I hope I didn’t miss one?

Why do we make little girls into little princesses instead of preparing them to be wise women and queens who take responsibility?

Many women never get out of that role and stick to naive and romantic world view.

Modern TV also sticks to that behaviour: all those Top Model reality TV series enforce that stupid behaviour – just be pretty and adorable.

Who do we like to eat saints? Is that a weird leftover from the holy communion or simply greedy consumerism?

The good old sentence "when are you getting married" is considered no longer to be "politically correct".

Thanks to Feminism young women are no longer pressured to marry, mate and pump out clones as young as possible. At least that’s what we pretend to tell ourselves in our modern lives.

But all the pressure to look sexy and adorable is all about being a good catch for mating. So the old biological pressure is still there – but simply disguised as a "personality cult" (I am so cool and adorable) and consumerism ("buy this and your social ranking rises" – translation: more people want to mate with you).

We still are unable to differentiate between a person’s biological physical capabilities and their true identity. Our sexuality is not our identity – it is just a genetic mission every member of your sex is programmed to follow.

Red lips are a physical indicator that a female is aroused – not an indicator that you spent six years at an University …

It is such a joke when Women buy for example makeup to bring out "their personality" – it is actually only about advertising your fertility to sperm donors.

A new Post-Feminist-Movement wants females to be wild, sexy and smart, but that won’t stop the hormones from flowing and won’t guarantee happy relationships either.

I am a "real women" – I stuffed myself to have extra fat reserves for growing a baby inside of me …

Especially sarcastic is the modern brain fart of "being a real women".

What does that mean?

Following your "female instincts" and therefore following your genetic programming anyway by simply getting humped by the best available partner?

Any woman – real or not – is built to birth.

Your fat ass is nothing else, but an energy storage when you get pregnant and nature has designed you to be a perfect birthing machine. Mother Nature is cruel: she gives a shit about your great personality, those many hours in the gym to get rid of that "baby food" or long years of education.

But we are not completely slaves to nature.

How about being a "real person" first – understanding that women are as much shaped to serve  the genetic programming as males are.

Unless both men and women understand and are truly in command of their sexuality there won’t be a new age of consciousness  and equality between the sexes.

Let’s be honest: isn’t Christmas the best time to be a cookie monster? Yummy!

We humans can see much better than dogs, but they "out-sniff" us. Maybe smells are for dogs as sensational as colours are for us? (not counting all the bad odours out there)

It’s always nice when a gentleman takes care of a females Camel Toe.

I am sure that will bring quite a few hits from search engines – for all the wrong reasons.

I grew up watching a lot of SciFi series aimed at kids – it still was the space age and we all wanted to Astronauts (and not bloody rapper or skinny super models).

Barry Gray composed the soundtracks of many famous British TV shows.

I love his style: driven, funky and almost always cheerful. A bit militaristic sometimes – but most SciFi was based on military organizations: like SHADO in UFO or Captain Scarlet.

His music also reflected the positive attitude to the future – something we finally lost in the 1980’s (thank you so much Riddley Scott and Chernobyl).

Click player below to start the UFO – Opening Theme:

Click player below to start the Mysteron Theme from Captain Scarlet:

Click player below to start the Loch Ness Monster Suite:

I totally ignored the big German Unification party. For me the united Germany is already normality.

I can remember the day we “united” – I was on a plane to London and happy to have left Teutonia and all the hysteria.

I consider the reunification process a great failure – thanks to one man: Helmut Kohl. He suffered like our modern Kaiser Wilhelm the II. from delusions of grandeur.

Many smart people warned us about the many dangers and difficulties of uniting these totally different countries. Especially the economic stumbling blocks were easy to spot.

But Herr Kohl couldn’t make history fast enough and wasted a lot of money and opportunities to “get it done”. I blame him for many social and economical problems we have now on him.

Taking the piss out of East-Germans: My first Banana

Today we still pump billions of Euros into the East, while millons of Ossis have fled their side of the fence. Many towns and rural areas in the east are deserted – so deserted that wild animals making a comeback from Hungary.

Those left behind have no jobs and are often badly educated and motivated. So it’s no surprise that east Germans more often vote from Neo-Nazis and Communists than their western brethren.

And I don’t blame these people: they are the toxic leftover of a rushed unification.

Today the west is in need of renovation and additional funding. Many eastern cities have brilliant infrastructure, but hardly any citizens, while western cities are rotting.

This has to change: the west is no longer the “golden west” and the east no longer the “wild east”.

All of Germany has to be treated equally.

PS: I hope that in 20 years time we can celebrate with the good people of Korea their reunification – which will be even more difficult to manage …

PPS: Great thanks for Michael Gorbachev – he really is the man behind the reunification, because he allowed it to happen. No thanks to Ronald Reagan or David Hasselhof!

