Reader Tips

Unless my eyes are failing me, shouldn't that caption be mama bear.

[ THE scientist at the centre of the “climategate” email scandal has revealed that he was so traumatised by the global backlash against him that he contemplated suicide. ] timesonline

Technically, your not watching the show is failing you ;-)

[ THE scientist at the centre of the “climategate” email scandal has revealed that he was so traumatised by the global backlash against him that he contemplated suicide. ] timesonline

Art imitates life:

"The entrance to Harry was tucked beneath a heating stove."

http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/nova/greatescape/harr-nf.html

I think we now have 'WaveGate'

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/earth/environment/climatechange/7177230/New-errors-in-IPCC-climate-change-report.html

I might add that this is where the phrase, "Tom, Dick and Harry" originates. Or is that an urban legend?

Alright Vitruvious, you win. Do not need new glasses now. I think however that the shows producers had it wrong or those guys have been in the war too long. Papa bear is one of the two nicest looking sergeants I have ever seen. The other being one of the orderly room sergeants at CFB Westwin,Winnipeg in 1990.

This episode was still funny the second time around.

Not being up on cars or computers I found this article of interest. The Mercedes S class has up to 100 million lines of code. The F-35 Raptor will require about 5.7 million.

http://news.discovery.com/tech/toyota-recall-software-code.html

The F-35 probably (hopefully) uses proprietary code, something close to ADA or machine language.

Car computers likely do not. As an example, on some of my webpages I just comment-out stuff that is not currently relevant but may become useful later.

This is the cause of what's called "cruft".

Hey, hold on. Are you sore at-a me? Who told you about-a Mama Mia?
My mother actually laughed when her own children teased her over this episode. She probably heard much worse as a teen, since German military were quartered at her father's house in Bologna.
Strange to say, she was unfamiliar with pizza. When the Allies arrived, she did not understand why they rudely called her a peasant.

LeBeau was my favorite.

National Post, Saturday, February 6. Letter from Dave Coles, president of the Communications, Energy and Paperworkers Union of Canada.

He's responding to a column by John Ivison on Feb. 4 which opined that the government might change legislation that (in the words of the letter) "gives Canadians control" over telecommunications and broadcasting companies. Naturally the union is aghast this possibility.

"Canadians" don't have control over these activities (I definitely don't) - certain companies do. I think the union fears the possible changes that might ensue from a shake-up in the industry - like greater efficiency in the provision of services, and perhaps fewer union members needed to perform the work.

He also trots out the usual drivel about culture: "Our cultural identity is also at risk - our stories, our music, our own perspective on the news ... Do we need foreign companies to pipe in yet more U. S. programming?"

What we need is a system whereby any company with content to offer can freely offer it to any consumer who might be interested. That's best for both the creator of cultural content and the artistically minded consumer. Whether or not Canada has a "cultural identity", and if so, what it is, is not particularly relevant, and anyway it might change over time.

Perhaps more importantly, there is no "our perspective on the news". Every individual has a different perspective. Of course, the individual gets lost in the shuffle when unions come around.

U. S. culture is not wonderful, but having Cancon shoved down one's throat, especially when its content is rubbish, is far worse.

The quality of the Hogans Heroes video is stunning. I guess the show was remastered - or whatever they do to it. So much better than when I watched it as a kid.

How DO they do it?

As for the content - how did those knucklehead Nazis ever think they could win the war?

The actors playing the Germans, Colonel Klink (Werner Klemperer), Sargeant Schultz (John Banner), and General Burkhalter (Leon Askin) were all Jews. The actor playing POW LeBeau (Robert Clary), was the only member of his family of 12 to survive Buchenwald.

Toronto Star, Saturday, February 6. Letter from a professor of history who shall remain nameless here.

He says "Harper's trashing of ... Rights and Democracy ... is merely an extension of his innate hostility to modern conceptions of universal human rights and democracy that are expansive as well as respectful of minority communities."

Let's hope so. There is only one proper conception of human rights, and it is up to humans to discover it. Actually, it is based on the fundamental moral principle of civilized society, namely that no person has the right to initiate the use of force on any other. The alleged "modern" conception referred to here turns out to be one that destroys legitimate rights such as freedom of speech, religion and association. In other words, it's based on old-fashioned paleolithic brute force rather than freedom.

