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All of this second world war reading has provoked some clear thoughts on life strategy. As we wind down to the end of 2005 and to the beginning of 2006, there is a lot to reflect on.

What brought down the Third Reich were too many fronts open at the same time. While the Germans were approaching policy one issue at a time (revitalising the economy, rebuilding the military, taking over Sudentland and Bohemia, amalgamating Poland, conquering France and Western Europe), they were unbelievably successful.

But at that point in August 1940, the Germans began to lose focus. Instead of taking the Battle of Britain to its logical conclusion (the absolute elimination of the Royal Air Force - apparently they were 24 hours away from shattering the RAF when they withdrew from the Battle of Britain), the Germans became involved in bombing raids on cities in England, finally giving up the Battle of Britain and cancelling the invasion of England.

At the same time they still had to fully digest Poland and France. They were also fighting a losing maritime battle in the Atlantic (another reason to continue with the Battle of Britain single-mindedly). Colonial struggles were going on with the British.

But instead of focusing on eliminating the one extant threat (with Britain conquered, any question of American entry into the war would become moot and the Germans would have had full control of the European and African seas) - Hitler went and opened up a second front against the Soviet Union.

There was only one issue which mattered at that point. Absolute mastery of the European skies. With control of the skies in their pocket, Britain would have been doomed to conquer. Like Japan after the drop of nuclear weapons, the British would have had no choice but to sue for peace in the face of endless and relentless bombing.

With a single front and more patience, there is no reason that the German war machine could not have taken European Russia and the Ukraine (Leningrad, Moscow, Kiev). The Germans had the best infantry, the best armoured divisions, the best generals, the best air force.

But instead they squandered their assets by focusing on too many targets at once: the sea war in the Atlantic, two air wars, fending off invasion in the West, advancing in the East, managing new territories in Poland and Central Europes, the desert war.

Basically I am suffering from the same malaise which brought down the Third Reich. I have too many fronts open. In my favour, I have innovative camerawork, strong editing skills, excellent html and decent CSS skills, improving photography, a good sense of design and human interface and a growing understanding of web marketing. In addition I did have strong financial analysis and good organisation skills (not so certain about those two these days). I have fluent spoken Russian and excellent written French with modest conversational German.

Against me, my attentions are divided between a design and marketing business, dance writing, photography dance and otherwise, dance filmmaking, sport and a too keen interest in politics. I also owe some months to the formal study of German. There are too many targets here. And so I am losing the war, after a year of remarkable victories.

While many of these interests and skills are complementary, there is too much here. Winning individual battles will not take the war. And I am tired, very tired (see previous post on email). I must regroup my forces for a clearer strategy in the New Year.

Happily, unlike the Third Reich, I did not open a second Russian front this year. And after a reconnaisance mission to South America and taking a measure of the terrain there, I had the good sense to withdraw from invasion plans there. But the targets must be ever more restricted and victories more absolute.

I have been ill for the last week with some kind of nasty lingering cold. Enough to slow one down and prevent the taking of vigorous exercise, but not enough to lay one down flat in bed.

But in line with general technological fatigue, I stopped checking email for all of three days. This afternoon I checked email again. Over three hundred pieces of spam (fortunately SpamAssassin and Eudora Spamwatch do a reasonably good job of keeping all the spam together in the junk folder). Another one hundred pieces of personal mail, professional newsletters. About twenty-five pieces of spam (those damn watch and pharmacy spams) managed to make it into my Inbox.

Some people talk about handling 200 pieces of personal/professional mail per day. Quite frankly, there is something wrong with this scenario. One needs downtime to think and to have one's own thoughts. Just having a few days without email was such a joy. Imagine eagerly waiting for the post. Getting handwritten and personal letters of length and substance. Imagine settling into a good book.

After at least a year of checking email more or less every day, I don't know why it finally bothers me so much.

I know the head of a major dance festival who doesn't have a computer nor an email address. All of his lieutenants (about four) and their staff (another ten to fifty people depending on the season) do have email addresses. If it's important enough the email gets printed and put on his desk.

I wonder what it would take for me to get there. Difficult considering I run a technology business. But it would be nice. Bravo, Karl!

I wonder how Casanova would have put up with the hundreds of emails and notes he would have received every day? Probably just not answer most of them. Not a bad idea.