Everyone has his / her own Christmas movie they like to indulge to get that "happy family feeling".

Strangely Tim Burton’s "Nightmare before Christmas" touches that very nerve perfectly for me: it’s silly, it’s emotional and very funny.

And mixing Halloween and Christmas somehow expresses perfectly our modern approach to the whole affair for me …

But it’s not just the movie that’s so great – it’s soundtrack is brilliant too and feature many great songs from Maestro Danny Elfman:

Click player below to start the great Overture:

Click player below to start Jack singing "What’s this?":

So if you haven’t seen the movie yet – get it on your Christmas list.

Compared to the overall size of our planet our atmosphere and the habitable outer shell are extremely thin layers.

This biosphere is very vulnerable and took millions of years to evolve.

For example: It took plants and trees millions of years to create an Oxygen-rich atmosphere.

That is why we have to monitor the atmospheres composition so carefully: any change can have an huge impact on the planet’s biosphere and therefore our lives.

Just start the player, lean back, close your eyes and enjoy …

We humans are so evil! And yeah, I want a dog now and a lot of cardboard …

Click image for more water.

This years autumn storms are causing once again a lot of devastation and misery. My heart goes out to the wet people in Britain …

I love social art like that and thanks for YouTube for allowing us to share these Kodak moments …

PS: This post is free.

We Europeans prefer our politicians weak and not as dashing as the Americans. Oke, Berlusconi is an exception …

But Herman Van Rompuy is a terrible and also fitting manifestation of Europe’s state: old, stiff and without a vision. Just a petty compromise, not a bold direction or force to drive us forward.

He will be a mediator and traffic warden for Brussels.

I don’t like Tony Blair – but at least he stands for something (you can oppose).

Plus our new President is against Turkey joining the EU, which I consider not very visionary.

From Wikipedia:

In 2004, he stated "An enlargement [of the EU] with Turkey is not in any way comparable with previous enlargement waves. Turkey is not Europe and will never be Europe." He continued "But it’s a matter of fact that the universal values which are in force in Europe, and which are also the fundamental values of Christianity, will lose vigour with the entry of a large Islamic country such as Turkey."

Great documentary about the alternative German music scene. The Brits named these great experimental category “Krautrock“, which is basically a reason to start another war.

But the documentary is brilliant! Now you see what David Bowie got from being in Berlin and that Kraftwerk is hardly the oddest German music formation from that era …

I get the flu almost each year and I get it badly. Usually when I get a flu shot I don’t get – or at least not as bad. When I forget the vaccination I am always close to getting hospitalized, because the flu really knocks me down.

Modern Medicine is not perfect, but preferable over NO medicine at all. Vaccinations do help – people should stop their often irrational resistance, because at the end of the day they will run to their doctors and get treatment when it’s already to late …

The flu is virus we will battle for a long time and vaccinations are helping you to fight it BETTER.

UPDATE (after I got some flak):

Let me rephrase my point. The flu – or any – vaccination is "risky" by it’s very definition – it’s an weakened or even live form of the bacteria or virus. This is meant as a training exercise for your bodies anti-immune system to build anti-bodies for that particular bug.

Basically the process is designed to make you "mini-sick", so you can form anti-bodies. (I know that vaccinations are bit more complex than that.)

This is of course "risky" – just as getting the flu is "risky" as well. but doing nothing is also "risky".

The question is: Is a calculated and controlled risk better than facing the chance of the full impact of the flu?

We all do not react the same to a "medicine" and our bodies often contain many chemical (either induced willingly like alcohol, drugs or certain) that can cause unexpected and bad reactions.

But I think that the small risk of a vaccination outweighs the negative risk of side effects or the full impact of the flu.

Welcome to your cloud account at Google.

After years of speculation and wet dreams the Nerd world finally got to see the fabled Google Operating System (Chrome OS): a boot loader for a browser. (long video here)

A bit of an anti-climax.

Wired and all the blogs are disappointed – they wanted a razzle-dazzle new OS that would leave Windows 7 and Snow Leopard behind.

That’s not going to happen. Google is first and foremost an Internet company. They live in a “cloud” of servers and web applications. Google doesn’t do old fashioned hardware and applications.

The heralds of the digital age don’t understand that web applications and a cloud based operating system will never offer the same power as desktop computing.

Desktop computing is literally putting “Information AND PROCESSING POWER at your fingertips”. Your data and your CPU belong to you – no stinking net connection needed to “reach it”.

Once we have your data we own you … biatch!

Cloud computing is a step back to how computing was in the old days of Mainframes and Terminals. All the power and data resided in a giant computer the mainframe – and you could “peek” into it by using a dumb and feeble terminal. The terminal itself had no processing power or data storage to speak of – it was just a “window” into the mainframe.

