sibylle from luebeck, germany

Today I came across the website of the "dropping knowledge" project, a very ambitious project about making people more aware of their world, to start asking questions.


I watched several of the films and commercials and ads at this website and I was very touched by some of them. I am not sure about the founder of the project. Is he just smugly or is he (like he prefers to see himself) a messias on the way to a better world? And does it matter? He managed to touch me with his films, to make me think. Isn't his enough? Otherwise: I was touched because the pictures, the music and the people in the films are beautiful. Is it bad to start caring about a problem because you learned about it through highly aesthetical pictures? Would I have listened and watched otherwise?

Apart from these questions, the films on this website are probably inspiring for many people in one way or another. In one of the commercials I learned to know Uma Thurmans father and his questions. I always assumed that Uma Thurman is "not only" a great actress but also an interesting personality and her father definitely supports this assumption.

In many of the films you just get a glimpse on how other people live. Inspiring and agitating - just go and see for yourself! What are your questions?

My daughter was at her friend’s house this morning and so I spent a few hours catching up, as it were, in the blogsphere It is not that I’ve been Internet-deprived these last weeks during summer holidays. It is just that I haven’t had the time to listen to longer talks (here and here) or meander through some of my regular blogs (here, here, and here) or get a taste for some new blogs (topic blogs: here and here, personal blogs: here and here, and one in between: here).

Odd, but I got the feeling that, though the time spent reading and listening was not a waste of time, it was a suspended, listless sort of passing of time. Not something that I usually feel; which could be due to the fact that there were none of the normal regular household interruptions occurring. Or it could do with the fact that I hadn’t actually done anything with my day before I sat down with my tea and blogroll (droll, just couldn’t resist).

Interesting enough, I read a very interesting article (here) a day or two ago where the author recommended that we all not read our emails the first thing after arriving to work, but an hour or two after firing up our computers. How radical! I tried to think if I knew anyone who didn’t spend the first half-hour or so at work doing this tedious task.

Yet, once I took some time to digest this suggestion, it is not only brilliant but also self-evident. If, in the first hour of work, we channelled our energy and creativity towards tackling important and, hopefully, interesting tasks than there is a fair chance we'd feel as though we had accomplished something wonderful even before most of our colleagues arrive in their offices. And, feeling so, when the interruptions arrive, as they inevitably do, our deposition towards the interruptions would be other than they usually are: more of a bring-it-on-bring-it-on than a god-not-another-wipe-out-day. What a thing that would be!

So, I guess the hours spent in the blogsphere this morning were well invested after all.

susanne from luebeck, germany

Die so wunderbar in kräftigen Gelb- und Orangetönen weithin sichtbar in den Gärten leuchtende Blume, hat an Heilkraft einiges zu bieten. In erster Linie werden die Blüten der Ringelblume gesammelt und entweder frisch zubereitet oder für die spätere Verwendung getrocknet.

Ich selbst habe sie und ihre Wirkkraft zu schätzen gelernt, als mein Sohn das Laufen anfing und es hin und wieder zu Schürfwunden kam, die dann versorgt werden wollten. So ist die Ringelblume, in ihren verschiedenen arzneilichen Zubereitungen, in meiner Hausapotheke zu einem der wichtigsten Bestandteile in all den Jahren geworden.

Die Heilwirkung auf die Haut ist sicherlich der bekannteste Effekt der Ringelblume. In vielen Salben findet sich ein Auszug aus den Blüten wieder. Insbesondere für den wunden Kinderpopo ist die Calendula-Salbe von hohem Wert.

Hier folgt nun eine kleine Zusammenstellung über die Anwendungsmöglichkeiten und die verschiedenen Aufbereitungen der Ringelblume in der Hausapotheke... (mehr)

Germans folk are a funny sort of people sometimes. Not, haha funny, but I-can’t-grasp-this sort of funny. For instance, I heard the most wonderful story today about a fickle German stork husband that cause a great outcry by taking on a French mistress (a female stork from Alsace) and how the whole human population followed its development…


You have to realise that a lot of attention is given all over Germany to its migratory stork population. For those of you who do not know storks tend to be monogamous, and they also tend to return to the same nest every year to bear their young. Any house or farm considers themselves extremely lucky to have storks nesting at their place. And the house owners often build platforms (equipped with web cams) specifically for the convenience of their storks.

Thus the storks are not only watched closely by the scientific society, and the various village communities where the storks roost; their mating and egg laying and the hatching of their young, etc. are followed by many over the Internet from the web cams installed on the mast of the nests.

In Erlangen, in a wonderful traditional family beer brewery and terraced beer garden, a scandal occurred this year between the resident male and a French floozy. The male stork arrived in Erlangen from its winter vacation in Africa a week earlier than his partner (the first suspicious occurrence).

Promptly after he arrived, a French female stork arrived in his nest (suspicious occurrence II). Ohlala! And then, and then, the two storks proceeded to “amuse themselves” (quote from front page of the local newspaper) for a week before the female stork arrived.

Then, and then, the loyal wife appears! The city residence wondered what would happen? Oh ha, it’s hardly fair, the poor female stork comes home from a long journey from Africa to find her partner in bed with his French mistress. Well, the newly arrived female stork takes one look at Madame I-just-happened-to-drop-by and with no further ado throws the floozy out of the nest.

Does she go back to France? Non, bien sûr! She goes around the corner and builds a nice new nest for herself with a terraced view of her lover’s bedroom window. The hussy!

