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For fiften years, the popular website Futility Closet has collected arresting curiosities in history, literature, language, art, philosophy, and mathematics. It's like Uncle John's bathroom reader, but intellectual.
Started in 2005 by editorial manager and publishing journalist Greg Ross, it's an online wunderkammer of trivia, quotations, mathematical curiosities, chess problems, and other diversions such as pipe-smoking robots, clairvoyant pennies, zoo jailbreaks, literary cannibals, corned beef in space, revolving squirrels, disappearing Scottish lighthouse keepers, reincarnated pussycats, dueling Churchills, horse spectacles, onrushing molasses, joyous dogs, soul-stirring Frenchmen, runaway balloons, U-turning communists, manful hummingbirds, recalcitrant Ws, intractable biplanes, vengeful whales, hairless trombonists, abusive New Zealanders, unreconstituted cannibals, mysterious blimps, thrice-conscripted Koreans, imaginary golf courses, irate Thackerays, plus the obscure words, odd inventions, puzzles and paradoxes. It is simply one of the most interesting websites on the internet.
Hours, days, even weeks of reading and listening pleaure awaits you (shhhh ... you might even learn something!)
There's something wonderfully direct about the German language. I mean, what other language has a word like "Schadenfreude"? And why call a board game "LUDO" when your aim is to piss off your opponent and create some "Lebensraum" for yourself? Who, in fact, knows that "LUDO" is Latin for "I play"? Who cares? How much better to call it "Mensch ärgere Dich nicht" (Man, don't get mad) and practise all that "Schadenfreude"?
In Germany, everybody knows the game that started it all at the beginning of the last century, to be more exact in 1914. Developed by Josef Friedrich Schmidt as early as in the winter of 1907/08 and going into production in 1914, it turned into “the nation’s most popular board game” (Der Spiegel, 1987). As early as 1920 more that one million copies of the game could be found in German households. Up till today more than 70 million copies have been sold.
"A wise game, an educational game where you learn to lose", said Heinz Rühmann (who, incidentally, was my Godfather but that was at a time in Germany when we were all still starving together) in the film classic "Wonderful Times" (1950) (Herrliche Zeiten) and he is definitely right. As kids in Germany, we always played "Mensch ärgere Dich nicht" and must've worn out several boards without ever getting bored. And having learned how to lose, I certainly know how to enjoy my occasional victories!
There's no need to hide this blog from Padma as, surprisingly and for once, it's not about me but about Alain de Botton's very first novel, "Essays in Love" (titled "On Love" in the U.S.), written at the age of 23 and made into the film "My last five girlfriends" (sorry, all I've got is this trailer).
Alain de Botton, of course, is the writer of essayistic books that have been described as a 'philosophy of everyday life'. I discovered this philosopher of everyday life sometime in the early 2000s, and I've been reading his books ever since:
There have been so many times when I read a book I enjoyed so much or from which I learnt so much that I thought, "I wished I had read this book twenty or thirty years ago. How different my life might've been."
I don't want you to have those regrets about Alain de Botton's books which is why I listed them all above - you can even read all the underscored books online (just SIGN UP - it's free! - and LOG IN and BORROW), although for me it's all about the tactile experience of holding the book in my hand (I have been known to buy the same book again just for its exquisite binding or beautiful typeface) and then adding it to my ever-growing library. It's not hoarding if it's books!
My office on the top floor of the Al Bank Al Saudi Al Fransi building in Jeddah, Saudi Arabia
I've previously reflected on my past stripped-down working life. I liked it that way and my employers did too as it meant that no domestic chores distracted me from giving my full attention to their business affairs.
My office was behind the window on the far right on the top floor
My work was my life and my office was my home, and there was little else besides. "All work and no play makes Jack a dull boy" was how I coped with life in the world's largest sandbox (a.k.a. Saudi Arabia).
Note my portable OLYMPIA typewriter, bought in Kieta in New Guinea in 1972.
It travelled the world with me for many years
Not that there was much to play with: the television reception consisted of little more than re-runs of Walt Disney's "Bambi" and so-called 'newsflashes' of members of the royal family travelling to or returning from the fleshpots of the West denied to their own citizens. As for alcohol, there was none - but you could get stoned anytime.
