Grandma's Diamond

I am very lucky that this diamond seems to have some attraction to me.

When my grandmother got re-married at 80-something, her new husband bought her a large diamond ring. "We can't take it with us," he said, "So let's splurge!". He had a nice portrait done of her with the ring prominently displayed.

I was not able to attend her funeral for complicated reasons, and her stuff sort of remained in her house, as my aunt still lived there. When my aunt died, I was there for the funeral, but my Dad had to sort out all the stuff. He had some boxes of stuff for me, that he kept until I could come sort through it.

One thing he had kept was her cloth purse - I opened it up, and next to her comb and hanky was that ring - apparently they had had her wearing the purse for the viewing at the funeral, and taken off the ring before burial.

I tried it on - it was a perfect fit. So I wore it.

Some years later I discovered the stone had fallen off at work - I was distraught, how could I lose it? I retraced my steps of the day, and did remember a faint klonk at one point - and there it was, rolled under the fire extinguisher. I had a jeweler put it back on.

A few weeks ago I was trying to put on a mattress cover and tugging and pulling, I remember the ring getting caught in the matting, but I ignored it. I was all over the place - rode the subway, walked outside, etc. etc. - before I discovered the stone again gone.

I patted down the mattress multiple times, searched ever corner of the room, I even emptied the vacuum bag in case I had vacuumed it up by mistake. No luck.

I was seriously sad for a day - how could I be so careless with Grandma's ring? But life goes on.

Yesterday I put on my black, slinky jacket, and after all sorts of meetings started to teach. I had just started the introduction and shoved my hands deep into the pockets of the jacket. There was something hard there - I pulled it out, and lo and behold: the diamond!

I couldn't really stop, and I didn't want to lose it again, so as I spoke I took out my wallet and put the diamond in the change pocket.

I'm so happy to have it back - I hope that I can find a jeweler to put it back with some kind of cement that holds better. And I vow to take it off when I do work with my hands.

What do I do?

Okay, I admit it, I peeked at my email just after midnight to see if anyone managed to send me an email birthday greeting right at midnight like I got last year. Nope. Oh well. I did get an email and a call today from friends, so that's okay. And my Dad congratulated me on turning a year older than I actually will be ....

But there were four copies of an email from a student: "I just finished my exercise and want to upload it, but the system won't take it, it says that it is too late. What do I do?" All identical.

My answer - the deadline was 23.55 - was "Get done earlier next week. I don't accept late work." I only sent it once, though.

They are supposed to be adults, what is so hard to understand about that?

I like my Tag Cloud

Just did an ego search on 123people. They make a tag cloud about you. I like mine - students are important to me! Of course, this blows my cover, but it was only semi-anonymous anyway....

An Old Tatort

They were showing an old Tatort (German police drama TV format that has been around since 1970) on TV Saturday night called Amoklauf. It was a Manfred Krug one, he's a very refreshingly blunt character who was born in the West but moved to the East as a teenager, only to return to West Berlin at 40 - and they were glad to be rid of such an outspoken person.

Anyway, it takes about 30 seconds to realize that this is a re-run, and it's not just because Krug is suddenly much younger that he was on TV a few weeks ago. But I had some difficulty defining exactly why this was so, but I came up with quite a list:

• There are no active women on the show, except for wives/girlfriends.
  
• Manfred Krug is allowed to smoke on camera.
• There are only a very few, really old computers to be seen.
• No one has a mobile phone - and that makes the suspense scenes rather silly. They are in a hotel room, no lights, telephone cut off - and you want to scream, "What, are your batteries dead??? Call the cops!"
• The hair and the sideburns
• The ransom money is in DM
• The furniture in the hotel
  

Still current are

• The desks to be found in the police station
• The paint on the walls
• The type of car they drive
• The bad weather in Hamburg
  

Moving Stuff Around

Now that WiseKid has moved out and I have convinced him to repaint the room, it is fit for habitation. We are now in the process of rearranging the furniture in order to have some use of the room besides a guest room.

The first order of business was to get the big, horrible Schrank out of my office and back to that room - it had been WiseKid's when he was a little boy and got stuck in my office on a room switch on account of being so big and klunky.

I bribed WiseKid with the prospect of a meal and use of the washing machine to come help me move the thing, which weighs a ton. We couldn't get it out the door in one piece, so it had to be dismantled, schlepped over piece by piece, and then reassembled. It took a while, but it worked.

While emptying it WiseKid commented exasperatedly on all the crap of his I have in there: his whirly-bird beanie; the lamp he made for one Martinsfest; some of the costumes I made for him for Fasching throughout the years (I threw out the Darth Vadar mask); his cone from the first day of school; the only wool cap he ever wore (with Bayern München on it). I also found lots of my gloves and scarves that somehow got themselves kicked out of the official winter gear area.

