Baaba Maal telling stories in a boat

A Room For London

Many warm summers ago, my family sailed with another family, the Rantis, over some weeks on Lake Champlain in the States. They were in their boat. We in ours. It was a very loose arrangement. Each boat would sail around during the day as we so wished in whatever direction the wind took us. We met up at some per-arranged destination in late afternoon. We spent the evenings together watching bats fly, swatting mosquitoes, squishing black flies, talking about sailing, and laughing at silly jokes. The parents teasing the children. The children nudging our parents stories into forbidden areas according to the consumption of rum they were imbibing in.

When our boat was anchored on those late afternoons, it meant my siblings and I had an hour or two to go off in the dingy and explore the coastline or island we were anchored near before dinner was served. When the Rantis put down anchor, it was time for the family to play music. The parents were professional musicians and had to practice the pieces for the next symphony season. The two children (flute and oboe) also had their practice sessions.

So off my sisters and brother and I would go out in our dingy accompanied by their music bouncing over the water right to the corners of beaches and rooks and wooded areas we explored. It was an magic experience.

Boats, dusk into night, family, friends,  stories, music... magic... Baaba Maal, Jim Palmer and Mamadou Sarr performance in A Room for London is all that and more.

A matter of intent

Ken Burns: On Story from Redglass Pictures on Vimeo.

"Ken Burns: on Story" is a very compelling short film about storytelling. He argues all of storytelling is manipulation. It is just a matter of deciding whether what you are doing when you tell a story is an acceptable form of manipulation or not.

It is difficult to get my mind around this idea. If you look at the definition of the word,

"Shrewd or devious management, especially for one's own advantage"

or of psychological manipulation,

"a type of social influence that aims to change the perception or behavior of others through underhanded, deceptive, or even abusive tactics",

then obviously storytelling being a form of manipulation can't be good, right?

What if we separate the intent (a type of social influence that aims to change the perception or behavior of others) from the means (through underhanded, deceptive, or even abusive tactics). What if the means we use arise out of a genuine honest wish to share or explore our ideas with others? Is that just splitting hairs? Is it just another form of manipulation?

Slowing down and speeding up

April, May, and June were crazy months... lots of contracts to fulfill, lots of people to talk to, lots of ideas turning around in my head. As of two and a half weeks ago, most of the busy-ness came to a standstill. Now, I will have time to slow down.

Sleep in a bit later if I wish. Got to be a bit earlier... And, this did happen. I felt the tension leave my shoulders. I watched rather too much meaningless television series. Read some light lit. Went out for some walks late in the evening with my daughter.

The whole time I was picking up project work I had put aside and managed to finish the last details. Even the pile of tax stuff is ultra thin. Nice to get those off the list. Tick.

Slowing down was doing the trick. Then I sat down on Saturday morning to type in some dialogs for a series of podcasts I am producing for a client and wham... seven hours later my brain was steaming and my fingers were typing away and I was speeding along with ideas. This state of creativity hasn't stopped since.

I know you can not force creativity, when it happens, it happens. Yet, I think slowing down does help to speed things up...

Making old men cry

On the surface of things, it might be hard to imagine why the words, "They combine to give us a combined significance of five standard deviations." were important. Yet, once the speaker speaks them, there is a momentary pause, a deep felt wonder, and then the audience explodes in clapping and laughter and a few old men cry. It does seem odd, doesn't it?

Not so, if you realise that what the speaker is saying, unequivocally stating is, "You were right. You aren't insane." And, more importantly, "Our knowledge of how the universe works is now forever changed by a combined significance of five standard deviations." The seats in the auditorium were filled with people whose lives were spent realising that significance. I imagine this new finding gives their lives new meaning.

Whether this finding is/was worth the cazillion dollars it took to find, we will probably not know in our lifetime. Presumably, hopefully, this was not purely done out of intellectual curiosity. Presumably, hopefully, this new-found knowledge can be used toward finding a new form of energy, a cure to cancer, a way to supply clean water to all beings on this earth. It has got to have some far-reaching significance, right?

If you want to know more about what the Higgs boson is, this video does well to give a simple explanation.

Just as an afterthought... It is odd, in Newton's time it took a falling apple to figure out how gravity worked...

