The New Mercedes-Benz Museum

Oh Lord, won’t you buy me a Mercedes Benz?
My friends all drive Porsches, I must make amends.
Worked hard all my lifetime, no help from my friends,
So Lord, won’t you buy me a Mercedes Benz?
Janis Joplin, 'Mercedes Benz'

A couple of weeks ago I joined my dear brother on a drive to Stuttgart, to meet with some of his bush taxi-friends at the Mercedes-Benz Museum. Although Mercedes-Benz in itself should already be an offence to a real bush taxi pilot it was really interesting for the whole bunch of us. Here are some pictures:

First steps...


Benz Motorwagen – the very first car with a piston engine


First touring cars...


That would be mine: Mercedes-Benz 500K


To whom do these exhaust pipes belong...?


Exactly: THE LEGEND, Mercedes-Benz 300 SL!!!

The sexiest car-front made in Germany


Hot-water rocket as used to drive cars in crash-tests


Here comes luxury: Maybach 62S. How many houses could I buy for the same money...?


If your car looks like this under the bonnet it’s a fast car

After a long and exhausting day at the museum we parted and drove back home - another 250 km with only 100 km/h on Germany's unlimited highways. But what do you want with a Toyota HZJ78...

Two Things Meme

Although I still have another meme pending I will do this as a quickie:

Two Names You Go By:
1. Mac
2. PFlight2000

Two Things You Are Wearing Right Now:
1. Sweatsuit (caught a flu...)
2. My beloved Tevas. ET once stated that I'dprobably wear them from April to October constantly...

Two Things You Would Want (or have) in a Relationship:
1. Respect
2. Humor (haven't been in a relationship for a long time, but I guess that would still be it)

Two of Your Favorite Things to do:
1. 'Flying' long haul flight on Flight Simulator
2. Cooking

Two Things You Want Very badly At the Moment:
1. Stronger medication - this flu is killing me!!!
2. Getting healthy on the spot

Two Things you did Last Night:
1. Having a very uneasy sleep with feverish dreams
2. Got really mad that again I catch a flu at the last day of my holiday - what will the bosses think...?

Two things you ate today:
1. A banana
2. Another banana

Last two people you talked to:
1. Mom - she popped in because she saw that the bicycle is still in the shed and that means I'm not at work
2. My brother

Two Things You're doing tomorrow:
1. Trying to get healthy
2. Brewing more linden-blossom tea

Two longest car rides:
1. To Würzburg and back in one day, getting my brothers first Bushtaxi (800km)
2. To Mendrisio and back in one day because the weather was to bad to stay longer (500km)

Two Favorite Beverages:
1. Earl Grey Tea with cream and sugar
2. Mineral water

Two Things About Me you may not have known:
1. Sometimes I try to imagine what it would be like to die - and who would REALLY miss me...?
2. I'm very afraid of turning fourty in two years.

Two jobs I have had in my life:
1. Liquidator for a bankrupped furniture shop
2. Messenger cyclist

Two Movies I would watch over and over:
1. Heat (NOT Andy Warhol's, the one with Pacino and De Niro!!!)
2. Ronin, because I like the actors, I like the plot, I like the car chases, but most of all because I have been to most places in the movie.

Places I have lived:
1. Switzerland
2. Scotland

Two of my Favorite Foods:
1. The ones that I cook
2. The ones I get in my favourite restaurant

Two places I'd rather be right now
1. Singapore - Chinese New Year is coming up next week!
2. At work to f***ing do my job!!!

Two people I think will respond:
1. No idea...
2. Even less ideas...

I’m not tagging anyone, but feel free to do it.

Ventriloquism in Latin means ‘belly speaking’. But this description is wrong, because it’s not the belly that’s talking. It’s simply the art of speaking without moving the lips. The consonants are produced with the tongue and the palate only. As the lips are an essential tool for speaking, there are several restrictions for a ventriloquist: He (or she) can’t pronounce the letters P, B and M. He needs to create the illusion of pronouncing these letters – otherwise the show is screwed. The illusion gets perfect when the artist uses a puppet that – in the simplest form – can move its mouth. The more complex puppets even roll eyes, move eyebrows and maybe the arms as well. If the puppets are handled correctly, the audience gets the illusion that the puppet talks. Let me give you some examples:

Paul Zerdin is a British ventriloquist who acts both alone and with puppets. In this short clip he shows how to wind up sound engineers prior to the show when he’s doing the sound check, along with some other rather nasty jokes. ‘I was a unique case at the mental hospital: I was the only patient with voices in the head others could hear as well.’


