While we're at parallels... if you're asking me about my favourite book, I'd be hard pressed to give you an answer, there's quite a lot of them that I enjoy and like to re-read now and then. Even a favourite author would be a hard question to answer - there's a handful of them as well. (Jane Austen is among them, by the way, and C.J. Cherryh.)

But my favourite playwright? Easy question. It's Bertolt Brecht. He wrote quite a lot of plays, most of them looking at the not-so-nice and not-so-intelligent character traits and acts of human beings. He's the inventor, so to say, of the style of the Epic Theatre, intended to get people to think about what they see on stage, instead of just getting drawn in and getting pulled along.

My favourite piece is the Threepenny Opera, which is one (if not the) of his most upbeat pieces. (Also has great music.) But he also wrote something very relevant to today's developments: "The Resistible Rise of Arturo Ui", which is a parable to the rise of Hitler. In case you're interested, there's the full play online, in a version brought onto stage by the CSU Theatre Production:

I only looked at a few of the scenes, but it looks good to me. Brecht-good, which means scary, in this case... There's also music, and dancing, and good costumes, and a lot of very obvious parallels to what we'd prefer to never have again.

If you watch it, I hope you enjoy it - do let me know in the comments what you think about it!  

If you listen to what certain extreme right-wing parties have on their agenda, you could feel like we've all been transported back in time. To about, hm, a hundred years ago? Approximately?

Mind you, I'm an archaeologist and as such I do datings just roughly. I won't attempt to pick an exact year to set into a parallel with today, but it definitely feels like the NSDAP has been re-born, and there's unfortunately plenty of people who are on board, and think that going back a century would be the solution to all our modern problems.

I really can't understand how this is happening, and part of me just wants to "disbelieve this illusion". But unfortunately it is no illusion, there's actually politicians saying things about deportation and firing squads out loud, and they are still on their posts and still active. I freaking cannot believe that this is happening here IN GERMANY! Of all places in the world. Goodness, the last survivors of the Holocaust aren't even all dead yet. We still have contemporary witnesses alive. (Oh, by the way, what they are saying is "yes, that's how it started back then".)

So today's work day will be cut short because I'll spend some of it going demonstrating against this fascist right-wing shit. Thank you very much.

Oh, by the way, you can sign about a gazillion of petitions to stop the AfD, and of course if you're in Germany, you can add your warm body to the group on a demonstration near you. There will be quite a lot of them this weekend (Erlangen is a little early, but who cares), and you can find them on this handy map from zusammen-gegen-rechts.org

Please stand up and protest. Write to your Abgeordnete. Say something. Protect our democracy. Because if we're time travelling back to the Nazi Era... we'll all be fucked.

One of the things I've come across recently is the fact that most Germans have no real concept of proper wilderness. Wilderness as in "no, there's really nothing and nobody around to help you when you get in trouble, and there's also no shop that will sell you food and water". Because, well, there's no such thing in Germany. You are never far from the next village, or the next road, or the next house, or the next shop. (I was tempted to write "or the next telephone booth", but that, actually, is not the case anymore. There's still about 12.000 of them left, but they will be taken out of service this year, according to Telekom plans.)

Germany as a country is rather densely populated, and there's a huge amount of roads to get you about everywhere in your car, if you so choose. Which means that you won't be able to get further than about 13.48 km from any road - and that's only the case if you travel up to the small island called Greifswalder Oie, off the coast of Germany. On the mainland, you're usually less than a kilometre from the nearest road - if it's more than that, you're already sort of far out.

If that's made you curious, go and check out the fantastic map made by Hans Hack, where you can see the distances to roads throughout Germany. And the next time you wonder why Germans have no concept of being in the wild, or feel like they are on a different planet if there's lots and lots of land with no signs of civilisation... you know why!

It's almost holiday time - we've tried to get all the seasonal things done that we always do, and that make us happy. There's been baking of Plätzchen, and some meetings with friends, there's been Lebkuchen and Stollen and tea and coffee to go with them, and our traditional trip to the "Historical Christmas Market"... to eat Currywurst mit Pommes (sausage with curry-tomato-sauce and french fries). 

This tradition started several years back, when the "Historical Christmas Market" in Erlangen was still named "Medieval Christmas Market". Because then it's obviously much, much funnier to eat stuff with tomato and potato there. But, well, we have coped, and live with the little bit of loss of amusement. It's still Currywurst, after all!

I will now be off into my winter break - I hope you will all have a few nice days that you can spend in a way that pleases you, with friends, family, both, or alone if you prefer. May your last bit of the year be nice, and may your start into 2024 be a good one - and I'll be back on the blog on January 11.

See you next year! 

Sometimes you need to read in more than one book at the (more or less) same time - because, for instance, you want to compare stuff. I know that I've had space issues when trying to check things in several books at once.

Well, turns out that there's a solution for this, and it can be found in a library in Mexico. It's a book wheel - something looking a bit like a rolodex (for those of you old enough to know these), with several shelves for one book each, and you can turn the wheel to look at the books in turn. 

Go see the thing in the original article about it. Unfortunately, I don't parallel read more than two books often enough to justify trying to build one of those...

I've looked a bit more for museum collection management software... and I am amazed at how many different options and solutions there are. Most of them, however, will upload or import or otherwise duplicate an existing file. Most of them are also designed to run on a server (though that is something that I could work with), which makes perfect sense for an accessible database, and are accessed through the browser. (Also workable.)

However, it takes a bit of time to skim the documentation for each of the options to see if it might be suitable for my purposes... and that's where I'm still stuck, skimming stuff and figuring out which one may be worth a try. 

That's all happening in little bits of time inbetween "proper" work stuff, though. With extra help from the little cat today (who has been putting her paw down on the touchpad more than usual...). But I won't complain too much about having a fluffy companion while working!

Having the cat relax and hang out on the desk also means that I get to sneakily shorten her claws as necessary. She's not active enough anymore to keep all the claws short enough through wear and tear, and the tendons in older cats sort of wear out as well and don't retract everything as completely as it should be... and that has actually caused her issues with walking. Plus claw snags, which may look funny, but must be rather annoying and sometimes probably also painful. So we got a claw trimmer (human nail clippers have the wrong shape) and now we're keeping her claws short enough that they don't bother her. 

Fortunately she's fine with having her paws handled; the only really difficult claw is the thumb claw, but even that is unsupervised and standing out sometimes, in some sleepy positions. And then, snip!, it is suddenly a little shorter. And Madame is a good bit happier - not strictly in that moment, but overall, since being able to walk without pain is definitely a great factor in personal happiness!

I'm still on the hunt for a replacement for my photo database software (sigh...), which means that occasionally I'm procrastinating by looking for something. The newest direction that I've been going is museum software. Most of that is tailored to run on an Internet server, but that's something that can be done by localhost.  

It does look like there's quite a few open source and free cataloguing software solutions for museums - so maybe, with a good bit of luck, one of them will be suitable for my purposes. (For most of the things I've looked at until now, one of the dealbreakers is that everything is uploaded into a new folder structure. I have a system for my files that helps me to find them outside of the database, and I'd very much like to keep that...)

While looking for stuff, I've stumbled across a "tagging game" (in German only, sorry folks) where you can look for, and tag, items in medieval artwork. So in case you need something to do and like to look at (and for) old things, you might want to check out the Austrian ThingTag!