Hail to the Chief

Another President down and another to go. Christian Wulff resigned just 3 days ago and our decisive political parties have already agreed on the new guy: Joachim Gauck, the one who didn’t make it in the last round of elections will have the honorable task of restoring our country’s dwindling faith in the most meaningless function in Germany: Federal President.

These Presidents really don’t last long anymore. Köhler, Wulff, and now Gauck happened all within the last 2 years. And can we blame them? Our unemployment rates are at an exceptional low, the economy is outgrowing the rest of the fest, so why should eligible elder state’s men accept any occupation offered to them by our Chancelloress Angela Merkel?

Seriously, in today’s job market, would you accept a President’s position without any of the fun parts? The power to declare war, veto any bill, throw out the government, or ride around half-naked in the prairies of Russia? All you can do in Germany, is sit around in your big castle, host a number of boring parties with pesky little children, fly out to other countries to inspect the designs of their military uniforms, and once a year address the nation on a subject of so little relevance that only the state-owned TV stations will endure the financial hardship of actually broadcasting it.

Wulff should have stayed on and made it a more fun function. Okay, he threatened the media, but hey, in other states the President owns the media. Okay, he was about to be stripped off his immunity for criminal proceedings, but hey, in other states the President simply legalizes whatever he was accused of through Parliament. Okay, he kind of liked fancy travelling and upgrades paid for by wealthy individuals not at all keen on any return on invest, but hey, how do you expect to pay for all that with the lousy income of 200 grand a year? He didn’t even have sex with an intern or spy on the opposition or declare war on countries with forged evidence or…

Whatever. In Germany, only the dullest guy will have any chance of lasting the term of service. Maybe this is a good thing. The more feisty Presidents of the past have lead to no good. So, hail to the Chief! Hail to Joachim Gauck! May he renew the glue of our society with his sincerity and sugary words.

Ballantine’s Day

Today is Valentine’s Day. And no, I have absolutely no intention of ridiculing it. Of course, there is much potential for it. As always, you just have to sample some of the entries on Wikipedia and you’ll find it hard to resist some bemused chuckling about the way traditions form.

Of course, Valentine’s Day is named after Valentinus, the name of one or several martyrs in the early and fun days of Christianity. I will not go into their individual misfortunes, but let’s just note here that their common plight was to be beheaded. How the day commemorating the headless became a day for lovers is just one of those mysteries that make us Humans so lovable.

The traditions surrounding Valentine’s Day in Western countries today are well known (but usually forgotten by male individuals during the first half of February). Probably lesser known is the way South Koreans like to celebrate February, 14. As in Japan, Valentine’s Day is all about women giving men chocolate. Yes, women give chocolates to men and not vice versa. The main purpose of this ritual is to get some chocolate back (namely white chocolate, which my friend Stefan refuses to classify as chocolate, but merely as “fat”). The return gift is due exactly one month later on March, 14 and is aptly called White Day.

While Japanese leave it at the “you give me chocolate, I give you chocolate back one month later”, the South Koreans really take it to the next level. They have another day called Black Day yet another month later. On April 14, those who have been left out on White Day, express their disappointment by eating a dish called Jajangmyeon which consists of noodles in black sauce. So men who missed out on Valentine’s Day and women who expected their rightfully earned white chocolate in vain on White Day, all get to drown their sorrow in Jajangmyeon. Probably better than killing yourself. Then again, who knows what Jajangmyeon tastes like.

Heroes of the past

When I was a student, his music was absolute cult. We spent quite a few evenings singing his songs in the drunk over heightened pitch that groups gravitate towards later in the night. Everyone listened to Udo Jürgens, everyone knew his songs and lyrics. Not because they were such astute writing. They had an ironic, rebellious, sometimes melancholic, sometimes defying ring to them, but mostly dealt with simple but emotionally rich scenes you could relate to and soak up. Greek immigrants in a foreign land longing for their home country, a man stuck in the mediocrity of his life realizing he could just run away, dreaming about the exciting things he could spontaneously do, just to pass up the chance and never mention his dreams again. A man who knows what he wants and sings his self-affirmation song while the woman he longs for is just leaving him.

