German vs. British Sense of Humor

What the Germans seem to object to is a sudden switch from slapstick to sarcasm or irony. This is the essence of British humour, the shift of levels, the ambush. Germans prefer their wit delivered in a straight line, like a ball in a bowling alley.

I think that the British prejudice about Germany’s supposed humour famine stems from the fact that there is no German tradition of daily banter. In London you can hear a dozen wisecracks in a day — at work or on the bus or in the coffee shop. They may be lame, but at least they’re quick. In Germany, humour is stockaded, kept apart from everyday life. In the evenings Harald Schmidt, a genuinely funny talk-show host, will crack their sides. But only after dinner has been eaten, the plates rinsed and the yoghurt pots washed, ready for recycling. In the office next day people will repeat Schmidt’s gags and they will laugh again. However, they will fail to spot the inherent absurdities of their own office life.

-Roger Boyes writing about his book My Dear Krauts

Why not to be overly concerned with being healthy

"One may think that "prevention is better than cure" is a quote from the goddess Hygiene, yet the vintage is recent and the wisdom is more limited than it appears.
...if incisive changes in lifestyle are proposed, would not the prohibition of horse riding, parachuting, mountain climbing, and skiing be "better" than the risks associated with these pastimes?
"Tobacco, alcohol, drugs, coffee, chocolate, sugar, salt, red meat, raw fish, oysters, dairy products, smoked food, and food cooked in aluminium pots have been shown to constitute risks, as do walking in forests, living with mites, bats, dogs, cats, reptiles, or birds, or riding a motorcycle, sunbathing, or touching other people's genitals without gloves. One is told to move one's bowels regularly and inspect stools, monitor blood pressure, breasts, testicles, cholesterol... What is the fate of a person who lives by these rules? ... Do healthy people have a better life? True, a healthier society is more productive in terms of material wealth...
But is there an observable link between health and creativity? Great art has always been associated with suffering. The putative elimination of disability, of pain, and of anguish and the fear of death may well impoverish human experience. The two outstanding healthist societies of history, Sparta and Hitler's Germany, were philistine. There is no evidence that a healthier society generates more thought, more beauty."
Imre Loefler, editor, Nairobi Hospital Proceedings, Kenya
http://www.bmj.com/cgi/content/full/328/7431/115-a

Life is everywhere on Earth, but apparently not in space?

On Earth, it's unfathomable how life is everywhere. If you looked at a bit of dirt under a microscope there are countless tiny bugs and micro-organisms. bacteria is everywhere, the most successful form of life on earth in terms of reproduction. Organisms eat each other, even when we breathe. If we could see a little better even in our own homes there are tiny http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Springtails everywhere.

But apparently outside this atmosphere it's a vaccuum where nothing lives. And the universe as a whole is pervaded by radiation where celestial bodies are. The Earth seems to be kind of unusual in the universe for having any life at all.

Life has got to be out there in the universe too. But still, then how many planets have this much diversity of life everywhere?

the origin of species?

What if you took your weird cousin and put him on an island with a person of the opposite sex, and came back a couple of generations later? And a couple of genrations after that? they'd have their own dialect, and leaving aside any issues of genetic mutations, they'd have a distinct look and culture. Darwin would have it that eventually they would mutuate into a new species. And i accept that's probably true.

But would this speciation thing happen just because of genetics and survival of the fittest? I don't think so -- I think something else is also going on as well. Not being a scientist, I am free to use my powers of induction, recklessly. Here's some things i have read and do observe:

1.
The New Yorker had a story a few years ago about how people in Europe are now really tall on average, in the Netherlands they've got the highest average. that's to do with health and not getting sick when you're little, apparenlty, not genetics. Go back a couple of generations and people were pretty short there, and in most of the world, as health and nutrition have improved in the developed world. So most places everyone's got the potential to be big, it's just if that potential is fulfilled.

2. Ten years ago there was still such a thing as a Chinese-Cuban community in New York City where i briefly lived -- people who were ethnically Chinese but had lived in Cuba for a long time. They had restaurants where they served both Chinese and Cuban food. These people really looked both Chinese and Latin to me -- the climate and the food must have altered their appearance, even in the span of just a couple of decades.
Native Americans from North America and the Indiginous peoples of Central and South America are supposedly from the same racial stock -- even from the same dozen people that crossed the bering straight during the last ice age, according to some recent genetic research(PBS program i saw). But don't those ones from North America look different ...