My hotel room was equally spartan, trimmed down as it was to the basics of sleeping, eating and work brought back from the office.
The view from the room with no view
It was a room with no view and the only diversion was the men-only swimming pool, as long as the scorching sun had set behind the Red Sea and the hot desert wind didn't sandblast the skin off your face.
All up, it was an assignment that came at a huge personal cost to me and yet it contributed to what I am today. Thanks for the memories!
We watched VERA last night, and then loaded up the fireplace before going to bed. It was still blazing away when I came out this morning to cook my porridge and the living room is warm and cozy. Goodbye, puffer jacket; hello shirtsleeves!
It's too early to brave the cold morning outside, and so I took "The 8.55 to Baghdad" while cooking my porridge. Proust can wait for another day as can T.E. Lawrence even though he got to Baghdad well before me.
I've always needed a reason to travel - work mainly - and the author of "The 8.55 to Baghdad" found it in Agatha Christie's life. He replicated her rail journeys to the archaeological sites where she met her second husband, Max Mallowan, and worked with him on his ecavations while also pursuing her career as a novelist. It's a very Paul Theroux-style narrative with bits about the Orient Express, the Balkans, and Iraq.
It's a bit of a mixed bag - and the author's use of ten words when five would do, doesn't help - and at four hundred pages, it might become a struggle but I hope to finish it before my own "Appointment in Samarra".
It seems that with all those brown onions, soy milk, avocados (why is there an extra 'e' in tomatoes but not in avocados?), chocolate-coated marshmellows, basmati rice, and Danish pastries, Padma managed to smuggle into yesterday's shopping something fishy:
LACURA®Skin Science Caviar Illumination is a luxurious lifting and firming skin care range for women 40+. Each product contains powerful anti-aging caviar extract - an energetic active ingredient which is very rich in protein, vitamins, minerals and lipid components.
Lipid? What is lipid when it's at home? Anyway, whatever happened to good ol' soap? In any case, Padma is 56, not 40+, so why even bother? They won't sell me their rubbish; I don't need it! I've only got the one wrinkle, and I'm sitting on it. 😀
The back of the box reads, "Wrinkle depth appears reduced up to 37% after four weeks." Why only the "depth"? Why not wrinkles per se? And who figured out the 37% and how? If it had to be something fishy, I would've bought a jar of rollmops for half the price, not lipid caviar.
Please await my follow-up post in four weeks' time!
Yes, we're back from town where we stocked up on duck food for our raft of ducks on the pond, and enough sunflower seeds to see our king parrots through the winter. On the way, I spotted this apostrophe-challenged van. I was tempted to apply but then I worried, "Driver is wanted for what?"
And, speaking of cars, at the servo I was behind a chap whose car had the numberplate RM-4711. "Are you German?" I ask. "No, but my wife is, he replied, adding, "this is her car." No. 4711 - Eau de Cologne; get it?
Of course, I rescued some more books from our local op-shop. I mean, how could I resist yet another book about T.E. Lawrence for a mere $2. As for "The March of Folly", I already have a copy which I want to read again but I just won't find it in my library until I have rearranged all those thousands of books by authors' names (I really must get away from arranging my books by size and colour, OSASCOMP doesn't apply!!!)
I also already have a copy of Alain de Botton's "How Proust Can Change Your Life", but how can one refuse to give a good home to a book which comes complete with a bookmark to indicate that it was acquired for £10.05 at the Chapters Bookstore in Parnell Street in Dublin, next to the Rotunda Hospital at the end of Moore Street? In fact, I emailed the Chapters Bookstore to say that their book has found its way to Australia.
I emailed the Chapters Bookstore in Dublin, "From one booklover to another, I thought I just let you know I picked up your book in a local op-shop. I love Alain de Botton! (beats reading ROUND IRELAND WITH A FRIDGE :-) The book was still with its pricetag of 10.05 Pound and your bookmark! With greetings from Australia." Someone called Megan replied, "Thanks for your email, really lovely to see! We’ve shared it on twitter." It's what booklovers do!
After a beautiful Thai lunch at the Sawatdee Restaurant with our friends Lorraine and Heimo, we crossed the road for coffee and cake at Amber's also apostrophe-challenged café, and are now safely back at Riverbend, lit the fire and settled in for the weekend. Retirement is so exciting!
