Adventures at Haribo

Haribo is the manufacturer of Gummi Bears. The factory is located in Bonn. Acting on a rumour, some of us rode out to the southern part of the city in an attempt to get a tour of the factory. We only got as far as the mega shop of Gummi Bears and related confectionary.

kraut Sandles

In the summertime the Germans like to let loose. This is reflected in footwear. Sandles are worn with socks here. If you buy a pair of Birkenstocks, first make sure you have several pairs of socks with which can complement your ensemble.

Arrival in Marburg

This is the house I am currently staying in. Can it look anymore Teutonic?


A room with a view. Well, kind of....


No sleeping in for me. The workers start making noise at 7AM!

Are these the 'United States' of Europe?

Is there a certain flag missing from this picture?
Namely, the Stars and Stripes?



What is the dirty secret about the EU?

The United States was the mid-wife to the birth of European Unity. After WWII, the Americans fully promoted the goal of political and economic reconstruction and integration in the western half of Europe. It was in the self-interest of the United States to do so.

Ideas that the EU can act independently of the United States in global affairs are overstated. Much was made of the fact Germany and France opposed the war in Iraq. It was a good call on their part, but it hardly signaled a desire to go it alone in the world. The US does not fear an independent Europe.

Check out this quote from one of the top planners of Yankee imperialism:

"A breakdown of Franco-German cooperation would be a fatal setback for Europe and a disaster for America's position in Europe."

From page 65 of Zbigniew Brzezinski's book The Grand Chessboard.

So, what do you think? Is the EU a rival or a partner of the United States?
Would a world in which the EU was more powerful than the United States be a benign world?

Ride for Heart

Take a bike ride, but only when the air is clean!





This is your blogger and some of the other twelve thousand cyclists riding south on the Don Valley Parkway. We just passed the halfway point on a 50KM charity bike ride.

Cycling is normally an activity that keeps you fit and your heart healthy. However, here in the T-Dot we have no shortage of bad air days. On days when the smog mixes with humidity it's wiser to leave the bike at home and avoid any strenuous exercise which requires you drawing vasts amounts of air into your lungs. Actually, it's best to avoid the outdoors at all on those days.

Day of protest against the wars.

Smash imperialism before it smashes us all!




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Yellowstone National Park

Old Faithful


"...in a van by the side of the river."



Old Faithful in Yellowstone. And me, thinking some deep thoughts. Sometimes I'm good at that.

The joys of graduate studies.

Sorry for the delays in new postings. There are still a few stories to tell and more pictures to post of our adventures in America this past summer.

As I struggle with various epistemologies and concepts such as "performative utterances", there will be a longer break in between postings. But keep checking. Coming soon will be some pictures of Yellowstone national park.

Cheers.

A line from Johnny Cash. And, is that snow?

Reno is located in Nevada and is the poor brother to Las Vegas. You might remember the line from a Johnny Cash song, I shot a man in Reno, just to watch him die.

And on to Utah...


No it's not snow, it's salt. This is in Utah on the salt flats. We walked out on to a small portion of it. I never actually tasted to see if indeed it was salt but I'm pretty sure it was.

America is just full of surprises, isn't it.

Lake Tahoe

We spent about half an hour on the shores of Lake Tahoe, which is located in north-eastern California, right at the border with Nevada, at an elevation of 6225 feet above sea level. It has a connection to the Godfather part 2 movie. The Corleone family had a home on this lake. This is the place in the movie where Fredo goes out in the boat with someone, says the Hail Mary, and then you hear the gunshot.

"Charlie don't surf!"

Charlie didn't do much wine tasting either, but we did. In the Napa Valley to be exact. Francis Ford Coppola used the money he made with the Godfather films to buy a vineyard, now known as Rubicon. For $25 we had a little tour and history of the winery and got to taste five different types of wine. The Zinfandel was my favourite. It would go nice with a meal, especially if it's a roast of some kind. Bunny? (Sorry, couldn't resist.)



The large house on the estate also had a small museum devoted to film history and had props from some of Coppola's films. The surfboard above is of course from Apocalypse Now.




The desk you see is where Michael Corleone sat and conceived his misdeeds. There really is a town in Sicily called Corleone. B and I visited back in 1992.

When Two Tribes go to war...

These are a few things I picked up on the tour of America. Too bad I can't get the song Two Tribes by Frankie Goes to Hollywood to accompany this presentation.

The guides to surviving the fallout from a nuclear war comes from the shop called "Things" in Tucumcari, New Mexico.








This matchbook comes from a shop in Chelsea, Manhattan. What do you think? Does the artist go too far using the events of 9/11?

"That Bunny is dynamite!"

From what we hear, many of you have been horrified by the our use, or as some have stated, our abuse, of bunnies. For strictly silly reasons, bunnies became the leitmotif of the blog. But let me put your liberal hearts to rest. No American bunnies were hurt by us with bullets or otherwise. In fact, during the last leg of our trip we even put ourselves slightly at risk to save a bunny. The event in question was quite surreal.

After visiting Yellowstone park, (about which I shall report in a future blog), we decided it was time to haul ass homeward. So we put the petal to the metal on Interstate 90 somewhere in Montana. This eventually took us in a south-easterly direction back through Wyoming. America is quite sparsely populated in these states and this section of highway was practically devoid of traffic.

We filled up with gas in Buffalo, WY at about 11:00pm. I had enough of driving at that point, so B took over. B loves to drive! We got back on the I-90 and drove for an hour to Gillette, WY without seeing a single vehicle on our side of the highway. There weren't many cars or trucks traveling in the other direction either.

