Neo Rauch's "The Flame"

Die Flamme. By Neo Rauch.

An emblem or simply thought-provoking with no resolution? Consider this: The liquid or molten appearance of the trailing foot, though far from the distant refinery flare, perhaps in Leuna, strikes me as having some meaning. (Not.) The severely hobbled artist is frozen in mid-stride by two wooden planks [gleichsam/as it were] trussing him, disturbingly so, as though a mirage, that one foot seems to liquefy before your eye. The fluid mind has to finish imagining the self-portrayed artist continuing to pace, with each step of course causing the wooden X to smack him in the head. A freeze-frame shot of letting the lower part of your body do its thing, even if the mind will suffer. (bonk, bonk). There is much to ponder in works bearing the unmistakeable signature of Leipzig artist Neo Rauch (born in 1960). This post encourages all to go or see his art.

Here is another review with a snapshot.
http://www.newyorker.com/arts/critics/artworld/2007/06/04/070604craw_artworld_schjeldahl?currentPage=all

Schalke 04 players feature in friendlies in US - a random overview

The much-reduced German squad which flew to Florida a few days ago includes a number of Schalke players. Questions emerged from the US-Belgium pairing pertinent to Schalke as well. Was emerging young stalwart Julian Draxler a force to be reckoned with in the same midfield mix as Ecuadorean Antonio Valencia of ManU in Orlando or simply "gutted" (knackered) from a long season? My verdict: exhausted and a bit too tentative with his body language and what his team-mates wanted to do with him, or he with them. '

The chemistry should have been there for him paired up as he was with familiar faces like Roman Neustädter or Lars Bender - the new scoring menace - from earlier national team efforts: in fact I saw Draxler's teammate Benedikt Höwedes more conspicuously driving forward as a fullback on the "rampage"- but I guess that catches your eye since you only expect Höwedes to infiltrate the Ecuadorean area without it being a set piece a few times a game from the back four. It is probably part of an offensive scenario decided on by the coach, though it makes him look like a captain getting people fired up, which is already his job in Gelsenkirchen.

Those Multilingual Americans and Germans

Various reporters have given Jermaine Jones good but not top marks for his performance in their team's 2-4 loss against Belgium last night. He is a tenacious and tough defender with great range, but sometimes not-quite-so-steady performer going forward, unless it is aerial. He has been tested in quite a few BL and European campaigns and getting a deserved audition in a lead role under Jürgen Klinsmann: I hope he takes his at times hotheaded over-ambition and the potential for unprovoked macho yellow-worthy fouls to heart as a problem worthy of being remedied, as otherwise it will trip him up.Aresenal players Per Mertesacker and Lukas Podolski put in solid to eye-catchingly dynamic performances respectively, with former Schalker Heiko Westerman, HSV regular Dennis Aogo, and former Leverkusener René Adler representing yet another trio of players from one club - Hamburg HSV. Joachim Löw is cleverly platooning in this reduced 19-man test squad in a way where small sub-units are from one team and thus know each others' moves. Hats off to that sagacity.

I hope Dennis Aogo can acquire a fair bit more aggression so as not to suffer the falling out of grace a too fancy, but insufficiently stout playing style lead to with Piotr Trochowski.

Mertesacker and Westermann are good for headers on set pieces and corners, besides their obvious defending acumen.

As for more areas where players can improve: can these still-rough elements be refined even more by the coaching staff, can a Timothy Chandler be coaxed into being a more lethal closer and controlled strong athlete - and not just be a speedster with a good solid rack of a body. Witness the scoring threat Jonathan Pitroipa now is with Rennes in France, nearly tripling his goal-scoring rate compared to his Hamburg stint. I feel this can be achieved with a young player, especially if the coach of the US team is a former gem of a striker and communicates closely with the regular coach at the player's club.

The fleet-footed attacking Sidney Sam made his German national team debut in tandem with slightly more capped team-mate Lars Bender - thus only lacking Stefan Kießling for a 3-fold Bayer Leverkusen subset of the Nationalelf from the opening whistle. I don't think Mr. Salazar used his whistle again for about 35 minutes after that, encouraging injury-prone fouls. But without top Bundesliga scorer Kießling on the field, that meant soon-to-be Borussia Mönchengladbach-ian Freiburg standout Max Kruse could prove his mettle in his debut, showing good mobility on and off the ball, and the Leverkusen trio - alas - only became a trio when Stefan Reinartz filled in for Neustädter, whose assist to Lars Bender bolstered his chances for inclusion for Brazil in 2014.

Can sharpness/presence be taught?

Last night, during live German TV satellite coverage of the game in Orlando, I think I heard Jogi Loew scream: "Aaron Hunt, play defense!!" at the top of his voice, to snap him out of a bit of lethargy (the season was tough upstream slog, but with career-high 11 BL goals for Hunt) just seconds after he was subbed in. But in his defense, Hunt is a very experienced player with CL cred who paces himself, with dashes of speed when it counts, dishing off smart give-and-goes, and seam-slicing passes at pace and getting off strikes on goal, when it matters, or from the PK spot. This offsets calorie-saving "paced" running on the field or a "down" and inattentive moment as was perhaps seen in the US-Belgian friendly yesterday.

Take for example

Every time the name Christian Benteke comes up, I think of Robert Lewandowski's similarly excellent shielding of the ball when controlling "service" passes, something the two accomplish with unmatched poise, basketball-like positioning skill (box out! to "clear the boards!") and pure strength,with burly physical presence made lethal by adept ball skills in their closing and attacking game.

Seeming nonchalance

Generally speaking, Jerome Boateng and Mesut Özil also both look deceptively nonchalant on the pitch - but that is just appearances - Özil will beat you down the sideline 70% of the time if you are not sharp, and Boateng won't let you outsprint him to a knocked-free ball or to the end-line 95% of the time. I am sure a player like Goodson for the US always wants to have that hustle on defense when it counts. Zooming individual and hopefully one-off errors to the size of Iran in Reagan's mental 1970s/80s world map though, may be counterproductive.

US Outlook and comments about Klinsmann salary

Hopefully, the strongly up-ticking soccer game in the US will see reporters and fans get behind the US players no matter what their "provenance" and Jürgen Klinsmann, no matter what detractors say, while he earns his pay both for qualification and hopefully being a presence in its WC group, for starters. Hopes beyond that are of course fervent, and, as Grant Wahl posited, exacting "damage" in a knock-out phase a likely aspiration given the 2010 showing, provided the team chemistry can come to a good boil, gel and be turned into a much-anticipated Brazilian tournament standout squad.

User manual translations market cornered. Market riddled with charlatans.

