German Joys

Star Trek, Episode MDCCXII: The Exquisite Corpse

Back in my college days, my reprobate friends and I would hand-craft gift calendars based on the principle of the exquisite corpse. All through the year we'd cut out words from newspapers and magazines, sorting them into little piles of adverbs, adjectives, and so on. In December, the annual ritual would take place, in which we'd select words at random from the various piles to form a sentence. The results became mottoes for each of the months of the year, such as: "Itchy hot Nazis and foaming graham-cracker ornaments always look right!" or "I floated past corn-moistening gas weasels" or "The skin pump knows too much. Liquefy!". (I won't insult your intelligence by telling you what months went with these mottoes.)

Naturally, these inspiring sentences would be accompanied by sketches illustrating the slogan as literally as possible. The resulting calendars were always an inspirational hit, selling in the high dozens. Actually, most of them were bartered for certain substances which enhanced the overall enjoyability of higher education.

I'm glad to see that a group calling itself the Day Job Orchestra is applying similar principles to Star Trek episodes. They strip the real dialogue, and then 'reverse-engineer' what the characters say based on their lip movements and gestures. The rule seems to be: anything that fits the lip movements goes: the stranger, the better. Apple juice is a recurrent theme. This one (NSFW) also involves dark sayings about Jesus and nuns. And Paraguay. And panda rape:

While We're on the Subject of Marriage...

Here's a rather long but intermittently interesting trailer for a documentary about the American way of marriage and divorce (h/t JR):

Here's philosopher Dan Moller's paper An Argument Against Marriage (pdf). The second long paragraph captures the reasoning of my many European friends who've decided against marriage, at least early in life:

There is an obvious, perhaps even trite, argument against getting married which deserves our attention. Reduced to a crude sketch, the argument is simply that, (a) most of us view the prospect of being married in the absence of mutual love with something like horror or at least great antipathy; (b) the mutual love between us and our spouse existing at the inception of our marriage may very well fail to persist; and hence (c) when we marry we are putting ourselves in the position of quite possibly ending up in a loveless marriage of the sort we acknowledge to be undesirable, and this is a mistake.

...

...If you marry, then either you will intend to keep your promise to maintain the relationship or you will not. If you do marry with such an intention, you are opening up the possibility of finding yourself in the strange position of having a permanent relationship with someone you don’t love, and, for reasons discussed above, this will seem unacceptable to most of us who would marry for love. For in that case, we will be unwilling for it to be reasonably likely that we end up married to someone we don’t love, which is precisely what the considerations discussed above indicate may well turn out to happen at some point in the future of any marriage. So marriage entered into with the intention to keep the relevant promises would be imprudent. On the other hand, you might go into marriage without any such intention to honour your commitment; you may simply think to yourself that if things work out, fine, and if not, you can always break your promise as a last resort. But if breaking your marriage vows is wrong—if the moral force of that promise cannot be dissolved by a change in feelings on the part of the promisor—then making a marriage vow without any intention of keeping it is itself wrong for the same reason any insincere promise is wrong. On the other hand, if it is permissible unilaterally to break off a marriage relationship, and it is this which allows you to make the marriage commitment sincerely and without imprudence, then such a commitment just seems pointless, for there won’t be any significant difference between committing and not committing yourself.

English Crime-Fighting Pushes the Technological Envelope

 The bobby's secret weapon in the eternal struggle against evil is an infernally clever new 'robotic mind' capable of performing literally dozens of calculations per hour. The mysterious new electro-static crime-fighing brain is called by its secret code name, 'Commodore 64':

Consider: in this day of powerful servers that connect computers around the globe, the link between the London Metropolitan Police’s communication system and that of the Tube’s Transport Police is a pleasant police officer named Vanessa, who reads reports of crimes in progress off of one system and inputs that news into the other. This is because the communication system of the Metropolitan Police is based on a Commodore 64 computer, which may be out of date and incompatible with the Windows operating system but it works fine and everybody in the department knows how to use it, and no one is going to invest the time or money to upgrade.