Napoleon Hill at the end of his inappropriately titled mystical treatise Think and Grow Rich suggests a council of historical and imaginary figures as one's personal think tanks. It isn't quite clear if he really feels he is visited by these men (Emerson, Paine, Edison, Darwin, Lincoln, Burbank, Napoleon, Henry Ford and Carnegie) or if they are figments of his own imagination. What I can't understand is that if one is going to have an imaginary council why choose such a collection of bores?

My method of addresssing the members of the imaginary cabinet would vary, according to the traits of character which I was for the moment most interested in acquiring. I studied the records of their lives with painstaking care. After some months of this nightly procedure, I was astounded by the discovery that these imaginary figures became apparently real.

Each of these men developed individual characteristics which surprised me....These meetings became so realistic that I became fearful of their consequences, and discontinued them for several months. The experiences were so uncanny, I was afraid if I continued them I would lost sight of the fact that the meetings were purely experiences of my imagination. [Ch. XIV, p. 197)

If it will help me tame the email problem, perhaps this imaginary council idea is not so bad

Somebody send this little book to George Bush for Christmas. It's just 68 pages and large print so he might be able to get through it. Here's the passage to bookmark and run the yellow highlighter over on page 30:

Good thoughts and actions can never produce bad results; bad thoughts and actions can never produce good results. This is but saying that nothing can come from corn but corn, nothing from nettles but nettles.

What is globalisation about? It's about rich companies bilking the world's governments of the taxes they should be paying.

It's not just Enron anymore. Both Microsoft and Google have been exploiting loopholes in Irish tax law and the US - Irish tax treaties to avoid paying hundreds of millions of dollars in taxes.

An effect of the arrangement is that Google Ireland, the operating company, made an after-tax profit of only €2.74 million on a turnover of €603 million. It had operating expenses of €359 million which are understood to include the royalty payments to the other Irish company. Google Ireland paid Irish corporation tax of €1.6 million.

Earlier this month the Wall Street Journal reported that an Irish subsidiary of Microsoft was helping it reduce its tax bill by at least $500 million annually. The hitherto unknown subsidiary, Round Island One Ltd, made an after-tax profit of $3.8 billion in 2004, and paid $324 million in Irish corporate tax.

Of course is the US government is wasting hundreds of billions on a useless, murderous and illegal war, who the hell wants to pay taxes? It's not as if the taxes were going to make the world a better place or to alleviate domestic poverty.

So thank you Google, thank you Bill Gates for not paying your taxes this year.

An assessement:

You fit in with:
Spiritualism
Your ideals are mostly spiritual,
but in an individualistic way.
While spirituality is very important in your life,
organized religion itself may not be for you.
It is best for you to seek
these things on your own terms.
80% spiritual. 60% reason-oriented.

Just when you thought the web was a commercial mess, full of cloned ad-sense sites and flash-laden password protected media sites, along comes something really useful.

The world's largest how-to manual is being written online.

People write in their how-to tips and then others follow to rate the tips.

What was my issue? I bought a refurbished IBM T22 Thinkpad for my web business - it is in good shape but came with a bunch of adhesive stickers on the top of the lid. I was sick of looking at the stickers and decided to pull them off. Nasty adhesive underneath.

Wouldn't come off. Did a search on google for removing glue from tape. Found ehow in two offerings - how to remove bumper stickers and how to remove adhesive bandages. The bumper sticker article kept suggesting stuff I didn't have (weird solvent removers) or didn't want to use on my laptop (nail polish remover). On the other hand the adhesive bandage article offered baby oil (alternative olive oil). Olive oil I did have.

Worked perfectly. Afterwards a light soap and water wash and the Thinkpad looks like new.

Their article on removing calcium buildup from kettles looks good as well.

I will definitely be using this tips database in the future.

The genius is in the ratings system - bad suggestions get marked down and good ones up.

This place is not normally a home to pop psychology of any kind or any kind of motivational coaching. But I do have to say that the latest newsletter from Tom Venuto at Fitness Renaissance had some wonderful gems. The classic comes from Napoleon (I'd like to see the French for this one) apparently in 1769:

Take time to deliberate, but when the time for action has arrived, stop thinking and go in.

Some reflections on the possible from Vic Johnson picked me up a bit:

William James, the great psychologist and writer of the early twentieth century, said, “Belief at the beginning of a doubtful undertaking is the one thing that will guarantee the success of any venture.”....

