Feel

Found this word sprayed on a window sill in the middle of the town. “Fühle” is the German word for “feel” in terms of an order.
It was made sprayed using a kind of stencil and I suspect the creator made such a template because he intended to spray the word more than one time.
I stumbled across the image a few minutes ago while browsing through my recent pics.
Feel! Someone unknown asked me to feel. Strange.
No idea was the primary intention of the creator was.
Because I can’t remember something special on the window sill to feel I take it as an more generic order for my life.
At the moment I try to analyze what I feel. I’m a little bit puzzled these days so it’s hard work I can tell you.

I’m sure that my world is full of such hidden orders - or lets call them ‘advices’ - I just have to open my damned eyes and look more careful.

Mirror

Feeling like several persons in one body. Every single seems to head in a different direction. I have to keep aware of the fact that all of them are only mirrored images of the same man - me.

Thanks

Last game in the Basketball Euroleague for my team GHP Bamberg. Including this one they lost all games in this round and are out now.
On every chair in the hall was a poster with “Thanks Guys” on one side and “Thanks Nuremberg” on the other.
So I held up my poster, watched my team loose the game and went home. I don’t give a damn about professional sports but it simply was an appropriate end of an intermediate day.

Blue Box

An evening at the theater in Nuremberg with two friends.
Heavy stuff because the play was about the Nazi trials in Nuremberg after World War 2.
I’m very interested in that topic and I therefore I liked it although the actors weren’t as brilliant as in Weimar.
The theater was crowded with pupils and other teens. I guess most of them had to go there for some school reason. To bad that I didn’t fetch any feedback of some of them. I have no idea whether the german teens in general are interested in the german history of the last century. Hopefully I can talk to some young folks in my circle of friends about their political thoughts.

On the court in front of the theater there’s a big blue container called the “Blue Box”. It’s a very small experimental theater with an even smaller stage inside it.
I definitely want to see a play in that box some time in the next months.

The outside wall of the Blue Box

Rainbow

The first day I walked around outside only with a T-Shirt. Must have been almost 20°C. Too bad that I hadn’t had some really rockin’ music in my car.
Later in the afternoon I heard the first little thunderstorm of this year. Usually I’m a little afraid of thunder but this time there was a cute rainbow right behind my office to calm me down.
I do know the physical principle of a rainbow but I’m astonished every time about the ardor of colors that nature uses for such a useless thing - but I really love it.

Skate

A first walk with my new camera, the Fette Lotte. I call such walks “Digi-Pirsch” - digital hunt.
There was no specific goal but to wander around. I found a group of skater boys practising in front of a Museum in Nuremberg.
I enjoyed to orbit them shooting pics like a photo reporter. Actually the resulting pictures are nothing special but at least it was a good practising lesson. The Fette Lotte isn’t very familiar to me yet.

But one thing came to my mind independent of the camera: Those little freaks are unbelievable with their skateboards.

Metal Kick

In Germany there’s an old fashioned childrens game named “Tipp-Kick”. It’s a kind of soccer with two small players made of metal. No idea whether it’s common in the rest of the world. I didn’t played it for decades but today I had the chance to challenge the little son of my colleague.
I lost every game because the guy adapted the rules every time to take advantage of it. So I ended up in being not the forward but only the goal keeper made out of a yellow plastic bottle with lemon-juice.
Anyway - being transferred back to childhood for half an hour was superb.


The little metal soccer player and the little cheater

Instant Soup Bra

I was buying some food in a big supermarket in Nuremberg.
At the shelf for instant soup I saw something strange - a bra.
That’s difficult to understand. Maybe the woman intended to buy the bra AND some soup and there was not enough money for both. Usually one decides to survive instead of looking sexy. Therefore buying food has priority 1. Well, but from a mankind point of view the bra would make more sense. Whenever it comes to preserve the human species (what requires some sexual acts) a bra is more useful than stupid soup.
But I guess I’m completely wrong with my bra-soup-theory.



Furthermore I got the feeling in the supermarket that Easter is very close.

