My baby loves......

to get songs sung
to talk (18 words so far, we have counted them)
to walk (her first steps at the moment)
to be carried around
to read books (she is so concentrated, that she is humming while she's reading)
to look at pictures
cars (it's her favourit word: Auto; she says this word like an order)
animals (especially cats, dogs and rabbits up to now)
to eat, well unless she is ill and then we suffer
to smile and laugh when we are joking with her
to discover and disorder our appartment
to climb (on our sofa)
to hide and seek
well Mama and Papa hopefully

If it all was mine - would I be happier?

I turn around a lot of money at work.

I buy and sell and bargain and contract and contract out. There are amounts in this game that sound adventurous when you start thinking about them.

Normally I don't do this, but at this time we have bought our house. A single day's turnover would rehabilitate our finances drastically. Unfortunately my company knows my private account but they do not seem to be interested to use it for business purposes. Well if the word if would be.......my father would be millionaire.

Quiero ser millionario? I don't know.Money doesn't make you happy. That's what you are told often. But on the other hand? Does it make you happy to have no money? Not really.

Money has two main advantages:

1.) You can say "no".
2.) You can transform money to time.

So at the moment it turns out that we will be poor concerning our account but hopefully rich in quality of life. It was a dream for me to stay in Nuremberg and it has become true. There was a phase where I had given it up, well almost.

Maybe I have to go to Günther Jauch.

Zweitausendeins (2001) - Odyssey in music

Probably you know 2001 - odyssey in space.

Today I want to talk about Zweitausendeins ( German for 2001 )- my favourite source for music.
2001 is a publishing company, a mail order company and a shop for music and books.
It was founded in 1969 by Lutz Kroth and Walter Treumann. In 1971 Wolfgang Müller joined them and started the music program. Today 220 people work for 2001, most of them in the dispatch department in Frankfurt and in the shops.

There is a shop in Nuremberg, where I love to shop and spend time. 2001 is a specialist for jazz music, world music and pop/rock music (especially oldies). That fits perfectly my music taste.
Besides that books, audiobooks, CD-ROMs and DVDs are sold.

Moreover 2001 offers good prices and a huge range of products. There is always something to find and discover. A lot of treasuries have been recovered in my history there. A good part of my album collection comes from 2001.

The catalogue "Merkheft" is famous. Printed on thin recycled paper (they have to save money for their offers) it is released every eight weeks. On more than 300 pages it contains the current offerings, cheap and exclusive.
My dad had it at home already when I was a teenager. That was when my addiction started.

There are twelve shops in Germany. In Berlin, Düsseldorf, Frankfurt/Main, Freiburg, 2 x in Hamburg, Hannover, Cologne, Mannheim, Munich, Nuremberg and Stuttgart.

You could go and discover them.

The end of the world

The world ends each and every day at 8:26 a.m.
At this time Bayern 2 radio broadcasts the gloss "Ende der Welt" ("end of the world").
A three minute short and pointed, often sarcastic or polemic commentary I enjoy regularly.
It is nice to be sure that the world can end every day. It gives you a kind of safety in the uncertainty of the running of time. The world will end. The rest is not that important.
It is possible to download the end of the world as Podcast. If 8:26 a.m. does not please you, you can find your own ending time.

What makes it even better: Afterwards there will be the "Kulturwelt" ("culture world") on the radio, the daily feuilleton of Bayern 2. "Kulturwelt" is criticism & information, awareness & interest, life & drive, talk & essay, orientation & utopy. At least this is the demand of that broadcast.

Two parts of the world I do not want to miss.

Repeat the three-peat - 3 years of Tina and Konrad

Today Tina and I, we celebrate the third anniversary of our getting together.
On March 15th, 2003 we decided to go to Nuremberg's famous disco "Planet Dance".
We had met about two month before and had several dates. I fell in love quickly but Tina took her time.
So I was not very optimistic when the evening came. I was wrong. Fortunately.
We met and talked and danced and then..............we came closer, I took her hand and at a certain point we fell in each others' arms. Then we kissed. The rest is history.
We will go to a nice Italian restaurant tonight. My dad will babysit Emma, the revenge of the baby-sat?

Now we start to repeat the three-peat. Thank you Tina, I love you.

