Das Tal der Ahnungslosen

 

The grey area represents the reception of West Germany's ARD's television in East Germany. The areas in black had no reception and were jokingly called the "Valley of the Clueless" (Tal der Ahnungslosen), with ARD said to stand for "Außer Rügen und Dresden"

 

In the far east of Germany lie two infamous valleys. One is the far northeastern tip of the country, the other is around Dresden. During the Soviet occupation of East Germany, they were known as "Die Täler der Ahnungslosen", or the Valleys of the Clueless.

Not because the people there are unusually stupid, but because of the areas' topography which meant that West German television broadcasts couldn’t reach them. They were therefore cut off from the rest of the world, with only the East German state propaganda reaching them.

There are times when I feel I am living in the Valley of the Clueless, that valley being Australia. Here we all are, in an extreme energy crisis — although, if you listened to our clueless Labor government, you'd think that everything will be fine as long as we drive without our roof racks — and yet we maintain a full legislative ban on civilian nuclear power while sitting on nearly 28% of the planet’s known uranium reserves.

While China is building a nuclear empire, Australia is completely absent — zero operating capacity and zero prospective builds. While we are sitting on piddling fuel reserves, we are exporting gas. We also have oil but can't drill for it lest we upset our own homegrown bunch of Greta Thunbergs. And don't get me started on all those shut-down refineries.

While European investors still remember surprise bank holidays, limits on their ATM withdrawals, capital controls, double digit inflation and governments defaulting on their bonds, the stockmarket valuation of our country's biggest bank is greater than the world's biggest miner.

Our blissful ignorance is more ignorance than bliss.

 

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To be silent the whole day long ...

 

 

To be silent the whole day long, see no newspaper, hear no radio, listen to no gossip, be thoroughly and completely lazy, thoroughly and completely indifferent to the fate of the world is the finest medicine a man can give himself."

Padma has gone shopping which gave me an excuse to go to my little retreat at the bottom of "Riverbend". Just me, surrounded by some of my books and some of my keepsakes, and total silence on the inside and out, which is when the above quote entered my head. Where had I read it before? Of course, it was by Henry Miller, but in which of his books?

The question gnawed at me. Decades of forensic accounting when I had left no stone unturned, and years with management consulting firms who demanded that I would back up everything I wrote with footnotes to its source had left their mark on me, and so I went back to my library near the house to run through my Henry Miller books. No, not "Tropic of Cancer"; no, not "Tropic of Capricorn"; yes, of course, it had to be his book "The Colossus of Maroussi", which he had written after visiting the British writer Lawrence Durrell on Corfu Island in Greece in 1939. No wonder, it had stayed in my memory. And there it was on page 45:

 

 

Did I stop at page 45? Of course not! "The Colossus of Maroussi" is a beautiful Greek travelogue. As he wrote, "The light of Greece opened my eyes, penetrated my pores, expanded my whole being". In it, Miller travels to Athens, Crete, Corfu, Poros, Hydra and Delphi. As he describes these places, he also portrays Greek writer George Katsimbalis (the "Colossus" of the book's title), and Lawrence Durrell, and Durrell's first wife Nancy, as well as Theodore Stephanides, the Greek-British doctor and polymath who was Lawrence Durrell's brother's friend and mentor.

 

Read it online at www.archive.org

 

Even though I hungered for more silence and for more of Henry Miller, what drove me back to the house in late afternoon was Padma's promise to bring back a roast chicken — not that KFC-[expletive deleted] but a real roast chicken from the rotisserie at Woolies, with a bit of coleslaw on the side. (Did you know that 'coleslaw' comes from the Dutch phrase "koolsla," which is "cabbage salad" [kool = cabbage, sla = salad]? When Dutch settlers brought this dish to America in the 17th century, "koolsla" became "coleslaw" or "cole slaw". You didn't know that? I thought so!)

 

 

Having filled the hole in my stomach and the hole in your education, I searched YouTube for anything on Henry Miller's famous quote and found this video clip. Of course, the smartphones and algorithms, of which he speaks, did not exist in his time. This is all AI-stuff, but cleverly done.