User manual translations vanish from market

The business for translating German-to-English manuals for technology companies has shrunk dramatically for "normal-priced" freelance translators. I have noted this nosedive in the manuals business because all incoming orders for this type of work have come to a complete standstill here in our office.

 
An informal benchmark/unheard of dumping price

I have asked several colleagues who agree about this trend, and we have made an educated guess - a "guess-timate" - that the combination of technology, with leveraged and reusable translation memories, and end customers sending most or all work to agencies who have reduced their prices by sourcing suppliers who oftentimes offer to do work for 3 or 4 to 6 cents (euro-cents) a word. I was asked via the proz.com platform to do 2,500 words for 5 cents a word just today - of course the deadline was before April is more than a few hours old (this year) and the rest would only be placed as an order (10,000 more words) if you agreed to the pain up front.

The aggregate effect has killed off the normal wage market for translating manuals (from German to English) in Germany.

 
The market for homeowners who vacation 3x a year, but are translators

Forget the very respectable pay of the Foreign Office or some of the major government-run banks which pay over or far more than €1.70 a line = 25 euro-cents/word, or boardroom briefings, which can be quite sensitive and call for experience and linguistic acumen, which is paid at a rate of at least 22 cents per German word - yes German words are longer, so there are sometimes "only" seven words per line in a text.

There is a market for respectable work for a fair price, but it has been pummeled to the size of a battered meatball by price-cutting procurement practices.

Good pay on a feudal see-saw

But at the same time, if the department who drove the prices down then sends an agency a total of two days of work on a Friday morning, they expect the translator to work on the weekend for no extra pay and the job delivered on Monday afternoon - after the agency had part of Monday to check your work. This means they take the liberty of not warning a trusted supplier in advance and assume that good people will be available, with no regard to time off, which translators need, no matter how late they request rush work to be completed.

Meanwhile, at the factory assembly line workers earn time-and-a-half for holiday/weekend work.

So if a Fortune 500 German conglomerate issues a news item of 650 words, an agency will (be expected to) charge anywhere from 20 to 25 cents a word or higher, or be "guilty" of ruining standard market prices. However, the agency translator is not allowed to bid to the agency; he or she is only allowed to "swallow" the predetermined pricing of 11 cents/word.

The tacit agreement is regular work for the agency translator for one set fee, no matter how hard or easy the content or the damage which could result from the delivered product not making the right impression. 'Friß oder stirb' is the German adage for this, meaning "Take it, or leave it." ... but using language reserved for animals.

 
Tarred and feathered for starting dialogue

All backtalk is squelched, and your name thrown off their supplier list if you call them out.

Been there. Done that.

This has meant fewer and fewer translators can continue to make a respectable income in a skilled profession where you have to be very good at 1) handling manuals content and all the related terminology/content management interfaces and 2) producing clear native-language subject-matter-expert level content for systems which are often highly sensitive or potentially dangerous.

A local profession of, usually, fluent emigrés who understand Germany and how it ticks is being systematically gagged and forced overseas or into the hinterland. You are a translator? No opera for you, no jazz clubs, just chickens and goats. Sorry. Yes, we do expect you to translate difficult operatic/classical music content, obviously, but you may only cultivate your abilities on TV or the Web. Hope that's okay.

Profit motive produces nameless bumblers
There are scores of agencies making 75 to 125 percent profit for checking and sending in what spotty quality they manage to get out of the very low-priced suppliers. If they check it at all. Rather than pay a fair price to the skilled self-employed contractor/translator, they remove part of that person's function and push it up the supply chain by having the missing quality tested/corrected/edited into the faulty product which is faulty because it is done by incompetent or unpredictable and (luckily?) anonymous individuals - many doing it as a housekeeper or on the side while the spouse supports them.

Cost-cutters without logic - what goes round, comes round

As part of this trend, companies like subsidiaries of major worldwide manufacturers with "cost-cutting" procurement divisions, only three years ago demanded a 4-cent and 2-cent reduction per word in agency pricing, respectively, without any explanation as to why. When our office said No Way! the work was sent elsewhere, so we are told by our agencies out in the field who try to find work for us.

Just before entering negotiations, the reason we were being approached, said our middlemen, was that there were huge quality issues from outsourcing the work to India at a cut rate over a period of several years.

That was not the reason for demanding a huge price cut - that was the reason for coming to a big city agency in Germany again, on their proverbial hands and knees. How schizophrenic. That brought collaborations which had been cultivated for half a decade to an abrupt end.

Shoptalk insights, the stench of greed

Before the arrangement ended, I would sometimes get agency work and find Hungarian and Romanian names in the translation memory, mixed in with my well-translated sentences, and found fairly bad errors in their content. This meant, to maximize profit, jobs where I had done the same product manual six times before were then sent to a slashed-price market for a couple years, where my translation results were leveraged to produce translations which could, somehow, be invoiced with the end customer. After all, their English was not really good enough to assess what they were getting. Mind you, I myself had to already give discounts for content repetition or highly similar phrasings. If a bad complaint came from the end customer, then I would have to step in to work on the company's manuals again - as the clean-up man - as they could no longer risk continuing with low-quality suppliers.

Please don't get me wrong, I have friends in these countries, be it Hungary, Romania, the Philippines or India - but I do not enter a school and try to teach Romanian or Hungarian, or Hindu or Tagalog, as a classroom teacher, which is what I consider doing demanding industry manual translations as a non-native speaker amounts to, while also even more dangerous and negligent. However, I readily train and teach my colleagues all about my language, even if I know they might "cut into" my market share, because I know I can count on those colleagues for larger projects, when we all help each other deliver translations in multiple languages. What I do insist on is complete bilingual competence and aptitude for the job.

 
Flummoxed by Benelux

Two years ago: a person who described herself as a translation industry association member bid for a Benelux job at 50% less than the normal price. The end customer, a wealth manager, said to me, hmmm: your price is far higher than the other bid, please explain. When I told him what the other bidder had done, he responded with silence, but felt named and blamed enough to place the order with me.

But he never ordered from me again.

 
Outsource yourself to the Carpathians

For four years now, a major international automotive company has actively recruited translators to work 40 hours a week at an Eastern European location through an agency located there, in a securely supervised building, on their computers, not your own, but without a permanent contract. The initial period of work would be up to six months for (3,500 euros/month four years ago) 4,000 euros a month (recently offered).

Agreeing to such an offer may seem lucrative, but there is no guarantee that the automotive placement agency in eastern Europe would keep you busy after six months, and you would be neglecting your regular business with customers - or have to work evenings to keep those clients happy, too. This is an example of how a trade in Germany has been attacked by globalization. Basically they want to "own the translator" but not offer the terms commensurate with owning their time: a full-time position, as opposed to a time contract.
 
