Sweet sixteen

New Model Army - Vagabonds

I was sweet sixteen when this song came out. Now I am more than twice that age… What is it about songs that we listened to when we were exchanging first kisses? I still love Vagabonds tremendously; it's one of the few good songs from the 80ies I will probably still like to listen to every now and then when I am sixty eight

Passed away

Pina Bausch (1940 - 2009)




Karl Malden (1912 - 2009)

brief and painful

Abstinence from blogging… again I suffered from the not even knowing where to start.
While I've read myself though countless detectives, Dawkins’ anti-Bible and the almost 1300 pages of Robert Fisk's epical memories of all the shit that happened in the last 100 years in the Middle East, the rest of the world became completely absolved by CRISIS. Although my own bank account is painfully afflicted by the “crisis” I am getting extremely sick and tired of talking about it and being informed about its recent developments, its peaks and downs, its digestion and temperature curve. It's the one topic I hope to disappear from the news rooms for at least some weeks. Give us some rest.
Other headlines in contrast disappear quicker from TV screens and newspapers than one could wish for. For two weeks there was almost only one issue being broadcasted, CNN almost covered in 24/7. And now? It's almost a week since I heard any news from Iran on the TV. The papers remain silent as well. It's almost as if nothing ever happened.

Two things I wrote about in the past, I would like to mention again:
1. Krümmel, the run down, badly maintained nuclear power station, Germanys’ future to be Chernobyl, was back on the net for less than two weeks. After another incident, Krümmel had to be shut down once more. Let’s pray, this time for good.



2. While bathing in bad news I had a quick look at casualties.org, just to see where we are at the moment in Iraq. Well, the death rate is up to 4.321 casualties and we count 31156 wounded US soldiers. If there was a competition we would find the UK (179) on second and Italy (33) on third position. Of course we do not get that kind of exact figures on the Iraqis killed, as prior to 2005, violating the Geneva Conventions obligating combating parties to count all dead and to bury them properly, none of the civilians' or military casualties have been counted. This way they have been erased twice from history and memory, not even statistics will remember those who have been killed in the allied fire in the name of George W. Bush, Tony Blair and all the other deluded guys in charge who took part in that bloody war.
Well, I should stop watching CNN every so often. Yesterday a high rank general was deeply troubled and frustrated that so many Iraqis are celebrating that the occupying US army is about to leave the country. If it wasn't so pathetic, one could almost laugh as this total misunderstanding of Military Washington who would still love to look back at the mission as an act of liberation and relief…