harlekins spirit

Crime Scene Front Garden (Part 2 after all)

Of swindlers, robbers and executioners

The stories told here are not for the faint-hearted. According to human moral standards, they are all about the rejection of all ethical behaviour and the deep abyss of social machinations. Things get really bad in the bird kingdom. So think twice: do you really want to read on? I warned you….

Would you emigrate to Mexico, Beate?

… an email asked me some time ago. The mail came from XING, or more precisely from one of the “business communities” I am registered with. “I don’t think so!” was my first thought, and my second, “Why do you want to know that anyway?” The text informed me of the results of a large survey conducted by XING’s sister platform, InterNations. InterNations asked 12000 expats in 52 countries which country they felt most comfortable in.

State of matter with second time dimension makes quantum computers more robust

When I recently spotted the title in a science journal, my first thought was: Huh? (Hessian for Whaaaaat????) I understand the individual words, but I don’t know what they mean together.

I remember an episode when my brother happened to be standing in my office and overheard me talking to a colleague about a current IT project. When the colleague had left the room, my brother asked: “What were you actually talking about? I didn’t understand a word. What kind of gibberish was that?” He is a lawyer and therefore at home in his own language.

Detours, aberrations and remedies

To mark the the release of the second edition of “The Crazy PMPprep” (a novel about preparing for PMP and CAPM certification), we are publishing an excerpt from the book this week. This concerns Change Control. You witness a discussion between the (reluctant) project manager Henri and his patient and coach Peter Pomosch. The “Riemann” mentioned in passing is the director of the psychiatric clinic and initiator of the project “Concert performance with patients as musicians”.

Growing Green Cities

The Floriade 2022

The “Floriade”, the world horticultural exhibition, will take place in Almere in the Dutch province of Flevoland This year. The Netherlands organises the Floriade every 10 years and there are bad reviews each time thanks to massive budget overruns. How high the loss will be this year can probably only be said when the exhibition closes its doors in October. But it already looks like a record. The true numbers of visitors is much lower than those estimated – whereby Corona certainly also plays a role. Several heads have rolled among those politically responsible.

Security in uncertain situations

With ROLAND Protection Cover, you can sit back and relax even in the event of an accident. We ensure you enjoy extra security and convenience. * – Years ago I took out ROLAND Protection Cover in conjunction with comprehensive insurance for our new car. This month our car broke down 2000 kms from home. The message “gearbox malfunction” appeared on the display and we were advised to visit the nearest garage. With jerking, rev fluctuations and a speed of about 40 kph we made it to the nearest town.

Breaking News: Deutsche Bahn finds light switch!

At the beginning of August, an attentive Deutsche Bahn employee activated a switch in the Bahn Tower in Berlin for the first time. It turned out to be the light switch. The Deutsche Bahn press office is now convinced that this switch can turn off all the lights in the building. Overwhelmed by the innovative power of his company, a railway board member himself proudly posted a press release to this effect on LinkedIn. Malicious tongues had claimed that the railway is Germany’s biggest energy consumer and would now lose its top position.

Crime Scene Front Garden (Part 1)

Of foreboding in nature

This is not about your unease as a mighty thunderstorm front approaches, although this spectacle of nature could also be worth an article in Harlequin, especially if there is a theatre of clouds in the sky (look up and discover, as I did, your grandmother as a cloudy silhouette). And it’s not about mosquitoes either, which are, after all, known as awe-ful bloodsuckers of mammals and thus also transmit diseases. Nor is it about ticks, which, once they have bitten into a mammal, grow larger and larger and only occur at altitudes of up to 1,200 metres.

Today it’s really about crime stories, S&M practices, pretense and deceit. And all this in nature. And it’s about small and tiny creatures trying to hold their own in a world of eating and being eaten with artifice, guile and trickery.

Read-along Films?

Subtitling versus dubbing

On German television it has been standard for donkey’s years to show foreign films dubbed in German (with the exception of “Dinner for one” on New Year’s Eve, of course). DVDs and streaming services offer the choice of “original with subtitles” – but with films and series on TV international actors and actresses are still “dished up” with German voices.

Learning, Naturally

So much well-founded criticism of our education system has been levelled in various places and by various well- and lesser-known persons that we can confidently take this societal self-diagnosis seriously, despite all caution about fake news. And yet it seems to me that only a minority does, although nothing less than our future is at stake. Nothing new, you may say. Learning is something that simply goes without saying after all. Of course learning is part of life. Of course we learn throughout our lives. Of course the education system should make our children fit for life. Learning is in our nature after all, isn’t it?