Fat Lotte

Today an old dream came true. I thought about buying a SLR camera since the photographing class in school many years ago.
Now the time was ripe and I ordered a digital SLR camera - a Canon EOS 350D. My colleague CHK has the same one and he calls his the “Fette Lotte” which means the “fat lotte”. Lotte is an old fashioned female name. I liked the name so I simply adapted it for my EOS.
I can tell you I’m really edgy and I’m curious on how my way of photographing will change in the future. My small camera won’t get retired though because it’s small enough for having it with me all the time and it’s much better for very close macros.
But I’m sure that I will experiment a lot with the Fat Lotte the next days and weeks.

Hope

I love small messages that appear unexpected in the normal course of life.

The chairs and tables on the terrace of a nice restaurant in the city of Fürth were still empty - waiting for the first sun worshippers.
Some unknown person must have fetched one of the restaurants’ chalkboards, put it on a table and wrote “Die Hoffnung stirbt zuletzt” on it.
This means “Hope dies at last”.
Puh - heavy stuff. I want to know whether the guy meant it in a positive or a negative way.

Positive: “Hey evil life, you can throw at me whatever you want - you will never bring me down as long as I believe in myself”.
Negative: “Oh my dear, actually I’m already done but I’m too naive to get aware of it because I still hope for a miracle”.

He put the sign on top of the table. That means he wanted the people to see it. Usually one is quiet and hides from the light when all hope is gone instead of shouting his bad luck out loud.
This guy did shout with his chalkboard. Therefore I’m quite sure that he was ready to fight against bad circumstances, against the bum that is supposed to be his boss or against life itself. If you listen carefully you might hear him screaming
“I’ll make it. You’ll never bring me down. Hope dies at last”.

It’s a pity that I’ll probably never get to know him.


“Hope dies at last”

Two hours later the chalkboard was gone and a couple was sitting on exactly that table having some beers. I wonder whether they knew that this was a very special table. The place where a human being took on his fight with life.


The same place - two hours later.

Valuable Women

Ladies and Gentlemen have to be kept separated in some cases. Well, the hormons, you know?
It’s funny to get aware that life often can be reduced to hormons.
I saw that two cages with guinea pigs in an do-it-yourself store. They had a glass panel between the apartments for boys and girls. Girls on the left, boys on the right.
Imagine that you are a guinea pig. You sit in your cage and the love of your life is only a few centimetres away but absolutely unreachable for you. All you can do it sitting next to the glass plane and watch her munching a carrot. Probably she doesn’t even know that you are in love with her. The best thing that could happen to you is when some stupid man buys you and .... her.
Well, that’s not likely.

Beside the glass plane I noticed a very interesting fact: Women seem to be more valuable than men.

“Guinea Pigs - Female 19,99 Euros” / “Guinea Pigs - Male, 14,99 Euros”

---

Today I found the hatchery of “Them”. It looked like a damn glove army. I tell you something: mankind will never surrender.



Shit, I missed the posting deadline for Monday for 2 minutes. It’s already Tuesday. Now I go to bed frustrated.

Sun Spots

To prevent me from sleeping late I didn’t close the jalousie last night. My reward was being waken by a small spot of sun on my face. A few minutes later my blanket was covered with bright spots. I was delighted about this perfect start into a sunny day.

While walking through the city I noticed that I no longer pace from A to B like a frozen maniac as I did in the last months. Rather I strolled very slowly and enjoyed the brightness. I guess that sun slows down life in some cases.

After several months of darkness and coldness the first sunny day made life flowing through my mind with a much higher intensity that it was used to.

I even dared to have my first breakfast this year on my balcony - even wearing that stupid big sun glasses I got as a birthday present some years ago. Unfortunately I was alone.

And finally I had my first ice cream after the winter from the smiling italian guy nearby. His place was crowded with people in winter parkas licking ice cream. It seemed as if I wasn’t the only one feeling the sun flooding the brain.

Places like California or Mexico might be great because the sun is always shining but a californian will never know how it is to feel the first sunny day after a long cold winter. I really pity that people.