There are many singers who deal with love, life, and all the rest. Udo Jürgens is by no means unique in that. But what differs him from the kitsch of the harmonious and naive Schlager scene is his courage to go down several layers deeper into problems and couple his texts with outstanding, rich, and melodious music. Music venturing into all the different styles of the 60’s and 70’s from funk to salsa to bossa nova with the piano as unifying element.

Why do I recall his legacy? Because tonight it was shattered before my eyes. For the first time ever, I went to see him in concert and I never should have done that. Heroes of the mind can quite painfully clash with people of reality.

He is approaching 80 years of age, and naturally you wouldn’t expect him to rock the stage quite as he used to. However, when the audience gathered, I felt immediately disconnected from the crowd. The average age must have been around 55 to 60, probably higher. For the greater part of the concert, Udo Jürgens insisted on playing new songs which were terrible and nothing more than a feeble attempt to tie in with his former hits. They tried to address current themes, such as the insecurities of the internet or the frequent usage of anglicisms in the German language. But instead of the emotional and visually rich scenes of the past, his new songs were blunt, boring, and really embarrassing echoing a simplistic negation of anything new.

His attempts at positive contributions were nothing but platitudes, empty statements verging on the headlines of self-help books. No inspiration, only shallowness. Then the shameless promotion of his brother’s paintings with a terrible, really terrible song called “Mein Bruder is ein Maler” that featured pictures of his brother’s art. The storyline of the song was: My brother is a painter, oh so wonderful, and I am but a mere singer with his petty little notes. “I’m not worthy. I’m not worthy.” Give me a break of this bull-crap! This might impress the fat lady desperately waving a bundle of roses at your face.

Then he promoted some movie covering his life and that of his family. The main message of this never-ending piece was “listen to the man with the bassoon” (which is Fagott in German – so: “listen to the faggot”), which I never understood because I never saw the movie and everything was completely out of context and simply abysmal. It was like watching a 20 minute preview of a movie edited by a chimpanzee on some mind-altering drug. The worst, worst, worst was that his voice kept cracking and on at least 4 or 5 occasions he completely forgot the lyrics which was apparent to everyone.

I was so depressed, I couldn’t even enjoy the 10-15 minutes of the 3 hour concert that he actually played the old songs. My favorite song “Ich weiß, was ich will” was part of a stupid medley! But his last encore was different. He came on stage in a bathrobe (as always – there is a story behind it: google it). Before, there had been a fantastic 30 person orchestra accompanying him, but now he just sat at the piano alone and played some of his old songs. As if nobody were around. He started a song, stopped in the middle, chatted away into the microphone, and played another. Even here, on one of his greatest hits called “Merci” he forgot the lyrics. But it was beautiful, it was magical. It was the one intimate moment in which I realized that I probably love his music for entirely different reasons than 99% of the people in the hall.

Happy New Annus

It is February and I am finally ready to start the new year. Somehow, I spent the entire month of January just tying up loose ends from 2011. Things are either moving way too fast or maybe I am getting too slow. But as everyone around me is precisely at where I am now, I just have to conclude: it doesn’t get down in 12 months anymore. Everything spills over into the next year and before we know it, we’ll be celebrating New Year’s in June.

I always had that impression with the seasons. Back in the 80’s and 90’s, you could forget about White Christmas, but count on heavy snow around Carnival lasting right up until Easter. When Spring finally started, you were already planning your Summer vacation which lasted well into September.

Now, everything has simply become unpredictable. It is perfectly normal for mid December to be around 14 degrees Celcius with a record-breaking 8-week-streak of rain and then to momentarily switch to chill records with temperatures as low at -30 °C ín Germany. Nothing to worry about. Just something we’ve gotten used to like crazy stock prices or political instability in Northern Africa. A variance of 40 degrees within 2 months gives us that warm feeling that chaos is just a part of nature.

I wonder when people actually get any work done. January is gathering and understanding the data from last year. February is all about evaluating and determining people’s bonus and giving them the same feedback as last time. Then in March you finally get around planning the current year (with the subsequent 2 months spent on extrapolating these wild predictions as far into the future as possible – a process known as “strategic planning”).

