Ich bin ein Berliner (says Nofretete)

Hello, my name is Nofretete, and I was born in Luxor in Egypt. 1912 some archeologists recovered me from this dark grave in the earth and brought me back to light. I, who together with my beloved husband Echnaton were so much fascinated by the divine nature of the sun had to spend 3400 years in the dark. When I was recovered and brought to Berlin, this not only caused a real Egyptomania and Nofretete-cult amongst the ordinary people, but the sun itself started to shine brighter and stronger for happiness to have me back.

The Egyptians were always afraid of my beauty. 3400 years ago they hated my preference of the sun against all the single, little minor gods they were worshipping. Thats why they banned my statue and burried me deep under ground. After the German archeologists under Ludwig Borchardt excavated me 100 years ago in the meter deep dust in Amarna, and brought me back to sunshine, the Egyption authorities several times attempted to get hold of me. They ordered reviews from French lawyers that should proof how the Germans had violated a contract with Egypt and insidiously betrayed them by highjacking me to Berlin. I have to admit, that my escape from Egypt to Berlin did not happened against my own will: Without exchanging words, both Borchardt and myself understood that the Berlin New Museum would provide a more adequate place for me than an Egyptian dust bin. We were afraid that in Egypt, they again would try to hide my beauty from the public views. Now, 2012, 100 years after my rebirth, they introduce in Egypt the Sharia, ordering every woman to hide her face and her beauty. In Egypt, wouldn't they put me under a hijab or a burka, before showing me to the public ? Or will the Salafists who occupied a couple of parlament seats and some governmental posts attack me altogether, destroy me as they did with other statues in Afghanistan and in Mali, because they fear that people will worship my beauty ? In Berlin in the New Museum, people from all over the world come only to see me, and yes, they worship my beauty. They like me, and I like them, and therefore I will stay in Berlin forever. I am nobodies property, I belong to the entire mankind. But in Berlin they toke always care of me, and they will do so forever. During the bombings of the 2. world war, when the city was turned into a ruin field, they found a saver shelter for me somewhere far away in a mountain village. They were so intrigued by Nofretete, that the emperor Wilhelm II and the East-Germans (who lost me to West-Berlin) both ordered identical copies of myself. I am nobodies property, not the Germans and not the Egyptians. But I am and will stay a Berliner. The local people call me a "Berliner Göre", and although this sounds turkish, it is their slang for "naughty little girl". Although this of course is a (typical Berlin) understatement of my beauty, I can life with it.

Where has my blood gone ?

Ghazal my Dear, Two month ago, in September 2012 Israel seemed to be the most relaxed and calm country one could imagine. Except for very rare security checks at the entrances of large shopping malls, concert halls or the Jad Vashem museum, there were hardly any signs of the immanent threat of violent attacks. As travelers we were more concerned about the possible failure of the air-conditioning in our flat, or about the trouble to release our car from the car-park that was suddenly locked on Sabbath. In an attempt to dissociate myself as far as possible from the tourists (many of whom visit Israel for its christian heir or because they come on a cruise with a one-day break in Haifa) I was lurking around Lev Hamifratz Shopping Mall. There, a memorial plate told that during construction of the mall in 1991 it had been hit by a scud missile launched by the lunatic Saddam Hussein. Some years later an attempted car bombing attack by the Libanese Hisbollah was prevented by police that sapped the vehicle on the car-park outside the building. This suddenly reminded me of an ever-present, albeit latent danger for life or injury in Israel, and this might to a certain degree prompted me to decline to the invitation by the Magen David Adom (the Israeli equivalent to the Red Cross) to donate blood right there at the shopping mall. 

 

I never donated blood before, except when it was recommended before a surgery in hospital. When I laid down on this rubber-covered bed I had some time to talk to the doctor and the nurse about the most likely occasion when my blood (of course processed and perhaps mixed with a lot of Israeli blood to dilute out the Goi-factors) was used for transfusion. Anything could happen in Israel like anywhere else: car accidents, surgical operations with sudden complications, caesarian sections. The prospect of a military conflict was rather unlikely, two month ago.

Now, after Israel started its counter-attack to protect its people from the Gaza-launched rockets, it appears that victims of air-strikes, bombs or rockets blowing living-houses will be more likely to be in need of blood-transfusions. If my blood finds a way out of the deep-freeze storage into the circulation system of a patient, it could be a civilian who's house in Ashkelon or Ofakim or even in the suburbs of Tel Aviv were hit by Hamas rockets. It could be an IDF soldier who is about to enter Gaza in an attempt to neutralize the terrorists of Hamas. But most likely, it will be an innocent person living in Gaza, who has been misused by the terrorists as a living shield, who finally is be the most vulnerable and least cared-for victim. Israels IDF recently circulated a Twitter news promising that it will open the Gaza check points to permit delivery of emergency medical goods, maybe including my blood.