Sun Spots on my Bed


First Post-Winter-Breakfast on my Balcony


The crowded Ice Cream booth in my Village.

Recharger

I’m surrounded with little technical gadgets. Several cell phones, several digital cameras, PDA, GPS device, wireless telephone etc.
Yes, sometimes they make my life more convenient.
But what I really hate about it is the recharging issue. Every device comes with an own proprietary recharger. I constantly mix them up. Why do we have organizations like ISO when we are not able to build uniform recharging units? I mean, that’s really ridiculous.
That rubbish sucks out my nerves and my energy. I’d like to have some internal recharging for my brain.
...Well, I’m not sure whether I have an standardized recharger for myself.
Ok, I’ll be quiet now. Did you hear me saying something? No? Good.

This one is from the city of Bayreuth. Inside my old favorite italian restaurant. Italian - got it? Probably the Mafia is part of the glove conspiracy.

Trollies

Sometimes you need a trolly to carry all your stuff - or all your sorrows. If you look careful you can find mental trollies on many places. Most of them are available for free.
My few good friends are kind of trollies for me. But the system only works if I’m such a vehicle for them, too. I’m not very good in keeping all my trollies in good shape. And I’m even worse in showing that I’m also a trolly. I guess I have to call some of my trollies and tell them.

Whiteboard

We use our whiteboards a lot in the office. Most of the time the are filled with strange arrows in multiple colors, boxes and cryptic abbreviations.
Usually I make a picture of it after a meeting to make it easier to remember things.
Actually I think this is not very helpful. Our scribblings ar so cryptic that not even I would be able to remember what it was for after a few days.
I would need some spoken explanations about the drawings - drawings that were supposed to explain spoken things. Crazy.
A few decades ago our todays drawing would have been perfect as a attack strategy of the red army for their invasion of Western Europe.


Cold War Attack Strategy?

Sometimes even our technical sketches are cute and kind of sexy. Today my boss tried to draw an overview of a pieces of software showing its surrounding components. Well, for me it looks like the head of a female robot with pin curlers on its head. I am right, ain’t I?

Alphabet Soup

When I was a child I loved soup with little characters made of noodles - alphabet soup.
I forgot about that soup for many years. Last weekend I got a bag of it as a kind of present and I was delighted.
Well, alphabet soup is way too precious to be simply eaten. So I tried to lay a little nonsense poem by the german poet Joachim Ringelnatz with the characters. The poem is about a male stamp that falls in love with the princess that licked - uuh - kissed it.

A poem made of alphabet soup. I can tell you that this is a really hard task. Until now I managed only the first half of the poem. There ain’t enough “I” in it, the “W”s always flip upside down and one needs tweezers to grab the small characters.

My main thought was that all I did was to re-arrange the existing characters to make them a poem. The fact that I didn’t add anything means that all of the information about the poem was already existing in the bag - it was only unsorted.
Can you imagine what poems, secrets and short novels are still hidden in one simple bag of alphabet soup?
That’s a very inspiring thought for me. Poem Food.





By the way: Here’s the poem in German. Because Joachim Ringelnatz played with words a lot I’m not able to translate it.

Der Briefmark
Ein männlicher Briefmark erlebte
Was Schönes, bevor er klebte.
Er war von einer Prinzessin beleckt.
Da war die Liebe in ihm erweckt.
Er wollte sie wiederküssen,
Da hat er verreisen müssen.
So liebte er sie vergebens.
Das ist die Tragik des Lebens!

Ape

I went to the zoo in Nuremberg. I really like animals but in general I don’t like zoos because all the caged creatures making me feel bad.
OK, I went there and the giraffes and the small monkeys were real funny.
But the big gorillas and orang-utans looked very sad and hopeless. Their facial expressions were so similar to humans that it was frightening.
You sit inside a cage for your whole life with absolutely no change of getting back to your jungle.
Men can be real assholes.


Just thinking about politics or being depressed?


This is Fritz. He lives in the zoo for more than 40 years.