P.S. Oh, and Padma went for her eye test and, of course, they told her she needs new glasses!!! How else can they pay off all that new-fangled equipment they now have instead of the old-fashioned vision test:
They also gave her a hearing test but the results were still the same: she won't listen to me!
The story of my life reads like a fairy tale - GRIMM! And there was no grimmer time than my years in the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia! Being paid extremely well and living in a five-star hotel was small compensation for living in the world's largest sandbox.
The Four Pillars of Prohibition in Saudi Arabia are No Piss, No Pork, No Pornography and No Prostitution but it was the sheer loneliness of the place that reduced even the most hardened men to tears. Some of us resident expats would meet at lunchtime around the swimming pool of the Al-Harithy Hotel on Medina Road in Jeddah for a swim and a game of chess.
Then came the long night and the lack of entertainment and the lack of companionship until perhaps some time after midnight, just when I thought I had conquered my insomnia, there was a hesitant tap on the door. Outside stood one of the expats I had met at the swimming pool at lunchtime, with a chess-board under his arm, asking in a timid voice, "Feel like a game of chess?"
FEEL LIKE A GAME OF CHESS??? AT 1 O'CLOCK IN THE MORNING???
But, of course, I didn't say that. Instead, I switched on the kettle, set up the chess-board, and made the appropriate moves. Literally! Because it wasn't about chess at all but about the choking isolation, or about a "Dear John" letter he'd received from home, or, worse, no letter at all.
And so I played the game because it might be my turn next to stand outside someone's door with a chess-board under my arm, asking in a timid voice, "Feel like a game of chess?"
Do we really use television — and so many other "benefits" and "tools" of our technological age — or does it use us? Jerry Mander speaks the unspeakable and asks the unaskable in his remarkable book, "Four Arguments for the Elimination of Television".
Most criticisms of television have to do with the television program content. People say if there is less violence on television or less sexism on television, or less this or less that, television would be better. If there were more programs about this or more programs about that, then we'd have "good television".
Jerry Mander says that that is true – that it's very important to improve the program content – but that television has effects, very important effects, aside from the content, and they may be more important.
They organize society in a certain way. They give power to a very small number of people to speak into the brains of everyone else in the system night after night after night with images that make people turn out in a certain kind of way.
It affects the psychology of people who watch. It increases the passivity of people who watch. It changes family relationships. It changes understandings of nature. It flattens perception so that information, which you need a fair amount of complexity to understand it as you would get from reading, this information is flattened down to a very reduced form on television. And the medium has inherent qualities which cause it to be that way.
Switch off the 'idiot box' and read the whole of this thought-provoking book here:
If you're the Reader's Digest Condensed Books kind of reader and television has already taken away your ability to read a book from cover to cover, let me help you by quoting from Jerry Mander's last chapter:
"Imagining a world from of television, I can envision only beneficial effects.
What is lost because we can no longer flip a switch for instant 'entertainment' will be more than offset by human contact, enlivened minds and resurgence of personal investigation and activation.
What is lost because we can no longer see fuzzy and reduced versions of drama or forests will be more than offset by the actual experience of life and environment directly lived, and the resurgence of the human feeling that will accompany this ..."
This book should be read by all addicts and anyone contemplating participation in the desertification of the mind to which TV leads.
The "Colossus" of the title is George Katsimbalis, a Greek poet and raconteur. Maroussi is situated 13 km northeast of Athens city centre.