An aside on inflation/cost of living

Notice how the pay figure in the above section has gone up, maybe because people are hard to find for that, or because of inflation?  There has been no inflation-adjusted pay raise for translators for over ten years that I have heard about. Period. Inflation-adjusted income has dropped by up to 30% in Germany since the 1980s, and my US inflation calculator says that if my line price remained unchanged since 2001 but in the same period something which cost a dollar back in 2001 now costs $1.25 to $1.30. That means across the board there has been at least a 25% price discount through creeping inflation from 2001 to 2013. Robert Conrad would say: "I dare you to raise your prices now, after over ten years, by say a modicum step of 10 percent - I dare you." Tell all your agencies who have paid 90 cents a line for 12 years the price is now: €1.15 or €1.20 and wait for your phone to ring while it gathers dust. If you misplace your smartphone, in this case it won't matter.

Upshot? Dialogue not desired

If I reported finding bad results in the "translation memory" my agency provided me with, I was essentially ignored. If I asked why I was not given work for that customer for two years, I was ignored. As an individual, we are powerless to stop practices like these unless the agency and end-customer view us professionals on the local market as partners, with respect and real dialog going in both directions. Good work attracts good clients, everything else is pearls before cutlets.

The precarious playing field
That is why I value the relationships I now have with my intermediaries and end customers. Unfair practices outlined above are not given any oxygen in the customer-supplier relationship and you can afford to live a modestly (comfortable) life, avoid working weekends about 1/3 the time, have children (imagine!), become a grandparent eventually, without wondering - like so many in Munich, Hamburg and New York City wonder, if you will have to move to a hovel when you turn 70, and occasionally take a longer break from the impossible deadlines caused by content producers unwilling/thoughtless enough to not give translators advance warning about when they will finish their work (on time) like we always have to.

If you have identified any of your practices in this blog post, I hope you will consider it free advice (to stop doing it), meant in the spirit of mutual respect.

Coverage of Champions League on various fronts

The southern German newspaper Sueddeutsche Zeitung, based in Munich, had no trouble trusting its reflexes - and featured the news of the 4-0 victory by local Bayern Muenchen side as it outclassed the outstanding and famous Barcelona team in a 4-0 exhibition. It was a perfectly executed game plan masterminded by Jupp Heynckes, but which the team might have won anyway, without the deft strategy they carried out on the pitch. Big front page lead story yesterday on sz.de

Hats off to Dortmund, especially the fans who showed they can close ranks behind one of their team's young player in loyalty despite the Bayern Munich people choosing the eve of the Dortmund side's match against Real Madrid in the CL semi-final (in a war of attrition and legal poaching) to announce signing Dortmund's star player, who played very well, incidentally. Yes, I mean Mario Götze (Goetze).

But I am leaving my hat squarely on my head for the editors at Suedeutsche Zeitung for showing favoritism. Today, the news of the equally impressive, perhaps almost historic, but in fact against-many-odds win of Dortmund against the other top club from Spain, Real Madrid in the same competition, managed to coax its way into the 4th or 5th spot on the page at sz.de. Okay, some people might go and throw weisswurst (or a Nuremberg bratwurst) or epithets at the newspaper's building if Dortmund gets more coverage than Ulli Hoeness's illegal tax evasion and alleged kickback (get it?) from adidas. But I know they won't respond to this, they have never once responded to my e-mails to their editorial staff with useful hints, but I know they are busy deciding which stories to run first, second, third, fourth, and - yes Dortmund's win - fifth. After a higher-ranked news item on many German companies not paying minimum wage. And the news-worth(ier) story of Seehofer denying he showed favoritism to Hoeness. Horst Seehofer, Christian Social Union chief and Bavarias prime-minister once said: when Bayern Muenchen is doing well, Bavaria is doing well - and the blue-and-white checkered Bavarian legal audit authority (Rechnungshof) says there is a chronic lack of tax investigators who might track down more people suspected of tax fraud such as Ulli Hoeneß (Ulli Hoeness), president and CEO of Bayern Muenchen.

Barry Glendinning has jokingly identified the ingenious Kloppo, aka as His Kloppness, as an eccentric, Jupp Heynckes is not mentioned enough in reporting, and okay, saying the reason Manchester United failed to get farther (American leeches are supposedly to blame) is perhaps Victrola's Empire dog's Master's voice speaking with part of its cortex. Or joking that a Spanish center back will dally away the defeat with his supermodel dearest -- all this rather than actually providing insightful tea-time talk about football on the Continent - where was that again, oh dear, it's five already, bring me some Early Grey and some scaaahhns. Are those hornets out there, or that yellowjacket side from "Theremouth," near Sid-mouth and (S)port(s)mouth. Errr leeches, or verm(in)mouth.

But last night showed that a writer can wax lyrical in the moment: After some initial and realistically couched pessimism and making fun of Paula, Barry Glendinning predicts  Dortmund will be nasty to Mario Götze, which they were decidedly not: the wrath never appeared, only whistles for ref. He then comes through with wonderful commentary on the match: "Schmelzer ... smashed... a hopeful low diagonal hail-mary drive through the Real Madrid penalty area. The ball came to the feet of Pepe, but before he could hack clear, Lewandowski took possession with one touch of his right and performed a drag-back with his left before turning on a sixpence and sending an unstoppable screamer into the roof of the net from nine or 10 yards out."

Thank you Barry Glendinning, you have a knack for humor and very enjoyable commentary. The fans applauded Götze at the end, too, and you said they would deride him. Last night proved what great fan culture means. One budget against the other, an essentially majority non-Spanish side against an essentially majority German side.

Williston, North Dakota and Fracking

I respectfully submit that, if natural gas is coming from fracking, people and the land and water affected in the region would be better protected if companies such as Halliburton or Statoil were statutorily required to disclose all risks and all chemicals pumped into the earth and state in full candor whether their fracking practices harm(ed) the environment now or in the future. And if so, be forced to pay the price to meet a higher standard or phase out the practice.

Plus, existing laws which forbid mining and upstream gas operations not tenable or commensurate with good husbandry and good stewardship of lands need to be enforced. Is pollution happening? Is tainted/radioactive waste water being diluted and allowed to enter water treatment supplies? The resources and land need to be seen not merely as "ours to keep" and "exploit," come what may, but for us to respect and handle sustainably. This is what my Dad, who was director of the Dakota Leadership Program, woke me up about one November morning when Jimmy Carter was elected president. He was so thrilled that a conservator had been chosen to lead our country. I notice how silent people get when anything political is mentioned. And I hope Statoil has the guts to admit its ways are flawed and acknowledge their software helps in making harm happen more quickly.

