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When the lolcat thing first started up, I didn't get them. At all.
Then the bombardment commenced. They were everywhere.
Suddenly something clicked. (Possibly a brain cell giving its all and then taking one for the team.) And then I thought they were hilarious.
In fact it was the same thing for me with the comic Zippy the Pinhead. For years I read it with the rest of the funnies, mystified at who found this funny. Then one day, something clicked and I got it. Same thing with lolcats.
But as I just pointed out to RW, I now start imagining meatspace cats to have captions in their heads. Hell, I see bold white outlined letters in the Impact font superimposed on Cleo-Kitty all the time.
FOR THE LOVE OF GOD, I AM BRAIN DAMAGED BECAUSE OF LOLCATS.
Em and liberaltarian reminded me of this movie, which happens to be one of my favorites.
Here is a trailer:
If you want to understand modern Germany, you have to see this movie. Far from the jokes about militarism or Pickelhauben oder wanting to invade France again, this movie captures Germany's and particularly Berlin's essence in a remarkable way.
It is melancholy like the endless, sunless iron grey of a German winter sky. It portrays the helplessness of angels unable to do much except try to silently provide comfort where none can be given, helplessness against the passage of time and of events much greater than you or me.
Yet it is also bittersweet, with moments of great tenderness and affection and intimacy. Germans have their wall of formality to ward off feelings, but when the wall cracks open and someone is let inside, the raging emotions that are exposed are overpowering. There is nothing more tragic or romantic than a German friendship.
The symbolism of the angels is fascinating. The angels are unseen, except by children, or in dreams, or by the insane. They are immortal, but virtually powerless to affect what happens around them. They have no sense of smell or taste or even of color (hence the dominant black and white aspects of the movie). They don't even have much in the way of control over their lives, being moved about at will by an unseen and distant Fate, which is God.
This is how the Germany of the Cold War viewed itself. Sad, powerless, lashed to the fates of others, wanting to do good but unable to do so, being carried on a powerful river to places unknown. And no place embodied this more than West Berlin, itself an isolated island in a hostile sea, and littered with angels from times past by -- the Siegessäule or the Quadriga on top of the Brandenburg Gate, once symbols of victory, but pockmarked by war and stained by the polluting fires of industry.
Even now the reunified Germany has much of that feeling to it. It is more dynamic, flashier, a touch more confident than before, but ultimately it is still fearful of its own nature as well as of what comes next.
To indulge in some generalizations, the contrast to can-do Americans couldn't be more striking. Americans adopt new technology happily and without an afterthought; Germans do so only after skeptically turning it over in their hardened minds (but once they do, they do it to perfection, for fear of getting it wrong). Americans try first and perfect it later; Germans perfect it endlessly, rather than risk having it go wrong, as things went so badly wrong so many times before.
Berlin itself has changed a lot since Wim Wenders made the movie, but it is still Berlin, with layer upon layer of tragic past building up like strata of rock, and new strata being added with each passing decade. Many of the landmarks in the movie are gone -- not least The Wall -- but they are still there in spirit, like ghost pains from lost limbs or old wounds. Even now the course of The Wall is detectable in the layout of streets and the weirdly preserved pre-war subway stations of East Berlin.
Which is why the American remake of Der Himmel über Berlin, City of Angels, fell so flat in comparison. It was a good effort, but in the end Los Angeles lacks Berlin's ashen sky and the muscle to carry the story built by bearing the leaden weight of history on its broad shoulders.
Which is what separates Berlin from the other cities of the world. New York has wealth, London has culture, Parish romance, Los Angeles glitter, but Berlin has Fate itself.
If you want to understand Germany, you must see this movie. Even if you don't, it is worth seeing anyway, if only to see how good City of Angels could have been.
I asked Carol-Lynn Parente, the executive producer of “Sesame Street,” how exactly the first episodes were unsuitable for toddlers in 2007. She told me about Alistair Cookie and the parody “Monsterpiece Theater.” Alistair Cookie, played by Cookie Monster, used to appear with a pipe, which he later gobbled. According to Parente, “That modeled the wrong behavior” — smoking, eating pipes — “so we reshot those scenes without the pipe, and then we dropped the parody altogether.”
The funny (not ha-ha funny but why-why funny) thing is that recently iTunes began offering free Sesame Street clips for download. I was delighted by this and downloaded some...and was annoyed and flabbergasted at how utterly lobotomized the clips were. They were singularly unfunny, unentertaining, blatantly paranoid about offending anyone.
Jim Henson must be spinning in his grave.
I can see it now. Parents buying Sesame Street: Old School and showing it to their kids should be locked up for child abuse. (Count me in. I'm a-gonna "abuse" my kids that way, sho' nuff.)
The other thought that occurred to me: Al-Qaeda doesn't need to terrorize us. We're doing a fine job ourselves.
...
Addendum BoE showed me this in our local (German) paper. When I read the article I assumed it was another story that had been distorted or misrepresented or perhaps even a bad joke (it happens sometimes in reports about America and other places). But I went on Google and found out that the article didn't even come close to the bitter, sad reality.