The whole Greek world, past, present and future, rises before me. I see again the soft, low mounds in which the illustrious dead were hidden away; I see the violet light in which the stiff scrub, the worn rocks, the huge boulders of the dry river beds gleam like mica; I see the miniature islands floating above the surface of the sea, ringed with dazzling white bands; I see the eagles swooping out from the dizzy crags of inaccessible mountain tops, their sombre shadows slowly staining the bright carpet of earth below; I see the figures of solitary men trailing their flocks over the naked spine of the hills and the fleece of their beasts all golden fuzz as in the days of legend; I see the women gathered at the wells amidst the olive groves, their dress, their manners, their talk no different now than in Biblical times; I see the grand patriarchal figure of the priest, the perfect blend of male and female, his countenance serene, frank, full of peace and dignity; I see the geometrical pattern of nature expounded by the earth itself in a silence which is deafening. The Greek earth opens before me like the Book of Revelation. I never knew that the earth contains so much; I had walked blindfolded, with faltering, hesitant steps; I was proud and arrogant, content to live the false, restricted life of the city man. The light of Greece opened my eyes, penetrated my pores, expanded my whole being. I came home to the world, having found the true center and the real meaning of revolution. No warring conflicts between the nations of the earth can disturb this equilibrium. Greece herself may become embroiled, but I refuse categorically to become anything less than the citizen of the world which I silently declared myself to be when I stood in Agamemnon's tomb. From that day forth my life was dedicated to the recovery of the divinity of man. Peace to all men, I say, and life more abundant!" [From Henry Miller's "The Colossus Of Maroussi"]
After ten years in Paris, Henry Miller is almost fifty, and it's time for him to take a rest. In 1939 he takes off a year and goes to Greece. He went to visit Lawrence Durrell in Corfu. He did not know it, but the months in Greece would soon become the best period of his life. There is no doubt Greece performed a miracle on Henry Miller, a miracle which resulted in "The Colossus of Maroussi", a lovely and charming book, and by reputation one of the best, perhaps the best, travel book ever written.
I wish I had read it when I still lived in Greece. It would have made my time there even more memorable. I love this book. It's all Greece to me.
It seems the Australian Navy has begun quietly examining whether German-made submarines could provide an interim capability for Australia before a future $90 billion French-designed fleet is due to enter service in over a decade.
As tensions with the French company grow, the Navy is considering a German submarine option, the Type 214, a diesel-electric submarine already operated by several other navies and build by Germany's TKM.
In 2016, TKMS bid to design and build Australia's future submarine fleet but lost out to the Frenchies. Anyone who's seen DAS BOOT could've told the Australian Navy that the Germans are better at building submarines!
Drunken Noodles is the literal translation of Pad Kee Mao. The theory is that these spicy Thai noodles, eaten with an ice-cold beer, are a great cure for hangover
One more sleep before we go to the Bay again for our weekly shopping, followed by lunch at our favourite Sawatdee Thai Restaurant. I'd better bring along my driver's licence as Padma will again order Pad Kee Mao, or Drunken Noodles, and may not be able to drive home.
Of course, I will attempt to rescue more books from the local op-shops, and Padma will stuff her bags full with wool - what's the collective noun for wool? yarns? - to feed her endless production line of blankets for the "Wrap with Love" charity (we're both mad in our own very peculiar way).
Padma also has herself booked in for an eye-test. Not before time as I have to keep pointing out to her the dust on the mantelpiece which she can no longer see. It's either the optician or the marriage counsellor.
We're still five days away from winter - unlike in the Northern hemisphere, our seasons begin on the first of a calendar month - but already I've been going through an enormous amount of firewood. It's becoming a race between me and the firewood: who will be gone first? If it should happen to be the firewood, I might as well be dead as this winter promises to be a very cold one. Keep warm and stay alive!
Here's something to get you started: "Forget the Syrian Civil War for a moment. Even without the Sunnis and Shiites competing to give each other machete haircuts every sunny morning, there would still be a permanent Muslim refugee crisis.
The vast majority of civil wars over the last ten years have taken place in Muslim countries. Muslim countries are also some of the poorest in the world. And Muslim countries also have high birth rates.
Combine violence and poverty with a population boom and you get a permanent migration crisis.
No matter what happens in Syria or Libya next year, that permanent migration crisis isn’t going away.
The Muslim world is expanding unsustainably. In the Middle East and Asia, Muslims tend to underperform their non-Muslim neighbors both educationally and economically. Oil is the only asset that gave Muslims any advantage and in the age of fracking, its value is a lot shakier than it used to be.
The Muslim world had lost its old role as the intermediary between Asia and the West. And it has no economic function in the new world except to blackmail it by spreading violence and instability.
Muslim countries with lower literacy rates, especially for women, are never going to be economic winners at any trade that doesn’t come gushing out of the ground. Nor will unstable dictatorships ever be able to provide social mobility or access to the good life. At best they’ll hand out subsidies for bread.
The Muslim world has no prospects for getting any better. The Arab Spring was a Western delusion.
