the day the lolcats died

If you’re like me and woke up feeling rather clueless because you couldn’t tell the difference between a SOPA and a PIPA so you went to Wikipedia to get some info and found a black page with the ominous message that the Intrawebs as you know them will be forever damaged but why should you care because you’re not living in the USA and have never had a congressthingy to write to…

…the following video lays the issues out very clearly.

I was going to join the wordpress.com bandwagon and black out this humble blog for a day of protest, but unlike them and other heavyweights like Wikipedia, I’d rather have a laugh instead.

This guy’s kind of out of tune, but he’s funny:

Where does all the water come from?

We’ve been thinking a lot about life lately.

A couple of weekends ago K and I went by ourselves to Sylt, an island in the far northwest corner of Germany just below the border with Denmark.  The sea was roiling and we got doused with rain on our first long walk along the seashore, but the air was invigorating, the light changing with the pace of the wind.   When we finally reached a nearby town we took a long time warming up in a cozy inn over luch.

We’d been walking back to our hotel for about two hours along the cliffs and beside the crashing waves.

I looked out over the water and started to wonder about things.

“I’m going to ask you a child’s question,” I said.

“OK…”

“Where does all the water come from?”

“It came out of the formation of the earth four and a half billion years ago,” she said.

“You mean all that heat and pressure caused a reaction between hydrogen and oxygen on a massive scale, and that’s why we have all this water?”

“Something like that.”

We walked on a little more, watching the endless barrage of waves and feeling the cold North Sea wind on our faces.

Then she said, “but you know, when I look at the world and the incredible things in it, and I think of life and how we can create life – like the life of our daughter – it’s incredible, really.  And how life can end, too.  I’ll never forget being there at the moment my mother’s life came to an end.  Sometimes I think about this world and I can’t believe it.”

Once again my thanks to readers near and far who left their kind words.

1918 – 2011

I remember the first time I said a full sentence to her in the language she could understand.

Ich lade Euch herzlich ein, inviting my mother-in-law and wife to lunch, rolling my tongue seven times in my mouth to make sure I got it right the first time.

It was summer, 1997 and we’d just moved to Germany, still waiting for the shipping container to pass the Suez Canal.

Oma went on a lot of our trips back then.  She’d take care of the little red-haired girl while we went off to the sand dunes, or cook up for breakfast when we were still flaked out from overnight duty.

She had a long life.

Born when the First World War was still in its dying months, she became a young wife in the middle of the next, marrying a soldier on home from leave who left for the Russian campaign a week later.

Pushed out of her home in the East by the threat of advancing Russian forces, she carried her first daughter in the middle of winter over streams and borders to arrive in the west and give birth in the dying days of World War II nine months later.

Her soldier husband had no idea of her ordeal, nor did she of what had happened to him.  Nursing a baby girl to her first steps unable to know whether her love still saw the sunrise, flung between the limits of hope and despair without a word one way or another.

Until one day nearly a year-and-a-half later she opened an envelope from the Red Cross, knowing it was either from or about him, afraid to discover what was inside before reading in scratchy script:

My dear wife and daughter,

I now have the great pleasure to give you a sign of life.  I can tell you that I am doing well and am still healthy, and hope you are too.  I wish you all the best and send my most heartfelt greetings.  Yours ever,

It took still another year and a half for him to finally return from a prisoner of war camp on the Caspian Sea near Baku, in present-day Azerbaijan.  She said he’d become a brute in his years of fighting and imprisonment, couldn’t remember at first how to conduct himself in company or at table.

If, from then on, she led a quiet life in the countryside as a wife and mother, it must have been to make up for the way it began.

Her second daughter, my wife, came along a few years later.  At the time they were living with two other families in a house you’d swear wouldn’t fit a childless couple.  But her husband was a carpenter and builder, and they moved 51 years ago into the new house she lived until suffering a stroke and, two days later, passing away the day before Christmas.

Still on my way by train, I was told to take a taxi at the station and go straight to the hospital because there was no time for them to leave her bedside.

Arriving at the hospital I walked up the stairs to the first floor and opened the door to room 201.  She lay peacefully, a red rose placed below her folded hands.  The whole family was there.   I said little, but did what I could to console them one by one.

In this way it was a Christmas like no other for us.  The funeral was held on my wife’s birthday, Christmas dinner – for the first time, just the three of us – on New Year’s Eve.

It’s a time for looking back and looking ahead.