Yesterday’s Terminals are today’s Netbooks, Smartphones and iPhones. Small underpowered devices only meant to “connect” you to small datasets or the “cloud”.

Google, Apple and many other companies want to suck you into THEIR clouds – because once they have your data they won’t give it back so easily.

Services like GMail, Flickrs, Twitter, Google Docs, Apple MobileMe, YouTube, Facebook, Microsoft OfficeLive, Adobe’s Acrobat online etc – they all want your data on their clouds.

And they know: once you have a certain amount of “your life” on their server array it’s too much hassle for you to switch.

Because downloading or deleting all those documents, images, videos and links is a time consuming process via the browser – and it is also a “Social Inconvinience”, because all your friends & colleagues have these links and have their “cloud lives” linked to yours.

And you don’t want to disconnect your friends, will you?

Cloud Computing 1.0 – IBM-style …

Microsoft might have annoyed us for years, giving us software and data formats that were less than perfect. But at least we had everything on OUR computers and hard drives.

Once you save something in a “cloud” you have only limited access to it. Internet connections are far from being so reliable like electricity and not everyone has a brutally fast internet connection at home – or on the road. And without (a fast) connection there is no access to your “cloud”.

A backup or transfer of your “cloud life” to your machine or another provider is often cumbersome or even impossible. (so much about open standards)

That is the same strategy how IBM made loads of money till the late 1980’s: the vendor lock in. IBM’s mainframes only ran IBM software – for their customers was no choice and hardly a chance to get out either.

The PC revolution offered hardware and software even mere mortals could afford and operate. Although MS-DOS, Windows nor Apple OS/X are open source, the platforms allowed users to run applications from different vendors. In the case of the Wintel Universe you could buy hardware from any vendor and the Operating System as well as your applications would run. You were not locked into just vendor …

Now we will be equally “chained” to our cloud providers. If they deny us access we are locked out of our own data, email, instant messages, tweets, Facebook profile and our whole online identity – and in the case of the Chrome OS – our own computers – we are fucked! (and you thought loosing your cell phone was bad?!)

You don’t own the cloud – the cloud owns you!

We demand simplicity instead of control over our own data …

I am afraid the great PC revolution is over and many people will welcome the switch to “dumb web 2.0 terminals”, because they are too stupid to manage their own PCs and data.

I can understand them – keeping a system clean and running is a tough job: system updates, driver updates, viruses, malware, hackers, crash recovery, regular backups and their own chaotic file organization.

It’s so much nicer to have Google (or another data centre) taking care of that. You just USE the cloud, you don’t need to keep it intact, install anything or even do a backup.

All done by some invisible hand … and in most cases even for free! How can you compare that smooth “user experience” to the hassle of fixing a broken or virus invested Windows machine?!

Care for your local data – always make backups. No matter how weird your backup medium is …

But dear consumers: beware what you are wishing for!

Just look how your cell phone company milks you for every bit of data you use via their network and devices. Do you really think that even bigger computer companies will play nice once they got you by the balls?

And one more thing: trying to get your data back from your crashed computer is one thing, getting your data back from a locked down server on another continent a totally different task …

Madame Billionaire Extraordinaire Oprah has announced her departure and the end of her show. Good riddance!

But she is hardly alone and the brainless noise of tears, celebrity arse sniffing and shameless product plugging will continue anyway.

Are women (or better say house wives) really that desperate that they watch any crap that "touches" their puny minds and strokes their egos by reassuring that their dumb lives are worth something – if they buy the right cream?

I am afraid we are a stupid species …

Like the "compact stereo system" – the new Übermonitors suck. Apart from notebooks – who should include everything for portability – all other gadgets should be "separate". So when one part breaks it doesn’t spoil all other "elements" and usually the built-in components are not top notch, so you want to replace them anyway – but you can’t. The speakers suck and the webcam/microphone are not as good as say a good Logitech one.

Each time we flush the toilet we waste perfectly good amount of water. Our water systems in our houses and flats are stupid: it should collect hardly dirty water from showering, washing machines and washing up to flash down crap.

Christmas – like so many festivals – is a clone of the winter solstice celebrations.

The winter solstice is an important moment for any primitive agricultural society: the days get longer and spring isn’t far off. It also is an important date, it helps you to figure out when to till your fields and start sowing your seeds – especially when you have no clocks and internet.

So celebrating the winter solstice is important and it’s no surprise why people stuffed themselves with yummy food (if it was available). Those yummy and calorie rich treats also are meant to help you to master the rest of the winter.

But today we hardly suffer from no food in harsh and long winters. You can even have typical European summer fruits like Strawberries and exotic bananas all year round.

There is hardly any hunger or scarceness these days in rich countries. We consume HUGE amounts of sugar and other treats all year long.

So why not go sugar & treat free until Christmas to REALLY get into the spirit and celebrating that day by eating something you don’t have EVERY day?