Book Recommendation

I planned to do an "Intensive English Study Week" - unfortunately I got ill and slept A LOT! I still feel tired, dizzy and shivery but overall my health is better now. Or maybe it just seems so because, unlike yesterday, I managed to get out of my pyjama and put in my contact lenses. :D

 

As a positive result of lying around bored I finished one of the four English books I bought, called "The Hundred-Year-Old Man Who Climbed Out of the Window and Disappeared".

 

 

 

It's hard to give a short summary about this book, because it is NOTHING like you expect from the title. Allan Karlsson - Swede, centenarian and explosive expert - decides to leave everything (which is acutally not much) behind on his hundreth birthday. A story including murderes, thiefes and an elephant begins.

 

Next to that, Allan's past gets slowly revealed. Without taking much notice, Allan played an important role in almost any noticeable event of the 20th century. He, without any interest in politics and religions at all, saved the life of Franco and changed sides in the Spanish Civil War, met Harry Truman as well as Stalin, Churchill, Kim Il-sung, Kim Jong-il and Mao Tse-tun, who sponsored him 15 years of holiday in Bali because Allan had saved the life of his wife.

 

I don't want to give away too much because I think this book is a must-read. The story is hilarious and every person has its own detailed and special characteristics.. Throughout the whole book, Allan Karlsson often reminded me of Forrest Gump - kind of naive in talking and behaving, without any clue what's really going on but shaping history with his careless actions.

 

I can only recommend you to read it, but for me it's time now to rest a little bit to get well again :)

BYE!

 

 

 

 

 

Where have all the Honey Bees gone?

The dying of the honey bees is highly discussed at the moment, I think everyone has heard of it. I did some research about this occurence and guess what - I'll give you a short summary. ;)

 

 

Like we all know (hopefully), bees are essential to the pollination of flowers and trees. Thanks to the honey bee, we can enjoy apples, pears, nuts, onion, carrots, plumbs and even cotton. But all around the world bee keepers voice concerns about the vansishing of the bees. In some cases, bee keepers open their hives just to realize that up to 80% of the bees are dead.  While there were 4,5 million bees in the United States in 1945, there are now about 2 million. But why? What is going on?

 

A reason for thís mysterious "Colony Colapse Disorder (CCD)" could be parasites. Furthermore, bees often get transported  across the country what has also been considered as a possible reason, but one should know that this was going on for about 40 years now without affecting the bees and leading to such a "bee holocaust". Also the climate change was mentioned in one documentary I watched, but in my opinion this is a little bit far-fetched, but of course I'm no scientist.

 

According to biologist Marla Spivak, all this is happening because of changes in farming practices after World War II. Pesticides came into usage and as a result every batch of pollen a bee collects has at least six traces of pesticides in it, including neonicotinoids. While parasites die because of this pesticides, they affect the brains of the bees so they can not find their way back home. Scientists did some research and found 25 different pesticides in one bee. Nobody really knows what the combination of these toxins might cause.

 

As I was writing about GMO foods at my Food Magazine Article, this came not as a big suprise. Whenever I read something about genetic engineering, I imagine humanity as little children playing in the sand without realizing what they do.  We do not know the long term results of interfering with nature, but we just try it - just as little children.

 

The dying of the bees is one result I guess we'll soon experience firsthand. What can we do to avoid this? Planting as much flowers (without pesticides!) as possible in the garden, on the balcony, etc.. and maybe getting bee hives.

 

 

 

I wish you guys a flowery summer!

 

 

Why I love calligraphy.

Actually, I've always loved the act of writing. It doesn't really matter what I am writing, I just enjoy using different pens, feathery, papers and so on. But being a lefty led to some problems in the past - I always smeared up what I have written, therefore I nowadays hold my pens in a strange way to avoid this, but I've seen many left-handers doing this ;)

However, my passion about calligraphy and writing in general developed at the first year in HTL. Our teacher gave us pictures of different people with the task to design the letter "g" in a way that represents the facial features of the persons. I really loved doing that, but never had I imagined what this simple task might bring forth. I couldn't stop writing the letter "g" everywhere. And I mean EVERYWHERE. All the sheets we got at the different lessons and even the desk pad we had to use was full of letters. I must have been considered psychopathic by my classmates and teachers, but fortunately in a school for graphic design the pupils are expected to have their weird characteristics and peculiarities. :D 

As a result, whenever I'm sitting around bored and pen and paper are within reach, I start to scribble - not just letters, of course. But whenever I'm chatting with somebody on the phone, i unconsciously start to write some words used in the conversation in a calligraphic way. One big advantage of that - after the phone call I know exactly what we were talking about. ;)

Writing words in different ways helps me to calm down. I just need to let my creativity out now and then, especially since I'm studying something completely different, namely languages. I can not really explain why it makes me happy, it just does. At some point I even dreamt of opening a calligraphy studio, but soon I realized it's impossible to earn your daily bread that way. That's art - wonderful to create, wonderful to look at but at some point useless ;)

I planned to write a few lines about the history of the alphabet and calligraphy, but I even got bored myself so I think I'll release you from that. Instead I'll show you some wonderful artworks and handwriting:

Have a nice weekend, see you :)

Schindler's List

I can't believe I haven't seen the movie "Schindler's List" earlier - I watched it a few days ago (to be precise, immediately after PC2 ;) ) and was really moved. The film tells the story of Oscar Schindler, a German business man who saved the lives of more than a thousand Polish Jews by employing them in his factory. Jews who were important for arms production were not taken to concentration camps. At the beginning, Schindler's aim was not to safe lives but to earn much money by empolying cheap workers. Gradually, he became aware of the cruelty of the Nazis and decided to "buy" many Jews from SS-officer Amon Goeth. All Jews he wrote down on a list were saved from being gassed at Auschwitz.

