trick or treat!

claire is the graphic designer i'm working with in my day job. she's great - quick, flexible, easy to talk to. she also like dogs, bull terriers. she actually owns two. we have been working all day today on a layout for a brochure, and i have been getting on her nerves about how i want the *audience* not just to see, pick up and read the postcards we are producing. no, i want them to love them so much they hang on to them! typical marketing gaga speak. so claire got creative. and at one point, frustration might have been taking over, she sent me this picture. smile!

wintertime-lagged

severely wintertime-lagged i researched the world wide wonder and found an entertaining blog for you girls. single or not, looking or not. late night or early morning. enjoy.

my presentation at uni went well, thank you. i had prepared (= researched on the web, read big, serious books, typed up arguments and printed them out) 5 pages of bullet points... and then did not look into my notes once. why did i bother?
at soas, everyone is a marxist. i, who grew up in a wannabe-marxist country, and who knows the difference between ideal and reality, am not. a german saying in intellectual, bildungsbuergertum circles goes like this: *if you are not a marxist at 18, you have no heart. if you are a marxist at 30, you have no brain.*
well, i wish them luck with their historic mission. they have a long way to go!

in case your eagle eyes hadn't noticed - i have been putting very large pics in my postings, which are meant to make my homepage look more attractive. does it work? does my bum look big enough in this?

student chores

at soas tomorrow. i'm giving a presentation on the soviet union's cold war impact on the middle east, and the middle eastern influence on the course of the cold war. at 4pm in room 431 if any of you wants to come along.

my main thesis? the middle eastern states always had their own self-interest in mind and were less steered by the superpowers than we like to think. the socialist soviet union had a limited interest in the middle east, economically and ideologically. example: the oil crisis of 1973, when people in america learned to walk again, albeit for a short time. the eastern bloc only profited from that crisis. another example is the iranian revolution. or pretty much any conflict with israel.

if you have comments, scholarly if possible please, let me know before 4pm tomorrow.

autumn is here!

we have had a golden october in london. i just can't stay indoors when the sun is out. i have to go and worship the light. and guess what - the radiators have stayed off so far. global warming. works for me!

look what i found on my various autumnal walks:

never too cold for a mini!
mon dieu, jacqueline was here!

shoes

the times told the great british public today that 20 percent of women over 40 have more than 100 pairs of shoes. hm. i own exactly 18 pairs of shoes, and that includes boots, trainers, espadrilles and one pair of riding boots. a small minority of them have high heels. but then i'm not british or over 40. they have the shoes, but happy they are not. apparently women feel guilty about spending all that money on footwear. what else would they spend it on though? further education? charity? their men??? i think buying shoes is a good way of being economically active.

psychological insight of the week: *i don't think women are aggressive by nature. what makes them aggressive are shoe shops, too many shoe shops. it's these shoe shops that corrupt them, not their gender.* - imelda marcos

aristoteles des tages

allen hausfrauenundmuettern,
beamten,
volvofahrern,
bausparvertragbesitzern,
dispoentsagern,
stubenhockern,
oesterreichurlaubern,
junggesellen, die mit 30 noch bei mutti wohnen,
und denen, die ihre kinder nach 6 nicht mehr zum spielen rauslassen:

*wer sicherheit der freiheit vorzieht, ist zu recht ein sklave.*

idomeneo bei schmidt

wer einen nachtrag zum krach um mozarts oper lesen moechte, der schaue bei harald schmidt rein. ja, schnuckelchen lesen bildet!

my gucci bag, my malawi child

there are some things you read about in the news, and you shake your head, think *the world has gone mad*, and forget about it. then there are news that make your blood boil and you get really REALLY mad. for me, it was not the news about the extended congestion charge zone in london that did it, but the story of madonna buying a child in malawi.

madonna - baby trafficker. a one-year old baby, not an orphan at all because his father is alive and well, was taken out of his community in malawi, away from his family, and delivered to mrs celebrity in a private plane. madonna's publicist claims she adopted the little boy to help one child escape poverty. wrong. first of all, there was no adoption. in order to adopt a child, social services need to be involved, you have to go through lengthy application and scanning processes that can take years, especially in international adoptions. and in this case i believe but am not sure, malawi law forbids foreign adoptions altogether. madonna purchased this baby just like she'd purchase a gucci handbag. by paying lots of money through middle men and wait for the delivery. unless of course malawi would sell anything if the price is right, even their own children. children are, as we know, the future of a country. no government should be blinded by the fact that they have the cds of that person who they are allowing to steal a child from their country.

madonna - politically correct racist. if madonna wants to help this baby escape poverty, she can support his entire home village from afar. or help one of the many poor children in britain or the us. her self-righteous statement is pure pr bullshit. i did not believe angelina jolie, and i don't believe madonna. rather, this is a text book example of 21st-century colonialism. the rich, white 50-year old woman, who already has 2 children of her own, wants a new toy. madonna has nothing to teach this boy except how to be selfish. she is a bully who is obviously used to getting what she wants. she does not think much. african babies are the new status symbol in celebrity land i fear. the cuter and browner the baby, the better. unfortunately, madonna is a role model to some equally dumb, selfish women, therefore i have horror visions of hoards of middle-class, middle-aged women ordering an african baby as if it was the latest fashion accessory. *to help them escape poverty.* how cute. and they can all claim that we live in a democracy, and what is allowed to madonna should not be denied mrs rhys-jones from sussex.

