Suspected pedophile Oliver Shanti on his way to Germany

Damn, this is good news.

A new age musician and sect leader going by the name of Oliver Shanti has been arrested in Lisbon, Portugal and is now in custody awaiting deportation to Germany.  Born in Hamburg the 59-year-old is wanted in connection with more than 300 acts of molestation against six children - a girl and four boys from Germany, as well as another girl from Portugal. All of the children were between 10 and 14 years of age at the time.

Shanti, the object several months ago of my first and only Wikipedia edit, had been among Germany’s most-wanted list for several years. According to media reports, Shanti molested the children in one of the communes he founded in the Bavarian forest, another in Munich and again in Portugal. He was arrested outside the German Embassy in Lisbon last Friday after an embassy employee recognised him and alerted police. He had gone to the embassy to renew his passport, apparently on his way to Brazil to receive treatment for Leukemia.

I first came to hear about Shanti when I stumbled upon his Wikipedia entry while doing research for work. Stunned to see that the entry made absolutely no mention of the horrendous charges against him and the €3000 reward the Munich police were offering for any tip leading to his arrest and conviction, I signed up for Wikipedia and added that information. Not the most earth-moving of gestures, but maybe it helped somewhat in the hunt for him. Who knows?

In the meantime, there’s no shortage of drivel and slop passing for music by Oliver Shanti available on YouRube. On this one, notice the Viva music channel logo in the top-right corner. If they haven’t done so already, will someone please tell those people to stop putting this guy’s crap on the air?

BTW, if you didn’t click on his fan site, at least check out the guest page. Brutal stuff.

Ten facts and opinions about Canada

Have a happy Canada Day. Or else.

1. If you were to lay the history of planet earth from its frothy formation to the present day on a timeline representing the 7,300 kilometres from Canada’s West to East coasts, Canada’s birthday - July 1, 1867 - would be about 10 centimetres from the Newfoundland shore.
2. I’ve never measured this for accuracy.
3. It’s easier to cycle across the country from West to East, but more rewarding to go East to West. Why? You always have the best part to look forward to.
4. Someday I want to try to do this.
5. To Albertans, BC is short for Beyond Canada.
6. Two Canadians meet an American in a bar. The American says to them: it’s cold up here. The Canadians say: Sure is.
7. That counts as humour in Edmonton.
8. Some claim that Brian Mulroney was Canada’s worst post-war Prime Minister, others say that title belongs to Pierre Elliott Trudeau.  Discuss.
9. It is a little-known Canadian fact that Jesus was not born anywhere near Victoria, BC because they could locate neither three wise men nor a virgin.
10. It’s often said that Canadians define themselves by what they are not: they aren’t Americans.  True, but we’re more like Americans than we like to admit.  We also have social problems, toxic waste dumps and looming environmental catastrophes, serial killers and wannabe rightwing talkshow dingbats. 

And now it’s time to say a special hello to all you hospital patients and shut-ins, those who can’t get out to the  game, hope you’ve enjoyed this Canada Day broadcast on CKNW.  

For more Canadian content, visit

Raincoaster

Beaverboosh

Mausi

Azahar

Expatraveler

Wandering Coyote

timethief 

Canadada

Romi41

Brown Amazon

Zoom (aka knitnut)

Rositta

plus that unforgettable K-Tel advertisement staple: and many more.

Talking with an 11-year-old about insurance fraud

We finally broke down and bought the little red-haired girl a new bicycle last week. Summer’s already here and besides, pretty soon I’m going to have to drop the little.

We’d been holding off because it’s just so difficult to find a decent bike for a growing kid in Germany. You either find junk at the bottom end of the scale - expensive junk to boot - or top-flight bikes that will get ripped off the moment you leave it outside, which she is forced to do because there is no other place to lock them up where we live.

Then at one shop where we’d finally found one that was right for her, I told the guy that we wanted a really good lock, mentioning also that I’d had parts ripped off from my own bike after leaving it outside for only one night.

No problem, he said. If you’re worrried about security, you can get a complete insurance package for only eight euros a month. It includes replacement for theft and new parts if they’re stolen or the bike vandalised. Even if she has a fall, they’ll fix it for her.

So I signed up for the deal, thinking that it’s cheap at twice the price if I don’t have to worry about replacing a stolen bike a week after buying it.

After explaining to her that the insurance only works if she locks the bike around a bike stand or pole so that it can’t be carried away, she asked me:

How does the insurance work? What if you had two kids who needed bikes, but only enough money for one? Couldn’t you just hide the bike and tell the insurance company that the bike was stolen? Then you’d get another one for the other kid for free.

Sure, you could do that. I’m sure there are people who have done that. Would you like to be one of them?

No.

Well, I’m glad to hear that. Did you know there are people who try to get out of working by pretending they’re sick, saying things like their back hurts all the time, or that they can’t get out of bed?

No…

They get to go on disability pension, which means they get money every month without having to work anymore, even though they’re not sick. But there’s a catch. The insurance companies have people who check up on them. If they see them carrying around a pair of skis, riding their bikes, whatever, they get cut off their money, they don’t get to go back to their old jobs… they end up with nothing.

