Something deep down in my head tells me that I’ll find the (ultimate) answer to life, the universe and everything in these books:
Most prrobbbbabbbliii on page 42.
I choose the following instead:
The structures are coming down fast and no one is protesting….
So, hier jetzt mal mein Beitrag zur dämlichsten Kampagne seit dem Wir-sind-Papst Desaster. (..ich erwähnte es ja bereits schon für meine Freunde ausm Bubudiuland :-)
Continue reading “Du bist sprachlos”
There isn’t much to add to this – just found it via SPON. They say someone had an argument with the folks over in Bulgaria.
Why is it still called AUDI – although you never hear anything while driving these Audi A6 & A8 types?
Da ich immer noch öfters gefragt werde, was ein Blog sei/ist, hier mal ein nettes Video von arte zum Thema blogs.
Manchmal habe ich aber das Gefühl, dass sich hinter dieser RTFM-Frage eher ein rhetorischer Neid versteckt, weil andere den ganzen Tag arbeiten müssen und sich vielleicht fragen, wer das alles lesen soll? Die Zeit dafür habe ich eigentlich auch nicht, ich nehme sie mir aber. Oder auch: "Da hab ich Blog drauf." :-)
Yes, Du bist Deutschland (=you are Germany). Me? A country?
This 30 million EURO campaign, initiated by 25 big media companies in Germany, tries to reach 1,6 billion contacts which equals around 98% of all Germans (~16 contacts per person) – everything over a period of 4 months.
The message they are trying to convey is simple: You are Germany. Whatever that means.
The aim behind all this is to combat any dull or bad mood – something, Germans are good at. At least since 1945, my fellow Germans have followed the golden rule of panem et circenses and consequently left most important decisions to the government. People learned how to shut-up and focus on their work. The fruits of living that way were a working infrastructure, jobs, a booming economy, your Mercedes @home, etc. etc…
As the world is constantly turning around, there’s nothing as constant as CHANGE. We have seen the Wall falling down, a symbolic German Unification, a merger between Daimler-Benz and Chrysler, global terror portrayed with the help of the media, the introduction of the EURO currency in most european countries and reckless global markets coming up. No panem et circenses any more, people are waking up from their Matrix-styled laying batteries. Más vale tarde que nunca.
In summer 2005, Germany’s chancellor Gerhard Schröder asked for a vote of (non-)confidence in order to have reelections a year earlier than expected. The premilinary election results from September 18th are hilarious – 35,2% for CDU/CSU (right-wing) and 34,3% for SPD (somewhere-in-the-middle-wing). Time will tell what kind of coalition we’ll get (or was it Newsweek? :-).
Is it because of the elections that the media started this Du bist Deutschland campaign? I don’t know.
What I DO know, though, is that this stupid You are Germany phrase perfectly makes up for some great satire. Remember, this campaign started two days ago, and we already find visual material on Flickr (like the pic above), tons of media coverage and jokes that follow the “you are….” pattern. Hehe…
Three questions:
1. Instead of spending 30 million EUROs on this useless campaign and knowing that the Internet is a resourceful way of promoting ideas, wouldn’t it have been easier to just spend a few EUROs on a smaller start and see what happens? Or is it just another tax-saving model for the media?
2. WE ARE EUROPE. Why didn’t they use this one?
3. Faith. Hope…Religion? In times of fading interest for community work and a tv programme which is SO out of any morality (and produced by the media!), it apparently takes an expensive campaign to generate some awareness for standards like self-assurance? “Yeah, you know, we can’t offer you any decent jobs at the moment, but hey, look, there are ass and titties, soccer and lame shows on the screen to keep you busy. And to prevent you from slowly drifting away into chaos, here’s this cool campaign which shows you that you can do it too.” No words lost on the church or any other religious institution out there. How come?
Actually, it’s still panem et circenses. The only difference being that in these modern times, we see the media et al sitting on the tribune.
“We look out upon the sea, The coast is always changing,
I’ll bring my camera out to sea, The coast is always changing”
(Maximo Park)
Hmmm….so you think the streets of East Africa are slowly rapidly filling up with motorized Boda Boda?
My dear bro KPT moved to Taiwan the other day and now look what he’s just send me via Skype:
Motorcycles in Panciao, TAIWAN
Dude, where’s my scooter?
I was really wondering about blogging this, but here ya go:
A good friend of mine, Lady Kikuyumbuzi, had this crazy idea of climbing Mt.Kenya. Having a great ability to assert herself, she quickly persuaded some other volunteers (read: unaware interns) to accompany her on this quest of climbing the highest mountain in Kenya.
I never had any doubts that she’d do that one day when she told me, but, to be honest, I never really expected her to do it this early. She dropped me a few lines from Nairobi on saturday and wrote: “yeah, and btw, I’ll be climbing Mt.Kenya on Monday…..and there’s this other appointment I’m having like at the end of the week”. Yeah….
CAN YOU IMAGINE why I adore her that much?!
Anyways.