When I donated blood in September in Haifa, I had to fill in the form below, and of course without understand much hebrew I simply followed the suggestions of the Magen David Adom nurse and clicked any field she recommended to me. I did not asked her, if any of these fields to fill in were refering to the intended usage of my blood. Did it possibly exluded its use during military operations ? Or for certain minorities ? Or could it even be that non-kosher blood from a Goi like me would only be used to rescue non-Jewish victims ? Everything is possible, but I hope in the case of life emergency, people forget about race, nation, faith, and give the blood to those who need it most.

Omar Khayyam: Misinterpretation in the 20th century

Ghazal my Dear,

you might have asked why I wrote this recent critical post about an Indian guru (Yogananda), and why I suggested that a modern singer like Maryam Akhondy is a much better interprete of classical Persian poetry by Omar Khayyam. Here is an example of an original Omar Khayyam rubbayat and the silly Yogananda interpretation. Also, at the end of the post, don’t miss Nancy Sinatras song “You Only Live Twice”, and tell me if you see any similarity to Omar Khayyam.

Here is the Rubbayat No 41 from Omar Khayyam (1018-1113) Translated by E.Fitzgerald 1859)

AWAKE! for Morning in the Bowl of Night
Has flung the Stone that puts the Stars to Flight:
And Lo! the Hunter of the East has caught
The Sultan’s Turret in a Noose of Light.

And here comes the

Keys To Meaning (Hic!!)  by Paramhansa Yogananda, (“Cristal Clear Publications” Hic!)

Morning — The dawn of awakening from delusive material existence.

Bowl of Night — The dark night of soul-ignorance.

Stone — Delusion-shattering acts of spiritual self-discipline.

Stars — Falsely attractive material desires.

Hunter of the East — Eastern wisdom, hunter and destroyer of delusion.

Sultan’s Turret — The kingly minaret of pride.

Noose of Light — The light of wisdom, which, like a lasso, haloes

Expanded Meaning  (For experts only !!)

Forsake delusion! Absorb into your innermost Self the calm light of wisdom.

Listen! your soul calls you to embrace a new adventure. As the sun travels from east to west across the sky, so does the light of civilization and of knowledge move across the earth. From the east comes Wisdom’s call: Awake! all you who sleep in ignorance.

What has pride brought you but melancholia and pain?—dark products of soul-ignorance. Dispel gloom forever: Abide from today onward in the light of inner peace.

What a rediculous attempt by this 20th century wanna-be spiritual leader to understand Omar Khayyams wunderful Rhubbayat. Since Yogananda has not the slightest clue of Omar Khayyams world of thoughts, his deep love for science, pure mathematics, astronomy, and his second love for wine, beauty and the attractions of woman, he can not do anything else than spoiling the clear language of Omar Khayyams rubbayat with “interpretations”.
Karl Marx, the great analytic of human society, would have called Yoganandas rediculous “Wine of the Mystic” the clearest example of “Religion as opium for the people”. But Marx died 10 years before Yogananda was born.

Omar Khayyam, this outstanding spirit of classical Persian poetry and science, did not only gave us the collections of rubbayats, but invented the binomial coefficients (important for combinatorial calculations), which in the west were attributed to B.Pascal.

Tomb of Omar Khayyam

Here is an interpretation of his rubbayat, that he would have definitely liked much more. It is the great song “YOU ONLY LIVE TWICE”, originally by Nancy Sinatra but this modern version by Bjoerk I like better .

In this 1967 title song for a 007 – James Bond movie one is indeed reminded of Omar Khayyams rubbayat. Read yourself, and build your own opinion. You don’t need a guru to understand this.

You Only Live Twice or so it seems,
One life for yourself and one for your dreams.
You drift through the years and life seems tame,
Till one dream appears and love is its name.

And love is a stranger who’ll beckon you on,
Don’t think of the danger or the stranger is gone.
This dream is for you, so pay the price.
Make one dream come true, you only live twice.
And love is a stranger who’ll beckon you on,
Don’t think of the danger or the stranger is gone.