3. OK this is a little more compelling I think -- I heard this on the BBC radio a dozen years ago. This Swedish guy, a great grandson of August Strindberg the playright, wrote a book in which he questions whether we've really figured out how species can possibly evolve things like wings, sonar and complex organs like that merely from competition and genetic mutations (which are usually unfavorable, not x-men like powers). If only i could remember what his name was or the name of the book. He had a couple of ideas -- he thought maybe there was some kind of information-field that pervade areas and inform living things as to how to change to adapt to a given area, and this field was probably either magnetic in nature, or carried by the trillions of photons passing through our bodies every second.

Is Jerry Lewis Funny?

I've heard from various people that the French find Jerry Lewis funny. Once upon a time Americans must have as well since he did make several movies, but those bits that I saw of films like the Nutty Professor were just slapstick, very unfunny. Maybe in the 50's Americans laughed but you'd have to be a pretty corny old codger to now -- or French, I guess. Why is he considered funny? The French also have Jacques Tati, which is also visual humor that I don't think is funny. And they were crazy about Charlie Chaplin, though there was a real visual style and heart in that, whereas Tati and Lewis make me depressed somehow. I associate them with watching daytime television in the 1980s, giving me a horrible feeling of ennui, like i want to stick a knife in my head. That might have been a funny shtick for Jerry, actually.

Attacking the things that make France French

Two factors are at work. One is an assault on individual freedom, in the birthplace of liberty. France, with its strong state, has always imposed rules on its citizens. But, when it came to life's pleasures, the French have been free to enjoy, or wreck, their lives with abandon. Now prostitutes have been chased from the streets; the legal age of marriage has been raised from 15 to 18; G-string bikinis were even banned from Paris-Plage, the summer-long riverside festival.

The second factor is creeping globalisation. Libération's troubles affect many newspapers: the internet, the loss of young readers and advertisers. Globalisation often means Americanisation. The French elite profess hostility to America, but ordinary folk lap up Americana. Two of the top three box-office hits this year are Hollywood blockbusters. France is one of McDonald's biggest and most profitable markets. Even the baguette is under attack from le sandwich, often made from “Harry's American Sandwich” bread, a sliced product wrapped in decidedly unFrench plastic bags. Not exactly food for existential thought—especially in a smoke-free café.

-The Economist, October 19th, 2006

An interesting culture crushed by the Catholic church

From 1208, a war of terror was waged against the indigenous population and their rulers: Raymond VI of Toulouse, Raymond-Roger Trencavel, Raymond Roger of Foix in the first generation and Raymond VII of Toulouse, Raymond Trencavel II, and Roger Bernard II of Foix in the second generation. During this period an estimated 500,000 Languedoc men women and children were massacred - Catholics as well as Cathars. The Counts of Toulouse and their allies were dispossessed and humiliated, and their lands annexed to France. Educated and tolerant Languedoc rulers were replaced by relative barbarians; Dominic Guzmán (later Saint Dominic) founded the Dominican Order and soon afterwards the Inquisition, manned by his Dominicans, was established explicitly to wipe out the last vestiges of resistance. Persecutions of Languedoc Jews and other minorities were initiated; the culture of the troubadours was lost as their cultured patrons were reduced to wandering refugees known as faidits. Their characteristic concept of "paratge", a whole sophisticated world-view, was almost destroyed, leaving us a pale imitation in our idea of chivalry. Lay learning was discouraged and the reading of the bible became a capital crime. Tithes were enforced. The Languedoc started its long economic decline to become the poorest region in France; and the language of the area, Occitan, began its descent from the foremost literary language in Europe to a regional dialect, now disparaged as a patois.

-Languedoc-France.info

end-timers are ignorant haters

"John of Patmos deals with cosmic terror and death, whereas the gospel and Christ dealt with human and spiritual love. Christ invented a religion of love (a practice, a way of living and not a belief), whereas the Apocalypse brings a religion of Power -- a belief, a terrible manner of judging. Instead of the gift of Christ, an infinite debt...
"Christ will be made to submit to the worst of prostheses: he will be turned into the hero of the collective soul, he will be made to give the collective soul something he never wanted to give. Or rather, Christianity will give him what he always hated, a collective Ego, a collective soul. The Apocalypse is a monstrous ego grafted onto Christ."
-Gilles Deleuze, Nietsche and St. Paul

chillun

"An abundance of children is a blessing for the greater, saner, part of mankind: I and a few others find blessings in a lack of them." -Michel de Montaigne, Essays I:14