Oh…

Trying my best not to sound preachy, but probably failing because I’m doing all the talking, I add:

It just makes more sense to be honest and tell people the truth. That way, you don’t have to remember what you said to anybody, because it will always be the same thing.  You won’t always have to be looking over your shoulder, either.

Europe’s largest-circulation newspaper runs photo of naked 13-year-old

It always bugs me how many hits I get on this blog from knuckle-draggers and mouth-breathers looking for kiddie porn, naked 10-year-olds and similar illegal content.

It’s a Google phenomenon, I guess. If you’ve built up a collection of posts with completely unrelated tags or words in the title that add up to a string of words one of these losers is typing in, Bang! Someone looking for naked kids comes to your blog.

But they wouldn’t even have had to have gone online had they been lurking around German newspaper stands on August 3, 2003. That was the day that Bild, Europe’s largest-circulation newspaper and world’s fifth-largest, ran a photo of a naked 13-year-old girl.

An excerpt from the Spiegel online article which translates what Bild wrote as a caption:

Hotsy-Botsy, this summer is becoming a catwalk for naked children.** The sun is stroking our beautiful women in their birthday suits more beautifully than ever before. Melanie from Leipzig, too, just can’t keep her clothes on in this heat. Do your clothes slip off in this desert heat, too? BILD is seeking the hottest summer girl. Send us your beat the heat photos.

The editors give a gosh-we-didn’t-know-she-was-underage excuse, which is funny because as the excellent Bildblog points out - in German - Melanie’s write-up that day was the only one in the series which didn’t mention her age.

I guess given the tabloid’s reputation for getting it wrong willfully or through incompetence it would be asking way too much to expect Bild’s editors to adhere to one of the guiding principles of journalism: when in doubt, leave it out.

But like the old line, Never let the truth get in the way of a good story, here they must have been saying Who cares? As long as our sales aren’t the only things that are firm.

© 2008 lettershometoyou

**Literal translation of the German Nackedei, which you call kids as they run around naked.

Place des Vosges, Paris

We walked from our hotel near the Gare de l’Est through the streets of Paris to the Marais, which is where what’s left of the old Jewish quarter can be found. It was the Pentecost holiday Monday so not many shops were open, but we didn’t care. We were winding our way to find the school where K had worked as a teaching assistant at Lycée Victor Hugo 27 years ago.

A quick snap of her in front and we were on our way again, this time to Place des Vosges, one of her favourite hangouts during the year she stayed here.

We’d just turned a corner when we stumbled upon this scene: two police cars blocking the road, a half-dozen cops standing around, one holding a grumpy homeless man they’d handcuffed moments before. By the crumpled mass of soiled sleeping bags and dirty blankets, you could tell they’d used the grand covered sidewalk of the south side as a place to crash, and I guess they’d gotten into such a fight upon waking that someone called the police.

That’s not what I found interesting, though. It’s what was happening across the street in the park.

A whole row of kids on a school outing, or maybe in the park at recess, checking out the cops busting the bums.

They were gawking at the scene for a good five minutes before a teacher came along and shooed them away.

This is what we enjoyed most about Paris. Just being there, taking our time and taking it in.

© 2008 lettershometoyou

Learning English the Calvin and Hobbes way

I never get any peace and quiet anymore between the time the little red-haired girl goes to bed and her falling asleep, but I don’t mind at all.

“Daaa-deee,” she’ll call from her bedroom five minutes after bedding down. “What does philanthropic mean?”

So I get up out of my chair and go in to tell her.

“Well, philanthropic is being nice to other people, but in a way that benefits everybody. Like you donate a lot of money to support a hospital for sick children, or for buying space for young artists to work in. That’s being philanthropic. It has two root words in one - philo- meaning love of, and anthropos- meaning human being.

Forfeiture

Epiphany

Sophisticated

Pandemonium

Euphoric

Voyeurism

Subjugate

Co-dependent dysfunctionality

I’ve always spoken English with her, but she’s only 11, been taking English in her German high school for all of eight months, and I’ve never used such vocabulary in my conversations with her, so where does it come from?

Calvin and Hobbes. The Complete Calvin and Hobbes, 1400 pages spread over three volumes in a boxed set covering 10 years’ worth of colour and black-and-white comics.

She’d already dog-eared the two Calvin compilations I’d given her, books from my younger days when I too was a fan of the little guy with the big ideas and his imaginary tiger. She bought another one herself a few months ago, but after also reading through that one several times  over, went on a hunt for more. After discovering the three-volume set up for auction on eBay, she snapped it up, using her own allowance and birthday money.

I know she’ll probably not retain half of the new words she comes across this way, but that’s not important right now.   Expat parents are always trying to make sure their native language gets passed on to their kids in the face of the constant bombardment of the majority language and culture they swim in.

If she’s found something in English she not only loves to read but can’t seem to get enough of, my job is that much easier.

© 2008 lettershometoyou

This site may harm your computer

Waiting for a flight at Hamburg airport early last week I sat down at an internet terminal and was about to drop a coin in before the nice man sitting next to me said, “take mine, I have to go and there are about 25 minutes left on it.”

