German Joys

'Lovers by Polarization' by Jodie Zicherman

Move over, John Ashbery.  Make room for Jodie Zicherman.

From an email with the title "momma excitement," sent by Ms. Zicherman from Russia to thousands of people who might be interested in cheap prescription drugs by mail, comes this whimsical elegy (I've added slight formatting changes):

Lovers by Polarization

Or surf. He be region, doctoral.

was inventive beacon.

I crucial or jumps absurd.

The an disperse soup miniature.

empire a sensual. chat ashes at tragedy.

Or as irritable reprint. In in it shack my tolerant.

Go or woodwork. Have a underworld italian shady.

As do choke watchdog grow.

ignorance as epilogue. mature no said inward.

The collide. In celsius toad peasant.

Of so it glove of personally. by he estate.

And the helm posting distal. For to unpack cumbersome gateway.

innings be subsequent. overstock to youth grab.

For correlate. I camp. At the beta, obscurity.

A the crawler abolition. The roast Are taught.

Go is compute. Of an vacation dissenting extra.

virtuous my structural. no coastline, youth is blurb.

Which flawless? With go synthetic body.

I billiards you liturgy. Which diffuse.

In it breathtaking. My as disbursement grateful elemental.

lovers by polarization. at lust, corona or game.

[h/t PD]

Sir, Please Open the Folder "Juggzz"

This I didn't know:

Last month a US court ruled that border agents can search your laptop, or any other electronic device, when you're entering the country. They can take your computer and download its entire contents, or keep it for several days. Customs and Border Patrol has not published any rules regarding this practice,...

But the US is not alone. British customs agents search laptops for pornography. And there are reports on the internet of this sort of thing happening at other borders, too. You might not like it, but it's a fact. So how do you protect yourself?

The article contains further tips on how to protect yourself, but they're not exactly easy.  Consider yourself warned.

The Old Bailey Online

In a perfect fusing of two of my favorite things in the world -- technology and criminal justice, an English university has just digitized and put online the "Proceedings of the Old Bailey", London's central criminal court, for the years 1674-1834.  The Proceedings are short reports of criminal trials geared toward a popular audience.  The website's authors call the over 100,000 trial descriptions "the largest body of texts detailing the lives of non-elite people ever published."

On this day in 1742, for instance, we read that: "Christopher Peterson, otherwise Jack the Sailor, was indicted with one William Briers, for stealing an Oil-Skin Bag, and seventeen Pound Weight of Tea, the Property of William Barton, out of the Shop of the said William Barton." In his defense, the prisoner had this to say: "I have nothing at all to say. I leave it in your Hands, my Lord. I have no Friend in the World." Verdict: Guilty. Sentence: Death. Fortunately, "The Jury recommended him for Mercy," which would generally mean his sentence would be commuted to something like whipping or branding, or possibly "transportation" to Australia or the U.S.

The iPhone Smoothie

While Germans are waiting with bated breath for their new iPhones, Americans -- wasteful and easily bored cretins that they are -- are already throwing theirs into blenders, just for fun. Evidence of late-capitalist decadence here:

[h/t Lumpi]

We Can See Your Bloody Pixels

This is really a pan-European problem, but Germany is one of the worst offenders. Worst offenders in what, you ask?

In using crude blowups of digital photos in expensive printed flyers, that's what. Look at the example here, taken at random from a printed flyer advertising a Malian cultural festival*:

Check out the guy on the left. His dreadlocks look like misshapen, slime-encrusted tentacles, and he appears to be playing some kind of exotic Malian music instrument formed by a bunch of tiny blocks of wood. This brochure, like so many others I've seen featuring crudely-zoomed digital photos, was printed out on paper, no doubt at some expense, and distributed to thousands of strangers.

Let me make something perfectly clear. If the only picture you can find of your subject is a tiny digital thumbnail, you do not blow that thumbnail up to whatever size is required for your printing format, thereby turning the subject of the photo into Mario from fucking Donkey Kong. That is so 1997. So Albanian internet cafe. So high-school play poster.

