rumble of distant storms.

This one made an exception: it raced up the valley, unleashing not quite its full force, but a fair portion of it. We had at least 17 millimetres of rain; almost certainly more, but our rain gauge was knocked sideways. The sound sent our cats, normally not particularly fazed by natural phenomena, scuttling into the cellar, where I later found them watching with a mixture of trepidation and fascination at the spreading puddle of dirty water.

We were lucky. Our neighbour across the road sustained some minor damage to the roof: at the end of this video, he’s removing some other tiles to get at the dislodged ones and replace them before the next shower (he just made it).

The full force of the storm was felt elsewhere, though: we’re still very sheltered here. The radar showed a huge swathe of heavy rain and thunderstorms sweeping across central and southern Germany, and another of our neighbours, who is in the volunteer fire brigade, told us that every single brigade in the whole district was called out at least once, most several times, and a few were pretty much out and about for the whole afternoon.

Anyway, we’re fine, barring a few battered plants.

Filming woes

2011-06-21T21:01:00.000+02:00

It seems such a simple idea: a camera, a tripod, and a microphone is all you need to make a video featuring yourself standing in front of various bits of landscape. After two days and nothing to show for it, here’s what I have learnt:

Autofocus cannot always be relied upon to focus on your face even if it almost completely fills the frame. It does sometimes, but sometimes it will focus on the background instead.
Manual focus is tricky when you have nothing to focus on because what you are focusing on — i.e., yourself — is standing behind the camera trying to focus. You can try focusing on the patch of ground you’re intending to stand on and then tilt the camera back up to start filming, but if you’re using a lot of zoom because you want to throw the background out of focus, that trick isn’t quite accurate enough, as becomes painfully apparent in high definition.
Automatic Gain Control allows you to control the input level of the microphone. Use it wisely if you want audio you can actually use.
Take note of where the telegraph poles are in an otherwise empty field, and don’t position yourself between even a very distant one and the camera.
Trying to get your face evenly lit in bright sunlight will make you understand why the professionals use huge lights even on the brightest of days.
Stand near a tree, and you’ll find it impossible to light your face at all without washing out the background. A camera’s backlight setting does nothing more sophisticated than increasing the brightness.
Never, ever stand anywhere near an electric fence. Electric fences interfere with the camera’s circuits. Audibly.
If you do clip a lapel mic to your jacket, remember that opening the jacket will mean you’re no longer speaking into the mic.

Zombie attack!

2011-06-19T18:02:00.000+02:00

I have every belief that the people who drafted the Freedom of Information Act in the UK had the best interests of the British public uppermost in their minds, and were seized of a genuine desire to make government more transparent, accountable and democratic. The Freedom of Information Act — the FOI for short — sounds noble and simple enough: anybody can submit to a government body a request for information and can expect a reply in twenty days. And some important information has come to light, such as the revelation that 74 Metropolitan Police officers have criminal records.

But things don’t always work out in a country like Britain, where a favourite pastime is making civil servants run around in circles. They’re civil servants, you see, and servants are people you give nonsensical orders to in order to watch them break into a sweat. Finished painting that room yellow, have you? Well, I’ve changed my mind — I’d like it green. Nothing pleases a British citizen more than watching fussy little men in old-fashioned suits and round glasses metaphorically jumping through hoops, and that’s what’s been happening. The latest one to hit the headlines was a certain Robert Ainsley, who asked Leicester City Council what preparations they had in the event of a zombie invasion. The Council has been forced to admit that they don’t have any specific plans, prompting a crowd of people with nothing better to do at the weekend to mount a full-scale zombie attach on the city. Other requests included somebody with a taste for men in uniform wanting to know how many male police officers in Hampshire were bachelors, a question about the number of sexual acts performed on Welsh sheep, and a retired sailor looking for an old Navy recipe for sautéed kidneys and curried meatballs.

Commenting on this, stand-up comedian John Holmes said that one of the worst offenders was The Daily Express newspaper, and went on to calculate how many billions of pounds of taxpayers’ money had been spent by councils and government departments answering frivolous FOI requests. The inference was clear: our money being wasted to provide a tabloid newspaper with non-stories designed to enrage the kind of people who would be lost without the little ritual of choking on their breakfast cereal every morning (the average Daily Express ready, in fact).

Actually, there are two reasons to take Holmes’s comments with a truckload of salt. The first is that having got his audience worked up about a paper that exists to get people worked up, he cheerfully went on to say that he had put in his own requests and was waiting to hear, for example, what the combined lengths of all his local council workers laid end to end would be. Even if that was a joke, it doesn’t work because it asks the audience to believe that he is a hypocrite and will waste taxpayers’ money in order to get self-righteous about the waste of taxpayers’ money.

