Author: Chris C.

Time to leave Mainz behind and most of the German family with it! Chris and Sharon hopped into cousin Teresa’s tiny Citroen hatchback to be driven by Peter to Heidelberg for a quick tour. Peter is cousin Susann’s husband and owns Heidel-bike, a local bike shop. He took us for a quick visit of their home and on a short walk through the city center.

After crossing the old bridge across the Neckar river we saw the famous brass monkey sculpture. There was also another Christkindlmarkt in the town center that had a skating rink set up in it. More gluhwein! The Heidelberger Schloss ruin was, well, ruined but it still looked good from where we were.

We also popped into the ancient Church of the Holy Spirit and saw these bizarrely wonderful candelabras.

Then it was onward to the real destination of the day, Annweiler am Trifels, basically the family hometown and where Chris lived in as a teenager. He spent his freshman year of high school living with his grandmother and cousin Stefan and going to the local (German) high school with Stefan, inaugurating the extended family’s own little internal exchange program that continued for years as cousins went back and forth across the Atlantic spending a year of high school overseas (Americans going to Germany, Germans going to America). Chris’s mother and her family put their roots down here in 1950 and it’s the family base.

After checking in at the small hotel in Annweiler, we met up with old family friends Herma and Guenther at their home in the town center. The house has been in Herma’s family for a century and is 400-something years old; Herma ran the family photo shop (film only) until two years ago. They spent many years restoring the building and are now retired and enjoying the fruits of their labor. After a nice meal, we head out for a long walk to see a few things in town while it was still light, led by the hard charging Guenther, a former policeman. We hiked up to the Waldfriedenstrasse house that Chris lived in (now no longer in the family since grandmother Omi/Ilse has moved to Mainz), and then over to the high school at the top of another hill. The castle Trifels sits high up and can be seen from all over the town. Then back to Herma and Guenther’s for coffee and homemade cinnamon waffle cookies. Peter departed for his return drive to Heidelberg (thanks Peter for shepherding us around!) and we headed out for last short walk around the town, passing by the church that Monika and Oliver were married in. We finally got back to the hotel for a long night’s rest and starting our serious planning of the last segment of this trip — Paris!

The last of the extended family arrived at midday and we all settled in for another gigantic meal of bouillabaisse, roasted goose and fist-sized potato dumplings.

In the evening most of us (the older generation and discretely injured excepted) headed over to Andreas’s and Marianne’s for a party they were throwing. More drinking fun, but this time with pre-teen nieces running around offering beer — we had no idea where they got the idea, but we weren’t going to stop them. (Later we figured out that they were trying to get the men drunk so that we would throw them back and forth in a game they call “dwarf tossing”, no joke.) About half of the party (generally the female and/or young half) disappeared down to the basement, where it turned out that an Abba-fueled karaoke inferno was raging … occasionally the videogame afficionados were able to take over. By the end, nobody could resist the lure of the open mic …

Tomorrow: the third and final phase of the trip — Paris! Starting with the Heidelberg and Annweiler prologue …

Before the days family activities, Sharon and Chris got a chance to head into Mainz and wander the city center a little bit. With Chris’s dad Oliver in tow, we stopped by the freaky sculpture fountain in the city center and walked across the 50 deg North latitude line which happens to pass through the heart of Mainz (Europe is much farther north than the US). We circled the ancient Mainzer Dom (“Dom” = cathedral, started construction in year 975) which by luck started chiming its noon bells while we there. After a brief stop inside of the cathedral we moved on to the Saint Stephan church nearby. This church is also over a thousand years old but partially destroyed by bombing during World War II. During post war construction Marc Chagall was commissioned to do the main windows. Stunning.

