A Gänsemarkt New Years Eve is underway! Dinner at Rene’s at Seven, then Silwester at Giovanni’s….
Frohes Neues Jahr und ein Guten Rutsch to all of you!
The Mad Monk of Steinstrasse
A sometimes tongue-in-cheek look at the lives and times and travels of the denizens of Steinstrasse, Herford, Nordrhein-Westfalen, Germany.
A Gänsemarkt New Years Eve is underway! Dinner at Rene’s at Seven, then Silwester at Giovanni’s….
Frohes Neues Jahr und ein Guten Rutsch to all of you!
The Mad Monk of Steinstrasse
A traditional Polish greeting for a traditional German Christmas Eve. Here it’s called ‘Heilige Abend’ or ‘Holy Evening’ in Poland, it’s ‘Wigilia’. But the same feelings are inherent in all of the languages;
Na szczęście, na zdrowie, na tę świętą Wigilię!
To happiness (luck, good fortune), health, and a holy Christmas Eve!
Here on Stone Street, we’ll be meeting at Giovanni’s Mona Lisa after the individual families have had their meals and ‘Bescherung’ or the opening of the gifts. We may even sing ‘O Tannenbaum’
Christmas Day, or Ersten Feiertag (first Christmas celebration, the second being the 26th, Boxing Day, or as Wencelslaus would say, the Feast of St. Stephen) I’ll be visiting the Schalt family in Eickum to eat waffles. Sabine and I worked together at Wedeco and she is now dedicated to the joys of raising three children. Her husband shares the same name as my grandson-Gideon! All and all, a Frohes Fest!
LiveArt was held in the restaurant Nil last night and it was one great session!! Pan Flute, operetta, a belter, smooth guitar, a voice that alternated between Armstrong and Mathis, and a very funny stand-up comic, along with ambience, great people and a friend I haven’t seen in awhile all came together. Thanks and congratulations to Juergen and company for putting together a great show!
Any of you friends and family interested in showcasing your talents, come across the pond, you’ll be in great company…
Tomorrow night’s a promise of fun and interesting conversation. Künstlertreff will be in the Restaurant Nil, a much larger venue than the Café Schiller for a special Christmas presentation. Many of the Stone Street denizens will be in attendance. You can get an idea of the way things work from THIS LINK.
Local talent is good. Very good, in fact, and the audience is lively. I’ll get back to you later in the week with my thoughts. In the mean time, I’m filling my head with string theory, alternate universes, dimensions, and cookies. The cookies help me think. The rest of it makes me think that it all breaks down to daydreams and the time and place we think we think them in…..
Tomorrow night’s a promise of fun and interesting conversation. Künstlertreff will be in the Restaurant Nil, a much larger venue than the Café Schiller for a special Christmas presentation. Many of the Stone Street denizens will be in attendance. You can get an idea of the way things work from THIS LINK.
Local talent is good. Very good, in fact, and the audience is lively. I’ll get back to you later in the week with my thoughts. In the mean time, I’m filling my head with string theory, alternate universes, dimensions, and cookies. The cookies help me think. The rest of it makes me think that it all breaks down to daydreams and the time and place we think we think them in…..
A few weeks back, we had Kirmis in Herford. Sounds religious, doesn’t it?? It’s actually something like a county fair, with rides, cotton candy, shooting galleries, arts and crafts…
One photo I like is this:
The building in the background is the old postoffice (now a restaurant) and the fellow standing on the roof is Wittekind (or Widukind) who frequently destroyed Charlemagne’s troops until his miraculous conversion to Christianity….
As he stands high above the Rathausplatz,we can wonder if he really is a Jumper.
It’s not every day that someone from Steinstrasse goes on vacation. It’s more like every other day. One of the guys just got back from Gran Canaria and is off again to Turkey. Another just returned from Greece, where he had his wallet lifted in Athens and returned to Herford to find it in his mailbox (without the money, but with all of his papers intact, a savings of weeks of bureaucracy).
Not being a beach bum, I find my solace in train rides to places of historical interest. I limit myself to one or two days and if I need more, I take it, or them, as in photos and notes. If I were thirty years younger, you might say I’m trying to find myself, but since I always know where I am, that can’t be it.
It’s more fun to travel with a companion, so the ad is up again:
WANTED: travelling companion, female, between the ages of 35 and 50. Must be beautiful, intelligent, and witty. Apllicants apply to ME.
Robert Burns
better not to plan today. I’ve made three today, and missed two trains and a bus because I found something interesting to think about in between.