Democracy is a political system in which the populace elects representatives for government legislative bodies, and nothing more. It's certainly not a system in which anything and everything should be subject to government (or "democratic") control.

In other words, we don't need an "expansive" view of either human rights or democracy, because if they expand too far, they'll burst like a balloon, and then we won't have rights or democracy at all. Which, of course, is the leftists' goal.

As for minority individuals, they have the same rights as everyone else, including the right to vote within our democracy. Nothing else is needed. The agenda of the Marxist Frankfurt School that seeks to use minorities and "victims" as a working class surrogate for the purpose of seizing political power has been exposed, and will continue to be refuted.

Good background info, Sooke.

I was also wondering how it looked so good. I was amazed.

Dammit, you've made me go and watch it again.

Not to put too fine a point on it, but as I mentioned in our previous Hogan's Heroes show, according to the Hogan's Heroes Wikipedia link I first referenced supra (I actually do recommend checking them out when time permits, I've learned so much about 20th century western culture from reading web links while producing the LNR shows):

"The actors who played the four major German roles -- Werner Klemperer (Klink), John Banner (Schultz), Leon Askin (Burkhalter) and Howard Caine (Hochstetter) -- were Jewish. Furthermore, Klemperer, Banner, Askin and Robert Clary (LeBeau) were Jews who had fled the Nazis during World War II. Clary says in the recorded commentary on the DVD version of episode "Art for Hogan's Sake" that he spent three years in a concentration camp, that his parents and other family members were killed there, and that he has an identity tattoo from the camp on his arm. Likewise John Banner had been held in a (pre-war) concentration camp and his family was exterminated during the war. Leon Askin was also in a pre-war French internment camp and his parents were killed at Treblinka. Howard Caine (Hochstetter), who was also Jewish (his birth name was Cohen), was American, and Jewish actors Harold Gould and Harold J. Stone played German generals.

"As a teenager, Werner Klemperer (Klink) (son of the great conductor Otto Klemperer) fled Hitler's Germany with his family in 1933. During the show's production, he insisted that Hogan always win over his Nazi captors. He defended his playing a Luftwaffe Officer by claiming, "I am an actor. If I can play Richard III, I can play a Nazi." Banner attempted to sum up the paradox of his role by saying, "Who can play Nazis better than us Jews?" Ironically, although Klemperer, Banner, Caine, Gould and Askin play typecast World War II German types, all had actually served in the US Armed Forces during World War II – Banner and Askin in the US Army Air Corps, Caine in the US Navy, Gould with the US Army, and Klemperer in a US Army Entertainment Unit."

My apologies to those who are alergic to Wikipedia.

Palin's speech at Tea Party Convention (5 parts);
http://american-conservativevalues.com/blog/2010/02/sarah-palins-tea-party-speech/

Any prefiguration of the Bauhaus with the AGWHaus is purely coincidental.
..-

"The Bauhaus in its later years became a kind of religion, with apostasy and heretics that had to be excommunicated by those who still held the true light... more»" (a&l)

"Art as Manifesto

Bauhaus is back. With the 90-year anniversary of the founding of the famed German school of art and craft and design — the school that calls to mind sharp corners and flat roofs, glass and steel and exposed materials, simple furniture and bold painting — have come the exhibitions, retrospectives, and commemorations. Among these is a book by the art historian and writer Nicholas Fox Weber that seeks to illuminate new aspects of the Bauhaus through new descriptions of its major players.

This is all to the good, for to understand the Bauhaus it is necessary to understand the people who ran it. This may seem an odd claim to make considering that one of the school’s most cherished and foundational ideals was that personality, in the slimier, egotistic sense of the word, had no place within its walls or in its work — but that, alas, was an ideal. In reality, the brief and tumultuous history of the Bauhaus’s existence (1919 to 1933) is a history of a handful of artists and craftsmen, and their philosophies and ideas, working with and against one another to create the shifting and singular styles that would irrevocably change the world’s understanding of art, architecture, and design.