One Classy Dame

I discovered this video on Ronni's blog today. What a delight. I love Rita Hayworth. And thank you, whoever you are, who spent the endless hours figuring out what films and what parts of the choreography best suited the song. Doesn't it make your toes tingle?

Unrequited Love

Long summer days spent lovelorn meandering an inner landscape populated with accidental encounters and meaningless light-hearted chatter laden with twisted subtext. Or not. Oh, the tortures of unrequited love...

We have all probably at one time wished we could stomp our feet loudly and sing bravely the words, "I belong to you. You belong to me in my sweet heart..." Yes, of course it is sappy, but dearly so.

Summer Hole

In Germany, we have this phenomena called the "Sommerloch", which translates literally into "summer hole". Most self-employed businesspersons, fall into this hole at the end of June and don't crawl out until sometime in September. There is just no one out there wanting any work done.

The hole is caused by every single person in All Of Europe going off for weeks and weeks of vacations. If you can imagine the huppla of a 4th of July weekend and just extend it endlessly over the whole summer, you get the idea.

This means, in theory, I have some time to twiddle my thumbs and write blog posts. So, you heard it here, I am back...

When Matt Grows Up

We probably have all grown up during the last seven years in matters of the internet, since the first "Where the Hell is Matt?" video appeared in 2005. Well, it shouldn't surprise you, so did Matt.

If you want to read a very interesting assessment about what that growing process encompassed, please read this article titled "When the world is your dance teacher" by Ethan Zuckerman. It points out some of those forks in the road Matt took while seemingly covering every corner of this earth.

Something silliy, something vain

It's been a while, not out of lack of interest, but life's wonderful challenges driving the direction my feet dance and where and when I can put my thoughts to pen, as it were, which isn't in ink or written in stone in these digital days. There are thousand small moments when I see quirky situations right outside me living room window or witness delightfully vain pursuits, like those of hairy legged skaters doing pas de deux with scrapped up boards in some shopping mall parking lot, when my heart bursts with the silliness that is our life, there comes the wish to share it all with you.

Please know that the sparsity of posting does not reflect in any way a lack of interest or willingness to explore or share my world with you... it is only an indication that self-employment is a cookie monster who never stops wanting more time or energy or ideas or TLC. Thankfully, things are running well at last, thought tentatively so...

A rant of sorts

There is so much that puzzles me about the US election process, politics, and economics. This particular election's elephant in the porcelain shop seems to be the government's failure to have increased taxes on high income earners. Nick Hanauer goes on this rather eloquent rant about this topic.

It is interesting how he tries to interject statical facts into his argument in a peripheral manner. Almost as if to say, "numbers are good, but common sense is better".

Jacqueline Novogratz: someone to follow

Jacqueline Novogratz has been one of my heroes for a few years now. If you listen to her words of her Gettyburg College commencement speech, it will be easy to understand why.

What I like about her advice to the young graduates is how she tries not so much to inspire, but to make evident the necessity to live a meaningful life, to make hard choices, to welcome the challenges, and to pick yourself up every time you fall.

She is someone to follow during these times. I only hope some of those graduates who attended the ceremony do.

(If you wish to read the speech, here is the text.)

Grabbing our Attention

I've been wanting to write you about the marvelous science channel of The Guardian called the Newton Channel.

I'm trying to sit down and look and make notes on one of the videos every month. It is one of the many projects I am doing this year (and thus explains why I am sadly not blogging so much) to focus more on quality than quantity of information. Over the last five or six years, I have been addicted to information gathering.  That is why this video is appropriate in explaining this need. Here is the video description:

"You can have too much of a good thing … or not enough. The hormone dopamine is responsible for the cravings of addiction, but when levels are abnormally low it causes the muscular twitches of Parkinson's disease. Studying dopamine has also revealed a fascinating distinction between the brain mechanisms that underpin 'wanting' and 'liking' – a finding that has implications not only for our understanding of human nature, but also for the treatment of bipolar disorder and schizophrenia."

Please do watch the video. It is excellent food for thought.

If you wish to partake in a good study program, perhaps you should consider making up your own curriculum. The LifeHacker website collected information on all sorts of online self-study courses.

For example, Professor Benjamin Caballero offers a course on the Principles of Human Nutrition at the Johns Hopkins University.