A new thought comes to me: I once met a potato pathologist from Grand Forks, ND who was assigned to help work out what had blighted part of a potato crop in the Ukraine. We happened to be sitting next to each other on a long-haul flight and I recognized the worn round spot on the butt pocket of his jeans from his can of SKOAL, outing him as a Dakotan. Imagine: he was sent so far abroad to help reveal what was going wrong with farming the earth on another continent.

Perhaps soil and farming specialists can also help explain what's wrong with the approach being taken in their very own back yard in places like Williston, in a faraway corner of North Dakota, using Statoil's fracking expertise and proprietary and undisclosed chemical cocktail right in our potato pathologist's own state.

Young-uns, scrimmaging on the field and touchline

Back in September, I watched Tom Ince combine wonderfully down the left side with teammates Danny Rose and Jonjo Shelvley in an under-21 international in Baku, and voila, now Ince has popped 13 goals in so far at Blackpool, prompting Swansea/Laudrup to bid for him. Rose also rightfully bristled at racial abuse suffered in Serbia, and recent punishment handed down by FIFA against Bulgaria and Hungary were no doubt also spurred (pardon me) by the brawl after the Serbia match won by the England squad. If Swansea gets Ince, it will make their attacking midfield on the left more formidable. Explaining why Liverpool also wants him. When watching the match in Baku, Georgiana Turner said:
https://twitter.com/georgina_turner/status/243730787936108545
Rose-Ince-Shelvey are effective coming down left side (Zaha was having a less great night)

Lewis Holtby http://www.transfermarkt.de/de/lewis-holtby/profil/spieler_55508.html is also arriving at Tottenham in the near future, making the Rose/Holtby combo quite a formidable one, if they are fielded regularly together. Will see. Stay tuned for how this plays out.

Too svelte to belt (Gustavo and Kroos): Supported by a Great Back Four

Luiz Gustavo and even more so Toni Kroos inject something almost balletic into the grand worldwide sport of soccer - moving gracefully, even sprinting suavely, passing the ball around the pitch, at times knotting the legs of Naples midfielders and back four, at the very least helping to tire the opponent out by skilful ball circulation and immediately relocating their own selves, scooting as it were, all in synch with proven "senior" players like Schweinsteiger and Lahm - who are in and of themselves always creative and stable going forward or on defense. To tell you the truth - damn! - I really have not seen Toni Kroos go down needlessly or sloppily ever since I started watching him in a junior national German team almost two years ago - like Lahm, he will not dive, his inner ethos won't allow it. Can one venture to say that Kroos thus has the makings of Giggs or Raul, and will never be sent off, ever? His body motions are full of grace--not unlike Gustavo, who mirrors his teammate's slicing dolphin elegance, though in Gustavo's eyes you can for the moment still see the calculations and youthful inexperience still "impressing him" in his moves, quite proud, and rightly so, to be a newly nominated member of the Selecao in Brazil and wearing the red of Bayern München. Not so Kroos. His quarterbacking/playmaking skills, dangerously volleyed, mid-range and set-piece shots combined by his elegance is a sheer joy to watch, for Joachim Löw's national squad and for Munich.

What now to make of the curious blend of physical height, dribbling and passing skills of the center backs (van Buyten, Badstuber and Badstuber's equally young fellow international Jerome Boateng as the redwoods) and full back Philip Lahm in his inimicable, less towering play? Last night in the Champions League match, there seemed to be a slowly encroaching wave of offensive power originating in well-timed and none-too-soft passes whether turf-hugging or airborne, emanating from any one of them. Like variegated Neptune spear thrusts, they executed what one player, Borussia Dortmund's Mats Hummels, often must do alone - getting a creative crease-slicing pass down to his midfielder or striker teammates. But there's more - they all showed they can move downfield themselves, Lahm in his creative, dodging/dribbbling drives from side to center, van Buyten, well past the holding midfielder area, beyond the halfway line, eyes toward the goal, creating opportunities, not only on corner kick headers - and, one must add, not in the way Guy Demel always, yes, always used to for Hamburg, going almost to the goal line before a predictable cross, but with a pass just before the 18-yard-box which poses a real threat of Gomez, Ribery Kroos nailing a goal - while allowing him to play defense and not scoot back behind a counter-attack. And Boateng has been drilled in Manchester or with Joachim Löw to stop doing long, inaccurate passes, but instead far less frequent and shorter passes which are 5 times better. He has evolved into a formidable player - still a bit of a hothead - from 2 years ago to where he is now - stabilizing the defense of Germany's best team and adding a potent, swift-footed and well-considered passing game to his powerful physique. A tremendously sage move by Bayern München higher-ups.

If the rumor is true that Boateng would tell his U-20 German international teammates to open a window using streetwise hoodlum talk: "Fenster auf, Opfer" (open the window, victim) - now the Bundesliga and CL opponents will have to figure out how to get the better of him or they'll be victims, too while onlookers can claim having looked on as willing victims in their admiration.

World Cup Donuts for Germany

This is my kind of (coffee and) kuchen. US-style donuts covered with ice-cream sprinkles to help get into the spirit of things during the World Cup in 2010. I begged the Hamburg woman behind the counter at the Langenhorn-Markt U-Bahn station to allow me to take her picture - she had hash-marked her cheeks with Red, Yellow and Black for Germany. She finally allowed me a couple days later. But I think the donuts are the hit. Germany finished in 3rd place again after going far in 2006. Mesut Özil and Sami Khedira impressed, even wowed audiences, and Bastian Schweinsteiger and Miroslav Klose also were stalwart producers. The way they romped past England and Argentina capture the hearts of many fans the world over.

Part of a quote is not always enough

The failure of the press to correctly quote and correctly translate a portion of an interview with German President Horst Köhler in its original context has put the press on thin ice. An interview with President Horst Köhler was recently translated into slightly simplified form from the German, leaving out key contextual signals. Given how easy it is to get complete information nowadays, this is unprofessional and too lax. http://www.nytimes.com/2010/06/01/world/europe/01germany.html
Here is the quoted statement made by President Köhler in an interview on May 21 or May 22 on his way back from visiting German troops in Afghanistan.