Here’s a shot of the supposedly joyous Fastnachtsbrunnen fountain in the center of town. Fastnacht is a big holiday in Germany — it’s the counterpart to Mardi Gras, with “Crazy Days” occuring in the days just before Lent starts. Chris remembers attending the “Rosenmontag” parades in Mainz as a child, with candy being thrown from windows, wild costumes, and probably lots of drinking. This fountain though … looks eerily like Holocaust memorials we’ve seen.

We returned to Hechtsheim and Morschgasse (Winny and Marianne’s house) to meet up with family. Many of us then went to an afternoon Christmas Eve mass at the nearby church (more modest, only 200 years old), which was already standing room only when we arrived. Germany is a very Christian, very Catholic country — Martin Luther, the Reformation, and the current pope himself all hail from here.

Later … meals, presents, drinking! In the German tradition, gifts are opened on Christmas Eve, not the next morning. Each of us had been assigned a “secret Santa” and gave our gifts to each other. Complete chaos and joy reigned! Then we went back over to Heuerstrasse (Gisela and Helmut’s house) for dinner, noisily marching the five blocks carrying little candle-lit torches. All 25 of us fit into the beautifully decorated dining room for a huge meal of roast beef, turkey with tuna sauce and capers, avocados stuffed with shrimp, and much more. Here Cody and Jen demonstrate the proper way to drink plum schnapps. We have never seen so many different kinds of Christmas cookies.

At the stroke of midnight, everyone toasted Sharon’s birthday. More drinking! So many different kinds of alcohol!

We were headed to Mainz where all the Campbell/Conrad families were gathering. We drove with aunt Renate from Munich to Mainz on the A9 and A3 autobahns, passing through Nurnberg and Wurzberg. Chris got to drive Renate’s small Mercedes C180 hatchback once we cleared well out of Munich, but was limited to 160 KPH (100 MPH) because of the winter tires she had on the car (or so she claimed). Even at 100 MPH, faster cars were blowing by us — literally, our car would rock when passed by the fastest. The road was surprisingly free of the anticipated holiday traffic so it made for good driving.

We arrived in outside Mainz (Hechtsheim) to join up with the extended family (20 people, to expand to 30 by Christmas day) at the home of Aunt Gisela and Uncle Helmut, and also the new home down the street of cousin Andreas (Winny) and his wife Marianne. In the late afternoon we took the streetcar down into Mainz to go on a Sektkellerei (sparkling wine cellar) tour at the Kupferberg sekt factory. With commentary generously in English, the tour guide led our large family group down into the subterranean caverns lined with filth (that’s not filth, that’s useful fungus!) and filled with fermenting bottles. At the farthest reaches of the tour were some Roman caves over two millenia old. After the tour was a sekt tasting with five different glasses with varying degrees of flavor, dryness, sugar, etc. We learned much and enjoyed drinking with our friends more and more as the tasting wore on.

Our third and last day in the Munich area started with a car tour of Munich sights courtesy of Renate, ending at the Hofgarten and the Pfaelzer Weinprobierstube, right on Odeonsplatz across from the Feldherren memorial. More traditional Bavarian fare was shared among us for lunch (including a roasted dumpling dish), and then we did some more Christkindlmarkt spelunking. We went to one market that was a medieval-themed one –sort of like our cheesy Renaissance Fairs in the States, but, like, in the correct country and with actual antiquities in the surroundings. Some of the booths had animated puppets portraying traditional German fairy tales: Little Red Riding Hood, Hansel and Gretel, The Pope and the Snowman…

Then it was back to the car for a quick trip out to the huge Nymphenburg Palace and then on to a family gathering in the suburbs at Sabrina and Marcy’s home.

Sabrina and Marcy live on a huge plot of land in a ~100 year old farm house out on the rural edge of Munich. Sharon brought a toy for their dog Casey and Renate’s cat Sasha (Sasha originally belonged to Chris’s mom Monika’s, and was whisked away to live with Renate in Munich after Monika’s death in 2006). Sabrina said that we should bring the toy inside before nightfall or the “little foxes” would get it and take it to their dens. (We think she meant ferrets.) Sabrina also keeps several rescued degus. Lucky girl!

