Almost to the Black Forest

Well, I didn't quite make it to the Black Forest. I ended up staying for a couple days in Mannheim which is on the Rhein with a Canadian friend, Brennan, who is studying there and also one day in Strasbourg, France, neither of which are technically in the Black Forest.

Right after I arrived we headed for the Rhein where a friend of his was waiting with a small boat. We both got to drive the boat and take turns jumping the wakes from the bigger commercial boats and barges. I got to see quite a bit of Mannheim this way including the massive BASF plant there. It's something like 15 miles long and is like a city itself; a city full of toxic chemicals, a maze of pipes carrying unknown liquids, and huge silos full of who knows what. They may make the products we know better, but they sure have made a scab out of that part of the earth. Relatively small price to pay in the big picture, I guess.

One of the other highlights from Mannheim was my tripping on a curb and falling on my face in front of the central station just as I repeated, "We're idiots." to Brennan who hadn't heard me the first time. The other two hundred people who saw it may still not have heard me say it the second time, but I'm pretty sure they got the idea.

On Saturday we started for Strasbourg, France, in the mid-afternoon and got there with about two hours of daylight to take in all this city had to offer which is home to the European Parliament as well as one of the most elaborate cathedrals in Europe and hundreds of kilometers of canals among other things. The first thing we saw however was disturbing and sad. A woman who was apparently homeless was squatting on the sidewalk urinating and defacating as everyone walked by.

Don't worry. I'm taking time to relax.

A real three-party system in the U.S.?

There has been speculation that John Kerry might ask John McCain to be his running mate. Personally, I would rather see Tom Vilsack in that position, but I can see why people are excited at the possibility of a dream team ticket against Bush. A Kerry-McCain ticket would have a hard time losing. The consequences of such a combination could be very interesting.

Being that the two would be running against Bush, the combination would probably be more Democratic leaning to begin with than Republican. Such a division would be strengthened by the Republican will to exact revenge on a traitor. But the Republicans would be in a weakened position and would probably have trouble punishing McCain.

In the face of what would likely be seen as the end of the neoconservative wing of the Republican party the right side of the Republican party would maneuver to regain the power they've lost within the party within the last four years. If successful this could prompt an exit from the Republican party by people with some of the same complicated relationships to the party as McCain(i.e. Chuck Hagel, Schwarzeneggar, Arlen Specter).

The likelihood of such a scenario would be increased if at the same time something similar was happening on the other side of the aisle. There is a significant portion of the Democratic party that is not pleased with their movement toward the right. Howard Dean was their representative in the primaries. If during the first two-four years of a Kerry-McCain administration Dean's characterization of Kerry as 'Bush Light' is strengthened by further movement to the right then the 'democratic wing of the Democratic Party' as Dean called it could conceivably break off as well.

It could also go the other way. The Democrats could be so pleased with being in power that they could easily forget that they wanted to be different than the present administration. Being in power is an end in itself in today's politics. Instead of working to stir up their own party they turn their attention to securing a permanent majority.

But if the displeasure of the right comes together with the displeasure of the left and some measure of success in a Kerry-McCain administration we could have three relatively even parties on our hands. I'm not sure if such a situation would be desirable. The implications of a three party system would be dramatic, but for now I'll stop with speculation about the consequences of speculation rather than going into three levels of speculation.

Easter in Pinnow

Pinnow turned out to be a really small village with just a few dozen houses. It's not a very lively village. Around half of the houses are owned by Berliners as weekend houses. Brandenburg, the equivalent of a state in Germany, has the same problem as Iowa in that all of the young people are moving away because there aren't enough jobs. The problem in Brandenburg though stems more from the problems of re-unification than a movement away from agriculture.

After the fall of the Berlin Wall there was a mass migration from East Germany to the West. Because of this the price of real estate plummeted in the short term and many people from the West bought land in the East. Wolfgang and Linda bought their house at this time although it hadn't been lived in for a long time before they bought it. They worked a couple of years on the weekends to renovate it into a livable house.

It's a cozy house with fachwerk construction and a very steeply sloping roof. The landscape was in fact similar to Minnesota with lots of lakes and gently rolling hills. Because of the rolling hills it's called a feminine landscape in German. One day we took a walk through the forest and was struck once again by the degree of human manipulation of nature.

All of the trees in the forest were planted in a grid. It was planted like a field of corn. There was no place that hadn't been planned and just allowed to be wild. It was no different than a big garden and I didn't have the feeling I was walking through the forest but just a tree farm. In Colorado sometimes when you go off the trail you have the feeling that maybe no one has stood where you're standing for five hundred years, maybe never. Such a feeling of discovery is impossible to have here.

Catching up

So, when I dropped out of the blogosphere it was just before Easter.

On Good Friday I took the train with David, the Spanish guy who also lives here, to a small village north of Berlin called Pinnow. That was around the time of the Afghan donor conference in Berlin and there had been some battles in Afghanistan between the new national army and some warlords. So we started talking about that. (Seymour Hersh wrote a good article for the New Yorker about this but I can't find it to link to.) As usual it escalated and we had a pretty loud discussion on the train.

A couple of stations before we were supposed to get out I realized I still hadn't written in the card I'd boughten for Elena, Wolfgang and Linda's younger daughter who was having her 18th birthday. David and I were asking a guy on the train about the grammatical correctness of what I wanted to write when the train stopped and we scrambled to get our stuff together and get out. About thirty seconds after the train pulled away we realized it was the wrong station.

There were three brick buildings at the station including the station which doubled as someone's house. The next train would come in about an hour and a half. Luckily David doesn't have the qualms I do about having a cell phone and he called Wolfgang to see if he could come and get us. We thought we were really close and it would only take a couple minutes. We were at least forty-five minutes away. So we waited for the train.

About thirty-five minutes later (don't ask me how it's possible) Laura, the older daughter, and Wolfgang pulled into the station in a car covered in mud. There was a road closed and they had found a service road through a state forest. We threw our bags into the car and, throwing up loads of mud and sliding through the corners on the forest road, we arrived in Pinnow ten minutes later.

My ideas, new and improved

If this isn't the first time you've visited my blog you've probably noticed that it looks different. I'd like to let you know that it not only looks different it actually is different. Now you can comment on the posts and let me know what you think. So give me some feedback, ask questions, argue with me, etc. Also, if you want to get to know me a bit or check if this is the same Joe that you know then you can check out my profile.

Now that I've finished with my project for the UI I am going to be posting regularly again. Sorry to those who've visited and found nothing new. For those of you who didn't even notice I hadn't posted anything in more than a month, you should be visiting this site more often. I've got a bunch of topics coming down the pipe for your intellectual enrichment including the conflation of the meanings of the words 'understanding' and 'acceptance,' comparision of the differing impact of rebels (outside of system) and reformers (inside of system), thoughts on 'Crime and Punishment,' semiotics, 'Faust,' 'The Unbearable Lightness of Being,' my attraction to the German language, and maybe even recountals of some particularly heated political discussions. Don't worry, for those of you who are more interested in my life away from the computer and books, I will be updating you on what has happened since the last time I wrote and keeping up to date as well.

Enjoy.

Tom's Question

A couple days ago my friend Tom sent me an email asking me what I thought about Nick Berg's beheading. Nothing profound. I've been thinking about it for a week now and still haven't come a great distance from the feelings of disgust, anger, and sympathy that formed my first reaction.

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I've been sitting here at the computer trying to write something meaningful for a shade under three hours now. I wrote a couple paragraphs, but they were inadequate. I'll work on it some more and post it when I think it can add something.