Omar Khayyam -- brought into music by Maryam Akhondy

On the occasion of the finissage of the "Servus and Salam - an insight to Iran" exhibition here in Munich, the great music singer Maryam Akhondy with her ensemble Barbad gave a concert in the Maximilian church. A strong voice, for which the term Diva would be approbiate, also she is anything else than diva-like. Her music and her very special kind of humor for me was the only valid interpretation of the Omar Khayyams poetry. When I read his rubbayat (naturally in the famous english translation by Fitzgerald) I was always touched by the wisdom, fine lyrics and human feelings that emanate from them. A very free author, great scientist, amazing spirit and precise observer put down in words how he saw his life, the pressure from the society, his love for beauty and for human desires, and all this about one thousand years ago in a poetic language that seems very clear, not modern, but of an ever lasting diction.

A while ago, however, I started to worry, if my unconditioned excitement by Omar Khayyams poetry might be the result of a very naiv misinterpretation. A friend of mine, a persian book-seller and philologist recommended to read Paramahansa Yogananda "The wine of the mystic", in which the author claim to provide the only valid interpretation (or better called decryption) of Omar Khayyams rubbayat. So for each 4-line rubbayat, Yogananda writes about 3 pages interpretation. Already in the introduction, the authors warns us that each time that Omar Khayyam mentions "Wine", he refers to the "Divine Spirit". Similarly, when Omar Khayyam writes about "Love to Girl", Yogananda wants us to believe that this means nothing more than "Love to the divine spirit". For me, this so-called spiritual interpretation of Omar Khayyams rubbayat is nothing more than a violent misinterpretation, a unsuccesful attempt to clear his most beautiful, human and real eternal poetry of all value and of all its real spirit. Yoganandas book is a bad example of the attempt to misuse a former great piece of literature for religious hypocracy, be it christian, islamic or this yoga-guru style of Yogananda (he later founded an organisation of Self-Realization Fellowship, which in my view is a religious cult like a million others, with the ambition to be in possession of the final truth). Eventhough I immediately developed a strong antipathy for this "modern" spiritual interpretation of Omar Khayyams lyrics, there was one strong argument. Yogananda was able to read Omar Khayyam as the original persian text, therefore claiming that his spiritual interpretaion is more authentic than the secular western ones (beginning by the english translation of Fitzgerald and later by the german version of Rosen). Yogananda complained that all western readers simply valued Omar Khayyam by the wrong idea that he praises love, wine and the beauty of the world in the way we used to do it in the west. Unfortunately, this was a strong argument, although for Yogananda Persian was a foreign language as well. It might even be that he did his "modern-spiritual" interpretation based on Fitzgeralds english translation as well, rather than reading the original text. Yogananda spoke hindi, and there are quite many similarities betwenn Hindi and Persian, two indo-european languages.

But to my greatest relieve, Maryam Akhondy, a true persian, a modern singer, a woman that does not need to attract followers like a guru, she obviously interpreted Omar Khayyam, one of the greatest representatives of classical persian poetry, in the same modern and human manner as I intuitively read his rubbayat. For me, Maryam Akhondys songs are the only valid interpretation of Omar Khayyam, but for the best and dedicated readers, his poetry is completely self-explained. Omar Khayyam does not need gurus (like Yogananda) who try to build an ideology around his beautiful and clear lyrics.

Fighting christian dominance on Blogger"s blogosphere

Where have all these babtists, evangelicals and other "born-again christian" morons learned how to write a blog ????  Is it only me who feels like sitting in the wrong movie (as we germans like to say), because always when I click the Next Blog command in the header row of my own Broken-Radius I got the impression to be thrown into a christian fundamentalists propaganda machinery. Most of these blogs then display personal profiles aiming of presenting its owner as a more faithful person than holy Thomas of Aquin or Margaretha of Bingen. What a crap christian conspiracy is occupying the cyperspace here ? I feel surrounded by dumb christian fundamentalists flooding  the web with their bigotry. 

This is as worse as it is nowadays on short-wave radio, where you dont hear BBC, VOA, Radio Moscow or Deutsche Welle any more, but all free frequencies are taken over by Radio Maria, Radio Vatican, Bible Radio and their islamic counterparts.

However small my contribution to fight this spread of christian stupidity and lies might be, I will counterstrike with some photos showing that the battle is not lost jet. and in particular to show, that the real life and the real battles are still happening on the streets. One of these street-born counteractions took place May 2010 in Munich (sorry Asal, I forgot to invite you to this event), where me and Jane from west-coast USA demonstrated our discomfort with Pope Benedikt personal cult. The demonstration under the slogan "Jolly Procession" was organized by the Munich branch of the "Freidenker Verband". 

