eine edle Einfalt
If I don’t post on this site, it doesn’t mean I don’t have anything to say...or that my spouse is home with (without actually) a recently extracted wisdom tooth, or anything...it just means that there is simply too much to say.
A. The other night we watched Vercingetorix, a movie about an actual barbarian who was one of the first to unite the heathen tribes against the Roman Empire (Julius Caesar to be exact, and he died in a showy beheading in Rome--because they like that down south--as a result of it). You can rent it on the French DVD rental service
...but not on ours. It’s called "Druids" in English (the language it was filmed in).
B. A friend of mine has this to say about the upcoming German elections:
"It must be interesting to listen to a politician and not have a knee-jerk reaction to them being either Democrat or Rebublican and having that fit in a category of your brain. When the categories have changed slightly, I guess you can actually listen to them in an open way."
Yes and no, there is definitely a lot of pigeonholing that goes on here...one just hopes the natives don’t make a REALLY bad choice...it’s been known to happen. Said friend was responding to this:
"We watched a show on Angela Merkel last night. Even though she is running for the conservative party, I can't help but like her. The German Gloria Steinem said that if a man succeeds in politics it's just great, but if a woman does then all anyone talks about is all the men she must have stabbed in the back on the way. She is a former physicist (from East Germany, who basically spent her whole life knowing that this would severely limit her in relation to the rest of the world). Her father was a preacher, not a popular thing in communist countries so she had that to deal with as well. From her earliest days she was very aware of what could or could not be talked about publicly, the fact that they listened to western news at home for instance...this was, of course, not technically allowed. She also said that people accuse her father of having been close to the state, and that this is a misunderstanding, that he helped many people deal with the reality of the communist government and the secret police. He was (what we would call) a Democrat, and was earnest enough about what he did to move his family to East Germany (nobody went in that direction, naturally...almost unheard of)--so I can't imagine he was a bad man. Her mother, a school teacher, was not allowed to work in East Germany (as a preacher's wife). Her husband is a scientist and wants no part of the media brouhaha, and only shows up for one event a year. She speaks excellent English and Russian. Maybe she's just evil incarnate and it doesn't show. They definitely need a leader here who has a chance in hell of dealing with the massive problem of what is to be done economically with East Germany...it is a gargantuan issue, I would think having one of their own lead the country (one who isn't retarded enough to want the communists or the nazis back, as many of them do), would be a step in the right direction."
C. I found out who Winckelmann was today.
Murdered in a particularly rough trade kind of way, not unlike a famous local (who owned the oldest restaurant in town). Of course, there is a difference between having a 'tie' store...and influencing the great minds of your century (and beyond).
Anyway, ten euro type bucks were almost immediately spent in garnering 2 German books on the subject as those in English are frightfully expensive, even the Getty sponsored version of his major work coming out on February 1‚ 2006 ($67.50...paperback).
He is most well known in Germany for the line:
"Das allgemeine vorzügliche Kennzeichen der griechischen Meisterstücke ist endlich eine edle Einfalt und eine stille Größe, sowohl in der Stellung als im Ausdruck."
Which means:
"The exquisite characteristic Greek masterpieces have in common is, in the end, a noble innocence and a quiet grandeur, in the bearing as well as the expression."
...and , as you might imagine, it is primarily used in a shortened version ('eine edle Einfalt, und eine stille Größe') as a sarcastic dismissal of someone’s intellectual prowess.
A. The other night we watched Vercingetorix, a movie about an actual barbarian who was one of the first to unite the heathen tribes against the Roman Empire (Julius Caesar to be exact, and he died in a showy beheading in Rome--because they like that down south--as a result of it). You can rent it on the French DVD rental service
...but not on ours. It’s called "Druids" in English (the language it was filmed in).
B. A friend of mine has this to say about the upcoming German elections:
"It must be interesting to listen to a politician and not have a knee-jerk reaction to them being either Democrat or Rebublican and having that fit in a category of your brain. When the categories have changed slightly, I guess you can actually listen to them in an open way."
Yes and no, there is definitely a lot of pigeonholing that goes on here...one just hopes the natives don’t make a REALLY bad choice...it’s been known to happen. Said friend was responding to this:
"We watched a show on Angela Merkel last night. Even though she is running for the conservative party, I can't help but like her. The German Gloria Steinem said that if a man succeeds in politics it's just great, but if a woman does then all anyone talks about is all the men she must have stabbed in the back on the way. She is a former physicist (from East Germany, who basically spent her whole life knowing that this would severely limit her in relation to the rest of the world). Her father was a preacher, not a popular thing in communist countries so she had that to deal with as well. From her earliest days she was very aware of what could or could not be talked about publicly, the fact that they listened to western news at home for instance...this was, of course, not technically allowed. She also said that people accuse her father of having been close to the state, and that this is a misunderstanding, that he helped many people deal with the reality of the communist government and the secret police. He was (what we would call) a Democrat, and was earnest enough about what he did to move his family to East Germany (nobody went in that direction, naturally...almost unheard of)--so I can't imagine he was a bad man. Her mother, a school teacher, was not allowed to work in East Germany (as a preacher's wife). Her husband is a scientist and wants no part of the media brouhaha, and only shows up for one event a year. She speaks excellent English and Russian. Maybe she's just evil incarnate and it doesn't show. They definitely need a leader here who has a chance in hell of dealing with the massive problem of what is to be done economically with East Germany...it is a gargantuan issue, I would think having one of their own lead the country (one who isn't retarded enough to want the communists or the nazis back, as many of them do), would be a step in the right direction."
C. I found out who Winckelmann was today.
Murdered in a particularly rough trade kind of way, not unlike a famous local (who owned the oldest restaurant in town). Of course, there is a difference between having a 'tie' store...and influencing the great minds of your century (and beyond).
Anyway, ten euro type bucks were almost immediately spent in garnering 2 German books on the subject as those in English are frightfully expensive, even the Getty sponsored version of his major work coming out on February 1‚ 2006 ($67.50...paperback).
He is most well known in Germany for the line:
"Das allgemeine vorzügliche Kennzeichen der griechischen Meisterstücke ist endlich eine edle Einfalt und eine stille Größe, sowohl in der Stellung als im Ausdruck."
Which means:
"The exquisite characteristic Greek masterpieces have in common is, in the end, a noble innocence and a quiet grandeur, in the bearing as well as the expression."
...and , as you might imagine, it is primarily used in a shortened version ('eine edle Einfalt, und eine stille Größe') as a sarcastic dismissal of someone’s intellectual prowess.
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