I think I am going to contribute my share by looking at Hans-Christian Schmidt’s Requiem and the way that it selectively confirms and shapes our ‘memory’ of the 1970s, by design.

Lallopallo has tagged me - to maintain our blog friendship, I’ll have to answer his 28 questions (btw, I know that this type of pass-on questions is also referred to as a meme, but is it a meme really? dunno, don’t think so - doesn’t matter).

Here we go (I might choose not to answer if I consider a question to personal):

1. Last movie you saw in a theater?

Gerbert Rappaport’s Čeremuški or Черемушки (a Russian operetta from 1962)

2. What book are you reading?

A reader ‘Old media, new media’ and Weinberger’s Everything is miscellaneous (sporadically)

3. Favorite board game?

Scrabble

4. Favorite magazine?

They all suck.

5. Favorite smells?

The smell of whitewashed walls.

6. Favorite sounds?

Changes. Cute sounds, such as a new message coming in via twhirl

7. Worst feeling in the world?

That people who one loves will be gone forever when they die

8. What is the first thing you think of when you wake up?

I’m not able to think when I wake up

9. Favorite fast food place?

Any good kebab shop

10. Future child’s name?

well, it’s definitely not going to be something like Nova Fee Belle, or what people come up with these days

11. Finish this statement. “If I had lot of money I’d….?

only write

12. Do you sleep with a stuffed animal?

no, but I’d like to blow my nose with stuffed animals

13. Storms - cool or scary?

scary cool, if one is in a safe place

14. Favorite drink?

depends!

15. Finish this statement, “If I had the time I would….”?

write more

16. Do you eat the stems on broccoli?

yes, before it’s cooked

17. If you could dye your hair any color, what would be your choice?

orangey red

18. Name all the different cities/towns you’ve lived in?

Chapeau to lallopallo for being to brave to write them all down - I’m not. It’s likely around 20.

19. Favorite sports to watch?

Football, but only when the European or World Championships are on.

20. One nice thing about the person who sent this to you?

he must be a smart person, because he changed to wordpress eventually (and then his blog kicked off!)

21. What’s under your bed?

don’t dare to have a look

22. Would you like to be born as yourself again?

sure, if I can keep the wisdom I’ve acquired in this life

23. Morning person, or night owl?

night… owl

24. Over easy, or sunny side up?

scrambled!

25. Favorite place to relax?

nothing specific

26. Favorite pie?

anything from a good Viennese coffee house

27. Favorite ice cream flavor?

yogurt

28. Of all the people you tagged this to, who’s most likely to respond first?

I’ll decline - I kind of have the feeling that all the people I know who haven’t been tagged yet are too busy to respond

Are they for real? Is that a stunt from a comedy show? They’re like puppets!

Just a snippet from the PRISE conference I am attending right now:

dentifiable Person - means a natural person that is or can be identified, directly or indirectly, as a particular person by reference to an identification number or to one or more aspects of the person’s physical, physiological, mental, economic, cultural or social identity. Identifiable Persons may include any employee, applicant, former employee, or retiree of Datalogic, its operating divisions, or subsidiaries in the EU.

Personal Data - is any information about an Identifiable Person that

* is within the scope of the EU Directive,
* is received by Datalogic in the U.S. from the EU,
* is recorded in any form and
* is about, or pertains to, a specific individual; and
* can be linked to that individual.

Personal Data does not include information that is encoded or anonymized, or publicly available information that has not been combined with non-public Personal Data.

Processing - means any online, offline or manual processing and includes such activities as copying, filing, and inputting Personal Data into a database.

Sensitive Data - is data that pertains to medical or health conditions, racial or ethnic origin, political opinions, religious or philosophical beliefs, trade union membership, sexual orientation or any other data that is identified as “sensitive” by the Identifiable Person.

Source

I’ve just heard about the practice of waterboarding used by the CIA as an an “interrogation technique”:

Water-boarding involves a prisoner being stretched on his back or hung upside down, having a cloth pushed into his mouth and/or plastic film placed over his face and having water poured onto his face. He gags almost immediately.

Apparently, another attempt to ban it just failed; already in March, President Bush vetoed the ban. This is disgusting! Goddamit, USA, you really need some change! What happened to the home country of the citizens’ movement?

Read on BBC: What is Waterboarding

Am completely horrified by this atrocious crime that went on and on and on for 24 years in Lower Austria. I’ll post a link to an English story:

AMSTETTEN, Austria (CNN) — Austrian police believe a 73-year-old man held his daughter captive in his cellar for the past two decades and fathered at least six children with her, according to police and state-run news reports Sunday.

The woman, identified as 42-year-old Elisabeth F., has been missing since 1984 when she was 18 years old, police said at a news conference.