I was chatting the other day with an old friend from Montreal.  She said we’re all at that age when our parents are getting old and dying.

She said: I don’t want to get old.

Nor do I, I said.  But I don’t much like the alternative, either.

House listing withdrawn as forest animals wreak havoc

A central Hamburg real estate listing has been withdrawn after forest animals were discovered gnawing away at the newly built house.  A black bear and two raccoons were found ploughing their snouts into the exterior trim as owners Wolfgang and Hildegudrun Schmeddlapp returned today from a woodcutting expedition.

“We couldn’t believe it,” wailed Herr Schmeddlapp.  ”By the time we got home, they’d already eaten the door, window shutters, half of one side of the roof, and nearly an entire wall!”

The Smeddlapps, a Swabian back-to-the-land farming couple from Stuttgart, say they’d put their life savings into the house.  ”Work-work-build-a-house.  That’s what they always told us to do in life.  It’s all gone now,” moaned Frau Schmedlapp. “Just look at the place.  We might as well have invested in Greek bonds for all it’s come to.”

Wildlife experts say it’s highly unusual for black bears to come out of hibernation to feed.

“They usually store up a lot for the winter,” said Bea Lotto of the Hamburg Tierschutzvereinunddingsbums.  ”What we want to find out is why a house made with ginger and molasses, glued together with a mixture of egg white and icing sugar and decorated with Smarties, Gummy bears and those awful round things you get from Aldi around Christmas would attract bear and raccoon.  It’s a mystery.”

A banding found on one of the raccoons may give a clue to its origins and behaviour.

“If you look closely at the leg of that fellow up there on the left, he’s wearing an ID bracelet,” said Lotto.  ”It’s highly unusual for a Waschbaer – err, sorry, raccoon – to be tagged.  It might be a clue he’s from Munich.  We’ll have to do a scat sample to check for Weisswurscht just to be sure, though.”

Busking at the Christmas markets

The red-haired girl and a friend went out busking today, he with his saxophone and she with her clarinet.

Although they’re schoolmates and so see each other every day, they’d not had much time to practise their Christmas songs.  He lives far away south across the Elbe river, and they’re both busy kids.

But they did have time for a couple of sessions before hitting the Christmas markets.

She went out last year with another friend who also plays the clarinet, and that time I watched them both very closely the whole time.  But this year we left the two of them to practise at our place, catching up with them after we’d come back from having lunch down in the harbour.

They’d been playing for about a half-hour by the time we’d stopped by to watch and say hello.  First thing she told us was how a woman had just come up to them and told them to stop because they sounded awful!

I thought that was pretty mean, but the red-haird girl was smiling broadly.  She didn’t care.  They were out there in the crowds playing away, and coins were dropping into her clarinet case.  I added a couple.

“We’re heading downtown if the weather stays nice,” she chirped.

I hadn’t counted on them venturing so far away, and felt a free-range kids moment coming on.

“Uh… really?” I said.  ”All the way downtown?”

“Sure!”

“OK, but watch out for yourselves,” I said.  ”Not everyone down there is going to be friendly.”

“It’s OK,” her friend said. “I’m pretty athletic.  If anyone tries anything, I’ll run after them.”

As wife K and I left them to play some more, I told her of my anxiety, just letting them go all the way downtown midst the crowded madness of Saturday pre-Christmas shopping.

“Just remind me a couple of times that everything’s going to be OK,” I said.

Then I added that I didn’t want to be lurking around the corner all the time, they’re close to 15 and mature for their ages and could take care of themselves, I didn’t want to be like some sort of helicopter parent because that’s not the way I am.  But it felt very strange to just start walking away and let them go.

“They’ll be OK,” K said.  ”And don’t forget. We’ve got to give them roots, but also let them have wings.”

If Rudyard Kipling were blogging today

From out of the draft box – and in true web style, apropos of nothing – we hereby add to the enormous pile of parodies purloined from Rudyard Kipling’s most famous poem: If.