One of the best known stories about the power of belief is about Roger Bannister, the first person to run a mile in under four minutes. Before his accomplishment it was generally believed that the human body was incapable of such a feat. Bannister, who was a medical student, held another belief, however. “Fueled by my faith in my training, I will overcome all obstacles. I am brave! I am not afraid to face anyone on the track. I believe this is not a dream. It is my reality."

As soon as he broke the barrier, belief about the feat changed and his record only lasted 46 days. Within two years more than fifty people also ran a sub-four-minute mile.... What happened in 1954 that hadn’t happened in the previous 6,000 years of humankind that allowed Bannister to achieve this? Did the human body change so that this could be done? No. But the human belief system did!

As a college student, George Danzig studied very hard and always late into the night. So late that he overslept one morning, arriving 20 minutes late for class. He quickly copied the two math problems on the board, assuming they were the homework assignment. It took him several days to work through the two problems but finally he had a breakthrough and dropped the homework on the professor's desk the next day.

Later, on a Sunday morning, George was awakened at 6 a.m. by his excited professor. Since George was late for class, he hadn't heard the professor announce that the two unsolvable equations on the board were mathematical mind teasers that even Einstein hadn't been able to answer. But George Dantzig, BELIEVING that he was working on just ordinary homework problems, had solved not one, but two problems that had stumped mathematicians for thousands of years.

How many great things could you achieve if you just "believed" they were as easy as they really are?

I went to look at taking some more German courses today - after losing my German for two weeks after my Spanish trip - it seems to have come back. My results would place me between level 3 and level 4 classes - with the choice of which to take totally up to me. It appears that even German is within reach with a stretch.

Tom Venuto's own editorial has a wonderful story from his own life about being hampered by excuses:

Many years ago when I had just started college, my friend and workout partner, Steve, had decided to take the plunge into competitive bodybuilding.

I had already been training for five years (I started when I was only 14), and I wanted to compete too. I talked about it all the time, but I was making all kinds of excuses for why I couldn’t do it. Such as:

I had a small business to focus on, I had a girlfriend and social life, I was in college taking five classes, I didn't have enough muscle mass yet (had to train a few more years to get bigger), I had recently injured my back, etc, etc. (believe me, I had a LOT of excuses!)

WELL… Steve went on to compete and at the age of 19, he won his first competition: the Teenage Natural Mr. America title. I didn't compete because I was too busy making excuses.

You should have seen him - he looked AWESOME! I had never met anyone who had developed a body like that at such a young age. And he did it 100% naturally (absolutely NO steroids!)

As you can probably guess, that was the single spark that lit a motivational bonfire under my butt!

But it wasn’t just the fact that Steve competed and won that motivated me. It was the fact that he had all of the same obstacles that I did, (and then some), yet he didn't let that stop him. He overcame, competed and won, and that's what “blasted" my own excuses out of the water.

Steve was in college too; except he had six courses, compared to my five.

On top of his full academic schedule, he also had a part time job as a foreman/manager at a textile factory.

He had also recently gotten married and although he didn’t have kids yet, but he did have three dogs to look after!

Steve even had a bad knee from a high school football injury which required surgery and forced him to drop off the varsity team. Even that didn’t stop him. He trained around it.

So what was MY excuse now?

Back to work! There is much to be done.

I am so happy to be back in my beloved Vienna - the most beautiful and charming of all cities in the world, if often old world and occasionally austere - and life begins again.

Interesting article about the Wikipedia

Now when eBay launched, people were skeptical, because the site wasn’t trustworthy. The curious thing about trust, though, is that it is a social fact, a fact that is only true when people think it is true. Social facts are real facts, and have considerable weight in the world. The fact that someone is a judge, for example, is a social fact — the authority that attaches to judgeship is attached by everyone agreeing that a certain person has the right to make certain statements — “Court is adjourned”, “I sentence you to 5 years in prison” — that have real force in the world. Those statements are not magic; their force comes from the social apparatus backing them up.

Ebay has become trustworthy over time because the social fact of its trustworthiness grew with the number of successful transactions and with its ability to find and rectify bad actors. Indeed, the roughest periods in eBay’s short life have been when it has seemed in danger of being a platform for fraud.

The Wikipedia online encylopedia has become the best authority on the web. It is an amazing collaborative project. A new invention of human ingenuity. Some complaints of spam around the web. More complaints from the right-wing pundits about an obvious bias in the articles (i.e. articles about Marx, Castro, Chavez, Palestine are not polemical screeds in hidden praise of Adams, Reagan, Bush, Zionism).

