For what is probably the 10th time in the past 24 hours, I’ve just been asked what I think of the current Trudeau brown-face scandal. And every time I get asked about this I want to scream: are we all losing our minds? How did this become a thing?

At times in the past I’ve been accused of being too “politically correct”. Simple fact is that I just don’t like disrespect or lack of tolerance towards anyone’s culture, race, gender, religion, etc…. But at the same time I’m also a huge fan of balance and common sense. What we seem to have completely lost on this topic of black / brown / what-have-you face.

Don’t get me wrong, I am perfectly familiar with the historical significance of black-face, and as a brown person who’s had to deal with her own share of racism in this world, I do very well get where all the rage and frustration comes from. I think it makes perfect sense to say, “you shouldn’t wear black make-up to mock the ethnicity”. But Jesus H. Roosevelt Christ… now we are labeling a man racist because he dressed as Aladdin to an Arabian Nights themed costume party? What in the actual hell? Why is he apologising for this??

Every historical tragedy, every memorable fuck-up our humankind has created, has some historical imagery and elements surrounding it. If we were to start banning every element present at our past mistakes, what will we be still allowed to do? Actually hey, think about it, guns for instance have been responsible for a lot more tragedy than black makeup. How come guns have not been declared offensive and banned as yet? Hmm? Ask yourself, is this really about respect and tolerance? Or is it about finding some easy place to put the blame, to make ourselves feel better, since the actual issue of racism and xenophobia is just too big to do something real about?

As a brown person still grappling with racism today, I think people should be allowed to dress as Aladdin to their hearts’ desire. My black friends seems to not see what the issue would be with wearing dark makeup if you’re dressing up as Michael Jackson. And when a few years ago I dressed up as a Japanese anime character for a Halloween party, I wore makeup to change my skin tone and I don’t think my Japanese friend who accompanied me was offended one bit [were you Kyoko?]. Yes, the black- face history is complicated and one should be very careful of the image one creates. But celebrating another culture or ethnicity is exactly what our bloody divided world actually needs. In fact perhaps if more people would immerse themselves for a day in a character of another culture, maybe we’d have less xenophobia going around.

If you can’t see the difference between the content of this picture, and dressing up as Michael Jackson, you have a problem. A big one. This kind of thinking can’t be allowed to take over. We can’t allow our past mistakes to open even more gaps between us. Going too far today won’t change the past, it will just create us more tragedies today….

The “Raw Power” exhibition at Photobastei is definitely worth seeing… And yes, they have their own Banksy room. We were there for the opening night, and somehow during that evening a graffiti piece showed up right outside the venue that made us all think it might be a, well, Banksy!

Meh… turns out it isn’t. Apparently someone in the “Izzy” online magazine is responsible instead…. well, it was fun while it lasted. 😉

Zurich’s own Banksy piece. Real or a giant hoax? This appeared right outside of Photobastei at the opening night of the exhibition.Update: There’s been a bunch of claims but it now looks like “Izzy” the online magazine is responsible, and they have a video too… | Album @ lothlorien.aasemoon.blue

Source: DSC01267 | Oes | Lothlórien | Aasemoon.blue

Yup, these are not new. I read Gleick’s “The Information” quite some time ago, and halfway read “Chaos” as well but didn’t get the chance to finish it until just recently. Now I’ve finally finished Chaos as well, and enjoyed it greatly.

The two books I’ve read of him so far both have this interesting style of writing. He chooses a monster of a topic, and then goes about describing everything there is to know about it in a spherical fashion. He talks about the whole history of the topic, every important development that makes the topic what it is today, and he really likes to go deep into the lives of people who played a role in it. Scientists, researchers… he likes to talk about their lives, their eccentric habits, biographical bits that you may just not find in your standard biography book. His books as a result are quite fun to read…

Last Saturday we attended this year’s Turnip Parade at Richterswil. Unfortunately it turned out to be a rather big mistake and a terrible experience. Afterwards I wrote a review at the page of the Gemenide Richterswil. Here’s a copy of that just FYI, in case you’re considering going there…

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I was at the Räbechilbi Richterswil event yesterday evening with a small group of friends. I’m sorry to say that this was certainly one of the worst experiences that we have ever had in such an event inside or outside of Switzerland. To tourists or anyone else with an interest, we DO NOT RECOMMEND this event.