I lie not. This all occurred this year in Erlangen to one poor bloke (stork) who thought he could pull the wool over everyone’s eyes. His Big Mistake was not realising that Big Brother is looking at you…

I would like to recount an experience I had travelling on a train one time from Wuerzburg (between Frankfurt and Nuremberg) to Erlangen (just outside of Nuremberg). This is one of the many experiences that I've had with the Deutsche Bundesbahn (DB, national railway), which made me a great fan of this company.

This story takes place about twenty years ago. I went off on a Zen sesshin, or week’s retreat, at a Benedictine monastery situated in the hills of Wuerzburg (wine-making region of Germany). The sesshin ended with an early breakfast on Easter Sunday. I walked down to the train station with my backpack full of dirty laundry and my head in a strange state of mind and stepped into the first train heading south.

Ten minutes out of the station the conductor comes and asks for my train ticket. This fellow was a typical Bavarian: wide-of-girth, grumpy disposition, and spoke loudly in a broad Bavarian dialect. Something only the Bavarian employees of the DB have the courage to do, all the other employees speak (some well, some not so well) in the “Hochdeutsch” or high German.

The conductor takes my ticket, looks at it and then lets out a few tongue clicks of disgust. “Don’t you know that you are on the Easter Special?” I give him a blank stare that would make any teller of a “dumb blond” joke proud. He goes on to explain, “This train doesn’t stop until we reach Munich. It’s the Easter Special, which takes all the rich residences of Frankfurt’s and Wuerzburg’s high society to Munich for their Easter Sunday brunch and afternoon classical concert and then takes them back again later this evening”. Still getting a blank look from me, “The train doesn’t even go through Nuremberg, let alone stop off there”, he rumbles at me.

Slowly, it dawns on me that I might be in a bit of trouble: not only is the train not taking me where I want it to, my ticket, a normal rate, probably doesn’t cover the exclusive Easter Special, which means that I might have to purchase such a ticket as well as a one way ticket from Munich back to Nuremberg. My mind finally kicks into gear and I desperately search through all my dirty laundry for my wallet. I have to figure out if I have any money to pay for the new train tickets. While I am doing this, the conductor barks, “Don’t move, I’ll be right back!” He leaves the carriage with my ticket in hand.

I sat there somewhat subdued because I discovered to my dismay that even though I might have enough to pay for the trip from Munich to Nuremberg, there was no way I could pay for the Easter Special ticket. So I was contemplating what I could do; wash dishes for the train restaurant, sign over ownership of my rusty bicycle… when an announcement came over the train’s loudspeaker system, “Ladies and Gentlemen, this is Mr. Schmidt your conductor. I hope you are enjoying your journey with the Deutsch Bundesbahn this sunny Easter Sunday morning. I would like to announce that we are going to make an unscheduled stop in Treuchtlingen. I sincerely hope that this will not inconvenience you. Thank you for your understanding and a pleasant further journey”.

Treuchtlingen is a tiny station whose only claim to fame is that it is a crossing point for various train routes through Germany. Slowly, a horrible thought entered my head… unexpected stop… this train doesn’t stop in Nuremberg. And sure enough, five minutes later the grumpy conductor opened the door to my carriage with the biggest grin on his face. “So what do you think? You know everyone in their fat fur coats and their fancy hats are going to be curious to see who can stop the Easter Special.”

I turned beet red and stuttered to him in disbelief, “You are stopping the Easter Special to let me off?” “Yup”, he continued, “and not only that, I’ve called my colleague at the Treuchtlingen station and he will personally escort you to your connecting train back up to Nuremberg”. And with that he gave me back my ticket, which now had handwritten authorisation that I could travel back to Erlangen without any further costs. I didn’t know whether to laugh or cry; I was so touched at his gesture.

We quickly neared Treuchtlingen. The conductor carried my ragged backpack down the corridor to the train’s exit. When the train door opened, the stationmaster helped me down, took my backpack from his colleague, gave him a big wink, and nobly escorted me along the station platform. The whole time, the three of us kept serious expressions on our faces, and pretended not to notice how all the windows of the train had been pulled down and hatted men and fur-coated ladies stuck their heads out to discover the identity of VIP that stopped their Easter Special.

Karen and Chritine decided what our blog needed was it's own page dedicated to the lives of us working gals. Please take a look, A Day in a Life...

Karen, from Williamstown, USA has written the first article:

I work in an art library in a small museum in a small town in Massachusetts (USA). Though the museum and the town are small, the library is not; it occupies four floors, has 250,000 volumes, a staff of twelve, and a healthy acquisitions budget, and is a major player among art libraries in the US. One of the things that makes it a wonderful place to work is that it serves many different kinds of people; the library serves the museum staff and scholarly programs, it serves a graduate program in the history of art, it serves undergraduate students and faculty at a sister liberal arts college, and it is open to the public from 9 to 5 each weekday. This means that as the library’s only reference librarian, I get to work with curators, visiting scholars-in-residence, graduate students, undergraduates, college and graduate faculty, and visitors to the museum who want to find answers to questions about artists and works of art.

In addition to providing reference service, I also do Interlibrary Loan, and on a daily level these are the two main parts of the job. Students, scholars, and faculty send me requests for books they need that our library does not have, and I request them from other libraries. During the day I am available to help anyone who comes in, phones, emails, or sends a letter to ask a question.

November 30^th, 2005 was such an interesting day that I kept a record of the course of the day. I am always fascinated to know how people spend their working days; what kinds of tasks they do, what kinds of decisions they have to make, how they interact with colleagues and customers or patrons. My hope in writing this piece is that others will be inspired to keep logs and describe their working days. This day is not necessarily a typical day, but it gives a good picture of what it is like to work in an art library... (more)