Great and immediate reference material with live links to more in-depth material. The way the web was supposed to work. Leaves DMOZ, About.com and the Yahoo directory far behind.

As a reliable and comprehensive source may soon rival Brittanica and the other behemoths of the off-line world. Already beats them on everything computer and contemporary.

Long live the Wikipedia.

Salon has run a two page series of poems from readers on the theme We sing the body electric.... Here is one of them:

It finally happened at 30
my body left its confines
after years of spinning turbines
the cigarettes and wine glasses
of twentysomething dating classes.

The butt that never gained a thing
a lure for men, a giggling thing
that danced all night in gowns once worn
by tiny 20s movie stars.

But now a meal lasts a great deal longer
than lingering eyes over wine and pasta
and goes to my thighs like white on rice.
Hey Mom - I've discovered cellulite!

How now begins this epic battle?
Will esteem drop with hips that waddle?
I've heard the elders mutter bitter
of tits that sag, how men must gag
and that one day I'll understand.

But this precious territory
is sadly, only temporary
And it's the only one I've got
for life's in motion, life is not
the perfect frozen laundry list
the measure of the men you've kissed,
so let me die an onanist!

As a group the poems tend to describe dissatisfaction with one's body, generally on grounds of excess - being overweight. What's interesting about the poems written or at least the ones chosen is that they tend express resignation at one's rotundness and sometimes even celebration of it.

Rather than a diet and exercise - habits not beyond the reach of most healthy adults. But beyond most Americans. America seems to be a nation of extremes - 100% gym bunnies, male and female, typified by Jennifer Lopez - with bodies hard as rock. Or your pudgy everyday American, who is wearing two or three sizes above what he or she should be wearing at a given age.

Leadership of the free world indeed.

Curiously the frontman for all the attacks on civilians and the destruction of the constitution (yes, George Bush) does actually lead a close to ideal way of life with a daily two hours of exercise. Is exercise is an essential component in the life of a reformed alcoholic? Instead of the bottle, the bike. There is a chemical release (endorphins) very similar to the gentle delirium of an extra drink too, but more focused, more concentrated.

While the poetry is amusing, it is quite saddening to think that these limerick chimerae were the best effort that an educated public (readers of Salon) could muster in 2005. Eighty years ago the poetry would have been much better.

Waistlines too.

The Americans truly live in decadent times. They regress politically (presumption of innocence, the New Deal, the social contract, wars of aggression), aesthetically and in terms of both diet and lifestyle.

for the longest time, i would have nothing to do with german speaking women even conceptually. my single experience in this domain was the daughter of a consul who lived with my first girlfriend and shared the bed with us when i stayed over with the two of them.

brigitta corresponded to the clichéd foreign portrait of a german woman. she was exceptionally pneumatic with an enormous heaving bosom and massive rubenesque thighs. in this surfeit of flesh, she managed to have quite a small waist. she had curly blonde hair and prodigious appetites and a very sharp german accent employed vigorously to express her demanding personality.

considering that this teutonic maiden was probably the final hatchet into that first relationship, i forswore her kind for what i thought was a lifetime.

large pneumatic blondes and harsh accents have never been at all to my taste. a reason to avoid california and australia for that matter. soft speech, rounded consonants, long vowels, dark hair and light eyes are my synonyms for bliss.

and so a lifetime of mainly russia and france and wondering occasionally what it was i was missing in italy or spain. never a thought for german-speaking lands except how to exclude them from my travel plans.

well the image above - nothing could be further from the truth. particularly in austria. the austrian accent in english is completely different from the german one. it is soft and sultry. much clearer than the french accent in english and i would argue far more sexy. of course, nothing is more beautiful to the ear than a well spoken french woman speaking her native tongue but in english, nothing exceeds the grace of an austrian mädchen. almost all of them have it. particularly outstanding is a carinthian speaking english but at this point we are splitting hairs. the austrian accent is great. if you want to check up on it, just call austrian airlines from anywhere in the world.

but not all is well. particularly in germany there are a large number of excessively large girls and women. like canada, germany is a beer-drinking country. and as a group german girls drink beer, like the men. nothing spoils a woman's figure like beer (or a man's for that matter but men are not on the agenda today).