He was speaking in general terms, no longer about Afghanistan specifically. He had already expressed his support for the troops and said they were there to ensure the security of Germany. What followed this was what the German press jumped on and distorted:

"Meine Einschätzung ist aber, dass insgesamt wir auf dem Wege sind, doch auch in der Breite der Gesellschaft zu verstehen, dass ein Land unserer Größe mit dieser Außenhandelsorientierung und damit auch Außenhandelsabhängigkeit auch wissen muss, dass im Zweifel, im Notfall auch militärischer Einsatz notwendig ist, um unsere Interessen zu wahren, zum Beispiel freie Handelswege, zum Beispiel ganze regionale Instabilitäten zu verhindern, die mit Sicherheit dann auch auf unsere Chancen zurückschlagen negativ durch Handel, Arbeitsplätze und Einkommen. Alles das soll diskutiert werden und ich glaube, wir sind auf einem nicht so schlechten Weg."

"My assessment however is that in general we are moving toward [the realization], in fact coming to understand throughout society, that a country of our size with its focus on foreign trade and thus also dependence on foreign trade, also must know that in case of doubt, in an emergency, military action is necessary in order to safeguard our interests, for example [keeping] trade routes free, for example preventing regional instabilities, which are certain to have a negative impact on trade, jobs, and income. This should all be discussed and I think the start we have made is not bad.” (my translation)

That is the complete version, with the omitted portions in bold. A bungled and shortened version of his statement is reported by the New York Times with all things apparently up to standard today, meaning they multiplied the misrepresentation. Here is the NY Times version, available as the full story at the beginning of this post:

“A country of our size,” he said, “with its focus on exports and thus reliance on foreign trade, must be aware that military deployments are necessary in an emergency to protect our interests, for example, when it comes to trade routes, for example, when it comes to preventing regional instabilities that could negatively influence our trade, jobs and incomes.”

This version omits the previous sentence that people across society are coming to this realization, so the New York Time makes it sound like "people have to 'get it' and gain this awareness." That is grossly unfair. Especially if journalists repeat a mistake again in translation by not doing their homework. President Köhler was fulfilling his job and speaking in broad strokes, his only option for having an impact since his office enjoys no executive powers.

Now people are saying he was insulted. I beg to differ, he was more than insulted, he was made a target and misrepresented in a "soft blow" "hatchet job." This is a proven method of look-away mobbing and his response to silent mobbing while in office was appropriate, because his person and his high office were each maligned by "sins of omission."

I will remember his courage and feeling for others, on the Winnenden shootings, on the monstrous visage of short-term profiteering, which he decried in the most unequivocal terms and his deep interest in the destiny and circumstances of many people in Germany and especially Africa.

It seems a bit oversimplified for Germany's ARD to claim that Germans "don't understand" his resignation - the ease with which a publicly-financed broadcaster feels called upon to say what Germans think and pretend to be able to gauge this, even before it has sunk in, amounts to arrogance and presumptuousness. Even when their air time is paid for by the people, ARD has overstepped professional tenets and standards.

Teamgeist or esprit de corps

Given the calamity occurring in the Gulf of Mexico, it is striking how the entire group of upstream mineral oil producing companies have not created a pool of funds to unleash an unprecedented effort to contain and alleviate the damage. OPEC should not stand by, but send 5 representatives to stand with President Obama and the governors and commit to a clean-up.

In addition they ought to finance a people-controlled/grassroots-represented containment and de-escalation team with full spending power matching 1 percent of the affected coastal region's budget and a local draft of volunteers and this amount matched by double this amount from Big Oil - the teams to be staffed, 50 percent by oil company managers who are answerable to the other 50 percent who are non-oil-company representatives from affected local communities.

Shifts could be handled like on the North Slope. 2 weeks on - 2 weeks off, with one day set aside for briefing/debriefing between team shifts.

"Machines don't get irony"

"The text with a gold-colored background here," explains Willer, "was already translated and edited last year, so today the customer doesn't have to pay for it anymore."

"Eine Maschine versteht keine Ironie" - taz.de: "'Was hier golden unterlegt ist', erklärt Willer, 'wurde bereits im Vorjahr übersetzt und editiert, dafür braucht mein Kunde heute nicht mehr zu bezahlen.'"

Who decides if a piece of work should be left out or included and thus billed for. It should be the service provider who decides if they feel text repetitions should be charged at a lower rate, if justified. the alternative is accepting these terms as dicatated by the customer.

But when customers start pressuring you to come down in price for matches and repetitions (a match is simply a later repetition), not only does the amount you earn decrease, but a gap is created between what you do and what you are paid. If the number of repetitions saves you 25% of the work, you can bet that the agency wants a 50% discount. So you end up doing more work for the same price. The only other option is an unprofessional one: translating disconnected sentences which are not yet in the database and not spending even a half a second reading from one sentence to the next. That is an approach which is reckless and runs counter to how texts should be skillfully dealt with during translation. It can be likened to a surgeon saying she doesn't need glasses, after all that ear is on the left side of the patient's head, since she knows where it is, she commands: "Scalpel." and lops it off. Oh, I'm sorry, it was the next person's ear!! Not to worry, I have malpractice insurance for that. Translators can say: "Oh, I have liability insurance for financial loss," I'll accept those terms (ha, ha, life is fun!). A gross and insanely absurd analogy which has a pithy logical core. Do you care about your patient, do you care about your text? The texts my colleagues translate are often for heavy machinery with high voltage and potentially dangerous situations can arise from incorrect translation. Anyone who voluntarily places others at potential risk while also jeopardizing their own reputation by agreeing to "blind" fuzzy-match-only translations is taking an uncalled for risk. In some cases a proofreader makes sense, but with fuzzy matches being blindly accepted, a proofreader is then forced to use production resources to fix things you as as the translator could have done right in the first place.

It is not the marketing damage large institutions inflict upon themselves when making bad decisions about translations. This is systemic. The problems with "Fluggastkontrolle" (airline passenger "control") being rendered as "passenger control" is not the question here, though embarassing enough for Munich's Airport when they closed it down and the unchecked and very translated sounding phrase "passenger control" is shown to millions and millsion on all the German TV stations and international stations, too. No.... this issue goes deeper than that.

So, try to avoid agents who allow customers to force this on them. And end-customers, you are risking things... Discourage dialogs about repetitions and fuzzy match discounts. You decide that, not them, for your expertise is required for a successful processing/translating of the patient/text.

There's no such thing as a free lunch, except for maybe in the translation industry when critical sentences in a new manual don't get paid for - the customer/agent gets the free lunch, but uses the sentence for monetary gain in a transaction--publishing the content or selling it as a manual with a system or piece of potentially dangerous equipment. What bookseller is in the business of letting the same book be purchased for the price of one because the content repeats in the second book? I won't wait for your answer... As a colleague once said to me: "This is also true for filling up your gas tank at the pump." The major oil companies don't give a discount because their goods repeat themselves.