Sabrina prepared an amazing meal of roast duck, fish and shrimp, risotto and mashed potatoes with sauted truffles. Much champagne and beer was consumed. We were then delivered back to the Munich apartment for deep sleep.

Took a train an hour east to the Chiemsee / Chiemgau area, where we met up with Chris’s uncle Andreas to be escorted on a whirlwind tour of the area. After lunch with Andreas and his wife, Monika, we headed off. We passed through the tiny town of Mietenkam (where Chris had spent time as a teenager) and the slightly larger town of Grassau on our way into the Alps, on the hunt for snow. Andreas said we must have a “real winter” and he wasn’t going to take no for an answer.

Alas, wherever we went we found just steady rain that had washed away any remaining snow, and so we headed deeper and deeper into the Alps. Reit im Winkl, Ruhpolding, past Salzburg and into the Austrian Alps … finally in Obertauern we got past (above?!) the rain and into heavy snow … three feet of it! We trudged through the ski town to a favorite restaurant of Andreas’s where we had a traditional fare — a soup with dumpling and meatball, and a pastry dish called Kaisersomething.

Then we headed back down out of the Alps and into Salzburg to explore the city there a bit. More Christkindlmarkts and impossibly old architecture, and finally we stumbled completely randomly on … a Krampus/Perchten parade! This is an ancient Alpine tradition that occurs around St. Nicholas day and is a way to punish bad children and ward off evil. Sharon had resigned herself to missing the Munich event, but there was one happening in Salzburg that we completely lucked into! Sharon took a zillion photos and is still beside herself! Exhausted and thrilled, Andreas then took us to get some gluhwein from a nearby restaurant that had been first established in 803 (not 1803, 803).

A quick drive back on the Autobahn in Andreas’s Phaeton and a short tour of Traunstein where Andreas’s electronics company, Municom, is based and we were back on the train to Munich and soon back in bed.

We had an uneventful 9 hour flight, which Chris passed watching Wanted (fun eye candy), Ghost Town (rom/com that was actually enjoyable) and Hancock (predictably dull Hollywood product) on the seatback video system. Sharon smartly slept so she could arrive at 8am as if nothing had happened.

After arriving in Munich and meeting up with Chris’s aunt Renate, we headed over to the apartment of cousin Connie and her boyfriend Holger for a nice German lunch (sausages, cold cuts, cheese, bread, champagne, beer) followed by some wandering around the cobble-stoned city. We went to some Christkindlmarkts and saw sights like the wildly baroque Asamkirche and the bleached white intricacy of the Theatinerkirche. It was cold and drizzling but we stayed warm with roasted chestnuts, and occasional gluhwein stops (hot spiced wine) — or better yet, feuerzangenbowle. We collapsed into bed early in the evening to catch up on missed sleep. Renate was kind enough to let us stay in her apartment in the Prinzregentenstrasse area while we were in town and she spent the nights out at Sabrina (her other daughter) and Marcy’s home on the edge of Munich.

On Friday we depart for a trip to Germany and Paris.

We’ll fly direct to Munich, where we will spend 3 days with relatives exploring the city and the area. Then we all head up to Mainz where the entire extended family (~20 Germans and ~10 Americans) is gathering for a reunion over Christmas.

Then we spend a day in Annweiler, a small town that I spent a year in as a teenager.

Then we’ll take a series of trains to Paris, including a TGV bullet train, and begin 3 days of our patented whirlwind touring technique of that city for the first time. On Tuesday the 30th, we fly from Paris direct back to Atlanta.

I don’t know how much time we’ll have to post here, but we’ll try!