The second reason is that Holmes’s calculations assumed that each request would be given a single person’s undivided and active attention for the whole twenty days, which of course isn’t what happens: for most of that time, it’s sitting in various in-trays and out-trays. Besides, an FOI request can be refused if it would cost more than £600 to comply with. That’s designed specifically to allow requests that just require a bit of sniffing around in the archives, while relieving agencies of the legal requirement to take exact measurements of hundreds of staff.

And when you look at these frivolous requests, they’re not so bad after all. Given a properly-designed database, it’s the work of a few minutes to find out how many police officers within a certain age range are currently single and how many arrests were made for bestiality in a given area. A zombie attack might be a remote possibility (well, pretty much impossible, actually), but actually the wider question of how well local governments are prepared for a completely unexpected threat — scientists did recently use a hypothetical zombie attack as a model for an outbreak of a highly virulent disease — is a good one. If, eleven years ago, you’d asked the government of New York City how they’d respond if a jet airliner crashed into a skyscraper, you might have been laughed at, too.

Besides, it gave some people the excuse for a bit of good-natured fun, not to mention some fresh air.

New video fail

2011-06-16T14:24:00.000+02:00

I just spent a significant part of this morning filming a new sketch. I already knew I was heading for trouble because as I was filming the last, and longest, piece, a huge black cloud came over. But it wasn’t until I viewed the rushes (as we videomakers like to call them) that I realised that, despite my best efforts, most of the shots were horribly out of focus and unusable.

This is what comes of not having good studio lighting and not employing a cameraman.

Destination: Seligenstadt

2011-06-14T11:18:00.000+02:00

The latest video in my “Destination” series is about the historic town of Seligenstadt, which is one of my favourites in my locality. From where I live, it’s a short train ride, then a bus ride to the ferry, which features at the beginning of this video. The view at the jetty is what you see on the video thumbnail: the journey bypasses the usual trek through nondescript residential and industrial areas and takes you straight to the heart of the matter.

This is a remake of a video I did some years ago, which contained a factual error regarding the legend of Einhard and Emma — I’ve taken the opportunity to correct it here. I fear, though, that another error may have crept in: having said that the town hall is the only building on the market square that is not half-timbered, I now notice that there seem to be several other non-half-timbered houses there. In my defence, I will say that it’s not always obvious: some types of half-timbered house are rendered with plaster, although I can’t swear this is the case in Seligenstadt.

Also, in the earlier version of this video, I suggest that with the lack of parking in Seligenstadt, it’s best to park on the Bavarian side of the river and take the ferry as a foot passenger. I wouldn’t recommend that now: there aren’t enough parking spaces there either.

For those in Germany wanting to get to Seligenstadt by public transport, the nearest long-distance railway stations are Hanau and Aschaffenburg. From Aschaffenburg, you need to take the number 50 bus as far as “Seligenstadt, Fähre” to pick up the ferry. From Hanau, there is an hourly local rail service to Seligenstadt, which is very convenient, but you miss out on the ferry. Alternatively, take any local train bound for Schöllkrippen, Aschaffenburg, Würzburg or Nürnberg as far as Kahl am Main, and from there the number 50 bus for the ferry.

Debbie the crazy cat lady

2011-06-13T09:05:00.000+02:00

This is the video that currently has the online world abuzz with speculation, in which “Debbie”, filming a video for a dating website, breaks down and cries because she just loves cats and can’t get enough of them.

The report in the UK’s Sun is typical of the kind of speculation currently making the rounds. Having described in detail the entire plot of the video, the paper admits that “some viewers have speculated it’s all an elaborate hoax”.

Well, let me just state quite categorically that this video is not “an elaborate hoax” or a “fake”. Neither is it a genuine bio for a dating site. Journalists are becoming increasingly lazy these days, it seems, and not bothering with any real research — odd, considering that these days, research can be a matter of a few mouse clicks and a bit of common sense. But this does represent an interesting departure from the norm: while the Sun has clearly missed the point, the Daily Mail actually gets surprisingly close.

The video was uploaded by somebody calling herself “hartmanncara”, and it takes a second or two to just click through to her YouTube channel profile page, where she lists her name as “Cara”. There is also another video up, which is clearly by the same young woman, this time pretending to be cojoined twins called Cara and Kara. The point here is that the “cat lady” video hasn’t been downloaded from an eHarmony profile and re-uploaded to YouTube by somebody else: it was uploaded to YouTube by the person who made it and appears in it. Who, presumably, is called Cara Hartmann.

She has now added links to her Facebook fan page, where she is listed as an “entertainer”, and her Tumblr page, which includes such stories as Rosie O’Donnell discovering that what she thought was breast cancer was actually a baked potato. Granted, those links might not have been on her YouTube profile before she became famous, but even without them everything pointed to “Debbie” being fictional.