If…Rudyard Kipling had published his most famous poem in 2011 instead of 1910, here’s what it might have looked like:

If you can keep on blogging when all about you
Have moved to Facebook and say that you should too;
If you can trust yourself when others doubt you
Just keep on blogging – they can get one too;
If you can bait, but not get caught troll-baiting,
Or if on Twitter, don’t tweet no lies,
Or, being hated, don’t be swayed by haters,
And yet don’t Photoshop.  Don’t change those eyes:

If you can scream — and not post screams thereafter;
If you can think — while playing an online game;
If you can post both triumph and disaster
Most will click on Like just the same;
If you can bear to find a post you’ve written
Copied on a hate site to invite comments by fools,
Or watch the blog you gave your time to, ignored,
And stoop to build up hits with SEO tools;

If you can make one heap of online winnings
And risk it online gambling in one toss,
And lose — because they shut down full-tilt poker
And never tweet a line about your loss;
If you can rip off poems from mouldy dead guys,
Remember that it’s merely an exercise
To keep your brain in tune for the next time
You’re stuck for something to post that’s half-assed wise;

If you can source from crowds yet keep your virtue,
Or walk with Queens – nor lose your iPod Touch,
If neither trolls nor falsehood friends can hurt you,
If you can laugh at yourself — that counts for much;
If you can fill the neverending download minute
With sixty seconds’ worth of YouTube fun –
Yours is the Net and everything that’s fodder,
And – which is more – you’ll be a woman, my daughter!

New listing: a Christmas real estate deal you don’t want to miss

Now showing in Hamburg Estates, this one-bedroom, one-bath bungalow is the perfect starter home for a growing family.

Character is going to be your first impression when you view this completely new home located close to downtown Hamburg.  Built from the ground up using the best German-Canadian craftsmen with the finest materials and techniques.

Features include new electrical and plumbing, high-fructose roof and siding, new bathroom with clawfoot tub, new paint inside and out and an easy rental suite conversion in full above-ground basement, whatever the hell that is.  Spacious back-yard! Call to view.  Offer expires at Christmas.  Or whenever one of us gets hungry.

One day I’ll see inside the Yorkshire Air Museum

My whole reason for being in York one year ago was to go to the Yorkshire Air Museum to see the Canadian section and look up any information in their archives about my uncle Vince.  

But as I walked back to the hotel after a glorious first afternoon out in the snow, I started to realise that after waiting a decade or so to even make the trip and travelling half the length of the country just to get there, I was probably going to make it to the front door, but no further.  It wasn’t exactly high tourist season already – part of the reason I’d chosen to go in winter in the first place – but with the city looking much like an ol’ Mother Hubbard gingerbread house, I called the museum to make sure they were open.

I got an answering machine and the usual message about opening and closing times, but nothing more.

Not good.

What the hell, I thought, might as well give it a try and if nothing else at least I’ve seen the place.  So the next morning I headed back over a bridge into town for the stop for the half-hour bus ride out to the museum’s airport hangars.

The bus driver was pretty clear about what he thought of my idea of going to the museum.

“Yoo’ be’er looook i’ u’ I do’ owt ump rfhu toda’” he said, pointing to the sky.

“Yeah, you’re right about that,” I said.  ”But I have to go out there to see it anyway.”

Seeing as how the bus route had been changed on account of the snow, the bus driver didn’t charge me for the trip out, which I found quite friendly.  He and I – there was nobody else – quickly passed through the outskirts of York to arrive at the corner where he’d drop me off.  Normally I’d have taken another bus directly to the museum, but it wasn’t running.  Did I need any other clues the museum would be closed?

Since the sidewalk was covered in snowbank, I walked about a mile and a half at the side of the road to finally arrive at the museum entrance.   Deserted.  Already I could see planes – a massive bomber covered in snow was pretty hard to miss – but there wasn’t a soul around.

Placing my boots in a couple of tire tracks I crunched through the empty parking lot and  looked around to find a few planes, a hangar or two, and acres and acres of white.

But around a corner and across a small field I came across what must be the Canadian section.   The plane with two maple leaf flags is probably a Canadian-built Avro, but if you know it’s not, please tell me.  Of course I couldn’t go inside the building, so was left to contemplate from a respectful distance the course of history and my family’s small part in it.

Near the plane is a modest plaque of the Canadian Memorial Hangar:

Per ardua ad astra – Through struggle to the stars: the motto of the Royal Air Force but also others including the RCAF.

Despite the blinding morning sun I was by now freezing cold, so turning in my tracks I headed back for the trudge along the road whence I came to catch the bus back to York, telling myself I’d be back one day.

York Minster in snow

The train from London to York, stuck somewhere half-way, finally lurched forward again after a 90-minute delay.  The safety gate at a level crossing had frozen in the upright position, so the train could not proceed until it was freed.  As the train limped in to York station under heavily laden skies that were once again starting to unload their burden, I figured I was lucky.  I could have been stuck back in London, and who on earth would ever want to be stuck there…?