austria happily enough is more of a wine-drinking country. while the men do drink beer, the austrians are very keen on all kinds of things mixed with soda and lemonade (beer and lemonade is a radler), white wine and soda is a weissspritzer and red wine and mineral water is a rotspritzer and apple juice and soda is obspritzer. also popular is the italian prosecco (a sort of semi-sweet champagne), as well as white wines of all kinds. many women drink exclusively these beverages and consequently have very good figures and often retain fine boned grace into their thirties and beyond.

the women from german speaking lands are very different from their french counterparts. they are far less likely to talk an excessive amount of superficial nonsense. they would like to speak about what it is of interest to them. and to the point. they tend not to flirt very much aimlessly. you can trust that if a woman is paying attention to you for the moment at least she is interested in what you are saying. this may or may not be a good thing - some in france argue that the flirt is the lifeblood of gracious society. others consider it naught but a nuisance.

often the women retain good figures as a fair amount of outdoor activity is considered part of a good upbringing. any well brought-up austrian lass should be able to do a good few hours on steep hiking trails without trouble or complaint. the more adept among them even contrive to do hard-core climbing with the men. cycling and swimming are practiced through old age. not to participate in sports and outdoor activity almost marks a girl as lower caste or unwell in austrian society.

on the other hand, the women as a group do not try to rival the men. so in a group of mountain bikers one cannot expect the women to match the men for either strength or endurance. the physical condition of the women has polite limits, often made tighter but the unfortunate and widespread practice of smoking. but as a group they are stronger and more svelte and fitter than canadian, french or russians.

apart from their lovely accents (in the case of the austrians) and their good figures, the appeal of women from the german speaking lands is this: they are hard-working, clean and sober as a group.

the general level of habitation is so high - square corners, clean floors, sparkling bathrooms - that it is a national norm. women are highly social creatures, very sensitive to societal standards. when everybody's house is clean and immaculate, the pressure to meet the general standard is very high.

moreover, cleaning and maintaining a house properly is a kind of craft, a sort of guildmanship, which is passed from generation to generation. women born and raised in these lands - depending on the household, of course - have that savoir-faire. just as in french households, women have the savoir-faire of making extremely good dinners and running a soirée end to end.

this is not to say that in france the women keep dirty households or that austrian women, for example, can't cook. but as a rule one would find houses in german speaking lands significantly cleaner with better bathrooms, while one would find the general level of culinary expertise significantly higher in france.

in exchange for their ability to keep a household in fine order, women from the german speaking lands do expect the man to participate in the general cleaning, even if the woman is ultimately responsible for the overall standard. they also expect a man to be compliant (not necessarily obedient. his own belonging must also be kept in good order.

moreover, they cannot abide dirtiness in a man's person. french women and russian women are far more tolerant of the body in a natural state. canadian women are don't like dirt either but they are uptight about everything, including men's bodies as well as their own. no doubt someone will mention that there is promiscuity in canada as well. yes, but it is a brutal promiscuity - a promiscuity which leaves the woman's partner in debauch with more of a sensation of sleeping with a brazen prostitute than an act of tender intimacy (the women of quebec are a happy exception in all of this english speaking canadian ascetism.)

particularly unpleasant to many german speaking women is the act of fellatio. it is amazingly unpopular here. women from german-speaking lands would far rather have straight sex than oral sex.

in america, apparently it is the inverse. the young women - from presidential interns to walmart clerks - think nothing of a quick BJ. it a conceptual differnce. bill clinton maintained that he "didn't have sex" even after the stains were found.

in seeking an explanation for this, the best i could come up with is that in austria the men's loins often smell and are unclean. at least that is what my informal sampling revealed as the greatest complaint about fellatio among austrian women. at the root of austrian men's hygiene problem is their generally uncircumcised state. austrian women are very negative about oral sex, at least the performing of it, as past experience has taught them to expect a very unpleasant experience in taste and odour; once convinced of the cleanliness of the man their enthusiasm climbs substantially, and many even acquire a taste for fellatio.

CONCLUSION

from my original position of staying as far away from the women of german-speaking lands as possible, at this point i have to recommend them very highly with only a single caveat. for all the delight and good in them, their native tongue remains german.

which is neither graceful or lovely. in my experience one is ill-advised to sustain a long-term relationship with a woman whose native language you do not at least understand, as a woman's character is far more deeply embedded in her natural dialect than the characterless international english she is likely to speak.

to speak to her in english is to drink wine with one's nose plugged. one has only the faintest idea of the nectar that one quaffs.