It’s a cold, rainy morning on Steinstrasse. Golden October was here for a bit, I got in a few very nice photowanderings and enjoyed sitting outside drinking coffee. This weather is a preview of the long Nordrhein-Westfalen winter. Winter here is a lot harder on the soul than it is on the body. Shovelling snow is a snap (no, I don’t have to do it myself) and most of it is gone by the time the sun gets to the twelve o’clock position. With the right angle and the right light, rain can be interesting. Cold is a matter for good shoes and clothing. Golden October is a matter for the imagination……
Tonight is TextArt night at the Schiller Café. Readings from poets and other writers of their works. My German ear is being tuned by listening to the radio and reading Thomas Mann’s “Der Zauberberg” (The Magic Mountain). It is a great book in any language, but reading it in the original is a joy of discovery. There are nuances and descriptive phrases that don’t always translate. If you haven’t read it,do so, there are several good English translations.
Surprise, surprise. It’s raining. I’m tempted to put the Nikon in the water-proof sack, don my Gore-Tex and Quick Dry and just keep walking until I’ve a hundred grey, wet photos. I haven’t done a rainy day walk for a while now.
Stone Street’s going to be quiet for awhile. Giovanni and Nora are leaving for Majorca in the morning and Mona Lisa will be dark until the 28th. Eckard’s got another week in Gran Canaria and the rest of the boys will be scattered around town, playing cards or rolling dice in their secondary environments. I’ll be in either Almundo or Lamäng telling stories to my notebooks or the little writing machine. The only good thing about Mona Lisa being closed is that I can get more work done.
With the exception of a black gnat invasion (I walked through two or three clouds of them on my way downtown) it was a quiet day. Nursing a cold and a spider bite, I was pretty much out of gas for the day, although I did have a pretty interesting encounter on Saturday…
there’s an older man, late nineties (doesn’t look it) who ambles through the Gänse Markt using a walker. He stops people randomly to let them know how good they should feel about being able to get around unassisted. He stops me (because of the back pack and the hiking shoes) frequently. This time, he went a little further and showed me the scars of an entry wound behind his left ear and the exit wound in his forehead, received in the retreat from Russia in 1944. It was -55° C(that’s 67 below, kiddies) and the snow was very deep, and the Russians not very far behind. AND he lived to tell about it. Truth is indeed, at the least, more interesting than fiction.
Sunday, August 22, 2010 |
ROBERT LANZA, MD - The Huffington Post |
This is a pretty good overview of what those of us who are studying the nature of consciousness -- what your faithful editor does when not doing SR -- are exploring. This is all part of an important emerging trend, which is pushing the old reductionist materialist paradigm into crisis. |
Recent discoveries require us to rethink our understanding of history. "The histories of the universe," said renowned physicist Stephen Hawking "depend on what is being measured, contrary to the usual idea that the universe has an objective observer-independent history." Is it possible we live and die in a world of illusions? Physics tells us that objects exist in a suspended state until observed, when they collapse in to just one outcome. Paradoxically, whether events happened in the past may not be determined until sometime in your future -- and may even depend on actions that you haven't taken yet. In 2002, scientists carried out an amazing experiment, which showed that particles of light "photons" knew -- in advance −- what their distant twins would do in the future. They tested the communication between pairs of photons -- whether to be either a wave or a particle. Researchers stretched the distance one of the photons had to take to reach its detector, so that the other photon would hit its own detector first. The photons taking this path already finished their journeys -− they either collapse into a particle or don't before their twin encounters a scrambling device. Somehow, the particles acted on this information before it happened, and across distances instantaneously as if there was no space or time between them. They decided not to become particles before their twin ever encountered the scrambler. It doesn't matter how we set up the experiment. Our mind and its knowledge is the only thing that determines how they behave. Experiments consisten! tly confirm these observer-dependent effects. More recently (Science 315, 966, 2007), scientists in France shot photons into an apparatus, and showed that what they did could retroactively change something that had already happened. As the photons passed a fork in the apparatus, they had to decide whether to behave like particles or waves when they hit a beam splitter. Later on - well after the photons passed the fork - the experimenter could randomly switch a second beam splitter on and off. It turns out that what the observer decided at that point, determined what the particle actually did at the fork in the past. At that moment, the experimenter chose his history. Of course, we live in the same world. Particles have a range of possible states, and it's not until observed that they take on properties. So until the present is determined, how can there be a past? According to visionary physicist John Wheeler (who coined the word "black hole"), "The quantum principle shows that there is a sense in which what an observer will do in the future defines what happens in the past." Part of the past is locked in when you observe things and the "probability waves collapse." But there's still uncertainty, for instance, as to what's underneath your feet. If you dig a hole, there's a probability you'll find a boulder. Say you hit a boulder, the glacial movements of the past that account for the rock being in exactly that spot will change as described in the