Ronald McDonald's New Child Care Strategy

Everywhere, 30 April 2008. Ronald McDonald has launched a global campaign against children unsatisfied with their Kid's Meal Package. "Children need to learn who's boss. They cannot grow up thinking that costumer satisfaction is key to success. Studies have repeatedly shown that underachievement is often linked to unconformity and children cannot grow up just wanting more and more. We have decided to take action - children who don't like our food, or who think our toys are not fun or save, well, they need a good and hard hiding, like in the old days," a clown-faced spokesperson was quoted saying. According to Ronald McDonald, big business have to put their foot down in the current global financial crisis and show who's really running the show. Counter-strategies also include educational activities, such as the one shown in the picture above. "We would like to expand our educational strategy to areas such as making children work for their food, like they do in Africa, and then we would like to include women into our activities for gender sensitivity training. People need to know that each penny donated to the McDonalds charity reaches the target group hard and fast. Though there are still some legal issues we have to take a look at we expect our character building capacity to expand by about 18% this year, so we're really chuffed."

Wildlife in Essen

National Geographic would have had a field day. Just came back from a long walk with my father and baby brother in a nature reserve along our beautiful springtime river Ruhr. And guess what - we even saw three large water turtles, lazily lying in the evening sun - right on the log in the middle of the picture, a duck with nine fluffy ducklings floating by. They got really scared when I went closer and they frantically swam towards their calm level-headed mother. Spring now has a firm grip on people's lifes around here, and all those hibernating joggers, cyclers, fishermen, canoeists etc have crept out of their homes and holes. The city meets nature and canadian geese are the supreme rulers of our local river paradise.

Bulwer-Lytton Fiction Contest

I shall submit three entries to the Bulwer-Lytton Fiction Contest of San Jose State University in California. It challenges entrants to submit the opening sentence of the worst of all possible novels. So, this post shall test-drive my entries for the categories "general", "romance" and "science fiction". What can I do to make it worse?

General:

Martha was nibbling on her grand opulence sundae as a lorry-sized megapnosaurus smashed through the exuberant front panel of the Grand Palais, crashing Lord Edmund’s playful birthday costume party with odorous guts splashing right up to the miniature Buddha on the 18th century mahogany cabinet in the adjacent piano room, but Martha still couldn’t make up her mind if she had a good time.

Romance:

On a warm and breezy midsummer evening in the picturesque harbour town of Isla Cristina, traditional fishing-boats gently dandling in the evening sun, Lucy considered a sensation of moribund confection at the “I love you” Hank had just spat with germinal intention over lobster and caviar mousse, and excused herself, the evening song of a lone orphean warbler disturbed by noises of unorthodox disgorgement.

Science Fiction:

“I will not tolerate this insolence any longer”, Captain Zone Serrati barked while fingering for the “kick me” note posted on his back, but nobody really cared and after a brief, yet utterly futile, moment of suspense, Zone decided to sulkingly ignore the rest of the crew, intent on settling the score once they reached their final destination in the distant galaxy M87 half a century later.

Goodbye, and Good Luck

This is goodbye to magnify, the thread and needle, sweet and lime,
A hunch, a weak and futile lie - the urge to sing a lullaby,

To share, what won’t be shared again,
To purge, to heal, to chance, sustain,
To chase what’s brazen into light,
To gain and conquer, reunite,
The story of a gentle friend,
That signified with wonderment.

My friend, I’ve seen you snoop and pray,
For Paragon, the God of May,
Protecting love and luck and play,
Treads softly over heath and hay,
His antlers care to touch the frail.

My dear, I heard you cry tonight,
For Grampian rain is quite contrite,
We carry our precious freight,
The ribbon of a scattered kite.

Nightswimming in Zanzibar

Inspired by Katy's nightswimming meditation I remembered something beautiful. In august 2001 I stayed at a small hostel on the southern east coast of Zanzibar Island, trying to relax after two exciting, mind-altering and frustrating months in Tanzania.
Zanzibar had been a myth and wonder of my childhood years. There was a German popular song about it and I had starred at its shape and name on a map of my father's comprehensive atlas of the world.
Now I was in Zanzibar, but it wasn't what I had wanted. I couldn't stay on the beach, as I couldn't bear the begging children asking me for a pen for school (their parents probably send them to generate income). I couldn't stand the tourists (of which I was one), for their lack of courtesy towards the locals. And I couldn't get to know any Zanzibaris, due to the insurmountable cultural wall between us (human interaction stripped to its bone of survival and dissipation). So I decided to bugger off back to Dar and my beloved YWCA, where I had spend two weeks talking, chatting and mingling with all sorts of people - students, development workers, tanzanian politicians and two tanzanians who became my close acquaintances.
On one of my last nights on Zanzibar something beautiful happened. We, i.e. me plus three fellow aberdonian Students whom I had been on a workcamp with and again met in Zanzibar, listened to "Nightswimming" by REM. The song had never really been that important to me before, but that night it was suddenly clear - let's go nightswimming! While the others found the idea rather awkward and went to bed, I jumped out of bed to dress bathing gear.
It was one of the most beautiful things I had ever seen: The sea on Zanzibar's east coast is so shallow, that you can see kelp and white sand shimmering through from below the waterline for half a mile into the sea. The sea was calm and the moon nearly full. When I stepped onto the beach I was an only soul with a vast and surreal watery patchwork carpet of white and black right before me. The moon was bright enough to see fish swimming, as if the carpet was alive. It was low tide and I waded through lukewarm water for some time, standing in the watery carpet which was all around me. I wanted to swim and kept walking into the sea, but the carpet was endless.
When I got tired I turned around. I knew something special had happened and the image stayed with me, keeping a shred of the Zanzibar wonder of my childhood years alive. I happily went back and crawled into my bed, my companions already sleeping save and sound.

Smultronstället

This morning, right after getting up and scratching my bum while looking for mail I made a discovery. There are wild strawberries growing on the little patch of garden in front of my house! Four tiny plants right under my nose, merrily sitting under a rhododendron, taking roots and making oxygen. I wonder how they got there.
Incidentally, "Wild Strawberries" by Ingmar Bergman is also one of my favorite movies. Its orginal title is "Smultronstället". It is the story of an old, pedantic, emotionally cold and detached man, looking back on a life of work and studies. He is recalling his past while travelling from Stockholm to Lund to receive a honorary degree from Lund University. During the trip, he has nightmares and daydreams about his youth, family and impending death, forcing him to reevaluate his life in order to find peace of mind. It is a beautiful and bitter-sweet, but positive movie.
The swedish word "Smultronstället" describes a place, somewhere amidst the wilderness of the swedish forest, under birch or pine, where the sun quietly touches upon a soft mossy spot to ripen wild strawberries. It also refers to a place children treasure, where they share their secrets with their friends. Bergman uses it figuratively to describe a most private place in one's own mind, where some memories and secrets, bitter and sweet, are kept. Though the movie is black and white, it has brilliant mood and color, and some images are so beautiful, I wanted to cry.
So, I'll keep watch over these four little buggers. How could I not see them in three years?

Are you an onion or a mango?

Is human personality more like an onion or more like a fruit, say, a mango? Are we made up of spicy layers that can be stripped away until all eternity or do we hold protected a seed with all our basic makeup right in the middle of us? I'd like to think I am a fruit bearing a seed, doing all the stuff fruits do, with a core protected by juicy flesh. Who wants to be an onion? But did you know there are egyptian walking onions? Possibly you even know one personally? And what does it mean that the mango seed gets harder, the riper the fruit?
Anyway, depending on the sharpness of the knife both onion and mango can be easily cut right through the middle.