Soccer World Cup 2006 - The decline of German hopes

The German soccer team has lost the last important international match before the World Championship against Italy 1:4.
A not too little desaster taking the aim of becoming World Champion at home into consideration.
Not only the result but the way of playing was frightening. No idea, no spirit, no concept were apparent.
Okay, we have a young team and this should be the right approach, the old "stars" are saturated and lame. The young players should be hot and willing to pursue success.
But this should not mean fear and loathing of the ball, experience cannot be neglected. Especially the defense needs it, combined with midfield. And for the forwards, god will help.
Hopefully our coaches will find their way before it is too late.
A lot of young players lack practice because they are no starters in their teams. There are too little matches before the World Championship to close this gap.
But alternatives are rare. Christian Wörns of Borussia Dortmund has been kicked out. Most of the teams in the German league Bundesliga prefer foreign players for the defense. So where should experience come from? We have a big tradition of international respected defenders. Franz Beckenbauer, Katsche Schwarzenbeck, Bernd and Karl-Heinz Förster, Stefan Reuter, Jürgen Kohler just to mention a few. But these guys are too old now.
Something must have gone wrong............. defense, defense!!!!

Two out of three ain't bad

Now I have:

1. Fathered a child
2. Bought (not built) a house
3. Trees in our garden (not planted by us)

I think altogether this counts as two out of three essential things a man should do in his life. Not bad so far.
I think I can manage to plant another tree in our garden. Probably an apple tree or a cherry tree for our sweetie Emma.

Then it will be perfect. Isn't life wonderful?

In today's feuilletons - German pop authors

In the SZ ("Süddeutsche Zeitung) Christian Maria Beer writes on the revival of first-generation German pop authors Hubert Fichte, Rolf Dieter Brinkmann and Jörg Fauser.
For Beer, the rediscovery of these "rebels and flaneurs" is "an absolute sign of coolness.(...) But the grandfathers of German pop literature differ from their successful grandchildren in one key respect. Certainly, Fauser and Brinkmann also focused on classical pop themes like drugs, sex, parties, music and above all everyday life. But their relation to their surroundings was entirely different. What they wrote was also a reaction to post-war society. Their texts were – who would use such an expression today – socially critical."
See also the feature "Ladies and gentlemen, Rolf Dieter Brinkmann"

The Oscar goes not to .....

Germany!

We had two strings to our bow:

Sophie Scholl - The final days for Foreign Language Film
and
Ausreißer (The Runaway) for Short Film (Live Action)

We failed. The Oscar went to:

Tsotsi for Foreign Language Film
Six Shooter for Short Film (Live Action)

Couldn't six people shoot Tsotsi? Just kidding, but isn't this an election of proportional representation? South Africa was nominated in 2004 for "Yesterday". Now South Africa has got the soccer World Championship in 2010, why not an Oscar as well?
I'm not angry, well I am a bit. We had a good year of German movies in 2005. Sophie Scholl is not a comfortable issue. But if not Sophie Scholl then why not "Paradise Now" from Palestine, where two young Palestinian men prepare themselves for a suicide bombing mission. That would have been courageous, dear Academy.

Consensus went a long way.

As expected we had the Oscars for:

Reese Witherspoon - her endearing portrait of June Carter, well, very nice. But why not award Felicity Huffman's terrific apperance as Transsexual in „Transamerica“?
Another favourite: Philip Seymour Hoffman, he broke his promise to bark his acceptance speech; he mimed a gay in „Capote“ indeed, but at least a shady one.

But what the hell about "Crash"? The Academy actually found the lowest common denominator with mainstream. What an outrage!
The other movies dealt with:
Gay cowboys in love ("Brokeback Mountain")
A pamphlet for free speech in times of blind patriotism („Good Night, and Good Luck“)
A prayer for freedom as an answer to terrorism ("Munich").

It is no "mistake" to award a drama of racism with the most important movie award of the world - but this movie (not exactly a subtle work) is the only one from the list of nominees that avoids future discussions for the Academy.

The fact that Hollywood wants to be racistic in no case is not new. Whether it is also Bush critical, rejects violence as political means or can live with gay cowboys - about these issues the members of the Academy still have to think twenty, thirty years more. About Robert Altman, who received his honorary Oscar in a cool and unimpressed way and mentioned briefly, that probably not all people in the theatre would have liked his movies, the Academy had to think for thirty years.

So there were no real winners. Three Oscars for "Crash", "Brokeback Mountain" and also three Oscars but only in side categories for the only nominated blockbusters "King Kong" and „Memoirs of a Geisha“.
Probably most of the evening will be forgotten very soon.

If only Philip had barked.