Here’s an extreme example: Kevin Johnson uses TWO puppets at the same time. To make that even more complicated he shows the audience what it’s like in dubbed movies when the actor’s lips are moving differently to what the dubbed voice says.


At last: Jeff Dunham. This American ventriloquist has several puppets he uses on stage – one at a time. Achmed, the dead Terrorist can move his jaw, roll eyes and lift eyebrows – it seems to be alive. Along with playing a conversation this is probably the most complex kind of performance for a ventriloquist – although Jeff’s jokes are a bit worn out...

The Rubber Band Gun

When I was a kid still at school I was in a clique with my brother and a friend. Our 'headquarter' was a secret room between a wall and the roof in our old farm house. A loose board in the wall was the door, and what was behind that no-one was allowed to see. Yet the room was so small that you could hardly sit upright and with three people it was already packed. We had heating, a little water tank, and whenever soldiers were in the village for manoeuvres we begged for some of their emergency provisions: We had enough army bisquits and chocolate to survive several days. We trained ourselves in rope-techniques (my brother still does theat - but on a much more professional level).

Of course we also had weapons: One was a special plug whith the wires connected to each other, in order to blow every fuse. An unimpeachable strike against our school and always a guarentee to drive the caretaker nuts. Another weapon was the obligatory rubber band gun: A 'single barrel' weapon to fire one rubber band at a time, and the rubber band would strike in an area of about two square meters around your target. We thought we could conquer the world with our rubber band guns, but as time passed by we grew up and apart.

And now I found this in a forum:



Poor little us to think we had advanced techniques...

Car Commercials in Europe

Germans have a weird way to advertise their cars. If you watch a movie on TV you’re likely to see at least one commercial for a German car. And here’s the weird thing about them: They all have the colours faded to an icy, metallic gray. Here's an example:


Have you noticed? The only ‘real’ colour was the rear lights of the car and the blue Europe-label on the number-plate. Everything else is held in different gray tones. The reason for this colour is: It looks very technical. Cars shouldn’t show emotions. They should put the viewer in a special mood. The commercial has the message: This car is the ultimate perfect machine. It has no flaw. It never fails.

The British seem to have a completely different approach to car commercials. Just look at this:


Poor pussy though... The SportKa is evil. It shows emotions. It has to. This is the British sense of humour. Wanna see another one?


Reminds me of a mouse-trap in some sense... But as we all know, birds are very intelligent. And sometimes they pay back all we did to them and then laugh.

Mayday, mayday, mayday: Engine failure in modern airliners

By definition, an engine failure at an airplane is a hazardous thing. Compared to a car, which you can stop alongside of the rode and you’re fine, you can’t just stop an airplane in mid-air and call for help. This means the pilot has to deal with the situation in-flight and still keeping situational awareness – flying the aircraft and avoiding physical contact to anything more solid than the air it flies in. This requires a big deal of training, and also is one of the many reasons why professional pilots generally are well-paid labourers.
Back to the engine failure. There are many reasons why an engine of a plane seizes duty:
In the golden days, when airliners had huge piston engines with propellers attached to, the most common reason was fatigue of material. Just imagine: 18 pistons per engine, moving back and forth several thousand times per minute, something’s got to brake sooner or later. Today’s jet engines only have rotating parts, therefore fatigue is not such a big issue anymore.
Another reason may be lack of fuel. Mostly this results out of miscalculation in the planning stage of the flight, although there reportedly are cases when fuel-leaks occurred in modern airplanes.
But the most common reason for engine failure at modern airliners is given to pilots by mother nature’s own creatures: Birds.
Let’s have a closer look at that case. This is a modern jet engine:

It’s a widely used CFM56 engine, attached to such planes as the Boeing 737 and some versions of the Airbus A32X series. This type of engine is called a ‘high bypass turbofan jet’. High bypass meaning, that the turbofan in front of the engine – the thing that’s visible if you look at the engine from the front, here colored light blue – leads most of the air alongside of the combustion area. The bypass air is being accelerated and then mixes with the air coming from the combustion area. In modern jet engines this bypass air produces up to 80% of the total thrust in flight. And when the bypass airflow mixes up with the hot air coming from the combustion part - red - it also reduces the noise of the engine.
Another very convenient thing the front fan does is acting as a centrifuge, when something gets sucked into the engine that’s not air. We’re basically talking about water (rain) and ice (hail). The CFM56 engines have been extensively tested on that, and so far no-one managed to extinguish the combustion fire inside the engine with water.
Birds are a different story: Some of them are big and heavy enough to make it into the combustion chamber, causing mayhem in there. Although the front fan works a bit like a food processor and slices the bird into little pieces, the engine still gets ripped apart and can explode. In the temperate climate zone birds don’t fly very high. So the most likely moment to ‘catch’ a bird with such an engine is during take-off and landing. The landing isn’t much of a problem: The aircraft is about to touch down soon anyway, and the engines don’t run at very high power. The take-off is the critical moment: The engines are running at full power – well almost, but that’s another story – and the aircraft might already be too fast to stop on the remaining runway: Beyond a certain speed (V1) the pilot has to take-off, no matter what.
The deal is: Bring the aircraft to a save flight-level, stabilize its condition, and then deal with the problem. But the pilot doesn’t face an impossible challenge: Engineers have been thinking about the problem already. And here’s the solution: Modern airliners are able to take-off and climb to a save flight-level even when loosing half of their thrust at V1 speed.
I’m sorry for this very long introduction, but I think it explains what’s happening exactly in this video: Bird-strike at Manchester airport. The engine explodes and the plane instantly looses 50% of its propulsion, yet still the pilots react very calmly to it. This is not a fake, it’s been filmed with a video camera connected to an radio-scanner. Enjoy – and remember next time you sit in an airliner: Your pilots are highly trained professionals, and the equipment is extremely reliable and redundant.

Wild Pork Sirloin on Hay with Mushrooms and Pasta – for 4 hungry people

Autumn. The ‘Time of Plenty’. I really love that season. Not only for the foggy and cool weather after a hot summer. But also because the variety of fresh food is bigger than at any other time of the year.

Here’s a recipe I’ve tried out just recently. Sorry for the missing pics: Normally I cook alone and then I don’t think of taking pictures as well...

This is what you need:

800g Pork Sirloin, whole pieces
Salt
Pepper
Hay

600g mixed Mushrooms
2 little Onions

Butter
2dl Cream
1dl White Wine

500g fresh Pasta

Prepare as many sheets of aluminium foil as you have Sirloin pieces, big enough to wrap the pieces. Cover each of the foils with hay. Preheat the oven up to 180° C.
Spice the Sirloin pieces fairly with salt and pepper, then sear them for 3 minutes in a cast iron pan with little olive oil. Wrap the pieces in the hay and the Sirloin pieces and roast them in the oven. After 25-30 minutes take them out and let them rest for another 10 minutes. Then unwrap the Sirloin and wipe off all the hay.

Brush the mushrooms and cut them into pieces. Peel and chop the onions. Melt the butter in a cast iron pan until it boils, then put the mushrooms in. Stir gently, so they don’t get burnt. After two minutes put the chopped onions in and wait until they glaze over. Now pour the wine, and when it’s boiling pour the cream. Let boil until the consistency is right.

Prepare the pasta, then serve all together. Decorate the table with fresh grapes and figs. You can add leaves and maroons as well. Enjoy the meal.

Some advice from my side:

You can get hay from a local farmer, they feed the cattle with it. Normally they can spare one bag of it, a cow eats a lot more of it every day. Also pet shops have hay, but there you have to pay for it. If you want to take fresh grass and dry it, lay it in the sun. Don’t store the hay in a plastic bag, paper is ok, fabric is perfect.

Depending on the size of the pig, a piece of Sirloin is roughly 400-500g. So you should be fine with it. If you can get Sirloin of wild pork, that’s even better. But don’t go hunting a boar yourself unless you have a hunting licence...

Get mushrooms that grow in the temperate climate zone. Shi Take don’t match the general taste of this meal. Porcini, chanterelles and Champignons de Paris are ok. If you dare collecting the mushrooms yourself, please show them to someone who’s familiar with them. In Switzerland there are approved mushroom-inspectors that tell you which ones are edible when you show them what you’ve got. And don’t take the red ones with the white dots, they can make you see funny colours and scary faces if you eat them. Also you might get tummy aches...

Some of the ideas I took from this website - all in German...