Growing populations divided along tribal and religious lines are competing for a limited amount of land, power and wealth. Countries without a future are set to double in size.
There are only two solutions; war or migration.
Either you fight and take what you want at home. Or you go abroad and take what you want there.
Let’s assume that the Iraq War had never happened. How would a religiously and ethnically divided Iraq have managed its growth from 13 million in the eighties to 30 million around the Iraq War to 76 million in 2050?
The answer is a bloody civil war followed by genocide, ethnic cleansing and migration.
What’s happening now would have happened anyway. It was already happening under Saddam Hussein.
Baghdad has one of the highest population densities in the world. And it has no future. The same is true across the region. The only real economic plan anyone here has is to get money from the West.
Plan A for getting money out of the West is creating a crisis that will force it to intervene. That can mean anything from starting a war to aiding terrorists that threaten the West. Muslim countries keep shooting themselves in the foot so that Westerners will rush over to kiss the booboo and make it better.
Plan B is to move to Europe.
And Plan B is a great plan. It’s the only real economic plan that works. At least until the West runs out of native and naïve Westerners who foot the bill for all the migrants, refugees and outright settlers.
For thousands of dollars, a Middle Eastern Muslim can pay to be smuggled into Europe. It’s a small investment with a big payoff. Even the lowest tier welfare benefits in Sweden are higher than the average salary in a typical Muslim migrant nation. And Muslim migrants are extremely attuned to the payoffs. It’s why they clamor to go to Germany or Sweden, not Greece or Slovakia. And it’s why they insist on big cities with an existing Muslim social welfare infrastructure, not some rural village.
A Muslim migrant is an investment for an entire extended family. Once the young men get their papers, family reunification begins. That doesn’t just mean every extended family member showing up and demanding their benefits. It also means that the family members will be selling access to Europe to anyone who can afford it. Don’t hike or raft your way to Europe. Mohammed or Ahmed will claim that you’re a family member. Or temporarily marry you so you can bring your whole extended family along.
Mohammed gets paid. So does Mo’s extended family which brokers these transactions. Human trafficking doesn’t just involve rafts. It’s about having the right family connections.
And all that is just the tip of a very big business iceberg.
Where do Muslim migrants come up with a smuggling fee that amounts to several years of salary for an average worker? Some come from wealthy families. Others are sponsored by crime networks and family groups that are out to move everything from drugs to weapons to large numbers of people into Europe.
Large loans will be repaid as the new migrants begin sending their new welfare benefits back home. Many will be officially unemployed even while unofficially making money through everything from slave labor to organized crime. European authorities will blame their failure to participate in the job market on racism rather than acknowledging that they exist within the confines of an alternate economy.
It’s not only individuals or families who can pursue Plan B. Turkey wants to join the European Union. It’s one solution for an Islamist populist economy built on piles of debt. The EU has a choice between dealing with the stream of migrants from Turkey moving to Europe. Or all of Turkey moving into Europe.
The West didn’t create this problem. Its interventions, however misguided, attempted to manage it.
Islamic violence is not a response to Western colonialism. Not only does it predate it, but as many foreign policy experts are so fond of pointing out, its greatest number of casualties are Muslims. The West did not create Muslim dysfunction. And it is not responsible for it. Instead the dysfunction of the Muslim world keeps dragging the West in. Every Western attempt to ameliorate it, from humanitarian aid to peacekeeping operations, only opens up the West to take the blame for Islamic dysfunction.
The permanent refugee crisis is a structural problem caused by the conditions of the Muslim world.
The West can’t solve the crisis at its source. Only Muslims can do that. And there are no easy answers. But the West can and should avoid being dragged down into the black hole of Muslim dysfunction.
Even Germany’s Merkel learned that the number of refugees is not a finite quantity that can be relieved with a charitable gesture. It’s the same escalating number of people that will show up if you start throwing bags of money out of an open window. And it’s a number that no country can absorb.
Muslim civil wars will continue even if the West never intervenes in them because their part of the world is fundamentally unstable. These conflicts will lead to the displacement of millions of people. But even without violence, economic opportunism alone will drive millions to the West. And those millions carry with them the dysfunction of their culture that will make them a burden and a threat.