So I am sitting here in my warm and comfy room in Germany and thinking to myself: Well, I can’t be in Kenya right now due to other obligations, but my thoughts (and prayers!) are with her anyways so maybe….maybe I’ll just start another Google Earth session and have a closer look at the slopes of Mount Kenya. Maybe somewhere between Bwana Whispers shambas I’ll find a little Mzungugoat holding up a sign that says: “Hello Bw Kikuyumoja, me I am here. Sound and safe”.
I think it started way back in 1982 (?) after the AirForce coup when the Moi-regime banned all detailed maps of Kenya. Before, I was told, you could get the most detailed maps of Kenya (YES, those ones with contour lines!) and after that ….well, we apparently all know what those city maps of Nairobi looked like during the 1990s. They were just cut down to a minimum and rendered useless for real Safari needs…
Now, imagine this lack of proper maps and try to think of it in GoogleEarth. And it doesn’t even matter if you’re in Kenya or Germany – small Kijijis like Naro Moru or Suderburg (which is where I study – boys, this place is SO lost!) are not indicated on the map. In fact, those ignorants over at GoogleEarth HQ (a.k.a. Keyhole.com) apparently lost the key to the room that contains all those juicy, detailed maps that would show us our beloved Nairobi in its full beauty.
The Internet community though, being as resourceful as a kenyan fundi, quickly came up with a working solution. Why wait for more zoomable maps at higher resolutions if you can have real pictures taken at ground level and overlayered into GoogleEarth’s maps?! This useful Flickr plug-in for instance, which shows the closests 50 images posted on Flickr (based on your current viewing area). Of course it’s just a few pictures now, but as communities grow, more and more images on Flickr & other web resources will hopefully become connected to placemarks on GoogleEarth. This GoogleEarth Bubudiu isn’t just a great toy – it’s a new way of marketing locations. And Kenya being a preferred tourist location, why not promoting it through Google Earth? (Which of course reminds me of EduVision’s eSlates project at this point and adding a tourist functionality to the programme where they give out PDAs to tourists (with some futuristic “GoogleEarth for PDA” installed) and clickable maps…”Oh, yes, we’ve already marked our route on the PDA”. Or somethin’…)
Yani, this all goes to show that I might not be able to actually put my feet on the slopes at this very moment, but at least I can have a closer look upon the route Lady Kikuyumbuzi is taking and….I guess upon reading this blog entry once she returns, she’ll probably never talk to me again. Why? Well…remember Whisper’s wife Thatcher? Haia….go figure…
Today I read an interesting story on the efficiency of the so-called Dabbawallas in Mumbai (Bombay), India: >> The “Dabbawalla” system that operates in Mumbai is unique and incredible in the complexity of its task, simplicity of its operation, and surprisingly low error rates for a system of its size. It is a daily service in which thousands of men carry and deliver over 200,000 lunches every day, within a three hour block of time, across the city’s 70-kilometre stretch, with each lunch box (dabba) changing hands at least four times. <<
an indian mkokoteni (handcart)
>>In fact, the American business magazine Forbes gave a Six Sigma performance rating for the precision of dabbawalas. This rating indicates a 99.999999 accuracy percentage of correctness, meaning one error in every six million transactions — an astonishing (and perhaps unbelievable) degree of exactness.<< Some Dabbawallas have already been invited to lecture on their daily trade. And, to round it up, celebs like Prince Charles or even Sir Richard Branson went to Mumbai and spent some time with these diligent workers.
And there’s the Hawala system we all heard about – most notably since 9/11. This informal value transfer system that goes by the name of Al-Barakat in Somalia and which has been declared illegal by the Bush administration and other countries. Even Interpol has been lured into the debate and officially believes the Hawala system to play a role in money laundering (well, obviously there’s a point in that one).
Basi, what I do LIKE about both systems is the basis of their functionality: SIMPLICITY & TRUST.
As for the simplicty, I strongly believe that we should always strive to keep things as simple as possible. And what about the TRUST?
Why do we need a rating system on Ebay? Why do I need to pay for banking fees if I want to send money from here to XYZ – do I pay for the service or for the trust? Why do most religions in this world tell us something about loving each other, we’re fans of fictional worlds like Star Trek with its one-world idea, we go out eating and thereby trust some unknown wapishi (cooks) etc. etc… and yet we’re told that you can not trust the whole world. Why? Because the world, we’re told, is evil. Woiii?!
I think it’s about time for this world to sit back, relax for a moment and reflect what’s really important. I don’t want to think about things like trust when I do business or talk to a stranger. Those values should be taken for granted. I would like to see this basic idea of trusting someone implemented in our western world with such a normality we find on those described systems like the Dabbawalla or Hawala. Yeah, that would be nice.
p.s.: I titled this entry Ghar Ka Khana (~ good food, home-cooked Indian cuisine) because, instead of simply going to a restaurant for lunch, those downtown employees prefer (trust?) the food their families cook for them. The German part in me of course suggest that they should take their food with them once they leave home in the morning, but uhhm, well, if there’s a market for such services…