Weber presents the lives of six individuals — Walter Gropius, Paul Klee, Wassily Kandinsky, Ludwig Mies van der Rohe, Josef Albers, and Anni Albers — beginning with Gropius, a “bon vivant and womanizer” who founded the Bauhaus in Weimar, Germany. Born into a wealthy family, Gropius was part of an architecturally inclined lineage. His great-uncle was an architect, a renowned one, who designed buildings in the neoclassical tradition of Karl Friedrich Schinkel. Gropius’s father was also an architect, and he, too, idolized Schinkel (he had his son baptized in the church where Schinkel was buried).

Young Gropius, though, was far less enamored than his forebears of the old revitalized Italian and Greek styles. He first went to work for Peter Behrens, a painter-turned-architect whose severe or at least austere buildings rejected old-world designs in favor of what he saw to be authentic (that is, innovative — not derivative or replicative) and useful (no extraneous elements and decoration). Behrens’ best-known structures are industrial, built of modern materials like steel and glass. They adumbrate those that Gropius — and the architects Le Corbusier and Mies van der Rohe, both of whom also apprenticed with Behrens — would conceive in years to come.

In 1910, the 27-year-old Gropius wrote a 28-page paper describing his philosophy of building. In it, he pushed for the industrialization of housing — for “proven materials and reliable techniques” that would dispense with flourishes and ostentation and harness technology’s advances for the masses. He wanted low-cost, high-quality domiciles that worked for those who inhabited them. Weber doesn’t get deep into it, but such ideas were by no means unique. Behrens believed them, certainly, but so did other members of the Deutscher Werkbund, a group of artists and industrialists established in 1907 to advocate for the integration of art and industry and the consequent improvement of manufactured products. Another believer was Henry van de Velde, a Belgian painter who, like Behrens, had set aside his canvases to concentrate on architecture and design. In 1902, he had founded in Weimar the Arts and Crafts Seminar, which prefigured the Grand-Ducal School of Arts and Crafts, which, in turn, would eventually be transformed into the Bauhaus.

An ample chunk of Weber’s chapter on Gropius is dominated by Alma Mahler, which is fitting because she dominated an ample chunk of Gropius’s formative years. She was an insufferable woman. At age 17 she bequeathed her first kiss, that to the painter Gustav Klimt (who was more than twice her age), and thereby began a long career of torturing men."

http://www.hoover.org/publications/policyreview/83183772.html

Obama: 'She insisted she's going to be buried in an Obama t-shirt'

Yes, those are the words of the president, last night at the Democratic National Committee fundraiser in Washington. After listing his administration's accomplishments and vowing that "our most urgent task is job creation," Obama pledged to keep fighting for a national health care system. "We knew this was hard," Obama said. And then he described a letter he received from a campaign worker who suffered from breast cancer and has since died:

I got a letter -- I got a note today from one of my staff -- they forwarded it to me -- from a woman in St. Louis who had been part of our campaign, very active, who had passed away from breast cancer. She didn't have insurance. She couldn't afford it, so she had put off having the kind of exams that she needed. And she had fought a tough battle for four years. All through the campaign she was fighting it, but finally she succumbed to it. And she insisted she's going to be buried in an Obama t-shirt.

Many observers have noted that the president often seems extraordinarily self-referential. It's all about him, they say. But even those critics might be a little taken aback by the "buried in an Obama t-shirt" remark. Is it really that much about him?

Others ask how some of Obama's statements would have been covered had George W. Bush made them -- for example, if Bush had pronounced "corpsman" as "corpse-man" (as Obama did twice at the National Prayer Breakfast). Had Bush mispronounced the word so badly -- and he did say some weird things -- it's likely many commentators would have rushed to fit it into their Bush-is-stupid narrative. Now, it's Obama who's sounding strange. And even putting aside the "corpsman" gaffe, what does the president's telling of the "buried in an Obama t-shirt" anecdote tell us about him? (By the way, this is not about the woman and her choice -- people do all sorts of things, and we respect the decisions they make -- but about the president's choosing to tell the story himself.)

The statement comes at 8:25 in the video below. You can see that the crowd laughed after the "t-shirt" comment -- perhaps because they thought it was funny or perhaps because it made them a bit uneasy. In any event, Obama was serious.