Finally, of course, Cara (as we must assume she is called in real life) is also on Twitter as @hartmanncara (the same username as on YouTube, not hard to find), where she says nothing at all about cats, but does talk about going viral.

It doesn’t take a lot of time or effort to discover all of this, which is one reason I don’t think it’s an elaborate hoax. It’s certainly not elaborate by anyone’s reckoning. And calling it a “hoax” or a “fake” implies that Cara was deliberately trying to deceive us. I don’t think that at all: there’s no real attempt made to hide her real identity (unless this is an incredibly elaborate double bluff). I think it’s a young lady with the talent to amuse just having a bit of fun, and almost certainly never expected the video to go viral. It’s well-acted, but it is so clearly a parody, it’s hard to understand why anyone would take it seriously in the first place, or why anyone would be so disappointed to discover that it’s a complete fiction from start to finish.

Binned policies

2011-06-11T18:02:00.001+02:00

Once again, the British government are in trouble for abandoning their policies, this time for backing down in the face of council opposition to reintroducing weekly rubbish collections.

For those not up to date with British life, the inhabitants of that fair isle have been suffering unbearably under a clearly misguided government policy to allow rubbish collections only every second week, and to force people to recycle anything recyclable.

Some explanation is required for the benefit of those who, like me, live in a country where exactly this policy has been very successful for at least a couple of decades now, and has byzantine rules involving exactly what must go into yellow sacks, what must go into blue bins, what must be returned to the store and what must be taken to which rubbish tip or bottle bank. You see, what for Germans is a chore is for the British near slavery: in the words of the Communities Secretary, the corpulant and delightfully-named Eric Pickles, weekly collections are “a basic right for every Englishman and woman” — what he thinks the Welsh, Irish and Scottish people are entitled to was left unclear.

But yes, it is the absolute undeniable right of all English people not to have to worry about where to put two dozen million tons of rubbish every year when the landfills fill up. This is every bit as important as free speech, access to education and Britain’s Got Talent. The defeat of the government at the hands of local councils is just another stage in the slow but inevitable slide into anarchy, communism and fascism (all three at the same time, it’s that serious).

It is fundamental to the very essence of Britishness that 57% of all rubbish goes to landfill sites. If Germans think they can get by with a measly 1%, that’s their business, and no doubt they’ll pay for it later, you’ll see. One day, stinking garbage will become a valuable resource for powering time machines made out of DeLoreans, and then we’ll see how smug those Teutonic grins are, won’t we?

UPDATE: Apparently, reports of a U-turn have been exaggerated.

The hidden pitfalls of YouTube’s CC licence

2011-06-10T09:35:00.001+02:00

Last week, YouTube introduced a new feature: video uploads can be made available under a Creative Commons Attribution licence. What this licence means is that anyone is allowed to use the video, or parts of it, for any purpose, including commercially, on condition they credit the original author. It’s the nearest thing to public domain without actually being public domain.

The really interesting aspect of this is that videos set to this licence can be found using the YouTube online video editor: if you want to add some zip to your own video, you can use the YouTube editor to look for CC-licenced videos and edit them into your own. There are numerous possibilities here: for example, I could upload the beginning of a sketch, set it to CC, and challenge you to film and upload an ending, and use the video editor to add my beginning to your ending. This is pretty much in keeping with the whole ethos of Creative Commons, and YouTube’s recognition of that should be applauded.

Unfortunately, using this option is one thing; using this option legally is a whole other thing. One of the things that has become obvious to me over the years (and bear in mind that I am not a lawyer) is that there is a whole lot of ignorance about copyright law, and this is likely to cause problems for many people. You can’t release anything you want under this licence. In fact, the list of things you can release is vanishingly small, and is restricted to videos that consist exclusively of the following:

content that is entirely your creation;
content whose copyright has expired (which can take as much as 120 years);
content which has been explicitly released into the public domain by the original author;
content which has been released by the original author under a Creative Commons Attribution, Sampling or Sampling+ licence, but no other type of CC licence.

That last point is especially nasty: it means that you cannot use most types of Creative Commons material in your video if you want to release it as CC-BY. The potential for users incorrectly (and illegally) releasing videos under a CC licence is vast.

This poses a problem for people wanting to use the YouTube video editor to make mashups of this kind. Let’s say I illegally upload a scene from an episode of Doctor Who and (also illegally) set it to CC-BY. A little later, you fire up the YouTube video editor and, browsing through the CC content, find my video. “Perfect,” you say: “the exact scene I need, and it’s Creative Commons Attribution so it’s legal for me to use!”