 

 

I almost wrote 'KI' - Künstliche Intelligenz - because that's what Germans call artificial intelligence which surprises me. They've been throwing out perfectly good German words by the DUDEN¹-load, replacing them with English words (often even conjugating them with a German ending), and yet here they are, for once 'Germanising' what is essentially an English initialism². It reminds me of the French who insist on calling a computer an 'ordinateur' — but, of course, you already knew that, didn't you?

 

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The DUDEN¹ is a dictionary of the Standard High German language, first published by Konrad Duden in 1880 (which makes this an eponym).

An initialism² is not an acronym. Acronyms are pronounced as words (e.g., NATO), whereas initialisms spell out each letter (e.g., FBI).

If you want to know why I tell you all this, listen to ABC Radio National's Sunday Extra's "On pedantry *or being pedantic", as I did last Sunday.

 

Old school indeed!

 

 

After having spent more than ten thousand afternoons taking a nap and more than ten thousand mornings eating breakfast on the verandah, it's hard to believe that "Riverbend" didn't even have a verandah when I bought the place and immediately had one built.

That was thirty-three years ago, and the verandah is showing such signs of wear and tear that nothing short of a complete rebuild is needed.

I couldn't tell a good carpenter from a bad one if he hit me in the face with a claw hammer, and so I asked a friend if he had a friend who could do the job. He did, casually inspected it, and then quoted me $18,000.

 

 

I have little experience with tradesmen - of which most were bad - but I remembered the advice to always get three quotes. The first one was for $41,747.43 - I loved that 43 cents! - but didn't include an overhead beam which needed replacing, for which he quoted me $110 an hour. As I told him, "Not in my wildest dreams ..." He wasn't surprised at all.

 

 

The second one quoted me a not-quite-so-outrageous $24,499,20. It ticked all the boxes - as they say - and I thought I was on a winner!

 

 

But then came "Old School Quality Building" who had been the first one to show up for an inspection of the job but had been delayed giving me his quote, for which he apologised. $17,316.20. Old school indeed!

 

 

I immediately sent back an email, "Thank you for the time you took to look at the job and in preparing your quote. I really appreciated the thoroughness with which you did your inspection. I have never undertaken such a big job before, so please give me time over the weekend to think about it. I am keen to get started, so I'll get back to you early next week. I am also keen to establish a lasting relationship with a reliable carpenter as this old house is beginning to need more and more work done on it, which I hope you could help me with."

Think about it? Of course, I needn't think about! Three quotes and third time lucky! And so in my next email I said, "How soon can you start?"

 

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Instant recall

 

 

Last night, after yet another of my more frequently occurring "Pinkelpause" - look it up! - when I had trouble falling off to sleep again, the movie "The Beach" - not to be confused with "On the Beach" - with Leonardo DiCaprio entered my mind.

It is, of course, based on the book of the same name by Alex Garland, and one of the few instances where I watched the movie before I ever read the book (with the book usually a far more satisfying experience).

"The Beach", both the movie and the book, are thought to be a remake of that other book and movie about a group of British boys who are stranded on an uninhabited island and their disastrous attempts to govern themselves. That books, as every kid who had to read it at school knows, is called ... there I was, at four o'clock in the morning, and not being able to recall one of the classics of English literature.

I've always prided myself on a good memory and almost instant recall, and yet, despite willing my brain to come up with the title, it simply wouldn't obey me. It was only when the first light came filtering through the curtains and I heard an early fisherman passing on the river, that I gave up the fight, switched on my smartphone, tapped on the GOOGLE icon, and typed in "Golding" - yes, I had remembered the author's name but not the name of the book! - and there it was: "Lord of the Flies".

Of course! How could I have forgotten! From now on I shall always associate "Lord of the Flies" with sleepless nights which is perhaps as the author had intended it to be. Watch the movie for an instant recall.

 

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Phew, they're still there!

 

 

I've just heard on the radio, and then followed it up by reading, about a life jacket worn by a passenger on RMS Titanic as she escaped the sinking steamship on a lifeboat sold at auction on Saturday for $906,000. (Don't even ask me if that's in Australian or American dollars; it's totally crazy in whichever currency.)

 

 

I immediately rushed out to the jetty house to check the storage box. Phew, they're still there! Four old life jackets which could be worth a million dollars in years to come. I had better include them in my will.

 

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