I thanked him warmly and sat down in his place, immediately typing lettershometoyou into Google to see if I could find Adsense ads on my blog. You’ve probably heard that they’re out there, lurking on every wordpress.com blog. It’s the price you pay for free hosting, and no amount of whining is going to get wordpress to take them off short of your paying them to do so.

Problem is, if you’re logged in to wordpress.com you never get to see them.

So every once in a while I slip into the skin of Joe Regular Blog Lurker to try to find out how Google is making an even greater mess of my blog. Do they stick ads for jock itch powder next to posts about my mother-in-law? Blurbs for psychiatrists next to write-ups about psychos? Tart up my skiing posts with pitches for helmets and handbaskets and other crap I have no use for?

The list of hits Google chucked up had me scrambling for my camera. Not for what they said, but for the public terminal’s net-nanny warning label:

At first I thought they were referring to my blog. After all, even if there are no trojans waiting to ambush the unsuspecting visitor, there is a ton of stuff here people might find harmful. Fake news, accounts of deception and outright lies, denunciations of crap, transcripts of discussions with an underage female child concerning condoms, naked girls in newspapers, death and more death. I don’t know why I haven’t already been hauled before a judge as a menace to society.

Then I realised the warning was all about WordPress.com. How could it not be? The link is to wordpress, not lettershometoyou, which only appears in the description.

Maybe it was just a forewarning, because a few days later I and millions of other unsuspecting WordPress.com bloggers logged on to find our blogging universe turned inside out without so much as a ‘”hey guys, guess what? Big changes coming up tomorrow at 4pm Pacific Daylight Saving Time.”

Did someone at WP central hit publish instead of save by mistake before turning out the lights for the weekend?

I’m sure after a few months this will all die down and we’ll wonder what all the fuss was about, but in the meantime wordpress.com probably is harmful to your computer. Judging by the number of pissed-off entries on the forums, I’m surprised there hasn’t been a youtube video posted of someone throwing a laptop out the window frisbee-style in frustration. I don’t care what it looks like, merely uploading an image, for example, has become a mind-numbing chore, a multi-stepped process where once a couple of clicks sufficed.

This in an upgrade? Sure the savvy bloggers using wp.org had a go at it for a while, but given the huge drop in skill level between those bloggers and duffers like me using wp.com, didn’t they think to test it on a few hundred of us wp.com users who’d never seen it before? They could have run a little sneak-preview contest, choosing a hundred or so bloggers to run it through it paces for a month just to iron the kinks out.

Hell, maybe they did test it out on no-brain bloggers like me, I don’t know, but the way it was released reminds me of the time I bought a new desktop from Dell a few years back. The monitor was a new flat-screen model from the Korean firm LG, back when flat screen meant the surface was flat. The rest looked like an old-style monitor.

Anyway, the first one they sent didn’t work, so I sent it back.

The second one arrived three days later. It didn’t work properly either, so I sent it back, too.

The third one arrived a few days after that, and it didn’t work either.

So I phoned up Dell to complain - not for the first time - and asked them why they couldn’t ship me a monitor that worked. Their response? We can’t test the monitors as they come in, we just ship them along.

Fair enough, I said, but can’t they at least have someone switch it on at the factory? Twist a knob? Tweak a button?

Nööö, too expensive. It’s cheaper to ship them halfway around the world and have the consumer do the testing.

Happy blogging.

© 2008 lettershometoyou

So close, so far apart

My daughter and her Oma spend a lot of quiet time together. I love it that they get along so well and always seem to have something to talk about, even during those times when there’s not much to say or left to do but play checkers for awhile.

But as much as I love to stop and look at the two of them in their calm togetherness, I can’t help thinking that by the very nature of our family, one part of her childhood will always be hopelessly one-sided.

Her German Oma lives only a couple of hours down the Autobahn and comes to visit us regularly, but her Canadian grandmother lives nine time zones and a long, expensive flight away. My mother is turning 85, still fit and active, still drives a car, goes out with friends and takes short trips, but understandably no longer feels up to the exhausting flight to Europe from the west coast of Canada all by herself. She’s made the trek three times in the 10 years we’ve been living in Hamburg, and we’ve flown there four, but now it’s all up to us.

I’d like to be able to offer my daughter what I feel is the best for her, and that includes regular contact with her grandmother. But by the very nature of having a family where grandparents live on opposite sides of the world, on this I fear we are always going to come up short. In contrast to the close, comfortable relationship she has with her Oma, her contact with her Grandma will always be like getting to know one another all over again. She’ll still be the red-haired girl, but each time she’ll have grown and changed into a new version of herself. Depending on mood, the effects of jet lag and any other combination of factors, there’s no guarantee the two of them will ever be able to settle into each other’s company, and after our time’s up and it’s time to go, that’ll be it until the next time.

We’re headed to Canada this year, not just because we want to, but because it really has been too long since she last saw her grandmother. It’s going to be a great trip: a week in Canada, then a wander down the coast of Oregon and California to Los Angeles. There we will stay with a friend of ours, before flying home from LA.

I really don’t know when the next time will be. And in the back of my mind, I’m always wondering: is this time going to be the last?

© 2008 lettershometoyou