On the event catalogue it was suggested that at 3 different points in time during the evening it would be possible for visitors to see the lit up fountain at the lake side. When we went to see the fountain, we realized that the whole area around the fountain was fenced off, the entrances were locked and there was no way to get in. Of course the way the fountain is located, it is so that you can see very close to nothing from outside of the fenced area. We expected that around the suggested times someone would probably open one of the doors for us, perhaps we could get a ticket and get in, but no one came. Waste of time and bad organisation.

Before the start of the parade, our small group found a spot at one of the streets where the procession was supposed to pass through. [I believe the street is called Farbweg.] Just before the beginning, a group of security staff went about organising the rows of people standing on the sides of the road. They sent a group of people to find another spot, and organised the rest of us [standing on the sidewalk] so that we weren’t standing too close to the street. So we naturally thought we were fine to continue standing were we had been organised and given the “ok” to stand by the organisers of the event.

However as the procession started going forward, wider and wider lantern boards showed up, and it started getting hard for them to pass the street without brushing with the bystanders. At this point I already started having an uncomfortable feeling. The staff started getting more and more aggressive and rude with us, and at some point one terribly impolite staff member put his hand on my shoulder and pushed me towards the wall, while there was of course another human being between me and the wall behind us. I really had to control myself not to slap this person hard in the face.

But then of course it go even worse. At some point the staff started shoving us down the street, telling us that we could no longer stand there and we had to “go away”!! Well, go away where exactly? The sides of the streets were completely filled with people, who did not want us passing in between them or standing in front of them and blocking their view. And of course we couldn’t go through the streets as the floats / lantern boards kept coming! We were forced to go down on our knees on the sides of the street, it felt like a bloody war zone as we were pushed and pulled to every direction.

There was one person with us who could not go down on his knees due to health reasons and it’s safe to say this did not end well for him. Somehow we pushed forward and eventually made it out of the crowd alive, to our own surprise.

So we were first given the ok to stand at a spot by the very organisers of the event, and then rudely pushed away like a herd of animals to go heaven knows where in that crowd. This was unbelievable. It’s not as if the width of the streets change, how hard is it to come up with an standard for how wide the boards / floats are allowed to be? How difficult would it have been to organise this so that you don’t have to treat your visitors like animals? How incompetent can you be? This was simply shameful. This was an event for which we bought tickets. We only saw less than half of it, and we had the pleasure of being treated horribly by the rudest staff you can find anywhere in the world.

To the organisers of this event, I suggest you seriously reconsider how you organise your events and especially how you treat your visitors. To tourists and visitors in general, I suggest you do not go to this place until they get their act together.

It’s this ice-cold feeling I get, followed by an uncontrollable urge to run in the opposite direction…. When I come across this very special sort of people, who seem to read a lot but it doesn’t teach them. Learn a lot but it doesn’t change them. See a lot, but stay blind. Experience a lot, but don’t evolve. Touch a lot, but don’t feel.

I wonder what happened to you… where are your layers? Where is your soul? Where is your heart?

Fair warning, I’m pissed. This is going to be a rant-ish post.

For the life of me, I can’t understand how we ended up here. How did I go from voicing my opinion about the latest iteration of Doctor Who, to a full on conflict regarding the topic of “gender equality”.

The ridiculous non-issue issue:

In a massively misguided move, BBC decided that the next Doctor should be female. Yes, I’m a girl. Yes, I bloody well hate this decision. Why? Because this character has historically been the personification of dude quirk. He is male. He just is. In every iteration he has looked different, sounded different, been a different age.. but he has always been, without any doubts, a quirky, idiosyncratic male.

Don’t get me wrong, I am all for a kick-arse female time lord, but not turning an already established very much male character, female. BBC’s decision comes through as a cheap distraction, as if they simply had no idea where to go with the series next.

But you know what is boiling my noodles right now?