Read more at the Washington Examiner: http://www.washingtonexaminer.com/opinion/blogs/beltway-confidential/Obama-She-insisted-shes-going-to-be-buried-in-an-Obama-t-shirt-83645132.html#ixzz0eqzwN2gY

Obama: 'She insisted she's going to be buried in an Obama t-shirt'
By: Byron York
Chief Political Correspondent
02/05/10 11:42 AM EST
Yes, those are the words of the president, last night at the Democratic National Committee fundraiser in Washington. After listing his administration's accomplishments and vowing that "our most urgent task is job creation," Obama pledged to keep fighting for a national health care system. "We knew this was hard," Obama said. And then he described a letter he received from a campaign worker who suffered from breast cancer and has since died:

I got a letter -- I got a note today from one of my staff -- they forwarded it to me -- from a woman in St. Louis who had been part of our campaign, very active, who had passed away from breast cancer. She didn't have insurance. She couldn't afford it, so she had put off having the kind of exams that she needed. And she had fought a tough battle for four years. All through the campaign she was fighting it, but finally she succumbed to it. And she insisted she's going to be buried in an Obama t-shirt.

Many observers have noted that the president often seems extraordinarily self-referential. It's all about him, they say. But even those critics might be a little taken aback by the "buried in an Obama t-shirt" remark. Is it really that much about him?

Others ask how some of Obama's statements would have been covered had George W. Bush made them -- for example, if Bush had pronounced "corpsman" as "corpse-man" (as Obama did twice at the National Prayer Breakfast). Had Bush mispronounced the word so badly -- and he did say some weird things -- it's likely many commentators would have rushed to fit it into their Bush-is-stupid narrative. Now, it's Obama who's sounding strange. And even putting aside the "corpsman" gaffe, what does the president's telling of the "buried in an Obama t-shirt" anecdote tell us about him? (By the way, this is not about the woman and her choice -- people do all sorts of things, and we respect the decisions they make -- but about the president's choosing to tell the story himself.)

The statement comes at 8:25 in a video. You can see that the crowd laughed after the "t-shirt" comment -- perhaps because they thought it was funny or perhaps because it made them a bit uneasy. In any event, Obama was serious.

Read more at the Washington Examiner: http://www.washingtonexaminer.com/opinion/blogs/beltway-confidential/Obama-She-insisted-shes-going-to-be-buried-in-an-Obama-t-shirt-83645132.html#ixzz0eqzwN2gY

Vitruvius. I used to watch Hogans Heroes with my father who had spent most of the war as a POW in Stalag VIIIB. You never saw anybody laugh so hard. The show was probably a very good release valve for many of the people who lived through the war and were carrying emotional baggage around.

Such much political correctness:

"a cigarette in one hand".

"she doesn't want to stay in Haiti any longer. "I need out," she says."
...-

"Horrors of Haiti take their toll

Canadian nurse helping with aid effort is among those struggling to cope with post-quake trauma"

"PORT-AU-PRINCE–Magalie Bien-Aimé sits outside her tent, a cigarette in one hand, her forehead in the other.'

"Haitian-born Magalie Bien-Aimé, 44, a Montreal nurse, flew to Port-au-Prince to help quake victims. Dazed by insomnia and dealing with trauma patients, she doesn't want to stay in Haiti any longer. "I need out," she says."

http://www.thestar.com/news/world/article/761714--horrors-of-haiti-take-their-toll

CASUS BELLI (justification for war)...

DANGER ALERT: Syria Delivers WMDs To Hezbollah

http://thecanadiansentinel.blogspot.com/2010/02/danger-alert-syria-delivers-wmds-to.html

The secret transfer of the mobile surface-to-surface Syrian-made Fateh-110 (range 250km) missile to Hizballah sparked the prediction Friday, Feb. 5 from an unnamed US official that cross-border arms smuggling from Syria into Lebanon outside state control was "very dangerous" and "paved the way to war similar to Israel-Hizballah conflict of 2006. debkafile's military sources report hat Israel warned Syria through at least two diplomatic channels against Hizballah using this lethal weapon, which is capable of reaching almost every Israel city.

(...) Israeli foreign minister Avigdor Lieberman, known for his undiplomatic, blunt style, responded by warning Syria that it stood to lose the next war and the Assad family would lose its grip on power in Damascus.