One of the other projects I have been working on for about two years is learning visualization techniques.  The idea behind developing one's own visual language is to ease information assimilation, differentiation, and recall.  This sounds so very formal and serious a pursuit, but actually it is returning back to childhood, to a time when self-expression was not only limited to spoken and written words.

Dare you not to tear up

Good advertising campaigns are few and far between. Here's one, don't you think?

The Politics of Gaming

It is hard to explain why, but I thought this video by Jay Cheel intriguing. Maybe it is because I have quite a few friends like the fellows in the film. They spend hours of each day or their weekends playing board games or online games. Scrabble or Settlers of Catan, it is not important; they just need their daily or weekly dose.

What is interesting is how the game brings out the bad in people's behaviour. It almost seems as if part of the appeal of the game is being able to heckle and tease the other players.


I've never liked playing games of any sorts (exception Solitaire) and so the film presents a fascinating world without awakening anyany wish to get involved in it.

The problem is not children... it's adults!

Love a good burst of ranting from someone with a good heart and intelligent mind.

Economy is Politics in Disguise

It is well worth your time to listen to Ross Jackson's proposal about why we, as a society, need to rework our economical system. He suggests we make economy a subset of our ecological system, operating within its (ecological) constraints.

Telling A Good Story

To all of us who, as children, built thousands of forts, went on countless adventures down the Amazon, explored the wilds of the Yukon... Caines Arcade rules.

To all of us who want to tell stories about the power of a child's imagination, or how strong is our inner drive to create something concrete from the ideas swimming around our heads... Nirvan Mullick shows us how to do so with mastery.

The best part though, or maybe it is just the cherry on top, is the song at the end. Can you imagine having a song written about you?

Down at Albert Brown's

This last month has been crazy. Crazy good and frantically busy. Time to stamp my feet and to jiggle along to a speedy tempo. I do hope I will be back soon writing on this blog regularly. Can't promise. Just wanted to say hello to all you guys and not to worry, all is well here.

Except for the fact that it snowed again today!

Wanted: Firsthand Knowledge

 I have a bit of a bad conscious this morning. One of the teachers I worked with over the last years asked me to become a part of a parent, teacher, and student work group. The topic of the group is “use of private media in the school”. Initially, I said yes to participate in the group. Now I’ve decided not to get involved.

It is not because the topic isn’t worthy of thoughtful consideration. It is not that it isn’t one dear to my heart. Also there is an immediate need to figure out how to deal with earnest infringements of current policies. My reticence has to do with the dynamics of the situation in general.

There has been a boycott in using mobile phones during school hours for a few years now. The students are allowed to use other forms of media (e.g. iPods). Now with the occurrence of smart phones there is no distinction between mobile phones and other media. The teachers want further restrictions into media use. The students want leniency. 

It is an age-old challenge. How can a younger generation be heard?  So, on the surface of the matter, it would seem all we need is constructive debate, collective aims, and mutual respect for the different parties’ positions.

If I have learned anything in the last ten years of working with new media (can we still call it new media if it is twenty years old?), talk will resolve little. The students will resist being shoved into one box. The adults will site actual misconduct to promote the necessity for more restrictions. Everyone is avoiding the one elephant in the porcelain shop. That is, how to find an acceptable solution when those in a position of authority, teachers and parents, know next to nothing firsthand about what they are talking about.

It is as if Mennonite teachers and parents were asked to be leaders in teaching their students and children about modern farming practices.

It just will not happen. It is not that their skills and experiences in teaching that are obsolete. Nor is it that traditional education is wrong. Admittedly, there are many uncertainties in adopting modern methods and technologies. I am not disputing any of these things.

My only dispute is that I think the misuse of media by children and teens on the school grounds or in their homes is, in part, a result of our inability to act upon our responsibility to lead them in it proper use in classroom learning and social situations. If parents and teachers don’t know through their own personal experiences how media is best practiced, then it is questionable whether they are in a position to qualitatively offer assistance in restricting its misuse.

The Opposite of Poverty is Justice

It has been awhile since I sat at the edge of my seat and shivered with anticipation listening to someone speak. Bryan Stevenson tells a good solid story about the saddening injustices of the US justice system.

To get a short insight into what Mr. Stevenson is speaking of, you can listen to Quantel Lotts' interview. Mr. Loots was jailed for life without the possibility of parole for the murder of his step-brother at age 14.



Please spread the word.