Already wrote this in Tammy's blog, but saving it here for posterity.
When BoE and I were still studying, we would occasionally drive from the town where we lived at the time to where BoE's family lives. The route took us over land and through a number of small villages, one of which had a fairly large house at the main intersection (the town was just a wide spot in the road) and with a parking lot in front, conspicuously with cars only having out-of-town plates.
Once my parents visited us, and BoE and I were driving them to visit her family. Naturally we drove through that town, and my dad (who tends to be amazingly naïve sometimes, and who likes to vocally point out anything and everything of remote interest to him) pointed at the house and said, "Ooooh, look at the purty red lights!"
BoE and I sniggered while my mom asked him through clenched teeth if he knew what the red lights were for. He was utterly mystified.
Of course, in his defense the house otherwise looked pretty innocuous -- obviously an old half-timber farmhouse that had been converted to the purpose, and there were no obvious signs other than the parking lot and red lights. If you didn't know what red lights mean, you could have taken it for a restaurant or club or even a private home with too many cars. Even so, whenever my parents are here and we're out for a drive, invariably "look at the purty red lights" comes up.
The funny thing is that Hannover has a big bordello (link semi-SFW) that even advertises on taxis, street signs and the radio. That kinda blew my circuits when they started up.
And yes, prostitutes have to pay taxes on their income. It is considered a regular profession. It used to be that prostitution was technically illegal (or in a legal grey zone), but prostitutes had to pay taxes anyway. But some years ago they just fully legalized it, removing the last major bars from doing it.
One other fun bit about prostitution in Germany: One fairly traditional way of doing it was (and still is) for individual prostitutes to buy an old trailer, RV, or camper, park it alongside a country road and that was their place of business. If you see her sitting at the wheel, she's open for business. If not, she's...occupied. (If the RV is rocking, she's really occupied.) You see them once in a while, though not too frequently. But the funny part was that last year we drove to Wolfsburg with my parents to visit the VW factory (they have a snazzy experience museum). I had never been on that stretch of road before, and it was packed with those RVs.
And once again my dear old dad innocently wondered what all these women were doing parked on the side of the road. :-D
I mentioned in my previous blog entry the German conservative politician who wanted to introduce intelligent design into biology classes in Hessen -- then announced she was a lesbian. OK, that's a pretty unexpected thing, which makes my head spin a little.
But some time ago, I was shopping at a new big grocery store downtown for the first time, where they have a large fresh fish counter. I was walking up to the fish counter sort of absentmindedly, noting that the fresh fish selection looked pretty extensive. The attendant was standing there with his back to me, sharpening a knife or something, and I didn't pay much attention to him. I just stood there, scanning around to see if they might have catfish (which is getting easier to find over here, much easier than it used to be).
Then he turned around abruptly and spoke to me.
Now three things hit me all at once about this person at this moment.
1. He was Turkish. 2. He was wearing lots of makeup and dangly earrings. 3. He was speaking with an outrageous gay lisp.
Any of these things, taken individually, I would hardly take notice of (if at all). Two together, I might mildly take note of, but no big deal. Put all three together, especially when caught completely off guard like that, and my mind went SPLODE and I stood there, with my brain trying to catch up to all of this. I managed to stammer something to the effect of "uh, thanks, just looking" (which was a half-truth, as I was looking at his...quite remarkable earrings) and made my way to the frozen section, where BoE was waiting. I related this to her, and she of course was highly amused at my expense.
This is, of course, why she married me -- I supply her with endless such entertainment with my moments of weakness.
I stumbled across something that had my jaw drop. (No pun intended.)
JawTheShark (ha! there's the pun!) mentioned fountain pens in his blog. Thing is, way back when, almost ten years ago when I was still working for an ad agency, I had to do some projects for Pelikan, makers of fountain pens here in Hannover.
One of them is still online. The homepage is somewhat modified for some daft reason (and not in a good way) and the page renders a bit weirdly in Safari, plus they replaced the forum I originally did (which is actually a good thing, since it was a major hack). But the page is still there, with my old design largely still intact, from 1997 or 1998 (I don't remember the exact year).
Iamthefallen made a pretty remarkable statement regarding the debate between atheists and believers: "To understand the believer, you should probably understand his beliefs first."
To that end, maybe it might be interesting for me as a believer to lay out some bits of my beliefs, in particular with respect to other religions -- which may well be as effective a rebuttal to some of Dawkins' statements as I can think of.
As most of y'all are no doubt aware by now, I'm a Christian, specifically an Anglican (or, as we're known in America, an Episcopalian). I grew up in the Episcopal Church and was baptized as an infant, had First Communion as a small child, and was an acolyte in my teens. I also attended an Anglican boarding school for my freshman year of high school, then went to a non-denominational private school (albeit one that was dominated by fellow Episcopalians, since it split off from an Episcopal school) for the rest of my high school years.
Then in my college years I drifted away from the church and wasn't very much into belief at all. I would go back for Christmas and Easter, but didn't really have much particular strong feelings for the church, though I was still highly interested in church history.