If you’re lucky, you’ll get some work done in May just before key stakeholders disappear for weeks on end called summer break. Life comes to a complete halt as “out-of-office”-notices take over your inbox. The rest of the year is trying to forecast the outcome of the current year which you won’t know until January of next year anyway. You’ll spend a good part of that month explaining why your forecast was off by a mile and then the happy cycle continues over again. So, that’s what your annus looks like (which is Latin and means “year”, not the thing you’re sitting on).

Christmas is decided under the Tree

Another Christmas under my belt. Literally. But apart from my joyful and triumphant culinary sins weighing in at 2 kg, for the first time I got a little worried about how to deal with the real ones. Not mine, necessarily. They are too bountiful and numerous to address anymore. But everyone’s or more precisely: what is the foundation of our society going to be without an alternative anchor to the religious cult called the Catholic church?

I left the institution of Church a while ago and never thought too much of it. To anyone with a semi-enlightened mind, the Catholic church is half meaningless ritual and half incomprehensible mumbling. Apart from some decent songs I enjoy, the church’s contribution to my spiritual guidance is less than church bells are to GPS receivers. The fact that the overly important “urbi et orbi” blessing of the Pope not only eradicates sins, but according to official Vatican doctrine actually “works” just as well via TV and radio, says it all. (More precisely: the sins are not eradicated, but via this blessing you are relieved of all penance for them. Very handy blessing. I wonder if there is an equivalent on World of Warcraft.)

As a concession to my parents whose upbringing causes an uncomfortable unease to celebrate Christmas without attending mass, I joined them to High Mass on Christmas Day, 10 a.m., in a very traditional and Catholic neighborhood. Referring to past experiences, I urged them to leave early anticipating scarce parking and full pews. To my complete astonishment, the service was nearly unattended. We double-checked whether we were at the right place, whether this was in fact a Catholic church, and whether some natural disaster such as an earth quake or a viral outbreak had eliminated the grown-up population of that town. But the fact remained that not even a third of the church was filled, when the priest entered to commence the service.

The Church is dying in our country faster than we probably assume. It’s like Climate Warming: the real data always exceeds the original projections. I never thought I would witness an half-empty church on Christmas Day. And this somehow makes me sad. Yes, a lot of mind-boggling bullshit was read and said during mass. Maybe some of it made sense at some point in time, but they don’t really expect the phrase “the Word has become Flesh and this is the most important secret of Christmas” to catch on easily with today’s youth.

But the priest’s sermon really raised a point: can we successfully live in societies without absolute values? Is everything decidable by the democratic process with its ever-shifting forces? Is Christmas decided under the tree, e.g. by how many presents we make and receive? Do relative values (majority against minority) suffice? It’s a valid consideration and unfortunately a clear sign of desperation on part of the Church. It seems like an argumentation of last resort to point to its function as “glue” for society. And I don’t agree the Church to be the safe keeper of absolute values. Its history is as bloody and treacherous as any earthly state’s. But the Bible is. And other religious texts just the same. But the teachings of the Bible do form a common value system, a consensus, that keeps us from murder and mayhem. I wish the Church could transport that into our times. But after 2,000 years it seems they’ve lost their drive. The need for absolute values and an authority to represent them hasn’t been more evident than in this year of constant crisis.

The Hype Cycle

Although already established in 1995 by Gartner Inc., the Hype Cycle has not caught my eye until recently. It’s a wonderful way of describing and structuring the overhyping of new technologies by illiterates. The high expectations, the nervous commotion caused in lower ranks by some passing comment from the CEO based on a single newspaper article read in his or her Sunday paper, all that is summarized nicely in the Hype Cycle.

It starts with the technology trigger, the discovery or development of a something new: mobile payment, cloud computing, speech recognition, or whatever. As soon as hungry journalists try to feed their families by digging up new trends, this technology suddenly gets confronted with completely over-inflated expectations. It is seen as the solution to every problem. In a frenzy, new scenarios are envisaged of how we will all live in 2, 5, or 10 years and get attributed to the hip, young, and fresh social groups of today recognizable by their innovate hair styles.