We have all sorts of balls: handballs, of course, but a volleyball, 2 basketballs, a soccer ball, a softball, and an assortment of other littlish balls. No one plays with them, besides the handballs. We out to give them to someone.

Now I have to decide what to do with that delicious space on the wall. Odds are 99 out of 100 that more shelving for books is going up....

Burning Leaves in Berlin

Laurie Anderson was in Berlin this evening with her "Burning Leaves" concert. She is only giving three concerts, Umeå in Sweden, Berlin, and somewhere in Switzerland.

I really like her performances and her storytelling, her experimentation with sound. This was no exception, although she was reusing a good bit of old material. Ya get old, ya forget that ya already used that piece twice.

The stage had a stuffed chair, her synthesizer, her laptop, her violin, and a sea of candles. She was dressed, as always, in black, her hair looked rather normal. Normally, it stands on end. The Ex-Berliner reported in an interview on how she cuts her hair - she goes into a dark closet with her scissors and doesn't come out until it is done.

She even had one piece in German (Hänsel und Gretel, I wonder what she did in Sweden?) Swedish radio reports that she had the audience spellbound, DN lists the old stuff she used, but notes that she had the audience eating out of her hand.

Although I enjoyed the concert, the German audience was *definately* not totally spellbound and eating out of her hand. They showed up late - some very, very late, and I found it irritating that they were let in. They coughed and sneezed like they were coming down with swine flu. And then - at least 20 people left, all at different times, making an entire row stand up to let them out. Okay, it wasn't a concert, and it was in a strange language called English. But spending money for a ticket to an artist you don't know is always a bit iffy, especially in Berlin. I feel they should just suck it up and wait it out.

Laurie Anderson had to come back 3 times for bowing, but did not give any encores. German audiences are greedy, they want an encore so that the have the feeling they got something for free. I suppose they were hoping that her husband, Lou Reed, would come out with her and they sing some old Velvet Underground song together......

The Power of the Press

WiseMan is taking a course this week on the power of the media in Berlin. They are visiting different media - newspaper, TV, radio - and understanding how the media shape how we see the world.

This evening was a visit to the Axel Springer printing plant on the outskirts of Berlin. For some reason, half the course had said they were not coming. I asked if I could tag along, and I could.

I had been there in about 2000, I was teaching a course in the print technology program and followed along with an excursion to the plant. There were lots of very technical questions asked on that visit, this one was more superficial.

But this time we got to watch the paper rolls getting changed. Wow - tip of the hat to technology here! The printing plant goes through about 200 rolls of newsprint a day, each weighing 1.5 tons and holding 16 kilometers of paper. The girl doing the tour said: everyone asks me how many pages of newspaper that is, but I just don't know. Duh, do the math. According to the DIN norm, the newspapers in question are printed in Nordic format, 570 mm × 400 mm. They are printed four-up, so the theoretical number of physical pages (consisting of 4 newspaper pages) would be:

• 16 km = 16 000 meter = 1 600 000 cm = 16 000 000 mm
• Divide by width of paper, which is 570 mm, giving 28 070 sheets
• Times 4 for four-up is 112 280 sheets
• Times 4 for four printed pages is 449 120 pages.
  

So even with a bit of garbage, it is churning out 400 000 pages per roll, or about 80 million newspapers printed and distributed every day. Not all of these are read, of course.

Anyway - the roll changer is a piece of mechanical beauty. There are three rolls at a station: one currently feeding the printing tower, one exchanger, and the next one in, ready to be pushed in by an unmanned robot. As the feeder gets down to about 30 cm, an alarm sounds and everything slowly cranks into place. The expiring roll descends, the paper slows down a bit, but doesn't stop. The replacement is raised, and begins to spin, getting faster until it gets up to the same speed. A belt pushes it gently down, and a special strip of tape lets the paper stick onto the expiring roll, which tears off and is swung out of the way. The new roll has taken over, and the left-over paper (now called a stick) is fetched by a robot container called a dog. The waiting roll now gets pushed in and mounted, and is ready to roll into place in another 20 minutes or so.

Just fantastic!

The speed of all the machines - the conveyor belts, the overhead rails carrying off newspaper bits off to intermediate storage or to inserters that can put up to 7 inserts into one main newspaper book or the packagers - all work at breakneck speed. When they foul up (as happened as we were at the inserter station) they have to dig a lot of screwed up paper from the machines before they can restart the process.

The scary thing is that there are almost no people here. Just a few guys making the plates, and a handful of printers fussing with the color on the printing towers. In all, the guide said, they only have 370 people working at the printing plant, most of them in logistics. Everything else is automatic. And still, the guide said that it costs over double the stand price just to produce a newspaper, which is why they have so much advertising. I would be interested in knowing if she is right, it seems strange for the costs to be so high.