Since this story is based on real historian events, I want to write a few lines about the background and one person in particular: Amon Goeth.

 



 

Amon Leopold Goeth was a captain of the SS and commandant of the concentration camp in Plaszòw, Polen. He was born in Vienna and joined Nazi youth group and the Austrian Nazi party at the age of 17 and 22, respectively . At that time, the Austrian SS was an illegal underground organisation, as a result there is not much information about his activities available. In 1943, he was assigned to construct and command a forced labour camp at Plaszòw.

 

A description of Amon Goeth by Helen Jonas-Rosenzweig, one of the Jews saved by Schindler:

 

"As a survivor I can tell you that we are all traumatized people.

Never would I, never, believe that any human being would be capable of such horror, of such atrocities. When we saw him from a distance, everybody was hiding, in latrines, wherever they could hide. I can't tell you how people feared him."

 

In the movie, Amon Goeth seems insane. I especially remember the scene where he randomly kills Jews from his balcony, appreciatively smoking his cigarette. It's unbelievable. We all know what cruelties human beings are able to do, but it's still disgusting and depressing to become aware of stories that really happened.

 

As some of you might know, I believe in God. I'm often confrontated with the question - if there is a God, how can he allow such cruelties? Why didn't he do anything about it? Well, I really understand this question, I often asked it myself. But at some point I realized that God gave us free will. God never wanted us to be robots. No parent would prefer robots, built to say "I love you" all the time, to real children that can think themselves and therefore express their love without being forced to do so. All pain and cruelty is a result of mankind's failure and it's wrong to blame God for all of that -  that's what I think about it.

 

 

 



A Different Kind of Love Story

About one year ago, the  Isreali graphic designer Ronny Edry created a digital poster about his attitude towards the Iranians:

I know it's kind of yesterday's news, but I watched Ronny Edry talking at TED a few days ago and I want to give you a short summary of the story behind. Ronny wasn't acutally expecting such a big media attention when he put this poster online, because he made many different posters before wich were more or less ignored. But with this one it was different - he got up in the middle of the night and passed his computer, just to see many red numbers on facebook. Many people, and beyond them many Iranians, were enthusiastic about his message.

As a result, new posters with different people were produced. It was a stressful time for Ronny Edry and his crew, but this campaign was mentioned in worldwide media. There is even a facebook page with many different posters and pictures which you can find here:

https://www.facebook.com/israellovesiran

As the Iranians were really touched by this campaign, many responsing posters were made. The special thing about them all is that there aren't just statements from anonymous people, instead these posters show faces of real citizen who agree with the message.

I have to admit that my first thought was: Ok, that's nice, but how should "normal" citizen be able to decide wheather a country gets bombed or not? I do not think they acutally can, but I find it so wonderful to see how this campaign destroys many stereotypes about other countries. Friendships were made because of these posters and many people might have realized that people from another countries just feel the same way.

So if you're interested in this topic, I can highly recommend you to watch the video on TED:

http://www.ted.com/talks/israel_and_iran_a_love_story.html

The Help

A few days ago I watched a movie with some friends - guess the name of it - correct, it's called "The Help".

The reason I'm telling you something about this movie is the fact that this movie describes the life of black maids in the early 1960s. I guess you all know something about this date and what was going on in America at this time, as we all (even me as one of Fionas students) had to learn much about the American history.

The black maids in the movie have a hard life - they take care about the children of others, just to see them grow up until they become their new bosses. The most horrible thing about it: The maids are not allowed to use the same toilets as the house owners.

The main character of the movie, an awkward young female journalist called "Skeeter", decides to write a book about the whole situation. She was raised by a black maid herself and slowly earns the trust of Minny and Aibileen, two maids.

Enough said about the storyline as I don't want to give away too much information. For the exact same reason I'm not a fan of trailers, so all you get is a picture. :)

 

I can only recommend you to watch this film - I enjoyed the humour, but to be honest, at some points the movie almost made me cry.

 

One thought stuck in my brain the next day - it could have been reverse. It's so strange how one race feels superior to another without any logical reason. Just picture all black people being white and all white people being black. What would it be like? If the Afro Americans would be in the same situation as the white ladies in the movie - wouldn't they act the same way? Of course that's no excuse for all the cruel and horrendous things that were done to Afro Americans. It's just a mind game that leads to one result: there's something wrong with humanity - with all of us.