This “Peak of Inflated Expectations” is shortly followed by the cleverly named “Trough of Disillusionment”. Expectations aren’t met, failures outnumber success stories, adaption is slow, and the press ultimately abandons the subject. You might remember the virtual World called “Second Life”. In the peak of inflated expectations, the press suggested that we will all live parallel lives in this graphical nightmare that reminded me of the early days of 3D gaming on Commodore 64 (I’m thinking of the simple but effective game called ‘Comanche’). A lot of companies spent a lot of money buying land and programming their representations into this “Second Life” without reflecting how stupid, boring, and superfluous it really was. The truth of the matter was that nobody needed a second life, especially not a virtual one. The entire story imploded within a short period of time… trough of disillusionment.

Some technologies, however, make sense, and companies will further explore their benefits by gradually building compelling use cases and a subsequent followership. Real practical applications are developed, prices become affordable, and customers gravitate towards the new solution. Take cloud computing. It took ages for people to even understand what it is, then suddenly scenarios were up in the air predicting the end of physical memory. Soon after it imploded because of grave security concerns and untold dangers to life as we know it to now gradually become a part of our normal daily routines. Telekom wrote me a letter today offering me to test their free cloud offer.

This is called the “Slope of Enlightenment” and it climbs all the way up to the “Plateau of Productivity” where the application of the new technology becomes widely accepted, the press isn’t a factor anymore, and the development continues into its 2nd and 3rd generation (take MP3-players, USB-sticks, smartphones, etc.). That’s the point where it usually gets too late to enter the market. You want to invest right between disillusionment and enlightenment. Granted, the Hype Cycle is not a cycle at all. It’s more of a wave. And as most frameworks, it is retrospective and not prescriptive. It remains a mixture of knowledge, judgment, and pure luck, whether a technology will actually pick up and become a stable business model in the long run. But it helps tremendously to take the hype out of the big noise and buzz caused by the people who have no own gut feeling as to what the market actually wants.

Let the little children come to me

They say you shouldn’t mix friends and money, or you might loose both. I say what really puts a perfectly sound friendship to the test are children. Highly unpopular opinion, I’m sure, but where can one be more brutally honest and straightforward than in the comfort of one’s own blogosphere.

I love children. I really do. Especially, when they are cute, pretty, friendly, quiet, and say things that make us all go “ahhhh”. But children change everything, in particular the nature of relationships. Most obviously for the immediate parents who forfeit sleep, sex, and self-determination, but win what young fathers describe as “warm glow that you cannot describe”. That last point is curious as a recent Germany-wide study on happiness concluded that children don’t add happiness to parents, but rather to grand-parents. For parents, they are happiness-neutral. So, there must be some generation-spanning concept here that we are missing.

But children change all other social relationships as well. First and foremost effect is that parents immediately get cut out of the honest feedback loop of their friends the day the first baby gets born. As a sociological rule, young parents get lied to. Yes, their baby is so pretty, even though it looks like a gremlin. After being involved in a serious car crash. Yes, their baby has exactly its mother’s eyes and its father’s chin, even though there is objectively no resemblance at all. Yes, the name the parents chose is so beautiful, imaginative, and compelling, even though you still wonder whether that shampoo back in Thailand wasn’t called something similar.

Secondly, you never see them again. Their world view turns pre-Copernican and in this Babyocentric System the sun, planets, and the Earth revolve around their house. Yes, you can come by and visit any time. Sure thing. And if you’re lucky and the conversation is less than 90% about the children, you’ll even have a decent chance to keep that friendship going for some time. But if you are so selfish to assume that friends should be able to come by your place maybe once for every 10 times you’ve driven to their place, then all hope is foregone.

Surely, having a child – especially a newly-born – is a lot of work and totally encompassing. And it is wondrous and special to see a new life, a new person being formed and developed. It is a hell of a commitment and a huge responsibility, too. Granted all that. Plus it’s a big service to society and the human race to keep our species and societies alive, to pay our pensions, and much much more. But to be fair, young parents should not expect their friends to be as involved, enchanted, and delighted as they are themselves (or assume to be as the happiness study points another way). And parents should continue visiting their friends despite having a baby. Even in the fictitious tale of the Bible, Jesus says in Matthew 19:14: “Let the little children come to me, and do not hinder them, for the kingdom of heaven belongs to such as these."

