I’ll be proud to live in Berlin when the home owner expropriations are passed and the real estate madness is curtailed.
Article 15 of the Country’s Basic Law states that “land, natural resources and means of production may, for the purpose of nationalization, be transferred to public ownership or other forms of public enterprise by a law that determines the nature and extent of compensation.”
https://www.thenation.com/article/berlin-housing-gentrification-referendum/
I was supposed to see this play six years ago. Let’s say better late than never. Seen Wednesday, March 20th at the Maxim Gorki Theater.
It starts off very chaotically with everybody shouting. It is very hard to understand what anybody says. This gets better later on but I still had to peek at the surtitles regularly. I guess I’ve been spoiled by Dutch theaters where they strap microphones to their actors.
The premise is clever and the scene surprisingly light-weight. What follows is a bit too drawn out. The physical acting does not impress and you can only threaten to shoot somebody so many times before you actually have to shoot them. If you don’t, things get a bit dull.
The play itself is badly dated and the various debates have far moved on mostly to become irrelevant. The bits of Schiller that they play have held up much better over the past two centuries than Verrücktes Blut has over the past decade. Schiller also lets the actors in this play show their skills.
There is some Islam-criticism that is supposed to be edgy but misses the point. Additionally, we hit the obligatory ethno-clichés, many of which made me laugh during the wrong moments. Neither manages to be actually cutting. The social engagement on display is there for entertainment only.
The troubles with the kids in the play have only worsened and a new generation is now forced to make their rounds through Germany’s broken school system. Nothing about the systemic reasons behind the problems the kids are facing is even mentioned in the play. The situation is unfixable and there is nothing to be done other than ‘acting dumb’.
The actors can’t help the fact that this theater will have to play their break-out hit until the end of days. Especially if it keeps on filling the house. But at some point, it might be good to call the curtains.
Nice to see a talk by my colleague Alicia and grand-boss Dror featured in the local IT news.
Some nice parenting tips from the Inuit.
For example, how do you teach kids to stay away from the ocean, where they could easily drown? Instead of yelling, “Don’t go near the water!” Jaw says Inuit parents take a pre-emptive approach and tell kids a special story about what’s inside the water. “It’s the sea monster,” Jaw says, with a giant pouch on its back just for little kids.
“If a child walks too close to the water, the monster will put you in his pouch, drag you down to the ocean and adopt you out to another family,” Jaw says.
“Then we don’t need to yell at a child,” Jaw says, “because she is already getting the message.”
by a huge, active, buoyantly thriving German Department which its Head, Dr. Hagen, smugly called (pronouncing every syllable very distinctly) “a university within a university.”
Pnin, despite his many shortcomings, had about him a disarming, old-fashioned charm which Dr. Hagen, his staunch protector, insisted before morose trustees was a delicate imported article worth paying for in domestic cash.
desuetude
lozenges
It was the world that was absent-minded and it was Pnin whose business it was to set it straight. His life was a constant war with insensate objects that fell apart, or attacked him, or refused to function, or viciously got themselves lost as soon as they entered the sphere of his existence.
shadowgraph
Therefore he preferred reading his lectures, his gaze glued to his text, in a slow, monotonous baritone that seemed to climb one of those interminable flights of stairs used by people who dread elevators.
cerebration
anent
He never attempted to sleep on his left side, even in those dismal hours of the night when the insomniac longs for a third side after trying the two he has.
Still more oppressive was his tussle with the wallpaper. He had always been able to see that in the vertical plane a combination made up of three different clusters of purple flowers and seven different oak leaves was repeated a number of times with soothing exactitude; but now he was bothered by the undismissable fact that he could not find what system of inclusion and circumscription governed the horizontal recurrence of the pattern;
The evolution of sense is, in a sense, the evolution of nonsense.
surds
amphoric
canthus
Whatever eyes Liza Pnin, now Wind, had, they seemed to reveal their essence, their precious-stone water, only when you evoked them in thought, and then a blank, blind, moist aquamarine blaze shivered and stared as if a spatter of sun and sea had got between your own eyelids.
pharmacopoeial
ovipositing
vernalization
vagitus
“Why not leave their private sorrows to people? Is sorrow not, one asks, the only thing in the world people really possess?”
jocose
Only another Russian could understand the reactionary and Sovietophile blend presented by the pseudo-colorful Komarovs, for whom an ideal Russia consisted of the Red Army, an anointed monarch, collective farms, anthroposophy, the Russian Church and the Hydro-Electric Dam.
Kopffüsslers
cupule
distemper
slattern
“Pity Vladimir Vladimirovich is not here,” remarked Chateau. “He would have told us all about these enchanting insects.”
Literary departments still labored under the impression that Stendhal, Galsworthy, Dreiser, and Mann were great writers.
This did not prevent him from traveling tremendous distances to attend Modern Language conventions, at which he would flaunt his ineptitude as if it were some majestic whim, and parry with great thrusts of healthy lodge humor any attempt to inveigle him into the subtleties of the parley-voo.
poetasters
adumbrations
connubial
calvity
one of those informal gatherings where old-fashioned terrorists, heroic nuns, gifted hedonists, liberals, adventurous young poets, elderly novelists and artists, publishers and publicists, free-minded philosophers and scholars would represent a kind of special knighthood
I loved this summary of Julie Zhuo’s new book “The Making of a Manager” (excellent points in there about one-on-ones, self-awareness, delegation
“The perspective you have changes everything. With a fixed mindset, your actions are governed by fear — fear of failure, fear of judgement, fear of being found out as an imposter,” says Zhuo. With a growth mindset, you’re motivated to seek out the truth and ask for feedback because you know it’s the fastest path to get you where you want to go.”
https://www.fellow.app/blog/2019/julie-zhuo-the-making-of-a-manager/
Theranos employees are suffering some adverse consequences for participating in that scam (and rightly so).
https://edition.cnn.com/2019/03/14/tech/theranos-employees/index.html
A basic lesson in design and the importance of non-functional characteristics from Jony Ive: “What we tend to focus on are those attributes that are easy to talk about, and just because we talk about them doesn’t mean that they’re the important attributes. All that means is they’re the ones that are easy to talk about.”
Eggboy speaks: “This egg has united people.”
De Nederlandse huizenmarkt is kapot (net zoals de huizenmarkt bijna overal) en de mensen blijven maar VVD stemmen. Wat klopt hier niet?