A Potsdam Sunday

Sometimes it takes the visit of a friend to really get out and see some of the sights in your area, so it was nice having a friend stay with us over the weekend, giving us a chance to tour the grounds of Frederick the Great's Sanssouci Palace (it really is a VERY small palace, but with a lovely park) in Potsdam once again. I'm just posting a very few pics I thought had some artistic value :)




















An ornate gazebo.



















Detail of the gazebo.



















Frog's eye view of the wine terraces and the palace.




















Top o' the Chinese Teahouse.




















Some Prussian princess' bust. If you look closely, you see the snowflakes :)




















B&W can make anything look artsy.




















This final one isn't Sanssouci (duh!) but a picture from the historic Dutch quarter of Potsdam (I had to aim high, as I didn't want to have any cars, street signs or people in the frame).

The Women's Figure Skating event is just about the only thing I watch when it comes to the Winter Olympics.
While it's debatable whether anything that is subject to individual judging and not to objective measurement can really be called a sport, I love the blending of athletic effort and poetic grace that the best practitioners have always exhibited.

With no German competitors in the finals, it's easy for me to say that I don't usually root for the "home team", but I honestly subscribe to the motto that the best should win. But i understand that Americans were rooting for Sasha Cohen, who had done so brilliantly in the short program and who, it was hoped, would continue the tradition set by greats such as Dorothy Hamill, Kristi Yamaguchi (my personal favorite), and Michelle Kwan.

Watching the competition last night was tough. I tend to suffer with the athletes as they stumble or fall. What's worse in this particular sport is that after a fall, you have to grit your teeth, smile through it all and continue with the program. But if, like Sasha Cohen did, you take falls in the first 30 seconds of your program, that has to have a psychologically devastating effect, although she did recover.

I also felt for Russian Irina Slutskaja. At 27, this probably was her last chance for olympic gold. And while I don't have the professional eye, it was difficult for me to see why her program should have set her back behind Sasha Cohen in the end.

Shizuka Arakawa glided effortlessly and beautifully, with just the right amount of technical difficulty not to distract from the lyrical beauty of her performance. As her turn cam fairly late in the competition, it did not really take awesome predictive powers to say she would take home the gold, but that's what I did after seeing her skate.

Congratulations to her and to Japan, for the first ever olympic gold in women's figure skating!

Hunting with Dick Cheney

Oh, OK, this is not really about hunting with Dick Cheney. But the recent hunting accident involving Vice President Cheney made me think again about what kind of a "sport" hunting really is. Why do grown men (and they are almost exclusively men, I believe) find fascination in aiming a shotgun at some peacefully browsing unsuspecting animal ? Why would anybody?

Where is the sport in that - does the animal have any chance at all ? I strongly believe that animals are God's creations, with feelings not wholly unlike our own, and the desire to live their lives peacefully. What joy can there be in savagely terminating such a life? I wish we would put those remnants of our prehistoric hunter forebears behind us. Isn't it bad enough that we mistreat our domesticated animals by the way we raise, then slaughter them?

As for Cheney, I have never liked him and I like him even less now that I know he's a hunter...and an inept one at that (although as long as he shoots other hunters, the animals can breathe a little easier)

Nostalgia time

Anyone remember the 1964 New York World's Fair? Well, old-ish though I am, neither do I.

But I do happen to be a Disney fan, and the Fair was of great importance to Walt Disney... he was very much present at the Fair, with his team having designed several shows and pavilions, among them the State of Illinois, where an audio-animatronic Lincoln was first presented, the Unicef pavilion (sponsored by Pepsi-Cola), where the (in)famous It's A Small World ride originated, the Ford pavilion, and the General Electric Carousel Theater.

I recently happened to accidentally visit a website http://www.nywf64.com/ dedicated to the fair, and I'll post some of the intriguing (or so I think) aerial photos they showcase. Do visit the website to see more and to learn more about the history of the fair than I could ever tell you!

Looking at those pics with a somewhat false nostalgia, the corporate can-do optimism of the time strikes me as naive yet charming. But look for yourself:

Apropos of nothing...

I just wanted to share how much these sentiments always speak to me...



...and I hope you'll also still like them when I "reveal" that they grace Ronald Reagan's tomb.

Tell Me A Story cont'd...the difficulty of communication

On two separate occasions these past few days I was struck by how people construe their worlds, what stories they come up with to make sense of new situations:

One, a Berlin city magazine had a review of a new documentary film, the title of which escapes me, that is about Mormon missionaries and their training. Now, for the sake of full disclosure I'll state that I once was a member of that church and still enjoy reading their monthly church magazine. But I digress. The concluding sentence of that review went something like, "not bad, but it doesn't delve deep enough into the secrets of this homophobic sect".

Now, you may make sense of the Mormons in one way or another, but I dare say for most of us, real or imagined homophobia is not the first thing that comes to mind. Polygamy might, although that would also be inaccurate. Only if your own construct system has the homosexual/ heterosexual dichotomy as a core construct will you approach information about anything first and foremost from that angle.

The other experience evolved a conversation I had in class. My notebook happened to have a picture of Ronald and Nancy Reagan as a background, and a fellow student incredulously asked whether I actually liked Reagan (I do), because, and I paraphrase, "he was so conservative, and against gays and everything".
Again, I submit that in the grand context of world history, Reagan's position vis-a-vis homosexuals is a footnote at best and he will be remembered for other things, and while I am a fan of the man, I understand that many of his policies may be debatable.

Tenuous though it may be, I'd just like to make the connection to my previous post on Roger Schank's book, Tell Me A Story. People really do seem to make sense of the world, and of new experiences, by indexing and referencing them with "stories" they know. And obviously, you "know" stories that are of importance to you. So, if the situation of gays and lesbians is a concern to you, you have a repertory of stories and experiences that you refer to when you encounter something new. And this also means that you may be reluctant to accept new aspects, if they threaten the construct system you have evolved.

So, in a sense, two people can never really understand each other. Even if they hear the same story, they may come to radically different conclusions because in their minds, they may emphasize totally different aspects.

Well, thanks for bearing with me. This is an interesting topic (or so I think) and I may come back to that again.