 

The Hover and Hear Accent Page

The Hover and Hear page lets you 'hover' your mouse over a word and hear it pronounced in dozens of different regional English accents. You can even try out long-dead languages. German is represented as well, although not as richly as English.

Here's a sample: the Liverpool Scouse accent page, in which you can hear an oddly mournful-sounding woman pronouncing words like 'hunger' the way the 'pudlians do. You can even string together your own Scouse audio-poem by just hovering your mouse over words like 'holy-nail-honey-horn.'

Some Shit for the Kids!

I am occasionally accused of playing into lazy stereotypes of Germans and German society. Such as the admirable harrowing frankness about bodily functions displayed in Germany. Urination or menstruation (g), for instance, not to mention the #1 on the German hit parade, defecation. 

So I doubt anyone would believe me if I said there was a children's book in Germany which featured, on its front cover, a picture of the hero with a pile of fresh, steaming shit on his head.

Zurich Sprayer, Horsehead, Purty Trees

The Zurich Sprayer is at it again. The first photos is his latest, which is showing up on walls all over Duesseldorf (here, the tax agency. Symbolic?). The second photo is a horsehead, signifying the carriage entrance to a courtyard off the Brunnenstrasse. The last photos are some nice fall-foliage shots. Enjoy!

 

Homeopathy Catches on in the U.S.

Speaking of odd beliefs, a surprising number of Germans who you woulnd't expect to believe in homeopathic medicine actually do. Homeopathy is a quaint 19th-century pseudoscience that, unlike phrenology or Lombrosian criminology, lives on. Homeopathic folk-remedies are so popular in Germany, in fact, that most health-insurance providers will pay (g) for them. And now, it looks like homeopathy is catching on in the States, as well:

While the gold standard for drugs and vaccines is proof of effectiveness in the form of randomized, double-blind placebo-controlled trials, there is no rigorous evidence that homeopathy works better than a placebo for any condition. That hasn't stopped a growing number of Americans from using it to battle a panoply of ailments, including arthritis, herpes and flu. A federally funded survey in 2007 found that in the previous year nearly 5 million Americans used homeopathic remedies, made from substances including duck liver, heavy metals such as arsenic, herbs and poison ivy, and diluted in water until they are virtually undetectable.

A form of medicine invented by a German physician in the 1700s, homeopathy is predicated on the belief that "like cures like" -- that a disease can be treated using a substance that produces similar symptoms in healthy people. It seeks to stimulate the body's ability to heal itself through the ingestion of highly diluted substances that might be toxic at higher doses. Even though homeopathic medicines use substances so diluted that virtually no molecule of the active ingredient remains, proponents believe that water contains the "memory" of the original substance.

Many scientists dismiss homeopathy, which defies the laws of chemistry and physics, as quackery. Robert Park, a prominent physicist and critic at the University of Maryland who has written extensively about pseudoscience, has called it "voodoo science."

N.B.: I don't really have anything against homeopathic remedies. In fact, I find them to be one of the endearingly backward-looking aspects of life in Germany. I don't care what people want to spend their money on, as long as the the industry's tightly-regulated, which seems to be the case in Germany. Although perhaps someone will correct me in comments!

European Beer: A Tradition of Heritage

Scientology: Public Enemy Number 5,633

Well, I just unloaded a 'manuscript' on some sucker publisher, so now I've got a bit more time to blog.

Why not celebrate with a long-ish post that will surely attract a zillion comments? Without further ado --

I've often commented with bemusement on the German obsession with Scientology. Above, we see a demonstration against Scientology that I passed by last year; the protesters were holding signs asking motorists to honk if they were 'against' Scientology, and dozens did just that.