Nice quote

Titus Engel leads Freischütz production at Kampnagel in Hamburg - November/December 2004

Wie ein Torwart, der sein Tor verlässt, stampfte Engel bei den Jägerchören über den Rasen und stachelte die bierernst schmetternden Herren des Männerchores an. Seines Jacketts entledigt, mit Hosenträgern und langen Haaren, stahl er seinen Schauspielkollegen mitunter die Show.
//
Like a goalie who leaves his goal, Titus Engel strode across the lawn for the hunters' choruses, exhorting even more heroic tones from the exuberantly singing glee club members. Free of his tails, with suspenders showing and long flowing hair, at times he managed to steal the show from his dramatic counterparts.

http://www.bode-engel.com/presse/medienberichte-zu-der-freischuetz/flensburger-tageblatt-22112004/

Wall Street Pursues Profit in Bundles of Life Insurance - the Great New Leveraged Money-Cow

I was reading the New York Times today and saw this story: Back to Business - Wall Street Pursues Profit in Bundles of Life Insurance - Series - NYTimes.com: "Critics of life settlements believe “this defeats the idea of what life insurance is supposed to be,” said Steven Weisbart, senior vice president and chief economist for the Insurance Information Institute, a trade group. “It’s not an investment product, a gambling product.”

The overall article caused my skin to literally crawl. Some things come immediately to mind. Purposely innocuous terms such as "life settlements" need clarification. It seems like "securitizing" will upset people even more. It is morally questionable and worthy of condemnation to bundle or pool completely unrelated policies taken out by people who do not know each other, people who wanted to protect beneficiaries against future loss based on their individual policy premium payments.

Here is an anology. You have ten horses you have taken care of for years. A cowboy has a lame horse. He comes to you, the rancher, and says: "My horse is lame, can you borrow me one, and, as insurance, that nice gelding, too, as I'se a got a couple high-stakes rodeos comin' round and needs a backup, too." The farmer thinks rodeos are just great and agrees, charging 15 dollars a week per horse, but says he does't want to read about his horse in some cockamamie bank holdup in Montana, either. Oh, and just leave your lame horse with me, I'll have her good as new in 2 months. The contractual parties agree that the rancher's horses cannot be temperorarily "subletted" to anybody else. The cowboy ends up using the one horse each weekend in calf-roping, rents the other one to his barrel-racing cousin on the rodeo tour and during the week hires the horses out as draught horses to a quarry. The vagabond entrpreneurs make 250 bucks a week, per horse. A month later the cowboy returns the horses, who are looking rather gaunt, pays 30 bucks for feed for his recovered horse, takes it and rides off, not troubled by what he did.

All semblance to the life settlement and CDO industry is purely unintentional. It would seem like a horse or a pile of premiums just lying there is just too irresistible to some people. At what point does someone blow the whistle?

Insurance corporations are involved in pooling risk with potential profit involved. These insurers are accepting premiums from individuals and it behooves (get it?) the insurers to reflect on the example they set if they use the premiums entrusted to them for synthetically depersonalizing and spreading risk against potential loss with a profit motive, rather than just assessing normal actuarial risk.

The mechanics are questionable. Using policy premiums to involve more intermediaries making front-end fees should be made a punishable offence and severely mandated against. If insuraers lack self-control, government regulation is warranted.

The problem is that premiums paid don't look like horses being dishonestly rented out at rodeos. In this modern IT age, why is that not possible, to introduce an "Old Paint" tag to prevent abuse of premiums.

There is a cloak of smoke covering up what is happening. Who in the world among us people who lead a normal workaday life can get their head around "collateralize" and "debt obligation" all in one product name. Shouldn't it be renamed: "A vehicle for intermediaries to earn substanital fees from originating and "securitizing" life insurances policies"?

These deals, so brazenly made to sound harmless by generic-sounding labels such as "collateralized debt obligations" (CDOs) appeared to the Wall Street investment firms to be, to use The Washington Post's phrasing (thank you, Jill Drew), a "surefire way to profit from the booming real estate market without much risk to their companies. They engaged in a kind of financial alchemy, creating a trillion-dollar chain of securities on the back of subprime mortgages and other loans, which were sold to investors in private offerings that no government regulator scrutinized."


The sub-prime loans tanking nationwide stripped back the opaque names given to these "derivatives" and reverse-hedge hocus-pocus. The smoke cleared in every part of country and caught them with their pants down, shrugging their shoulders and saying: "... but I never intended to actually poison the well, after all I only poured things in for a few seconds." Or: What exactly did happen to Hamlet, that only took a few seconds, too, right? The spirit and intention are longer in the making. Can the concentration of financial prowess be to some degree removed from Wall Street or London financial powerhouses or what-have-you given how what they do sometimes occurs unfairly on the backs of the workforce. At the expense of what are actually people who are not driven by the profit mantra alone? Most people just want a fair benefit from working honestly and creatively.

Mediterranean impressions

A poem in celebration of August

Cicadas whirring as day's heat fades to night
Flip-flop steps bounce off a beachside boardwalk

Ibizenco espresso machines have gone silent
Instead, salt wind and the beat of the waves

Frolicsome, family, friends saunter by sunchairs
Three-fifty a day or seven for two

But our bed is the sand, the curls left by Neptune
Our sport to cavort without care in the sea

Our glee ringing out with a splash and a dive
Our bodies revived in the aquamarine pool

Bike knees churn uphill, the wind not working
The sweat on our brow pouring down in the sun

Some tapas - an ¡Hola! - a cordial reply
Welcoming strangers who smile with their eyes

Romano, Italo, Tedesco, and gringos
On these shores we're all just amigos.

Selective indignation on a crooked field

Philippe Sands felt a rock in his shoe and couldn't let it go until he had interviewed enough people involved to be able to analyze and ultimately write a book about it. The title: Torture Team: Rumsfeld's Memo and the Betrayal of American Values. The conclusion an intelligent reader of his book can make is that state and military power was abused at multiple levels and on multiple fronts in how detainees captured after 9/11 in the fight against terrorism were treated in contravention/violation of Geneva Conventions. His interview here reveals the compelling arguments to be found in more detail in his book. This courageous British lawyer, married to an American and living in the US, wants all facts on the table so that due process can follow. The response, showing individual responsibility (as in doping in my previous blog in 2007) being taken by people who were in power needs to be heard. The Rices, Rumsfelds, Cheneys, Addingtons, Hayneses have a duty as former civil servants or professionals to consider how they acted in the long run and step forward in candor and a contrite spirit, come clean without a trace of spin or tactic. The appearance of Condoleeza Rice on YouTube this week was appalling. It has to end. www.pbs.org/moyers/journal/05092008/transcript2.html?print

EXCERPT #1:

PHILIPPE SANDS: The story's a simple one. Back in '71, '72, the British moved as the United States has done now, to aggressive techniques of interrogation. They used pretty much the same techniques: hooding, standing, humiliation, degradation. Five techniques, they were called. [...] They went up to court, actually, and they were ruled to be illegal, in 1978 by the European Court on Human Rights. But there was a bigger problem, even beyond their illegality, in my view. And that was this: That what the use of those techniques did was to really enrage part of the Catholic community, who felt that IRA detainees alleged to be terrorists, were being abused. And it turned people who were perhaps unhappy with the situation into being deeply and violently unhappy with the situation. And if you speak to British politicians who were involved in that period, and the British military, what they'll tell you is that there is a feeling that the use of those types of techniques extended the conflict.