The fact that voicing that opinion has so far several times resulted in someone wagging a finger at me and bringing up our modern society’s move towards “gender equality”!! I think somewhere along the line we forgot what gender equality is about, what it actually means. Gender equality has never been about genders being equal. It has always been about genders having equal rights, about everyone being able to make their own choices about their life, their education and career. It’s about the law giving every human being similar rights. It’s about fairness in our judgements. It’s about respect.

But genders themselves are obviously not supposed to be equal. Some people are female, some male, some both, some neither, some somewhere in between. Each of these categories is unique, each have their own characteristics, idiosyncrasies, aptitudes. Each have their own special something to add to the balance of our human society. What is the point of their existence if they were to be all the same? Have we forgotten that simple fact? Aren’t we, in our overflowing enthusiasm towards the topic of gender equality, suddenly being dismissive towards the identity of each category?

I guess by now you can tell that this post is not about Doctor Who. My rant is about the many examples of the term “gender equality” being misused these days. I’m getting the feeling the term is turning into an all purpose gadget people use when they can’t come up with a better arguement. We’re going straight from one imbalance to the other. There is no way we can be fair to any gender, as long as we are not acknowledging the particularities of that gender.

Let’s keep that in mind the next time we’re wagging our finger at someone and shouting gender equality at them.

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P.S.: Yes, right now there’s two versions of my blog and they both look….. under-construction I guess? It’s the same content, it’s just two different systems… long story, it’s a test run and I currently am not finding time to move things forward, so for the moment… yeah there’s two of them.

Finished reading this some time ago. It was recommended by a historian friend with a special interest in Arthur.

This is an interesting read if you’re curious about the reality of King Arthur. The book discuesses the historical figure[s] and events that form the basis for the legend of King Arthur. There’s a ton of historical and archeological references and a good deal of something that feels like historical detective-work, showing that King Arthur, his knights of the round table and even Merlin are more than just fictional characters.

In the past few years somehow we were bombarded by similarly themed young adult novels of exploding popularity that were of course also divoured by Hollywood and made into a whole lot of cheesy movies.

Honestly I’m not very happy about how Lois Lowry’s “The Giver” quartet also got shuffled in, as yet another one of these. I read the series a couple of years back, and there are certain aspect of it that I still think about from time to time. I find the quartet especially well written, and the stories deep and meaningful, probably a lot more than they’re being given credit for, especially thanks to the rather ridiculous movie.

So if you’ve just seen the movie and ran the other direction, I do ask you to please give the books a chance. It’s possible you’ll find something entirely different in there.

I have no idea how many times I’ve watched the movie. The Green Mile is one of my all time favourites.. it’s one of those movies that I just randomly re-watch every once in a while just because. But up to very recently, it hadn’t even come to my attention that there even was a book! Perhaps partially because so far I haven’t been such a big fan of Stephen King’s writing, and I didn’t even know this was one of his.

Last month a friend of mine asked me what I thought of the book, and a couple of hours later I actually started reading it. I was a little worried that the book wouldn’t be that good, or that it would be too different. Fortunately as it turned out the usual rule applied here too and the book was in fact better.

Reading the book you get to know the characters much better. Their personalities, thoughts and circumstances of their lives have been much better described. And then there’s the mouse. In the movie you do fall in love with the mouse, but in the book you properly get to know the mouse. There is much more to him and his story, and he is perhaps the 2nd main character in the book. And I absolutely love that.

Paul Edgecombe’s story is also better told in the book. There is in fact quite a bit about him that doesn’t make it to the movie, including a very meaningful last chapter. That last chapter was hard for me to read…so very emotionally intense, and it gives you much to ponder about. Mind you it doesn’t really change the story or how it ends, but it does paint a move vivid picture of Paul Edgecombe.

[Update: Please ignore this post… In the light of who and what we now know this person is, I’m no longer interested in discussing his ideas…]

This is something I read last year, but recently it came up in conversation several times again and I remembered how much I enjoyed reading it.

What I really like about this biography, is that perhaps due to the topic of the book still being alive and very much involved in the writing of it, the book answers some interesting questions. It gives you an idea of what made him who he is, and where some of his absolutely brilliant ideas came from. Or for that matter what was going on in his mind when he made certain decisions. If you’re a fan of Joss Whedon, I very much recommend reading this.