Please note that we were escorted by the German Police, which expressed its sympathy and defended our march against the furious participants of a religious pro-Benedict festival that took place at the same time.

 

Thats NOT me and Jane, but the brave organizers of the event. This fake priest looks more disgusting than Joker from Batman, but the fake nun looks as pretty as Michele Pfeiffer.

We gave this grey day a lot of extra and vivid colours. Click on the "PLAY VIDEO" bottom below, please.  Never click on the "NEXT BLOG" bottom in the header row.

Why the Fukushima nuclear disaster is good for nature

It is always worth to follow Monthy Pythons advise and ALWAYS LOOK ON THE BRIGHT SIDE OF LIFE, even in case of an accident that is univocally considered a major disaster for the civilized world and in Japan the biggest catastrophy since their defeat in WW2. At least here in Germany, the most prominent critics of nuclear energy are the greens, in close alliance with WWF and Greenpeace. And as we all know how well and absolutely predictable this german Angst works it was no wonder that the Green Party managed to kick-out the conservative christian-democrats from their stronghold in Baden-Wuertemberg. They just had to point to Fukushima and reminding every voter in their state that it were always the cristian-democrats who support nuclear energy.

This, on the first glance, looked very straight for the green party, a clear "full-house" so to say. But in fact, they might have even won twice: Fukushima not only presented them the prime-minister post of Baden-Wuertemberg on a silver plate, but the long-term and global benefits of this "accident" might be even more important. I"m talking here about the whales and dolphins, who over the last years were slaughtered by the thousands to satisfy the desire of the japanese cuisine. Not the UN, nor Greenpeace or WWF could achieve, what the Fukushima accident did: a natural protection for these big naval mammals for at least one generation of animals. Remember, caesium 137, the strong gamma-isotope that was released into the japanese sea and into the pacific, has a physical half-life time of 30 years, and its biological half life time is not much shorter. It preferentially accumulates in the muscle-tissue of mammals, including whales and dolphins. For them, it does not bear a real health risk, so nobody of us should worry, and if Greenpeace and WWF do so, we all know it is just their business to beat the drum. In fact, muscle tissue is one of the most radio-resistent, so whales and dolphins will live as good or as bad as without caesium-137 in the ocean. But for us humans, since we always worry and we made the german Angst one of our best export-goods, any knowledge that some single atoms caesium-137 are in our steak or Sushi or Miso-Soup makes us sick right away. So the japanese whale-hunters and the violent Dolphin-Killers in Taiji will face some tough years to come. I guess the sale for whale and dolphin meat will drop by 99% soon. And unless some hard-liners such as Mr. "I-take-some-days-off"-Shimizu of Tepco, or Mr."My-blue-jackets-is-a-fake-Levis"-Edano of the gouvernment or his imperial highness Mr."I-love-you-all"-Akihito eat in front of the TV-cameras and on their web-sites some whale-sushi and dolphin-soup, the popularity of japanese sea-food would loose even more ground.
We all know instinctively, that there always must be light, when there is shadow. Or as a good friend of mine who was cought by the idea of physical laws-of-conservation ones formulated it: "For every person on earth who stops crying, another one has to break-out in tears. The sum of all the tears in the world is therefore a fixed number." Hence, we should not feel too much mercy seeing the japanese nuclear manager spreading their tears around and mourning in public and begging for pardon. We must know: for the whales and dolphins now starts a great time, they will live for the next decades a life without fear. Like the Jews still celebrate Purim as the rescue from a masacre planned by the persian minister Haman in the 5th century BC, such will the whales and the dolphins always commemorate the year 2011, when a devine hand blow up the Fukushima reactors and spilled the caesium-137 broth into the ocean to mark all naval mammals as unedible and unhuntable.
Or would it be possible that it was not God in his wise decision, who first triggered the earth-quake and than the tsunami, that hit Fukushima so badly ? Could it be that all the whales and the dolphins of the world came together on March 11th, to make a big, big wave, much bigger than the mini-tsunamis that our kids like to do at home in the bathing-tube ? A wave that hit the coolant-pumps and auxilary generators and electricity supply in Fukushima ? Don"t forget, how intelligent whales and dolphins can be: If you have ever seenw the movie "Hitchhikers Guide to the Universe", you remember how they could smell the coming disaster and with a smile on their face (which in fact they always have) they said "So long, and thanks for all the fish".
Does not matter who really did it, intelligent creatures (like the whales or dolphins) or a super-super-intelligent creature (like God or the WWF), finally we should understand that it was worth it. This little nervous break down around a japanse nuclear facility rescued the future life of our most loved naval creatures.