INCONSISTENT STANDARDS or as my Dad once called it... SO MYOPIC

Where is a fair shake and a level playing field now? Are all detainees created equal in our acutely aware, globalized world, and are they endowed with certain inalienable rights?

Indignation on whose behalf? On behalf of IRA detainees held by the British. On behalf of a "fallen brother." Hmmm. Indignation at basely carried out cruelty. Which extended a very difficult stand-off by years and years. This is a classic double standard if there are constantly dark green and light green bus passengers (shackled "air-freight" detainees flown around like hocks of ham) as you throw principles under the bus.

DEBATE SQUELCHED or A SIN OF OMISSION

Who went silent on the gross injustices in American detention practices, so myopically rationalized by one congressman who brazenly said, without knowing, or caring(?), for the truth, that "3,000 Americans died," when the victims were in fact from 90 different countries. The pain was felt inside and outside the US. The most serious blow was to the rights of the common man and the common weal internationally. London was eventually hit, Madrid was too, and so were a series of other terrorist objectives elsewhere.

THREE MINUTES

 BILL MOYERS: Going back to the hearings, one member of the committee, Representative Trent Franks of Arizona, a Republican, said--and I quote--"The results of a total of three minutes of severe interrogations of three of the worst terrorists were of immeasurable benefit to the American people. A full 25 percent of the human intelligence we've received on Al-Qaeda came from just three minutes worth of rarely used interrogation tactics."
PHILIPPE SANDS: Well, I remember that very well. And I appreciated very much everything that Representative Franks had to say. But I've described that to my friends in London as a sort of Monty Python moment in the hearing. Because he alleged that there had been three individuals water boarded. They had been water boarded for no more than one minute each. And they had spilled the beans. And I was sitting there watching him and thinking, well, that's new information. I've never heard that before. Where on earth does that come from? Counterintuitively, I can't imagine how a water-boarding of one minute is suddenly going to produce useful information. We don't even know if it is useful. But also, imagine the scene. You've got guys there with stopwatches. We're gonna waterboard him for one minute, and then we will stop. And in that one minute, everything will come up. I don't know where he got all that from. I thought he sounded as though he made it up on the spot...

THE POISONED WELL
I scoffed at this, and fired back in emails, even in my own family, when the party claptrap line was served up. But nobody would talk, though some may have been lurking. There was a silence hanging like a cloud over family communication.One family member near to me stated: yes, you have to torture in circumstances which help your country. I was galled and sickened.

So many in general were hoodwinked and taken in by this pushy, arrogant, mean-spirited mentality, some spreading it themselves, most chomping down on it hook, line and sinker. And, still, a sizeable portion of the US population is not visibly, palpably upset over the crimes. At the same time those not willing to talk sacrificed part of their family's otherwise intact communication, squelching debate and left those bringing up the subject "out in the cold" with the light switched off, to ensure their own, albeit momentary, political, and by extension, tax and monetary gain, and just chime in, or emotionally check out, on the difficult issue.

IT ALL COMES OUT IN THE WASH
Now, as we are being thrust further into a severe economic crisis, as my landlord says, "the correct and incorrect ones become visible in hard times." This phrase can cut both ways and has to be applied with an eye to when one day you yourself are down. In weakness, as we all have our own special weaknesses, we are exposed, and when things are going well, the ones with self-serving, illegal and selectively indignant methodology can cover up their trail with equivocation and (self)rationalizations, but time eventually brings around the reverse set of circumstances and lays bare tracks and exposes motives, which can be ferreted out by those willing to dispassionately take notice, like the man who prompted this blog post: Philippe Sands.

CLOSING ARGUMENT
EXCERPT #3:
BILL MOYERS: Do you think that people like David Addington and John Yoo and Jim Haynes, and the other lawyers you've mentioned who advised and were on the torture team, should ultimately be held responsible in court for what they did in government at this period of time?
PHILIPPE SANDS: If they were complicit in the commission of a crime, then they should be investigated. And if the facts show that there is a sufficient basis for proceeding to a prosecution, then they should be prosecuted. Lawyers are gatekeepers to legality and constitutionality. If the lawyers become complicit in a common plan to get around the law, to allow abuse, then yes, they should be liable.

Soccer and football merge, in a way

This is an intriguing development. German soccer reporters are noticing that some strikers have more running and more creative responsibility in their job description. One aspect at play here is the similarity with US football:

(English translation follows) "...mitunter wirken die Laufwege wie die von Wide Receivern im Football - einem Sport, bei dem Spielzüge und Laufwege vorher angesagt und auf dem Spielfeld bis ins kleinste Detail abgestimmt sind. Andrej Woronin etwa startete beim Spiel seiner Berliner Hertha gegen den FC Bayern vom Mittelkreis aus, bewegte sich auf die rechte Seite. Nach zehn Metern schlug er einen Haken und lief diagonal in Richtungs des Strafraums, um seinem herandribbelnden Mittelfeldspieler Cicero Platz zu machen. Auf Höhe des Strafraumkreises folgte der zweite Haken, Woronin lief nach rechts in die Gasse. Dorthin spielte Cicero den Ball, Woronin schoss ihn an Michael Rensing vorbei ins Tor." http://www.sueddeutsche.de/sport/527/466112/text/4/
"...[strikers in soccer] sometimes appear to be running patterns like wide receivers do in American football - a sport where plays and running patterns are called [in the huddle] beforehand and are defined down to the most subtle head-fake detail. At the beginning of the Hertha BSC match against FC Bayern for example, Ukraine star striker Andrey Voronin of Berlin started running from the center circle toward the right flank, then veered in a "V" pattern back from the sideline, running diagonally towards the penalty area, which cleared a path for the dribbling midfielder Cicero. At the top of the penalty area, Voronin again cut back on a second hook, spurting into a "seam" and taking a pass from Cicero to kick the ball past goalie Michael Rensing into the goal."