Searches and Sales

Exploring the black boards in some super markets. One can find strange things on that boards.
Sometimes the postings are so different that it’s real weird.
I found a posting from a guy that gives away horse dung. All he wants is a small donation. That means he tries to make money out of shit. Amazing.

Making money out of piles of shit.


My other favorite was a person searching for a girl named Kerstin. He (or she?) met her at a carnival party and all he (or she?) seems to know is her name.
Whow - how romantic. Just like in one of my favorite movies “Amelie from Montmartre” aka “Die fabelhafte Welt der Amelie”.
To be honest: I think all he (or she?) will get is some phone calls from insurance agents trying to sell him (or her?) some stuff. If he (or she?) is very lucky, the name of wife of the agent is Kerstin.

Searching for Kerstin, long dark hair, 160cm tall

Chili

Cooking Chili and having no idea about the amount of chili peppers necessary for creating the right grade of pepperiness. For some reason it tasted delicious though. I was really proud.
The whole Chili thing was inspired by the book “Betty Blue” by Phillipe Dijan. It contains a short chapter about eating Chili when it’s very hot outside. I really love reading borrowed books and finding markings made by the owner. This time the marking was about Chili.
Translated into English the chapter sounds like this:
“...I can eat Chili on every weather - even when the sweat is dripping into my plate. My Chili and I, we are one heart and one soul...”

Piles

I don’t know why I’m not able to get rid of that piles of clothes to be ironed. For some reason there are always a few pieces left until the next load arrives. That’s not fair. Ironing is definitely in my Top-5-List of most hated household works.

Vienna

Finally I’m back. No more ties, no more suits, no more demos for the moment.
I really liked my colleagues from the US ordering Schnitzel or a Zwickl beer in the restaurant. The way they pronounce “Zwickl” was worth the trip.

The last evening I walked around in the city on my own. I wanted to get at least a short glimpse of Vienna. All the old buildings were illuminated and the city looked great. My camera, my tripod and I had a great time.


The façade of the famous “Hotel Sacher”

I saw a building illuminated in blue and walked there to make some pictures. On my way I heard music from the distance. Waltz music. Kitschy. Something was going on in front of the building. Unfortunately the whole area was off limits. So I jumped over the fence and tried to find out whats going on. I felt like a special agent.
In front of the building was a big frozen surface with dozens of ice-skaters in ball robes. The men were dressed like hussars and the girls weared strapless ball gowns. I pitied them a lot because the temperature was below zero. Guys with big cameras were running around and a man on a crane shouted instructions. In the back was a full symphonic orchestra.
I was in the middle of a movie set for a kind of ice-skating-fairytale-movie.
The waltz music started again and the folks danced on the ice in front of the blue building.
Suddenly a guy stood beside me. He must have been jumped over the fences, too. We watched the scenery and talked a little bit. He told me that he was a guy from Oregon and on his first trip to Europe. He landed just a few hours ago and this was his first night in Europe.
Well, he was absolutely impressed and looked around with big eyes. The old illuminated buildings everywhere, waltzing sound in the winter air and an army of beautiful girls in ball gowns dancing on ice. He said that he never expected Europe being that way. I tried to tell him that Europe in general isn’t that “european” but it was too late.
Ok, it was only a movie set and I’m not from Austria but in that moment I was a little bit proud of being an European and that the guy liked my continent.

The blue building near the Heldenplatz


The Parliament

By coincidence we parked in a very very old parking garage from 1918. It had even petrol pumps inside and heating devices for the cars. Crazy. An old guy sat in a small booth and sold tickets for the cars. He forbade to make pictures so I had to do it secretly.


Finally I saw “them” even in Vienna. Europe is infiltrated.

ECR

Until next Tuesday I will be on a business trip to Vienna. My company has a booth at the European Congress of Radiology (ECR). Wearing a tie all the time, hanging around at our booth at the technical exibition, answering questions regarding our software and trying to collect information about our competitors. I’m not a great fan of such events.
It’s a pity that I probably will have no time to explore Vienna.
I guess there’s less or no chance for me to upload new postings in the next couple of days. I beg for mercy.