[Depending on how you reached this post, to see the next post you either just scroll up OR click on a link at the top of this page. The link to click on will be to the RIGHT of “Main” above — in this case it’s titled “Germany / Paris: Sat Dec 20th”. Click on that to see the next post …]

When my mother passed away two years ago, I had to take on the role of executor to handle her estate. Going through her finances, I was quickly struck by how much and how often she had been donating to charities. She was a hard working and successful health professional, but not wealthy by any means. Yet month after month, year after year, she donated regularly to causes that she cared about, and not modest sums either.

So, in 2007, I decided it was time for me to step up and start getting more serious about charitable giving. I’ve donated to various charities in the past, and I’ve given a lot of my time to various efforts, but with the success in my own career it really was time for me to get going with this. And so I embarked on a year of analyzing various organizations and spreading out the donations through the year.

After a year I’ve settled on the seven organizations below, most of which are tied to a general theme of helping the third world develop sustainable and free societies.

I’ve got these in a loose order — from most interesting to least. You’ve gotta check out the first few. They are exactly what I had in mind when I started looking for charities to give to.

KickStart is an organization that develops simple technologies to solve third world problems, and then gets those solutions into the field via novel method: they sell them at cost to local people who create profitable businesses around the technology. The most common product is a foot- or hip-powered water pump, but they’ve also designed and fielded a soil brick press and a cooking oil press. They’ve really thought this through, from laying out basic design criteria for new products to explaining why they sell instead of give away. A donation to KickStart is not a handout to the third world, it’s a step in building a functioning society.

Kiva is an organization that manages micro-loans. Micro-lending has been in the news a bit over the last few years — for one, Muhammad Yunus and his Grameen Bank won the Nobel Peace Prize in 2006. Kiva’s online mechanisms allow you to lend directly to unique entrepreneurs in the developing world. You might be helping a garment worker buy a sewing machine so that she could work on her own, outside of the confinement — and abuse — of a sweatshop. You might be helping a farmer open and operate a produce stand. And after the loan is paid back (in about a year) you can then loan to someone else. Personally, I just donate to Kiva to support their internal operations, so you can do that if you don’t want to get involved in making loan decisions. They certainly have lots of compelling loan opportunities though!

The Union of Concerned Scientists is an organization that lobbies government, pressures corporations and educates consumers on various environmental issues. Junk science has really had the upper hand in the public sphere for a long time, it needs to stop, and I believe UCS will be instrumental in that turnaround.

The Planetary Society lobbies for space exploration, with an emphasis on unmanned probes like Cassini, the Mars Rovers, New Horizons, etc. I spend a lot of my personal time keeping up with this stuff (including via their radio show / podcast and via Emily Lakdawalla’s awesome blog) and continued funding for exploration is important to me.

Amnesty International lobbies for human rights, especially for that of political prisoners. Obviously they are very well known operation, but I believe strongly in what they do, so I donate to them even though they already have tons of funding.

Similarly, Doctors Without Borders is a well known charity, but they also mesh with my interest in improving third world conditions.

Engineers Without Borders is similar to DWB in that they go to third world locations and help build infrastructure. They mean well, but after one year of membership I’ve found them frankly to be rather disorganized. Which is itself is pretty funny, or sad, considering they are engineers. It seems to be a very young organization, and it appears that they are focused primarily on getting US students to work with US professionals on projects in the field. Certainly they don’t put out the glossy PR like all of the other orgs above do. But I can’t help it, I’ve got to give them a chance.

As this tax year winds down, please take a look at the above charities and consider becoming a member.

I don’t usually write about politics here. There are probably few things as tedious and banal as someone else’s political opinion. But I want to write down how I feel, if for no other reason so that I can come back later and think about how my opinions have changed.