What a Waste!

I really had no idea. Half of the World’s production of food gets thrown away. Half! 50%. We throw away as much food as we eat. Take two carrots, well one gets thrown away. Not that we know exactly. It’s a proxy derived from several different industrial nations in Europe and of course the resource waster number 1, the USA.

I just read the book “Taste the Waste” – a shocking account of probably the biggest stupidity of us “developed” nations and perhaps the easiest solution to most of World’s problem. Read it and watch the movie that is out in theatres at the moment! You’ll be surprised that it talks about you!

First of all, not all the food that we grow on our wonderful fields even gets harvested and makes it into the food chain. The weird looking potato, the carrot with two legs, the lettuce that is ready to go, but hasn’t been ordered yet by grocers, just get left there to rot. I always thought that everything gets harvested and is later sorted into individual sale, bulk sale for processing, and probably even animal feed. The heart-shaped potato has all the nutrients, tastes the same, and is just the same as the perfectly round one we are used to. Who cares about the shape of the original potato when ordering fries, mashed potatoes, or dumplings? But it is left on the field or gets plowed under. Unbelievable.

Then the producers and supermarkets throw away a lot. We consumers are used to full shelves and availability of any exotic fruit not only all year around, but also from 8 am to 10 pm and later. Leaving out all the produce all day leads to enormous waste. Whatever lettuce wasn’t sold in a day, gets thrown out. Products with an expiry date two days into the future, get thrown out regardless. Some donate their waste to soup kitchens, but most of it gets thrown into dumpsters that even compress all the fresh food on the spot into useless mash. How much more cynical can you get.

About the expiry date: on meats, dairy products, fish etc. it has to be observed, of course. On any processed food, it is the date until which the producer will guarantee certain product qualities. The dessert with whipped cream will have perfectly stiff cream up until that date. The nitric in it will evaporate eventually and the whipped cream will go soft. That doesn’t mean you cannot eat the product anymore. It is perfectly safe to eat and fine way beyond the printed “best before” date. “Best before” means “still okay for some time after”. But we seem to have lost the ability and confidence to use our senses (look, smell, and taste) to determine if a food is fine to eat or not.

Then we throw away the rest at home. We buy too much, keep leftovers while already anticipating the garbage as its destination. I am guilty myself. How many breads, moldy cheeses, salads, rotten fruit, and other previously good foods have I thrown away and could have avoided it? How many times did I order food even though I had enough in my fridge?

Why is this important? Why should we care? Well, around a billion people suffer and die of hunger in the World and it doesn’t seem entirely fair and morally sound to start with. But the real and unbelievable fact is that food production is responsible for a large portion of the carbon emissions in the atmosphere. We think of climate change being caused by industry and cars, but agriculture as such contributes at least 15-20%. The processing, storage, and transportation of food probably adds another 10%. And we are wasting half! Half in terms of labor cost, direct cost of the product, and environmental cost in the form of carbon emissions. How absolutely stupid! It doesn’t even make economic sense. There’s a real business case to change this ridiculous behavior and progress on the more than mildly important goal of reversing climate change.

The worst of this waste is throwing away meat. Producing meat is the most energy intensive food in terms of feed and water and the worst in terms of climate gasses. 91% of all agricultural surface is for feeding livestock. The livestock in the USA alone produce 130 times more excrement than all human beings in the entire World. That’s a lot of shit and throwing away meat – apart from the fact that a living creature had to die for nothing – is like spilling oil into the ocean or burning tires in your backyard. Our grandparents knew better. They knew what it is like not to have any food at all.

The trend is your friend

When certain managers spot a trend, it’s fairly certain over. Not surprising. It takes some time for a trend, hype, or other cool development to get noticed by the people that make their money travelling to eCommerce, Digital Marketing, Web 2.0, and similar fairs to show off the same YouTube video for a year or two before updating the presentation with other entertaining stuff. The trend scouts, gurus, and think tank thinkers of the World are just as lazy as the rest of us.