Science experiment. But what about dinosaur fossils? Fossils are really no different than anything else in nature. For instance, the carbon atoms in your body are "fossils" created in the heart of exploding supernova stars. Bottom line: reality begins and ends with the observer. "We are participators," Wheeler said "in bringing about something of the universe in the distant past." Before his death, he stated that when observing light from a quasar, we set up a quantum observation on an enormously large scale. It means, he said, the measurements made on the light now, determines the path it took billions of years ago. Like the light from Wheeler's quasar, historical events such as who killed JFK, might also depend on events that haven't occurred yet. There's enough uncertainty that it could be one person in one set of circumstances, or another person in another. Although JFK was assassinated, you only possess fragments of information about the event. But as you investigate, you collapse more and more reality. According to biocentrism, space and time are relative to the individual observer - we each carry them around like turtles with shells. History is a biological phenomenon − it's the logic of what you, the animal observer experiences. You have multiple possible futures, each with a different history like in the Science experiment. Consider the JFK example: say two gunmen shot at JFK, and there was an equal chance one or the other killed him. This would be a situation much like the famous Schrödinger's cat experiment, in which the cat is both alive and dead − both possibilities exist until you open the box and investigate. "We must re-think all that we have ever learned about the past, human evolution and the nature of reality, if we are ever to find our true place in the cosmos," says Constance Hilliard, a historian of science at UNT. Choices you haven't made yet might determine which of your childhood friends are still alive, or whether your dog got hit by a car yesterday. In fact, you might even collapse realities that determine whether Noah's Ark sank. "The universe," said John Haldane, "is not only queerer than we suppose, but queerer than we can suppose." |
Not bad. Twice as far and as long as the last. Managed oncoming bikes with little or no panic and went up and down ramps through the tunnels without losing it. Ten more years…… nah, I’m getting it.
big thoughts this morning. should i ride my bike or take a train. the odd hours and days of KG (PT) have screwed up my internal clock to the point where i’m not getting about as joyfully as is my wont. one more week and i’m a leave in the wind or a rock rolling downhill again. something there is that does not love a schedule……
It’s rained most of the day. For the most part a lovely gentle rain, with short bouts of torrent. Sitting alone under the umbrellas of Almundo, I was given short, but delicious treats by the gods. I was the sole judge of a wet tee shirt contest in which the participants were unaware of their participation. No one won but me.
It distracted me from my writing, but there’s always late tonight or early tomorrow morning. It rarely rains Perfectly, I enjoyed it while it lasted.
Associated thought from Shakespeare:
The quality of mercy is not strain'd,
It droppeth as the gentle rain from heaven
Upon the place beneath. It is twice blest:
It blesseth him that gives and him that takes.
Mercy, forgiveness, the absence of malice or hatred or revenge, a quality we should all cultivate.
The hardest part about being a map nut is actually getting to the places on the maps. My disassociation with the space-time continuum has a tendency to turn plans and map-reading sessions into memories. Cogito ergo I did that……
One of the luxuries about retirement is not having to do the frenetic summer dance, that is, fitting it all into two weeks in July or August. Time frame for serious wandering is September and October. Stayed tuned for the maps-
On the writing side, it’s all the Yellow House. A few short stories, but they’re not ready for the world yet.
(and that’s a good thing)
Soccer: Germany and Spain are off to the Half-finals along with Uruguay and the Netherlands. Germany destroyed Argentina 4-0 and the Hollanders surprised Brazil. My vote says the endgame will pit Germany against the Netherlands.
Sunday means cafés and walking paths will be full. They mean families will be together and about 30% of the German population (I’ll check the statistic again, but it sounds right) will be in church. It’s the last day of the week on the German calendar, as opposed to the first in the US. Nothing wrong with either view, it’s just a convention.
The point of my writing today is the weather. For the first time this week, it’ll be under 90° F. 90 is my breaking point. I don’t take long walks, don’t do anything strenuous. I become even more of a vegetable than I normally am. Even though it’s walking weather, I’m passing on the obligatory Sunday walk and opting for working on my book notes. I found a few things I’d forgotten about and they’ve brought me back to a unified way of thinking about the plot. I’ve been having problems with the disjunctive temporal aspects of it and the notes are about space and time. No more hints today…..
Be aware.
Book titles, like all language, don’t always translate literally. Erich Maria Remarque’s classic “All Quiet on the Western Front” is titled “Im Westen nichts neues” or “nothing new in the west”. This post means, not much happening here today.
I watched the US match at home yesterday, then the German match at Giovanni’s.
Picked up a couple of blisters on my right foot climbing the hill in Desenberg day before yesterday, so the travels will take a break for a couple of days. I’ve been studying the maps and looking for a good train ride.
I’m thinking about taking the train down to Warburg today. I cleaned the apartment yesterday, so it would be best for me to avoid living here all day in order to preserve order for at least tweny-fout hours……
Why the hell do I use ellipsis so often?
Maybe because this is how I see myself-