Cryptic Message

Hi Ghazal, my Dear,

While waiting for an answer from you, I tried to de-crypt (or decode) a peculiar sequence of numbers to find out if there is a meaningful message hidden in it. The sequence reads as following:

5 2 6 0 2 0 4 2 2 4 1 2 0 1 2 1 5 1 3 3 8 1 4 3 2 4 0 1 4 2 1 2 0 1 2 4 1 2 1 3 3 2 3

Each digit is the number of messages that I wrote to you before I received an answer (during the last 4 month). Therefore, this sequence was virtually generated by you.
On average, you answered after receiving 2.3 mails from me, what is not too bad, considering that you have been very busy writing your thesis. I already thought how to bring the ratio closer to 1 (i.e. that one mail from you is followed by only one from me). This would mean I have to write less frequently, but this unfortunately  would result in much longer messages - a nightmare for you. On the other side, asking you to write more often would prompt you to shorten your e-mails to an SMS format again. And these very short mails too often lack any opportunity to say something important (although you are much more experienced in saying a lot with a view words only).

To decipher a hidden message in the above sequence of numbers, one can group them pair-wises (i.e. 52 60 20 42 24 .....). Using any text that is only known to you and me (i.e. to the sender and to the recipeint of the hidden message) one can re-derive this cryptic messsage by considering each of these two-digit numbers as the position of the next character within the key-text (method is called book-cipher)  (as above:
1. character at position 52
2. character at position 52+60 = 112
3. character at position 52+60+20 = 132 and so on).

With the introduction of your MSc-thesis as the key-text, the hidden message reads :

n matti nfecatskedatt
On the first glance it might still look very cryptic, but by re-positioning the empty spaces and with some fantasy one might read it like:

inmate at infected cats kedat

Ghazal, you have to help me further. Although I can read each single word now, I have no clue what you want to tell me. 

Take Care, my Dear
Michael
............................................................................................................

Hi michael, 

Oh, I"m surprised how far you got with decrypting this hidden massage. To be honest, I was not aware that there was some "meaning" behind the frequencies of my e-mails to you. The more I am surprised that the words make a lot of sense to me: 


"KEDAT"  is the name of my  "INMATE" at the university, with whom I share an office. She was sick ("INFECTED") with flue the last time we met. And now it might be that I ("CAT") caught the infection from her.

I have one general question about the decryption you did: You put the code (the sequence of numbers above) onto your blog, so everybody can read them. Even though the introduction to my MSc thesis is only known to you and me (unless I"m going to publish it in NATURE, ha ha)  I guess with some computing power the hidden message can be deciphered by anybody else, right ?  So how safe is it then ?


Seeing forward to hear you opinion.


take care
/ghazal



......................................................................

Ghazal, my Dear,

Sorry to read that you got cold. I hope it was not provoked by my intense search for a meaning behind the numbers (like a self-fulfilling prophecy). For myself, I try to "ban" the flue-bugs by going swimming in the cold once a week. Up to now, it seems to work.

Take Care, get better
Michael

speaking KLARTEXT

Hi Ghazal,

I called KLARTEXT about the german beginners course. There is one starting June 20th, twice a week (Thuesday and Thursday, 6p.m. to8.30 p.m.). The course number is A71-1.
You can register online here.

There are still free places.

Bye, Michael

A very polite Cat

Hi Ghazal,

Thank you very much for your e-mail. It was a pleasure to read some words from you. Hope you had a nice day.
I"ll be in the Lab tomorrow only for a few hours, at around lunch I"ll leave to see my parents in Berlin and some friends (where I stay till Wednesday). We talk tomorrow about the best way to organize next week. (Claudia is also away).

I already told the people at KLARTEXT that you want attend the course at the 20th since it is your birthday. They said it is no problem, and in fact they even offered that one can start the course anytime (even now), but this implies that one steps in when the other students are already advanced.
Ghazal, I"m sure that in mid June you have already learned some words or phrases in german just from the people in the Lab, so that missing the first lesson at the school won"t matter.

wish you good night

Michael

PS: please don"t call me Dr.R.
Nobody in the Lab uses these official titles. If you continue with this, I will start to call you Mrs.F (what sounds very nice, I have to admitt).