That in itself was quite strange. But to make things more interesting mother nature was putting on an electrical storm in the distance. Every one or two seconds lightning strikes lit up the horizon to our left. No rain was falling on us, but a wind was making itself felt.

The lightning didn't stop. And still no cars were to be seen either in front or behind us. The whole scenario started to resemble a clip from a David Lynch movie. We wondered maybe there was a good reason why there were no cars on the road. Do other people know something we don't? Is there a huge storm on the way?

And there was the bunnies. Dead bunnies. Sad, but true. I-90 that night was not very bunny friendly. Numerous bunny carcasses had the highway looking like a macabre canvas of jack-rabbit destruction. Some made it only a few feet on to the road. Others made it half-way, before some driver/performance artist, whose tires, which the laws of physics momentarily transformed into grotesque, deadly paintbrushes, smeared fur and blood into the asphalt.

But not the artist who was driving our car! Driving in the left lane, B spotted a fury creature hop into view from the left. SWERVE TO THE RIGHT. Saved! No one was driving behind us so that bunny probably made if off the road. Kukos to B! However, if there was traffic next to us, swerving would have been out of the question.

After that B stayed right in the middle of both lanes to allow for extra reaction time. At one time our headlights reflected back from the eyes of some deer on the side of the road wondering if they should risk crossing.

After an hour of living through this David Lynch movie we decided to pull off the highway at Gillette and stay the night.

Let me now provide a more balanced view of bunnies for those who think they can't be anything but cute and angelic.

I ask that you recall a scene from Monty Python and the Holy Grail.

You may remember the point in the film where King Arthur and his Knights suffer a defeat at the fangs of a killer bunny who was guarding a cave. More than one Knight of Camelot met his end there. This promted King Arthur to remark, "That bunny is dynamite!"

You never know. What would you do if you saw this little fellow hurling towards you? Would you squeeze the trigger of your Magnum .357 or your Ak-47?

It's a gas, gas, gas!

I wish we counted how many derelect gas stations we encountered on our trip. These lovely ones are from Youngstown, OH. Youngstown is a rustbelt town. Steel mills used to stretch for as far as the eye could gaze. The steel mills and their well paying jobs are almost all gone now. And many of the former workers and residents have left for brighter prospects elsewhere.

Housing prices in Youngstown are cheap. There are places where you can purchase a two-bedroom bungalow for as little as $5000.00 to $7000.00. Meanwhile in San Francisco that's what you would pay for a parking spot for one year.

Another interesting feature of Youngstown was the frequent occurance of arson. We passed a few burnt out homes on which the fire department attached an official sign stating arson as the cause. Our host in Youngstown told us that back in the day, she saw a burning house every morning on the way to work. People would have their homes burned to collect insurance money. Social decay manifests itself in bizarre and tragic ways.

"The French don't have a word for entrepreneur."

That's what George Bush allegedly said. This photo was taken a while back as we drove into Chicago. Click on it to see the entrepreneurial spirit of americans.
Most people would just leave an old bus alone. But someone had a vision of a mobile watermelon market.

This little heart of mine. I'm gonna let it shine!

San Francisco is my favourite city in N. America, maybe the world.

We fired guns in Ohio, in S.F we did something also very American, we went to church.
But not some conservative, old testament, you're going to hell church. We went to a gospel church called Glide. Check it out at www.glide.org

Glide is deeply involved in the social justice movement in the S.F area. It's a community of people from different backgrounds and religions who get together to make a difference, but most important to sing their hearts out. Most of the Sunday service is taken up by singing.

Our Sunday in San Francisco went something like this.
Coffee house culture has moved from Europe to America. And it's the europeans who brought it here. We had our morning coffees at Caffe Trieste, which has been a landmark in S.F since the 1950s. The walls are covered with pictures of famous patrons over the years. Bill Cosby had a cup of Joe here.



From Caffe Trieste we headed to Church. We arrived at Glide half an hour early to get a seat. And lucky we did, because the place was packed for the 11:00am service. People were sitting in the aisles by the time the choir took to the stage and the band started up. The whole place, us included, sang out, "This little heart of mine, I'm gonna let it shine." That was just the opening number. For the next hour we were overwhelmed by the quality and vigour of the choir and the musicians. After each song, everyone assembled broke out in wild applause.

Glide is about people coming together and changing things in the temporal world. If you are secular or even agnostic you'll find your spirts will be lifted by this place and its people. When you're in S.F make sure you check it out.

On the road to Northern California

Being in Los Angelos for just a little while has given me a new appreciation for Toronto. If you think the traffic and pollution are bad in Toronto, then go check out L.A.

Because of congestion and the expanse of the city, it takes a long time to get from place to place in the Los Angelos area.

We took HWY 1 north out of the city. First stop was Santa Barbara. Not bad. Santa Barbara is a place I'd like to return to. The highway going north follows the coast and offers beautiful vistas of the pacific. You drive on the side of cliffs.

L.A is a great big freeway.

We spend most of our time in traffic. It takes a long time to get from place to place in the Los Angelos area. The air pollution is unbelievable. Driving from Las Vegas, San Bernadino is the first city in the greater L.A. area that comes into view. It is at that point that a thick layer of pollution blankets the entire region.




We visited Venice beach today. Not many people were working out at muscle beach.





We stayed the last two nights at a motel called Saga in Pasadena. Depeche Mode played here years ago at the Rose Bowl. Those of you who are fans and saw the film Depeche Mode 101 will remember. I don't know why I'm mentioning that. It just comes to mind.