Meanwhile, throughout my childhood I was interested in science, particularly in cosmology and geology. I grew up watching Carl Sagan's Cosmos series on TV and was hooked. My elementary school also had the rare bonus of having its own observatory, and I was an avid stargazer (one thing I miss about being in urbanized Germany -- the light pollution and haze is horrible and I can't stargaze). I had lots of star maps and magazines about the Big Bang and formation of galaxies. I also got to go to Virginia Tech's geology section a lot on field trips.
I also, as I alluded to in the discussion in the previous entry, grew up in the buckle of the Bible belt. Lots of Creationists, Pentecostals, Baptists, you name it. As liberal somewhat high church Episcopalians, we were very much the exceptions in that area. Once in a while Chick comics would float around, too. So I very much understand the feeling of being an outsider because of my beliefs.
Once I came to Germany, my interest in church history -- now that I was in easy reach of all those historical sites -- kicked into higher gear, and I went on a lot of "pilgrimages" of sorts, most especially to England in 1994 to places like Lindisfarne, Jarrow, Glastonbury and Wells.
Gradually I started to reconnect to my own feelings about the church, but didn't find any parishes here that appealed to me or that I could agree with for various reasons. I didn't want to go to a Roman Catholic parish, there were no Anglican ones nearby, and the Lutheran and other ones didn't appeal to me at all, either (generally just old people and mostly empty).
Eventually I found out about the German Old Catholics -- who are more or less the German equivalents to and partners of the Anglicans -- and that they had a parish in Hannover. Once we found them, we started going to services, and was delighted to find that they more or less thought the same things I did, the priest is my age and is very much of the same mindset, and so on. I had finally found a spiritual home. BoE was also delighted and, after having formally left her church for many years and being a registered non-believer, she became an Old Catholic and was confirmed a few months ago.
So what were my feelings, and why did I only go to Christian churches, and not other religions? Did I consider the existence of God, or the lack thereof?
I actually considered the "proof" of God for years, even as a teenager, once I found out that Sagan -- my old hero -- was an atheist. I didn't know what that was, so being a good bookworm I looked it up. A friend was a bit of a non-believer himself and we talked a lot about it, pretty endlessly, in fact.
At about the same time, when I was 17 or so, I attended a class called "Physics as Metaphor" (based on the book by the same name) taught by the book's author, Roger Jones, a professor of physics at the University of Minnesota. That course also nudged me into thinking about belief a lot and how it intersects with science.
The thing is, I reached the conclusion pretty quickly that God's existence isn't a scientific question. Science is a creature of logic, which (I reasoned) was, like all other laws, a part of this Universe that was created with the Big Bang. Just as the entire Universe would be entirely different if the simplest physical constant was changed, so too could everything be changed if logic itself worked differently. I'm sure many people would be horrified at the thought, but I'm sure logic is just as much a prisoner of our Universe as we and our physical laws are.
Yet God is, almost by definition, outside this Universe (He must be if He made it), perhaps interacting with it, but maybe not (we just don't know and can't know). Thus He is independent of logic, just as He is independent of Time and all our physical laws.
Whether or not you accept this particular line of reasoning, you do however begin to see how logic starts to disintegrate as you approach God, no matter how hard you try. At any rate, I got to this conclusion when I was 18 or so.
In the meantime, my thoughts have continued on these lines, based on ideas from the Bible -- notions of the infinite, eternal God as possible philosophical answers to "what made God", for example, or the Trinity as a possible model for explaining the philosophical problem of the multiple aspects of God that we seem to perceive in various religions.
I've also since read Orthodox Christian ideas about the nature of God, where their explanations -- unfortunately too long to write here -- are endlessly fascinating, even while they are counter-intuitive and often maddening. Sometimes the whole point of seeking God, though, is to never find Him, but to continue searching.
So why Christianity? Why go back to it and not, say, Buddhism or Hinduism or Islam?
The answer there is neatly provided by the Roman Catholic Church, post-Vatican II. In its essence the idea is that all religions may provide some idea of the trueness of God, but some religions provide a better image than others. If you imagine each religion being a camera, some cameras focus better than others or may make a finer image, while others may just be a pinhole camera, but all likely show images of the same God. The question is, which camera is the right one?
Well, which one would you choose, if you felt the need to have a camera? If you had one you were comfortable with and knew how to use, presumably that's the one you'd stick with.
(I should add that at the time before I was confirmed, I didn't seriously feel the need to consider other religions, nor do I in hindsight regret my decision at all. At that point I had had comparative religion classes, was well aware of Judaism, Islam, Buddhism, Jainism, and of course atheism.)
Of course, there is a more to it than that. For one thing, once upon a time I was confirmed in the Church and made a solemn promise in the process, and I take that promise seriously, so I therefore stuck to it. But I also didn't see the need to seriously consider other religions, because while I would readily concede that they may genuinely lead to God, I also as a Christian must fulfill my duty to my own promise. But at least that gives you a general summary of how I got back to where I started, so to speak.
So I ended up being more or less a high church liberal Anglican, just as I was as a child, but deeper and in more detail. Am I right to do so? I have no idea, and will only know once I die. Even so, there you have a general -- if rather long -- overview of just what I believe, and why.