Obviously, it’s not legal for you to use, but you used it in good faith — after all, I’m the one who convinced you it was legal. But is that going to stop the BBC filing a copyright infringement notice against your video and putting your entire account one-third of the way towards termination? And what would be your legal position? To what extent are you liable? Should you have researched more carefully? Ignorance is never a good defence, but just how thorough does your research have to be? Suppose it wasn’t something as obvious as a TV show, but a music video from a no-name band of the sort that might legitimately be expected to release their music under a Creative Commons licence?

It’s a nice feature, but it could have lots of unintended consequences. Let’s just hope YouTube has thought about these questions.

The launch!

2011-06-09T14:44:00.001+02:00

This is it. Ahead of schedule, the new-look rewboss hub is online, and this blog is now officially launched.

So welcome, reader, to the wonderful new world of rewboss. At last, you now have the option of answering me back, properly, by leaving comments on this blog. And please do: currently, it’s set to accept comments from anonymous users, so anyone can join in.

How is this all set up? Well, the online world of rewboss is divided up into the following areas, all connected to each other and (hopefully) complementing each other:

The hub is the centre of the rewboss world, and will also host longer articles that have more-or-less permanent relevance.
This blog, keeping you up-to-date with my activities and giving some background information into the bargain.
The Twitter feed, for quick updates and alerts, as well as some bonuses.
The YouTube channel, where (obviously) I host my videos.
The forum, which I have neglected of late. Ideally, it would be a community for people to get to know each other, but I realise that internet message boards are now old hat. I’ll be watching to see what happens to it.

All the old articles from the previous incarnation of my website can be found at old.rewboss.com, so they’re not lost. But from now on, this is where it’s happening.

So... onwards, to greatness and magnificence!

Tidying up

2011-06-08T19:52:00.000+02:00

Almost there. The new-look hub is just about finished, and apart from writing one or two more articles for it (just so that it doesn’t look too empty when it goes live), the only thing left to do is to write the .htaccess and robot.txt files.

Then I have to download the current site, remove the ad code so that it doesn’t do unexpected stuff, and reupload it to the new subdomain. I think that’s pretty much it, and I’m looking forward to see how well it all works.

Still tweaking

2011-06-07T11:40:00.000+02:00

I think I’ve got the basic design and layout of the new hub working, which is gratifying, but there are still articles to write and things to tweak. The main navigation bar has undergone a small redesign: a tiny tweak, but resulting in what I think is a huge difference visually, and a bit more in keeping with the image I’m trying to project.

Even better than expected

2011-06-04T15:21:00.001+02:00

When you try doing something you’ve never done before, you expect things to go wrong. In the case of that SimplePie class I was talking about, the difficulty was just finding the correct download link. Once I had the correct link and the class was successfully installed, a quick test script I wrote actually worked first time (once I’d corrected a couple of silly typos).

The real test will come later, when I upload everything to the web server. But for anyone writing in PHP and needing to read RSS and Atom feeds, SimplePie is the tool I’d recommend.

Sadly, Twitter no longer supports an RSS feed, which you’d think would have been an obvious thing to support. You can get a little widget to embed on a web page, but it uses JavaScript to write it in, it’s clunky and it’s slow; and I can’t get it to integrate nicely with the design I have for the hub. The other alternative is to roll up my sleeves and get dirty with the Twitter API, something I have never done before. I’m not sure I want to.

Goodness, that was easy!

2011-06-03T08:56:00.001+02:00

My idea for the navigation bar on the new-look hub was, I thought, really ambitious. Imagine my surprise, then, when it worked perfectly first time.

There’s still some way to go, and the next big challenge is incorporating feeds from this blog and my YouTube channel. For this, I hope to use a nifty little piece of server-side software called SimplePie. I say “software”, it’s really just a PHP class that parses RSS feeds, and it’s just a lot more reliable than attempting to write my own. And this is also the reason I’m even writing blog posts before I officially launch this blog, so that I can get the feed working before I officially launch the hub.

Making progress

2011-06-02T11:20:00.001+02:00

Everything’s coming along nicely. The new-look, slimmed-down, rewboss website (to be renamed the “rewboss hub”) is looking good before I’ve even done the first mockup. I hope to get the whole thing up and running... soon.

Stitched up

2011-06-01T17:07:00.001+02:00

A short video in German about the reason for the stitches in my mouth. (Subtitles available for non-German speakers.)

Hello, there.

2011-06-01T16:50:00.000+02:00

As I write this, my new blog hasn’t officially been launched yet and is still in the very basic design stages. Which means that if you are reading this, either you have stumbled on this post by accident, or you are so fascinated by my blog that you just had to drill down all this way to read every single post.

Well, stranger things have happened.