So, with that caveat in place, here’s a few random thoughts:

I recently re-watched The Smartest Guys In The Room (more info including a preview), a documentary from a couple years ago about the Enron collapse and how the energy market got distorted by deregulation and manipulation. Within Enron there was complete corruption and utter contempt for public values; they rapidly liquidated the Californian treasury under the guise of deregulation, and fleeced their own employees out of $2 billion. (Note that this started under the Clinton administration, which plays to the old argument that both parties are bad for consumers and the middle class, but I think the last 8 years have clearly put the lie to that one.) One thing that’s remarkable about all this, and the recent crisis on Wall Street plays to this as well, is that it was only when wealthy investors and corporations started getting harmed that suddenly these became crises. Here in the state of Georgia we fought for legislation to stop predatory lending 5 years ago, and people were getting absolutely screwed 5 years ago, and those protections were quickly rolled back a year later at the behest of the financial industry. Now we’re awash in sub-prime loan defaults and suddenly it’s a big problem because the wealthy investor class is affected?

History will judge this Bush administration harshly, despite the partisans’ protests to the contrary. Even conservatives have been dismayed. I mentioned Jeffrey Toobin’s book The Nine in an earlier post about the Supreme Court and links to coverage. Here’s a passage where he describes Sandra Day O’Connors disgust with Bush, in the context of the political gaming that occured around the Terry Schiavo case in early 2005:

… To her, the Schiavo case marked only the latest outrage from the extremists who she believed had hijacked her beloved Republican Party. The hiring of John Ashcroft, the politicized response to the affirmative action case, the lawless approach to the war on terror, and the accelerating disaster of the war in Iraq all appalled O’Connor.

With the apparent collapse that the neocons have brought upon their party, it’s interesting to note a double standard. In 2002 and 2004, we had endless handwringing about whether the Democratic party was dead. Now we have the pendulum swinging the other way and yet nobody is claiming that the GOP is dead. So much for liberal media bias.

In the past few weeks, as the impact of the Palin pick has set in, it’s been quite entertaining to read columns by conservatives arguing that the GOP is a complete disaster and has abandoned whole chunks of the country. David Brooks calls them the party of the past and for the stupid. David Frum refers to the “rump”, the only part left after everyone else has left. Kathleen Parker skewers Palin. In that I see some hope that maybe we are starting to come out of the Dark Ages of the last 14 years, of playing to the base, use of wedge issues and splitting the country.

Speaking of wedge issues, Hillary on the ticket would have been a dream come true for Republicans. Nothing would have made them happier than to have her, because she’s a red meat motivator for their base, no question about it. And she would have continued the toxic tone of the last 14-16 years — a country rendered in two and campaigns that focus on what separates us instead of what unites us. Sure, negative campaigning works, but what’s the result?

Unfortunately we can look forward to another few months of speculation and positioning on whether Hillary will be in the Obama cabinet. I hope she won’t be. Obama needs to make a clean break with the politics of the past 16 years. There’s so many good people that he can get to serve with him, why play into the haters hands with a Hillary pick? Let her be a force in the Senate.

I still believe that the November 2004 election was this generation’s principal watershed event for our country. At the time I sincerely expected that there would be a 70/30 landslide rejection of Bush and his administration’s horrible policies, and I was completely wrong. The 2004 election legitimized the Bush presidency; the Bush cronies had spent the previous 4 years showing that “compassionate conservatism” of the 2000 campaign was a Big Lie and had been doing everything precisely against the interests of 95% of the electorate, and yet they still got voted back in. Two years later we at least got Congress out of their hands and the six years of bleeding stopped. But the precedent has been established: the electorate can be goaded into voting against their own interests. Objective truths no longer matter in a world of 24-7 news networks and endless talk radio opinionating. And this is why I really would not be surprised if McCain actually won after all of this.

John McCain is weak. By allowing the Bush/Cheney/Rove political hacks to take over his campaign and sully his reputation, he has shown that he would be dominated by his advisors just like Bush was. I’m tired of having a weak president who can’t think for himself and stand up for his own principles. John McCain was a decent, honest politician who has now allowed himself to be steered into the mud.