Interestingly, the managers and decision makers that react strongest to these trend presentations typically are men in their mid-forties, working in middle to upper management, carrying most of their weight around the middle. They insist on getting iPhones against all company policy and casually toss them on the table in meetings demonstrating their undeniable up-tempo. They talk about mobile payment, fabbing, and near field communication – words they’ve memorized from over-priced newsletters they secretly read on weekends. They aren’t the nerds that actually write the newsletters and gadget blogs. They are members of management that at an early point in their career were considered creative and consequently were put in charge of “strategy” or “innovation” or “business development” or “R&D” and now constantly need new material to speak of. Why? Well, without any real business responsibility, your name doesn’t come up naturally on the CEO’s agenda.

I guess when they were in their thirties, they still had a decent chance to keep up with what’s going on. At least they understood and possibly even used new technology as part of their daily routine, not as a scientific experiment. But they weren’t high enough up in the hierarchy to be in charge. In your fifties, nobody expects you to pull off the innovation show, but in your forties, you are really screwed. In charge, but not in charge.

So, they follow buzz words like moths the light. They desperately try to remain interesting for the CEO. Make him or her believe that somehow it is worth while to keep the department, giving him or her a welcome distraction from the boring numbers of the underlying business and quarterly reports. They let them ride on Segways, make sure they have the latest apps on their iPad, organize a jolly ride with an electric car. They are – let’s face it – the CEO’s jesters. Making him laugh, wonder, and telling him stories of far away lands. Being in charge of innovation is being in the entertainment business. And that’s were the trend is your friend.

Things you don’t know

There are many things we don’t know. For example, did you realize that the traditional Olympic torch relay was started by the Nazis at the Olympic games of Berlin in 1936? They were the first to do this. Who ever thought it would be a good idea to keep on doing that? Then again, sack hopping was an Olympic discipline as recently as 1904.

Did you know that there are no words in the English language that rhyme with “orange”? Or “month”, “silver”, or “purple”? Isn’t it peculiar that 3 of these words are colors? So, don’t worry about writing a song about colors. In German the word “Mensch” has nothing that rhymes with it. No rhyming word for human being. Hm.

-40 degress Celcius are exactly -40 degress Fahrenheit. Strange, but true. If you are a fan of Boss Bottled or Hugo Boss jeans, you’d be interested to know that Hugo Ferdinand Boss was a really big Nazi in the Third Reich. He designed most of the uniforms for SS, SA, Wehrmacht and Hitler Youth. He employed forced labor to produce then. How they managed to completely erase this questionable history and nowadays be one of the most respected designer brands in the World, is quite amazing.

Greece is broke, but rich in other terms. The Greek national anthem has as many as 158 verses. No wonder it took the Greek parliament so long to finally agree on the budget measures to save their dwindling economy. The national anthems of Great Britain and Liechtenstein have the same melodies by the way. And the melody of the American national anthem is actually based on an English drinking song.

The internal version number of Windows 7 at Microsoft is Windows 6.1. Luke Starwalker originally was meant to be Luke Skykiller. At 10 m depth under water, you are unable to fart. Americans represent around 6% of the World’s population, but consume around 60% of the World’s resources. The typewriter was invented by Hungarian immigrant Qwert Yuiop, who left his “signature” on the (English) keyboard.

I’m not so sure about the last one, but the rest is pretty interesting, isn’t it?

111111

Today is November 11, 2011. The beginning of Carnival in Germany, St. Martin’s Day, and probably the busiest day for Wedding Chapels since September 9, 1999. Don’t you love it when people choose a really easy to remember date for their wedding? Do they realize what they are telling the World? “We are part of the slower-thinking community and have trouble remembering things as significantly as our wedding date.” They probably celebrate their Birthdays on New Year’s just to be safe. Or maybe people get married and divorced so often nowadays that you need that extra anchor as a reminder.

But what I realized when looking at the calendar was that today is the day with the most occurrences of a single digit in its date in our entire lives. As far as I know none of us experienced 6 times the same digit in a date ever before. 5 at best. And for the next hundred years the most digits we’ll ever see also will be 5, for example on February 22, 2022. But a baby born today and turning 100 will even be able to experience a day with 7 digits in its date namely on November 11, 2111. I wonder what that will feel like.