If Muslims can’t reconcile their conflicts at home, what makes us think that they will reconcile them in Europe? Instead of resolving their problems through migration, they only export them to new shores. The same outbursts of Islamic violence, xenophobia, economic malaise and unsustainable growth follow them across seas and oceans, across continents and countries. Distance is no answer. Travel is no cure.
Solving Syria will solve nothing. The Muslim world is full of fault lines. It’s growing and it’s running out of room to grow. We can’t save Muslims from themselves. We can only save ourselves from their violence.
The permanent Muslim refugee crisis will never stop being our crisis unless we close the door."
I leave you with a quote by none other than George Orwell:
Hans Moehrke and I had met when he stayed at the SAVOY HOTEL in Piraeus where I was a permanent resident during my "Greek days". We breasted the bar on many nights and over many drinks, bemoaning the state of the world and our place in it, in three languages: Afrikaans, English and German.
We were both in commodity trading: I mainly in grains, in lots of 20,000, 30,000, even 50,000 tonnes at a time, whereas Hans was more into pork bellies for which there wasn't much demand from my Saudi masters.
We stayed in touch after my return to Australia in 1985, sometimes through an occasional phone call but more often through letters which became more sporadic after Hans had been diagnosed with Parkinson's disease which made it impossible for him to write.
His last message was a small parcel containing a detective novel by Colin Dexter with the now very prescient title, "Death Is Now My Neighbour", because less than a year later, on this day in 2015, Hans passed away at his home in Cape Town. Totsiens, Hans!
Rest in Peace, Hans.
People die only when we forget them.
I shan't forget you.
Ich wanderte im Jahre 1965 vom (k)alten Deutschland nach Australien aus. In Erinnerung an das alte Sprichwort "Gott hüte mich vor Sturm und Wind und Deutschen die im Ausland sind" wurde ich in 1971 im Dschungel von Neu-Guinea australischer Staatsbürger. Das kostete mich nur einen Umlaut und das zweite n im Nachnamen - von -mann auf -man.
Australien gab mir eine zweite Sprache und eine zweite Chance und es war auch der Anfang und das Ende: nach fünfzig Arbeiten in fünfzehn Ländern - "Die ganze Welt mein Arbeitsfeld" - lebe ich jetzt im Ruhestand in Australien an der schönen Südküste von Neusüdwales.
Ich verbringe meine Tage mit dem Lesen von Büchern, segle mein Boot den Fluss hinunter, beschäftige mich mit Holzarbeit, oder mache Pläne für eine neue Reise. Falls Du mir schreiben willst, sende mir eine Email an riverbendnelligen [AT] mail.com, und ich schreibe zurück.
Falls Du anrufen möchtest, meine Nummer ist XLIV LXXVIII X LXXXI.
Notice to North American readers:
This blog is written in the version of English that is standard here. So recognise is spelled recognise and not recognize etc. I recognise that some North American readers may find this upsetting, and while I sympathise with them, I sympathise even more with my countrymen who taught me how to spell. However, as an apology, here are a bunch of Zs for you to put where needed.
Zzzzzz
Disclaimer
This blog has no particular axe to grind, apart from that of having no particular axe to grind. It is written by a bloke who was born in Germany at the end of the war (that is, for younger readers, the Second World War, the one the Americans think they won single-handedly). He left for Australia when most Germans had not yet visited any foreign countries, except to invade them. He lived and worked all over the world, and even managed a couple of visits back to the (c)old country whose inhabitants he found very efficient, especially when it came to totting up what he had consumed from the hotels' minibars. In retirement, he lives (again) in Australia, but is yet to grow up anywhere.
He reserves the right to revise his views at any time. He might even indulge in the freedom of contradicting himself. He has done so in the past and will most certainly do so in the future. He is not persuading you or anyone else to believe anything that is reported on or linked to from this site, but encourages you to use all available resources to form your own opinions about important things that affect all our lives and to express them in accordance with Article 19 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights.
Everything on this website, including any material that third parties may consider to be their copyright, has been used on the basis of “fair dealing” for the purposes of research and study, and criticism and review. Any party who feels that their copyright has been infringed should contact me with details of the copyright material and proof of their ownership and I will remove it.
And finally, don't bother trying to read between the lines. There are no lines - only snapshots, most out of focus.
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