Instead, you contact the photo's subject and ask for a better photo. Or you take one yourself. Or you redesign your flyer.

Got it? Good. End of lecture.

* To keep things in perspective, let me add that as between living in a country in which there are cultural norms in favor of pretty brochures and living in one in which Malian cultural festivals happen just around the corner from where I live, I will choose the latter. But why can't I live in a country that has both?

I Like Windows Vista

Please excuse the geeky post, but it has a public-service component: Citizens, you need not fear Windows Vista! I recently got a computer with Windows Vista, and feared the worst. I must say I'm pleasantly surprised. Before I get flamed in the comments, let me say that I know there are other, more elegant operating systems out there, and that the people who design and use them are good and kind. However, I've gotten so used to working with Windows I can't really change now.

I had a lot of misgivings about Windows Vista, but so far they've proven unfounded. All of my old programs work, although some needed a bit of tweaking. Vista sometimes slaps a huge warning across the screen saying the program is "not compatible," but it will let you install it anyway. When you run programs the first few times, the screen goes dramatically dark and asks you whether you (as opposed to a Romanian hacker) really asked for that program to be run, but this behavior stops after you say 'yes' a few times.

I also had feared that the new operating system would continue Microsoft's annoying habit of giving you a nice, shiny graphical GUIs while burying the really important files you needed to access in obscure locations such as /applications/local settings/Version32/App/. Not so. You can get to a standard Windows Explorer interface pretty quickly, and the file structure is actually quite simple. The search function is available inside pretty much every application, and it's truly lightning-fast.

Microsoft has left a lot of the functions the same, and in the same place, which makes the transition easy. A files-and-settings-transfer program called Windows Easy Transfer is provided. It's actually not all that bloody 'easy' unless you buy Microsoft's special "cable," but it does let you use other options, such as wireless transfer, or burning your files onto CDs. Oh sure, it says it will also work with DVDs, but the spectacularly unhelpful program wouldn't do so and wouldn't tell me why. Anyway, if you can get it to work (I had to burn 12 CDs!), it will transfer a pretty astonishing amount of personalized data, including Word macros, initialization settings, and every single aspect of how Outlook works and everything you've ever stored in Outlook.

Finally, Windows Vista is pretty. It looks bright, unfussy, and logically laid-out. The buttons are big, moist-looking and shiny, like fresh Gummi bears. Switching between applications, or monitoring ongoing processes, is a lot easier, since tiny windowlets pop up to let you know just what a program's doing in the background. So far, Vista has been surprisingly stable, even as I've used some pretty involved applications that were not designed to run under it.

I never thought I'd say this, but I, for once, am perfectly satisfied with a Windows product.

Natascha Adamowsky on Computer Games

Everyone's talking about computer games! Regulating or outlawing them, that is. American politicians are falling over themselves to criticize the games; Illinois even passed a law (the Safe Games Illinois Act) calling for mandatory labeling of computer games. German politicians have also stepped into the fray, after some violent incidents in Germay linked to young men who played violent video games. Conservative politician and Bavarian Interior Minister Guenther Beckstein has even proposed (G) sentencing makers of games that "glorify violence" to a year in prison.

Die Welt recently interviewed (G) Natascha Adamowsky, an academic in Berlin who studies the history of culture and of games. Violence has always been closely linked to games, she says. Video games are a step forward compared to past centuries, where competition produced piles of real, not just virtual, corpses. She's not averse to regulating the content of the nastiest specimens, but also believes that some of the criticism of violent computer games is driven by general Luddism and computerphobic intellectuals' inherent fear of new technologies. A few excerpts of her interview, translated by yours truly:

WELT.de: How do you react to the word “Killer Games”?

Natascha Adamowsky: It’s an understandable moral reaction to say that there should be no killing in games. We live in a culture in which we reject killing other people even in games. However, history provides many examples of games in which one or the other player does not survive. A game is not a morality play.

WELT.de: For example, the Colosseum in Rome?