what's shocking is the silence of the media and child support agencies. how can any one individual steal a baby under the watchful eye of millions of people, governments and institutions, and get away with it? that's my question. does anyone out there have an answer?

i am angry. the world should stop this baby delivery service now. take that little boy from malawi back home. and take madonna and all others involved to court for what they did: baby kidnapping and trafficking!
in the meantime, i'd like to see what happens when chinese millionaires start *adopting* sweet little gingerhaired babies from, say, the rough neighbourhoods of glasgow.

staying on the case - schnuckelchen.

chinesischer fluch des tages

*moegest du in interessanten zeiten leben.*

nachtgedanken

ich freue mich ueber den friedensnobelpreis fuer muhammad yunus. seine idee, mikrokredite, soll das thema fuer meine magisterarbeit werden. so steht es geschrieben, so wird es geschehen.

lawrence, piaf and the other

our international politics topic this week is colonialism. this reminds me of my english history courses at leipzig, and i'm glad there is an almost seamless transition to where i left off in 1996. we'll be looking at the englishmen's favourite colony of course, the palestine. on my trip to the holyland, all the english tourists i met saw themselves as little lawrences of arabia. *aqaba... from the land!*
then there is algeria. i had a french friend in belfast, frederic, whose parents to this day cannot stand to listen to piaf's *je ne regrette rien* because it was the song of the french expats as they were forcibly returned to france in the 1950s. but at soas, we discuss abstract theory, not personal experience.
back to said's orientalism. when we talk about the concept of the orient, of course we talk about the *other*, the *exotic* and, to us pale and bloodless eurocentrics, the *strange* and *mysterious*, and either the *heathen* or the *religious fanatic*, depending on which century you live in. 19th-century english literature is full of the sujet *morally upright english gentleman is seduced by exotic femme fatale in far-away, hot land, and either [a] prevails or [b] is destroyed*. i did the literary criticism, now i wonder what the political discourse will be like.

isms

orientalism
exoticism
colonialism
marxism
... stereotypism?

my second week at soas. i bought edward said's book orientalism, and amazon delivered promptly. i also shopped for the complete set of texts for both my courses today, which set me back a not very student-friendly 42 pounds! i got a 1 pound fifty discount, but keep that quiet please. definitely a case of plunderism. in other words - for a uni that rates marx as high as soas does, at least admin has internalised his teachings on capitalism well. i'm happy i have a monthly income.

we the students introduced ourselves today in the international politics tutorial. i'm the oldest student, but not older than the tutor thank god, and i'm also not the only german in the class. i wonder am i the only one who grew up with marxist thinking. in the german democratic republic, where our holy trinity was marx-engels-lenin. where we learned at weekly pioniernachmittagen that everything is political, especially the private and personal, i.e. things that therefore should be spied upon. at least i can say i read the communist manifesto at 16! i still have my little school copy... somewhere. yes, marxism is big at soas, and it takes me back...

after dinner, belgrade

quote of the day: *mendacity is the system we all live in* - brick/paul newman in cat on a hot tin roof
other quote of the day: *you don't know what love is. to you it's just another four-letter word* - brick to big daddy

an evening in the intercontinental, belgrade

after a grey and rainy day in belgrade (it was 29 celsius yesterday. mirjana blames the heat on global warming. she also blames the bulgarians for bringing the balkans into disrepute), a brown-beige evening in the intercontinental. my hotel room is so 1970s i feel like stuck in a starsky&hutch episode. my colleague terry calls it vintage and swears that this stuff would fetch *thousands* in london. but in london, anything is expensive that's older than new labour. they call it retro, i call it old-fashioned.
i'm watching fashion tv. we are all wearing butterflies on our faces and beehives on our heads next season. back to nature! my attention is drawn to the little rolls around my hips. once again i promise myself that next time i go on a business trip, i'll bring my running shoes. absolutely!
i may just go downstairs for a chat with radivoj from reception. he is guaranteed never ever to smile at a customer. it must be in his contract. unfortunately, this sort of natural unfriendliness (as opposed to trained friendliness) is perceived by westerners (which i'm not!) as *typical* eastern european. last night though, when i was seeking a restaurant tip and a taxi into town, stroppy radivoj got on my nerves.

mobil mit t-mobile

ich bin zuhause wieder online! dank mark aus schottland von der t-mobile hotline bin ich nach unendlichen 10 tagen wieder im internet. zum nachrechnen: 1gb fuer 7 pfund 50 im monat - wieviele traummann-profile kann ich mir also pro tag von match.com runterladen?? (kleiner scherz)

einen schoenen, herbstigen, weinseligen und kastanienbraunen oktober uns allen!