Read more on CNN

This makes me so angry!!! I might later regret to have ever said (written) this in public - but this crime makes me think that the pillory isn’t such a bad idea at all. This guy destroyed the lives of eight people: first of all his daughter’s who was abused since she was 11, locked up at 18 and raped and raped and raped again for 24 years - never saw the sunlight! And the child she gave birth to which died, because it wouldn’t have needed care that cannot be found in a dungeon… and the other SIX children she gave birth to, three of which grew up WITHOUT EVER SEEING THE SUN. If this where the middle-ages, and if the pillory existed still, I’d be the first to go there and spit into the face of this monster that is Josef. F. The monster is 73 years old - if one wanted to lock him up just for the amount of year’s he held his daughter captive, once couldn’t because he is probably going to die.

How ironic that this atrocity only ever came to late because the oldest daughter is ILL with a HEREDITARY DISEASE which is the result of the incest, and of which she is probably going to die now (still hospitalized).

UPDATE: A surname is mentioned on the ORF website - an “accidental” leak? I am watching the press conference right now, but they don’t mention his surname.

Wer ist Josef Fritzl, der seine Tochter in einem Kellerverlies gefangen gehalten, sexuell missbraucht und sechsmal geschwängert haben soll? Der 73-Jährige dürfte ein raffiniertes und glaubwürdiges Doppelleben geführt haben. [Source]

This is SHOCKING!

The United States has less than 5 percent of the world’s population. But it has almost a quarter of the world’s prisoners. …

The United States has, for instance, 2.3 million criminals behind bars, more than any other nation, according to data maintained by the International Center for Prison Studies at King’s College London. China, which is four times more populous than the United States, is a distant second, with 1.6 million people in prison. (That number excludes hundreds of thousands of people held in administrative detention, most of them in China’s extrajudicial system of re-education through labor, which often singles out political activists who have not committed crimes.) …
The United States comes in first, too, on a more meaningful list from the prison studies center, the one ranked in order of the incarceration rates. It has 751 people in prison or jail for every 100,000 in population. (If you count only adults, one in 100 Americans is locked up.)

The only other major industrialized nation that even comes close is Russia, with 627 prisoners for every 100,000 people. The others have much lower rates. England’s rate is 151; Germany’s is 88; and Japan’s is 63.

Read the full NY Times article here.

I have been watching the Clinton/Obama web war and the whole issue that was set up around Jeremia Wright with a mix of fascination and disgust - and read Michael Moore’s latest (actually: the first one during the primaries) intervention with some sense of relief. I hope America will be able to rid itself from Republican rule, and I couldn’t agree more:

I know some of you will say, ‘Mike, what have the Democrats done to deserve our vote?’ That’s a damn good question. In November of ‘06, the country loudly sent a message that we wanted the war to end. Yet the Democrats have done nothing. So why should we be so eager to line up happily behind them?

I’ll tell you why. Because I can’t stand one more friggin’ minute of this administration and the permanent, irreversible damage it has done to our people and to this world. I’m almost at the point where I don’t care if the Democrats don’t have a backbone or a kneebone or a thought in their dizzy little heads. Just as long as their name ain’t “Bush” and the word “Republican” is not beside theirs on the ballot, then that’s good enough for me.

I, like the majority of Americans, have been pummeled senseless for 8 long years. That’s why I will join millions of citizens and stagger into the voting booth come November, like a boxer in the 12th round, all bloodied and bruised with one eye swollen shut, looking for the only thing that matters — that big “D” on the ballot.

I hope the majority will go for the D on the ballot (but I am also afraid the elections might be rigged, and that the majority might not count in the end - is the UN thinking of sending some observers?).

But the question I keep hearing is… ‘can he win? Can he win in November?’ In the distance we hear the siren of the death train called the Straight Talk Express. We know it’s possible to hear the words “President McCain” on January 20th. We know there are still many Americans who will never vote for a black man. Hillary knows it, too. She’s counting on it.

Pennsylvania, the state that gave birth to this great country, has a chance to set things right. It has not had a moment to shine like this since 1787 when our Constitution was written there. In that Constitution, they wrote that a black man or woman was only “three fifths” human. On Tuesday, the good people of Pennsylvania have a chance for redemption.

Read Michael Moore’s full article here!

It’s in German and set up in support of my PhD thesis. It’s called: digiom (as in Digitale Online Medien). Read it here.

Have you ever heard about the whistle register (Pfeifregister)? Mariah Carey is apparently using it - now I am not very familiar with her music, but this demonstration make it immediately apparent what it means. Myself, I can only produce one (and always the same) note in whistle register - and then it’s so loud it makes people turn around and leaves them baffled….