John McCain is reckless and would be a shaky hand, not a steady hand, on the tiller. He has chosen a chaotic management style for his campaign, and what we need right now is an administration that is focused and organized for the purpose of rebuilding this country as efficiently as the Cheney machine dismantled it.

I believe Obama will bring bipartisan compromise back to Washington (and end the neocon’s stranglehold on the dialogue), and that starts with running a campaign that doesn’t demonize the opposition, because they’re going to have to actually work with the opposition next year. The Obama campaign has not wallowed in Palin’s effort to ban books or belief that dinosaurs and human coexisted or the hypocrisy of her daughter pregnancy. They’ve stayed on the topic that she’s fundamentally unqualified for the job. And they’ve stayed on the topic that McCain is now just another tool of the Republican machine.

On a completely different subject, I believe that we’ve enjoyed an increasing sense of cultural unity over the last few years, especially in the art/music underground, because there’s been a common enemy in Bush. Those days will be behind us when Obama takes office, because the Left will be split, just like it was during the Clinton years. The sense of unity (unified against Bush and blatant corruption) will give way to infighting and handwringing and internecine politics as people disagree on Democratic policies; the old arguments of “the Dems and Repubs are two sides of the same coin” will rear their heads again, with little attention paid to shades of grey that do in fact differentiate the parties. I fell for it in the late 90’s and I won’t do it again. Republican politicians are not working in your or my interest; Democratic politicians are at least trying.

I spend a lot of time working with and using open source software. Open source is a powerful concept — it says that you can basically tinker with a software and make it work better for you. To me it means that, over the long term, the market will evolve better and better software, and that we all will benefit from that refined software. Open source is starting to take hold in the arena of voting machine technology, and it can’t happen fast enough. But I really hope that it will take root in the legislative process itself, specifically the concept of revision control. Did you know that the actual language of legislation, how particular clauses, is not tracked? Congressmen can simply slip in language via backroom maneuvering and then claim ignorance when their buddies get a windfall from the government or a loophole in the tax code. There’s a movement afoot to track the process of writing legislation the same way we track software code — with a source code management (SCM) process. SCM simply tells you what language was changed when. We don’t have that, and that’s a form of sunshine that we desperately need on our laws.

The GOP has been leveraging electronic voting machine technology to steal elections since 2002; Dems need to win by margins large enough to beat the cheat percentage, or expose the cheating in the process of losing. I’m not sure which will happen on Nov 4th, and I worry about the Bradley effect.

I believe that Obama is the best choice in this election, but that doesn’t mean I agree with everything he says. Telecom immunity? Lock em up. Detroit bailout? Let em fail. Offshore drilling? Don’t yield one more inch to the oil industry, they’ve got their decades of windfall profits and their time is now over. So don’t snark at ME every time you find something laughable in an Obama statement, or worse, want to pick on some position of the Democrats in general. The GOP’s failings completely dwarf any problems I have with Obama or the Democrats.

Money has completed corrupted our government, and frankly I had given up on that a long time ago. However I see a glimmer of hope in the fact that Obama has repudiated PAC and lobbyist money.

Assuming Obama wins, it’ll probably take about 3 weeks for the right to settle back into their comfortable position of sniping about how the Democrats controlling Washington have ruined everything. One can only hope that we can at least dig ourselves out of this mess (again) before they sweep back into office and start digging back down. This is why I hate the rhetoric of “change”, because it’s just going to boomerang back on them once they take office. I don’t want change, I want an end to corruption and a transparent government. I realize that an Obama administration may not deliver all those things to me, and I’m bound to disagree strongly with some of the things they decide to do, but at this point anything will be better than the Republicans.

Finally, I leave you with a graphic that I saw on the web somewhere over the summer. I made a few bumper stickers out of it; let me know if you want one. The point isn’t that Obama is not worth supporting, and it’s not just naked cynicism; the point is to recognize that no one candidate is perfect for any one person, and when your candidate makes a disappointing move, like supporting telecom immunity, you should step back and look at the bigger picture.