Once upon a time there were nations (now we have the USA). Every nation had a flag. The flag was a holy thing. You had to salute it and you had to sing the national anthem, with a face, as if god stood in front of you.
Now we have football/soccer-clubs. They have flags. If you see them, you salute. You sing “Wo die Weser ei-nen gro-ssen Bo-gen macht” or “Pascal, bizi diskoya götür”, with a face, as if Messi or Aziz Yıldırım stood in front of you. You don’t have to be English to be a Liverpool-Fan. Famous football-clubs are the new nations. You can be Canari everywhere. Lately I saw a video about fishermen on a remote island of Indonesia. They lived like in the stone age, they had no teeth and no birth-control, but one of them wore a Barcelona-T-shirt.
Tag: English
Daily mythology: Books
I asked myself: when do we read books during our life? As students we need to read much, mainly non-fiction of course. But we may read poems novels and short stories too. But: Shouldn’t we rather live than read? Instead of consuming traveling-novels we should travel, instead of reading development novels we should develop, instead of reading about couples fucking we should fuck? As old beings, stuck to our houses, we’ll have enough time to read about all that…
Daily mythology: Bloomsday, 16th of June
Every year throughout the world Bloomsday is celebrated. On June the 15th, 1904 James Joyce met Nora Barnacle and was deeply impressed. He asked for a walk together, she agreed but didn’t appear. So he wrote her a letter with the same demand (By the way: This proves the quality of postal services in those times: Letters were delivered the same day!). This time it worked and they took a walk on Sandymount-Quai. Along tradition she slipped her hand into his trousers and took it back only when it became wet. I don’t believe this: how can you ejaculate and walk in same time? Maybe they stood still, maybe there was a bank nearby, who knows? Nora later stated: “That was the day I made a man out of him!”. Until James’ death in Zürich they never parted again, lived together in Trieste Paris and, yes, Zürich. After James’ end that girl from Galway spoke a perfect Züritüütsch. To remember that first walk Joyce fixed the day, Leopold Bloom wandered through Dublin on the 16th of June 1904. Noras portrait is given in “Ulysses”too, by Molly Bloom, who lays in the bed and meets Blazes Boylan there. In real life they both hardly had affairs, and when, rather Jim himself…
Mainly people celebrating Bloomsday go for a booze afterwards. Isn’t it congenial?
Daily mythology: Cork in badminton-shuttlecocks
As we learned shuttlecocks were made of a cork-ball, covered with leather. A ring of feathers were tucked into to make it fly. Mesmerizing: only feathers from the left wing – mostly of goose or duck – were used, in order to make the shuttlecock rotate properly. Poor birds! They had to fly anti-clockwise in circles! Don’t believe that: alas, they were slaughtered, a bit of gluten added, cooked and sold as Peking-ducks.
Badminton but became a very fast game, sometimes you can hardly follow the shuttlecock with the eyes….
Daily mythology: Boycott
First: I love the word because it comes from Ireland. There in the 19th century the British captain Charles Boycott tried to overcome a work- and trading-stop by securing 50 harvesting Orangemen by 1000 police, with the result that the costs were far higher than the harvested goods would bring. From then on the word “boycott” was born.
Second: I don’t like boycotts.It reminds too much of “Don’t buy from Jews!” during the Nazi regime. But we’ve the right to choose what we do, what we buy. I’ll never acquire goods containing palm-oil (as far as I know it), I may ask some restaurant owners here: How did you vote in the last referendum? and then say: well, I don’t want to spoil the results, and walk away.
Daily mythology: Philosophy of life – Weltanschauung
How we smiled about Paracelsus. What they believed in the Middle-ages! Falsified for a long time…
For more than a thousand years Aristotle was the ultimate philosopher. Then came Kopernikus and Kepler and cleared our view of the world. Now, the sun was in the middle of our planetary system and no longer the earth. Sometimes they defended their views in danger of life – see Galileo Galilei or Giordano Bruno. Then came the 17th century, often we call it the century of Newton. Faster and faster we gained new evidence. Otto von Guericke proved the emptiness of the vacuum. But is there really nothing? What about infrared radiation?
Then came empiricism. What you get is what you see. Binoculars, microscope and electronic devices extended our perceptions. But what about things we don’t see (yet)? And with perceptions beyond our sense organs? Good bye empiricism.
Light: it is vibration. It’s proved. Light is working with high speed particles. That’s proven. Both in same time is impossible. Though you prove what you believe….
Will the 20eth century be called the century of Einstein?
Just act like the constructors of atomic bombs or mobile phones. Just don’t worry about theories. Use it!
But nobody believes in me when I say, that the earth is a hollow sphere…..
Daily mythology: Scabiosa
The widow-flower in soft purple. After her up to today the women of dead husbands are named “widows”.
In Zartlila: die Witwenblume. Nach ihr werden bis heute die Frauen verstorbener Mȁnner “Witwen” genannt.
