diego.blogger.de

Debora and Ralf, ilha comprida, early 90s

The heatwave of the last weeks and the recent rain reminds me of a song played by the Ramones. In the early 90s we had to go a lot by car. Driving, we listen to the radio, namely to 89 FM. Funnily, often when we hit heavy rain, they played Have You Ever Seen the Rain? (1993: Acid Eaters), which is a cover-version. We found it a bit ironic. Later we had the opportunity to see a show by the Ramones (10/05/1994). When I was in NYC, I also went to Rockaway Beach (wiki). Today the band is history - three of the founding members passed away, Joey the singer in 2001. However, their music is still very influential.

check out this funny site.

ok, here we go

For the first time I did not get copies of my fotos but only got the developed film. It is a caesura for me and let's see how it goes.

Above you see a foto that I took in May 2010 at the UN headquaters. It shows the sculpture "Knotted Gun" by Carl Fredrik Reuterswärd and belongs to the UN art collection.

The current german Minister of Economic Cooperation and Development, Dirk Niebel (FDP, liberal party), was not allowed to visit the Gaza strip (telepolis, german).

I wonder if this has to do with the secret service agent who recently was arrested in Poland (spiegel, german). German court demands extradition. It seems like he helped another agent to obtain a german passport. The delicate thing: he claimed to have been persecuted during the third reich.

I find it interesting that Niebel lived for one year in a Kibbutz in Israel.

update: It seems like in the last time no higher foreign politician was allowed to visit Gaza and Niebel probabily was aware of it. (s1, s0)

update2: European politicians invited to visit Gaza (spiegel, german)

I don't like the combination with the image of the post below and therefore remove the Issyk-Kul image and show it later.

Kirgistan: Yssykköl 2005

On my computer at home I found the above image. The interesting about it is that I created the file in June 1998. Obviously, it was referring to the championship of that year (I forgot where it took place and don't want to look it up). However, it shows that already at that time I was unhappy with the insanity of soccer.

For two reasons I think it became worse.
1. Nowadays every small bar has a projector or at least a large TV screen to show the games (12 years ago this was not the case).
2. Since 2006 people in Germany are much more nationalistic or show it more. There are flags all over the place.

I would like to beam myself 4 weeks into the future.

In a recent posting (Fighting Zipf) I had tried to point out that inequality and strongly skewed distributions represent one of the major problems of society.

In Germany there is some discussion going on about minimum wage. But the current government does not understand the idea. They try to implement various minimum wages for different sectors - avoiding a global minimum wage.

I would like to suggest to couple the minimum wage of a company to its maximum wage. Such as that the minimum wage an employee can earn in a company is by a factor 2 (or maybe 10) smaller than that of the employee with the maximum wage. Maybe this could be a compromise. Alternativerly this could be implemented on country scale or even larger.

At the time of brent spar, people were saying "bomb shell to hell".
Thus, I thought, what to do about BP? A boycott might be a measure. I also thought, I might not be the first having this idea and searched for such a boycott initiative. Unfortunately the first site listed by gockle is on facebook (I wonder why). The next reasonable seems to be this one: Boycott BP Gas Stations