Bam Bam's post-SotU address bounce in the polls is short-lived according to Rasmussen:

http://tinyurl.com/5krqjz

What I find particularly disturbing, however, is that there is obviously a significant portion of the voting electorate that is easily swayed by a few pretty words. Nothing new here, of course ... just always alarming to see it displayed so nakedly, in this case, by a highly credible polling firm.

Deb Grey Alberta's next lieutenant-governor?

"But if I don't take it, what will I do? I have nothing except my savings"

The race is on, and the choices as of now are, well, diverse

By Paula Simons, Edmonton Journal

This week's throne speech wasn't Norman Kwong's swan song as Alberta's lieutenant-governor, not officially. Although his five-year appointment expired last month, he'll continue to serve as the Queen's representative until his successor is chosen and named. But Kwong used Thursday's speech to say a public goodbye and thank you to the people of Alberta. It seems fitting for us to do the same.

Fastest Flip-Flop on Record
Who's responsible for the most breathtaking broken promises? By Rafe Mair, 13 Feb 2006, TheTyee.ca

It comes down, I think, to a race among Jean Chretien, who promised, in 1993, that the first three things he would do would be to cancel NAFTA, bring in proportional representation and cancel the GST; Preston Manning, who promised that if he became leader of the opposition he would not move into Stornoway House; Deborah Grey, who swore on all that's sacred that she wouldn't accept a government pension; Brian Mulroney, who came to power in 1984 and promised to clean up Canadian politics; and Stephen Harper who made these (Stronach/Emerson) cabinet appointments

http://www.edmontonjournal.com/business/race+choices+well+diverse/2530321/story.html

John Banner's portrayal of Sgt. Schultz is an archetype.

"Aaaaboluuuutely brillliant Herr Komandant!!"

PiperPaul:

The phrase "Tom, Dick, and/or Harry" predates WWII by about 3 centuries in English, and according to Wikipedia, has an analogue in virtually every major language.

However, you may be interested to know that my best friend's dad, who was taken from us last year, actually was in Stalag 17 during the Great Escape. When we asked him about, he noted that the camp held close to 3,000 men, and only about 300 were involved in planning and executing the escape, so the great lot, for security reasons, were completely unaware of what was going on. He thought the movie was great fun, but probably as accurate as Cameron's Titanic.

This is probably Kate's favorite line from Kolonel Klink's klutzes:

"And you call yourself a german shepherd, you couldn't find a can of dog food."

Cheers

Hans-Christian Georg Rupprecht, Commander in Chief

1st Saint Nicolaas Army
Army Group “True North

"lauded as artistic and innovative when it was unveiled by the architect Jeronimo Padron-Lopez in the early 1980s —".

"Jeronimo"?
...-

"Architecture group Docomomo stops demolition of Cité des Poètes ghetto

The alleys are dark and menacing, the shops are boarded up and the residents have only one wish — to see the estate demolished and rebuilt under a €42 billion (£36.7 billion) plan to regenerate France’s violent, drug-ridden suburbs.

Their dream of a better life, however — a new school, playground and middle-class neighbours — has been stymied by an association of architects which is hailing the bleak, concrete landscape as an historic monument worthy of protected status.

The architects, backed by Parisian establishment figures, have won a court injunction to stop the bulldozers from pulling down council homes depicted by their inhabitants as a prison.

Now the inappropriately named Cité des Poètes (City of the Poets) in Pierrefitte-sur-Seine, north of Paris, has become the setting for a battle which symbolises the French social fracture."

http://entertainment.timesonline.co.uk/tol/arts_and_entertainment/visual_arts/architecture_and_design/article7018530.ece

"Architecture group Docomomo stops demolition of Cité des Poètes ghetto"

[censored}

http://entertainment.timesonline.co.uk/tol/arts_and_entertainment/visual_arts/architecture_and_design/article7018530.ece

Why did you say censored? The link works fine for me.

"John Banner's portrayal of Sgt. Schultz is an archetype.

"Aaaaboluuuutely brillliant Herr Komandant!!" "

It seems to me to be a comic version of Sig Ruman's Sgt. Schulz in "Stalag 17"