This choreography can be seen in knowing looks before the beginning of a half or during extra time in championships. See 22-yr-old Pitroipa's mischievous smile at his teammates in Hamburg two nights ago just before the whistle blew for 15 more minutes of overtime. Lo and behold, a play had been called with a "pattern" just like in US football, with a double pass involving Jonathan Pitroipa which failed, but was agreed on beforehand. What a shame that the young striker was stopped (and "taken out") by Bremen goalie Tim Wiese in the final minutes. The outcome of the 120 minute ordeal hung on whether the Burkina Faso playmaker's dash for the goal and cunning foot-flick of the ball around the last defender, would culminate in a rousing victory. It was oh-so-close to becoming a great play-of-the-day. He is player to watch who HSV management want to groom and develop over time with a contract till 2012. He plays all over the midfield and can dribble into dangerously close range of the opponent's goal on his own or with a give-and-go or speedily recovered an errant ball with his lithe and heads-up moves.

If one of his striker teammates like Petric, Olic or Guerrero are saddled with an injury or benched for accumulated yellow cards, his hour will have come.

Gerhard Richter - S. with Child

Gerhard Richter - S. with Child Having recently learned about how Gerhard Richter handles his medium, I realize how protracted and personal this must have been in the making. I sense the floor dropping out from under me in this work. And it works. Yes, it's a Madonna and Child, but no, it's not, it's S. with, not and, her child. First he takes a snapshot and, leaving nothing to chance, traces its outlines onto his ground and then the work begins in earnest. An important feature is how he split the snapshot into wide, evenly spaced striations so a cross-texture of rough wooden planks seems to cut through the picture-plane. The upper left takes this wood of the horizontal "fencing" and allows it to be a staging area for his colors and textures. His palette self-referentially laps over into the scene--the unformed and as yet uncombined pigment the medium from which he will weave the image of a beloved mother and child. The palette affords a view of his own inner life, laid bare, on display alongside that of his wife's Bonnard-like intimacy. Their snapshot, his materials, converge into art. I feel like the label "in process" hangs over this piece. His far younger second wife, the second generation of his infant son, a second layer running across the piece by the cross-planking, weather-warped and deteriorating, as though the snapshot of "S." had been left on a billboard in wind and weather. The fudged, undried buon affresco countenance of S. a foil to what snapshots are meant to do, preserve. Biographically, she brings to him renewed conjugal unity, their child staving off his barren years, yet accelerating their approach by making the artist a father and partner of more than a companion--the adults now fellow parents. The process detaches you from the immediacy of a family album. The suckling child on S's breast rendered by Gerhard Richter into a mist-beaded contemplation of how we fade away in the flesh--at the same time the religious ikon quickening our human soul with its eternal image of maternal and religious nourishment. The weathered effect of his prepared canvas gives the scene a fragile honesty, as delicate as the English Patient's book of life.

Tour de Farce

There's a big problem in this country, a big problem in sports. Someone needs to step up, say enough is enough, and we're going to do what we can do to combat that problem.

Jim Scherr, CEO of the United States Olympic Committee, commenting on the U.S. situation

I know I owed quite a lot to fellow athletes around me who were a model to live by. If it wasn't the inspiring endurance of runners like Todd Volk, Tony White Bull or Jeff Turning Heart, it was looking at the achievement in sports such as wrestling. Fellow South Dakota sports teammate in track & field, Jim Scherr, with his brother Bill, are examples of this.

In the statement above, Jim has framed the crux of competitive sports in plain, unequivocal language. I hope he realizes he may be the one who can step up--and put a stop to all of it. With a little help from powerful friends. The malady calls for concerted action, not just from within the sports world's governance organizations.

Sports heroes are looked up to, set an example for others to follow and plant seeds of hope in young athletes who truly believe in them. This year, I have noticed a failure on the part of professional road bicyclists to grasp their role model function. As one confession after another rolled in to the news ticker here in Germany over the past few months, there has been surprisingly and disappointingly little talk about the squandered chances to set a positive example to young people. With media focusing on the failings of certain big names, they are not providing coverage about the underlying dilemma. Through ineffective leadership and insufficient stewardship, a wonderful sport is being dragged down by blood doping and drug abuse. With each passing interview and confession, I have yet to see a role model look into the camera and frankly admit the sense of shame he must feel that he has disappointed the next generation of aspiring cyclists who are looking up to him.

Where is the "I am sorry." directed at young athletes?

Instead only one word of "Bedauern" (regret) creeps in, while looking quite unconcerned, the focus is on the embarrassment of the individual athlete and the self-centered shame of the nation affected. Accusations of complicity between athletes and organizers are passed back and forth. The sport in general and the tour in particular morphs into a farce with teams wanly protesting by refusing to start at the starting line. Credibility suffers. A general sense of unease emerges and dishonor to the establishment and community. Cyclists who admit to manipulation or doping are punished, though the penalties may not impress them, they are so oversponsored. After admitting their error, they are back on the saddle somewhere.

What needs to happen
It is certainly a tragicomic affair this year and devastating to those who love the sport. Funnily, though, I am not seeing a strong, grass-roots emotional tug anywhere, just unease. It may be too late to reschedule the tour to next year and have a blackout moratorium until the rules are rewritten so the farce can be stopped. A needed step back so the seed of hope in young cyclists is not suffocated. But it would not have been a bad move.

Maybe a gold medal 10k winner in Tokyo is in fact among the racers - one who will get up after stumbling and win people's hearts over. Someone who will speak up for the values which have to come into focus for the sport to regain its place as a great test of honest endurance. Is it possible that a fallen racer will reconsider and start a campaign for reinstating the honor and pride the sport has lost. The rules can't merely be changed, a sea-change needs to be set in motion, too.

Afterthought - but my main point.
See Bill Bradley's book Life on the Run where, significantly at the close of his popular book, we find him and his teammate at a basketball clinic, passing their knowledge and skills on to younger people. Senator Bradley's book tells of Willis Reed explaining the basic low post moves a center should have down pat for his defender, going through the motions for 50 young school kids on the Pine Ridge Indian reservation. "After you drive once you've got him set up for the drop dribble. ... take one bounce away from the basket, turn, and shoot. You'll have him flat-footed." Bradley continues by relating how "Willis gives the group a little lecture about hard work, responsibility, and the need to set goals. He says practice and study go hand in hand with a clean life. He speaks with the assurance of a man whose life has been built upon moral certainties. ... The kids are enraptured. 'There isn't much these days that hasn't been done,' he says. 'There's been a man on the moon and somebody has already run a mile in 3:55. But you have a chance for a real first: One of you can be the first Indian to play in the NBA.'"