The protesters belong to a group called 'Anonymous', which declared 'war'  (g) against Scientology last year. Hackers associated with the group have hacked into Scientology's computers, releasing its internal data (g). I must confess, it was a tad unsettling to see people going out into the streets to call upon their fellow citizens to openly express their dislike of some religious minority. (Yes, plenty of people will say they're not a religion, but to me, the answer to that question -- even if anyone could agree on what a satisfactory answer would look like -- isn't really important.) I'm not going to throw around any accusations here, but this is really the sort of thing that Germans might want to think twice about doing.

But it's not just individual crusaders. As I've detailed elsewhere on this blog, the German government spends millions of taxpayer dollars investigating and monitoring Scientology, which has led to mild diplomatic tension with the U.S. government, which considers official surveillance of and discrimination against Scientology members a form of discrimination. 

But it's all for a good cause, right? Because Scientology preys on the weak and the ignorant? Well, not so much, according to an article called '6 Bullshit Facts about Psychology that Everyone Believes': 

Studies show cult members are just as intelligent, if not more so, than the general public. And around 95 percent of cult members are perfectly sane (when they join up, anyway), with no history at all of real psychological problems. They're not stupid, and they're not crazy.

Of course this only serves to make cults even scarier. How in the hell do these groups get people--who are every bit as sane and smart as your best friend--to join up?

OK, ask yourself this: Why do rebellious biker types all immediately go out and start dressing and talking exactly like other biker types?

As social animals we are hard-wired to want to belong to a group. It's a need as basic and real as hunger or sex. When we get cut off from our group--say we lose a job, or move to a new city, or break up with our girlfriend--we go a little crazy. Cults are very, very good at finding people in that exact moment of weakness, and saying exactly the right things....

If you can't remember ever doing something dumb and embarrassing because you were feeling lonely and rejected, well, either you're very young, or you were just too drunk at the time to retain the memory.

And once these people are in the cult they realize that, no, not all cult members wind up as part of some bizarre suicide ceremony. Most lead normal, successful lives.

Now, take it for what it's worth, since it's from a site called Cracked Magazine. But I don't find anything very implausible about this. People can combine strong beliefs in very odd things with leading outwardly normal, law-abiding lives.

I'm still trying to understand why German authorities and ordinary citizens (like all the ones that honked in response to the protesters) are so terrified of Scientology. I suppose it's probably because Scientology is weird, it's American, and it's commercial. But that still doesn't add up to a justification for widespread government surveillance and hacker campaigns and the like. I find Scientology's beliefs just as odd as the next person, but I see them as essentially harmless, because:

(1) My general orientation is 'the more odd beliefs, the better' This may be be a personality quirk, or it may be my Anglo-Saxonness live-and-let-live-iness. Whenever I see demonstrations against Scientology, I'm always reminded of Ralf Dahrendorf's quip that if the Beatles had been a German band, a campaign called 'Aktion Saubere Buehne' would have immediately emerged to stop them.  

(2) I've never heard any accusations against Scientology that weren't comparable to what plenty of other institutions do -- in particular, certain religious institutions subsidized by German church taxes. For instance, I don't recall anyone accusing Scientology of covering up a massive sex abuse scandal for decades.

(3) even if one were able to stamp out Scientology (as disturbing a goal as that is), is anyone naive enough to think that another comparable organization wouldn't immediately replace it? People don't join Scientology because they're in love with Xenu, they join because it provides them with a sense of purpose and meaning in life, and a community to rely on. These are universal human desires which will find some outlet somewhere, and often find outlets much, much uglier and more dangerous than Scientology.

Maggie as Only Her Husband Has Ever Seen Her

This picture comes from:

a) The cover of a 1983 album by legendary British punk group Sydenham Shirtlifters.

b) A late Andy Warhol.

c) A scientific experiment.

d) A Labour party campaign poster.

e) A Scientology indoctrination film.

Answer -- and bonus hideously-distorted Prime Minister -- after the jump!