Adamowsky: Or among the Eskimos in Greenland, who had plenty of fun twisting each others’ ears off. Or medieval football games, where villages played against each other and beat each other to a pulp. Or during the classical age in Central America, in which ritual demanded that the losing team be killed after the game.  There are also completely modern deadly games, such as when young people bet on how long they can drive on the wrong side of the road. The American ethnologist Clifford Geertz called this “deep play” – a game in which your own life is at stake. But the classic children’s game, where children “shoot” each other with sticks and yell “Bang! Boom! [in German: „Peng! Puff!“] you’re dead!“ can be seen on every playground.

German Joys Goes to Poland

Hello everybody. Sorry about the light posting lately. First it was a rush of last-minute tasks as the semester ended, then, this weekend, I spilled coffee on my Toshiba Satellite laptop keyboard. The spill forced me to become much more intimate with my laptop, which is a healthy and natural process nobody should be ashamed of.

I didn't know this before, but it's actually pretty easy to fix laptop keyboards (at least Toshiba ones, that is), unless the spilled liquid goes deep within them. Removing the keyboard is surprisingly easy: you pry up a plastic strip, remove three screws, and then you can lift the keyboard up, exposing the guts of the laptop.

The keyboard is connected to the rest of the laptop by a thin, flat brown foil strip with micro-thin gold connectors at the end. You can just pull these (carefully!) out of their socket, and walk around with the keyboard. I let the coffee drip out over my sink, and then cleaned the whole think with alcohol-based keyboard cleaner

The important thing is that afterwards, you have to let the keyboard dry completely before you reattach it. This means propping it in front of a fan for 48 straight hours, until every molecule of moisture deep within the plastic and foil guts of the keyboard is gone. (If you plug it in too soon, before it's totally dry, your computer will go crazy, thinking that you're somehow pressing the y,5,r,s, and control keys simultaneously, 4000 times a second). It takes a while, but it works, and it's a hell of a lot cheaper than the repair shop.

So now, after providing you with an excuse for the lack of recent posts, here comes another excuse. The German Joys editorial team flies tomorrow to Poland for a mildly-needed vacation. The team will start in Gdansk, then meander down to finally end up in Krakow, before flying from Krakow back to German Joys Plaza on the 29th. I hope a few posts will show up, since Typepad, in the course of recent service improvements, has actually fixed their email-posting option, which is a big plus.

But before I go, I will deliver you a very special Word of the Week, and perhaps one or two other things. Thanks for your patience.

MerkelCast 1.0

Here's Chancellor Angela Merkel's first Podcast. Quite tech-savvy! Non-German speakers will not be able to determine whether Merkel's (a) describing her country's hopes for the World Cup; (b) registering her sadness at the recent death of a prominent German politician or (c) announcing a subsidy program for conversion of certain mineral deposits into alternative bio-diesel.

Famous Intellectual Distrusts Internet

Juergen Habermas recently won the Bruno Kreisky Prize for the advancement of human rights.  From Sign and Sight, this excerpt of his acceptance speech, in which he said some interesting things about the European Union, then said this about the Internet:

"Use of the Internet has both broadened and fragmented the contexts of communication. This is why the Internet can have a subversive effect on intellectual life in authoritarian regimes. But at the same time, the less formal, horizontal cross-linking of communication channels weakens the achievements of traditional media. This focuses the attention of an anonymous and dispersed public on select topics and information, allowing citizens to concentrate on the same critically filtered issues and journalistic pieces at any given time. The price we pay for the growth in egalitarianism offered by the Internet is the decentralised access to unedited stories. In this medium, contributions by intellectuals lose their power to create a focus."

I've read a bit of Habermas with profit.  However, I have a few questions here.

• Why is Juergen Habermas winning a human-rights prize?  Sure, intellectuals enjoy giving each other prizes.  But Juergen Habermas just sits in an office writing books.  Then sometimes gives speeches.  Shouldn't the prize go, as it has before, to someone who directly defends human rights, perhaps even risking death?