I stumbled over this (admittedly very meaningless and arbitrary) fact when naming a power point file for a meeting today. I always go by the convention “YYMMDD File Name version number.extension”. So today would be “111111 Meeting v1.ppt” and that is just beautiful. I know many people have different conventions for file naming, but I can confidently say that they are idiots, because my way of doing it is the only sensible one.

What people often do is put the date on the end of the file, such as “Meeting v1 111111.ppt”. What good is that for? Most people on this planet have their file folders sorted in alphabetical order. The YYMMDD convention guarantees that all documents are sorted in chronological order. You will always be able to find what you’re looking for.

Fair, some go for the YYYYMMDD convention. I’ve seen a lot of 20111111 files going around. Those most likely are people that got really scared by the Y2K bug (something the younger generation will never understand or probably even hear about) or are terribly precise in everything they do. But let’s face it. The chance that my documents will last until the year 2100 and then get confused with newer versions is pretty inconceivable. Believe me: this is more pragmatic thinking that lack of self-esteem.

P.S. I just realized that February 22, 2022 also has 6 identical digits. I forgot about the first 2 in 2022. Nevermind.

St. Anachronistic

I might be gradually turning into a grump. Yesterday, my village celebrated St. Martin’s Day and I couldn’t enjoy it as much as I did as a kid. This particular festivity, usually held on November 11, commemorates the legend of St. Martin of Tours, France who lived in the 4th Century. He started out as a Roman soldier, then got baptized and became a monk. His greatest deed according to legend was cutting his cloak in half and sharing it with a beggar on the street who was freezing in the snow.

So, most likely St. Martin was a really nasty and evil man. I mean, we all know how legend grossly exaggerates the virtues of a person. If all they could come up with was praising him for sitting on a horse, cutting a piece of cloth from his assumingly enormous cloak, and then throwing it down at some person on the street, you really start to wonder. Granted, in the 4th Century the Catholic church was pretty young and fresh, and needed to quickly recruit a sufficient number of holy people to worship. You could think of Catholicism as a startup looking for new hires back then. Standards to join must have been really low. If you accidently dropped a piece of chicken on the floor and somebody else took it, you instantly got blessed. Drop another and you were right on track to holiness. Now, of course, the ranks are filled and someone like Mother Teresa had to really go the extra mile, performing miracles and good deeds by the dozen just to get considered.

With this meager record of greatness, I wonder why St. Martin’s Day is such a big thing here. Children build lanterns weeks in advance to carry them through town in a procession and then convene at a monstrous bonfire on a field. This year’s gigantic fire coincided with the news that Humanity’s carbon footprint has in the past year exceeded even the worst case projections and catastrophic consequences for the planet are now becoming very hard to avoid. In that context I didn’t find it comforting to see this enormous amount of energy and carbon being released into the atmosphere without at least being used for heat or light or both.

Once their parents had enough Glühwein, the children start roaming the streets in little groups ringing doorbells and singing St. Martin songs for sweets and often little amounts of money. Parents supervise this procedure and to outsiders it would be difficult to explain the difference between St. Martin’s Day and forced child labor. At least in my neighborhood, Children will probably be able to keep their loot and won’t have to hand it over to their parents.

The real meaning of St. Martin’s Day of course is lost and obsolete. On the one hand, in the Byzantine calendar the 40 day fasting period that now is observed before Easter, started that day giving it the same celebratory function as Carnival today. On the other hand, November 11 was the day that taxes had to be paid to the liege lord. In an agricultural economy, taxes were paid in kind, so in grain and animals. Especially geese were slaughtered for “Martini” to not have to feed all of them through winter. As start and end of the agricultural cycle, land lease contracts until today use Martini as a dating reference.

With our lives completely disconnected from those agricultural cycles and produce available all year round for some decades now, the traditional Thanksgiving and St. Martin festivities have lost relevance and meaning. The emergence of Halloween in Germany points to a longing for a different tradition. I don’t think the majority of people know what to make of St. Martin today. The trick-or-treating of Halloween interestingly comes close to the St. Martin tradition of singing for sweets, so the shift will be smooth and uneventful, but it will happen in time.