As I hauled my bag to the hotel about 15 minutes away, passing groups of happy teenagers who looked like the weather had kept them away from school for the day, I started to realise that I had a rare opportunity that afternoon to take some urban winter photos in a place I’d never been before.  Every 15 minutes it would dump like a day-long blizzard, then suddenly clear up.  There was hardly a whisper of wind, so the tree branches were feathered beautifully.

After dumping my bag at the hotel I headed straight for the old town and York Minster, the second-largest Gothic Cathedral in Europe after the colossal Cathedral in Milan.   There were a few people about, but hardly any traffic braving the snowy roads, so it was fairly quiet as I padded through the streets and over bridges, pausing to take in a few sights on the way.

I came across more of the teenagers I’d seen earlier by the station.  They were making the most of the snowfall.   A few of them had climbed over the gates on the ancient wall encircling the old town to pelt snowballs at drivers and pedestrians below.  Others dragged sleds up the steep slopes of a castle and spent the afternoon whizzing down the embankment.  Some didn’t even bother with a sled.

The sun was now low in the sky about a half-hour before dusk. I found myself alone in the immense churchyard, making a slow circumnavigation of the cathedral as the sun played off the snow draping the spires.  Though I’d read how spectacular it is inside – much of it reconstructed after a devastating fire in 1984 -  I left that ’til later, savouring the late-afternoon light and contrast with the brilliant layering of snow.

Enjoy the slideshow if you don’t mind this technical problem I ran into:  I tried to remove from the slideshow the two photos already published above, but couldn’t figure out how.  Still have a lot to learn about this blogging thing.

Monday: frozen out of the Yorkshire Air Museum.

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Frozen out in York: how I never made it all the way

Some of my posts take ages to get published.  This is the first of a series of four of them, about a trip during a massive snowstorm one year ago this week that I took to York, England.

All I wanted to to was get to the Yorkshire Air Museum to muse over a piece of family history.

On the night of March 30-31, 1944, during the Nuremburg bombing raid, the Halifax bomber in which my uncle Vince was flying was shot down 7km north of Frankfurt, Germany.  He managed to bail out, but was captured along with three others of his crew and confined to a German prisoner-of-war camp.  After he was liberated he made it back to Canada, started a family and lived his life.  Despite the amazing nature of his ordeal, uncle Vince told us all very, very little about what happened during his war years.  There were whispers to us when visiting that asking him wasn’t what he’d want, that he didn’t like to talk about it.

So the family legends out of what might have happened to him only grew.  They were ALL wildly off the mark, but they remained stuck in my mind, and it was precisely this shroud over the facts that instilled a fascination for my uncle Vince.  He was the only one of the three boys on my father’s side to go to war.  My father – the eldest – was excused on medical grounds, while the youngest of the three was in still in air force training in Canada when the war ended.

A few years ago my uncle Vince’s widow was asked to attend a ceremony at a flight museum  in York, England commemorating the Canadian airmen who served in the war.  I’d always wanted to go to see how my uncle is mentioned there, and to marvel at the reconstructed Halifax bomber family legend says holds pieces of the plane he’d been shot down in.

But I never seemed to find the right time to go to York until one week at the beginning of December last year.

You might remember that week one year ago now.  A fistful of winter.  It’s not that it snowed that much, but this is England, remember.  The British bureaucrats in colonial times made sure that railway station roofs in subtropical Malaysia were built to withstand the weight of three feet of wet snow, but as soon as a few flakes start to build up on the railway tracks back home even today, the whole country’s system screeches to a halt.

No, wait.  First they make sure to get you on the train and half-way to your destination, and then they shut it down.

So it was on my way to York after having hopped to London from Hamburg to stay with a friend for a couple of days.   Things didn’t look bad pulling out of the station on time, and once we left the bleak wastelands of London’s sprawl the trip north through the blankets of snow was an endlessly changing panorama of slow-laden trees and hedgerows stitching together the rolling hills.

But after a few delays and false starts, the train came to a full stop about an hour short of York.  Before they finally announced that we couldn’t proceed owing to snow blocking a level-crossing gate, I’d imagined the worst.  On a lot of lines in England, if there’s any build-up of snow on the tracks the contact between the “third rail” – the one with all the juice running the train – and the train itself gets clogged up with ice, and it all just stops, and they have to close the line until it can be cleared.  This can take hours or even days if the weather doesn’t change.

Tomorrow: visiting the Air Museum.  Or not.