Asterix et le Griffon

The two partners in Gaul, Jean-Yves Ferri and Didier Conrad, are back! They had and still have happy confinement and concocted an invigorating potion for us: a new Asterix album to be found on October 21, 2021, in all bookstores in Gaul and the Known World!

What a positive announcement.

Red Baron has a complete collection of Asterix albums and at least 60 centimeters of secondary literature on the odd couple Asterix and Obelix and their surroundings.

The title of the 39th volume of the comic will be "Asterix And the Griffin. "    

In mythology, a griffin is a legendary creature that borrows the body and face of an eagle and a lion's back and hind legs.

The above mystery page has been added to the announcement of the new comic.

Red Baron started reading Asterix comics in 1969 when he began his work at CERN, struggling with Molière's language.

Here is the cover of my and the first volume (1969) of the Asterix comic series, slightly gone yellow ...

… and the repeating introduction page.

Already in the third volume, the two heroes started to travel, adventuring into the Goth territory.

 

The Goth comic harps on French readers' stereotypes about their German neighbors. Their dialogues in this volume are in French, although in Gothic-type letters, and the Goths are martial males wearing spiked helmets.

Their sixth adventure brings Asterix and Obelix to the British Isles …

… where it's (always) raining, the beer is warm, and Obelix's favorite diet, wild boar, is served cooked in mint sauce.

Red Baron is looking forward to October 21.

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Island of Bliss

In Germany's southwest, Freiburg and its surroundings remain below an incidence rate of 100 covid cases per 100,000 people.

©ntv

If you look at the map, it is an island if you englobe neighboring France. Regarding German corona restrictions only, Red Baron lives on a blessed peninsula.

©Der Tagesspiegel

Above an incidence rate of 100, a "federal emergency brake" grips from yesterday night on.

Parliament (Bundestag) and Senate (Bundesrat) tightened and revised the Federal Infection Protection Law in an expedited proceeding. Grudgingly, in a special session last Thursday, the Senate voted in favor.

The governor of Hesse, Volker Bouffier (CDU),  said, "The law represents the deepest cuts in fundamental rights that have ever existed."

Concluding the session, the governor of Saxony-Anhalt and the present president of the Senate, Reiner Haseloff (CDU),  sharply criticized the shift of responsibility in a pandemic to the federal government by the amended Infection Protection Act. "Today is a low point in the federal culture of the Federal Republic of Germany," said Haseloff. "The legislative initiative and the discussions to justify have inflicted damage on the cooperative federalism we have successfully lived for decades. That won't be easy to heal."

However, given the third wave of covid infections infesting Germany, time is of the essence. The Federal President signed the law last Thursday evening.

©ntv

The covid situation remains tense.

©ntv

The available number of intensive care places in hospitals is not limited by the number of ventilators but by the availability of capable nursing staff.

©Der Tagesspiegel

Within the third wave, the age distribution of covid-stricken persons has changed. While during the second wave, the age group from 80 to 90+ needed intensive care, now persons from 15 to 60 are the most infected group. Old people, including Red Baron, are vaccinated, but the younger cohort shows more severe disease progression and a need for longtime intensive care.

Last night, the "federal emergency brake" came into force in 325 of 401 German counties and cities, with a seven-day incidence of more than 100 per 100,000 inhabitants over the past three days. Key measures include nighttime curfew restrictions, contact and shopping restrictions, and federal rules for schools and daycares:

Curfew restrictions: If the number of reported new infections per 100,000 inhabitants in a county or city exceeds 100 for three days in a row within seven days, people will not be allowed to leave their homes after 10 p.m. There are exceptions to this rule: Walking and jogging alone, for example, are permitted until midnight, and driving to work or home from work is possible. Those in need of medical assistance can, of course, get out as well.

Meetings: Likewise, if the seven-day incidence exceeds 100 for more than three days, no more than one household may meet with another person, excluding children 14 and younger.

Shopping: Up to an incidence of 150 for three consecutive days, stores may only offer shopping by appointment or "click and meet" and only to customers who present a negative Corona test. If the incidence exceeds 150, only "click and collect" is possible.

Schools and daycare centers: If the seven-day incidence exceeds the threshold of 100 for three consecutive days, alternate instruction becomes mandatory from the day after the next. If the incidence exceeds 165, attendance classes are prohibited from the day after the next, and regular care in daycare centers is not permitted. Graduating classes are exempt.

Home office: Employers must continue to offer the home office if possible, and employees must take up the offer if reasonable.

The updated Infection Protection Law leaves it up to the federal states to lay down additional, mostly stricter rules.

In the meantime, opposition parties, groups, and individuals sent more than thirty emergency appeals to the Federal Constitutional Court (Germany's Supreme Court) to declare, in particular, the curfew as an "authoritarian state" regulation and, therefore, as unconstitutional.

©BZ

Freiburg presently has an incidence rate of 96. Red Baron keeps his fingers crossed that the number will stay below 100. In case of exceeding the mark during three consecutive days, Kieser must close. I still keep a prescription in my wallet worth ten sessions of machine-supported physiotherapy at an authorized medical center for such an emergency.

Breaking news: Tonight, Freiburg passed the limit of 100 and is at 103.8. Red Baron's hopes are zerstoben (dispersed)!

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On the Poetry of the Higgs Boson

Our master of ceremonies started off the Freiburg Writers' Group meeting on April 13 by "talking about the essay, the genre able to hold all other genres, and the genre most frequently associated with figuring out what one thinks about a certain topic."

"We, also, as usual, looked at an exercise in Brian Kiteley's 3am Epiphany: '#84, Fact and Fancy,' which asks the writer to alternate factual, 'objective' sentences with personal, 'subjective' sentences and pay attention to the tensions created between sentences."

"And we started writing essays on various topics. Since we all attempted, we were all successful."


Red Baron tried hard to write about his topic, "On the Poetry of the Higgs Boson," but wasn't so successful with all my insufficiencies regarding my active vocabulary in poetry. After all, the English thesaurus comprising Germanic- and Romance-rooted words is enormous.

Here is a slightly improved version of what I was able to write by hand* on April 13 in the limited time given:
*Red Baron likes finger exercises, which is the only opportunity to keep my handwriting abilities active. The writing of letters of condolence is always so depressing.

When the long-awaited Higgs boson was finally discovered, the high-energy community was relieved but still unsatisfied. The standard model, now being confirmed, does not explain the world. There must be physics beyond the Higgs.

The rose of physics only to be compared to Luther's rose (©Stefan Mesoli/CERN)

I, on the other hand, as an old man and a physicist, feel satisfied. I see the beauty of the by-now classical system with the Higgs boson falling just into the right place.

Leave me alone, you unsatisfied young guys, although you are right in pointing out the deficiencies of the standard model of high-energy physics. Only to mention: Why can't we still predict or better calculate the masses of all known particles? What about the missing dark masses and energies that must be somewhere, guaranteeing the stability of the world in which we live?

All experimental physicists are frustrated looking for a "new physics" without success, while theoreticians create one complex string model after another.

We don't need those even bigger and more expensive machines. They become too complex, like string theories. Aren't all established laws of physics simple and full of mathematical beauty?

We need a new genius capable of writing treaties like Kepler's Astronomie nova, Newton's Principia, Maxwell's electromagnetic equations*, Einstein's relativity theories, Pauli's exclusion principle, Heisenberg's uncertainty principle, and Gell-Mann's quark model.
*lagniappe at the end

So far, I don't see anybody. Has the human brain finally reached its level of incompetence? That's too bad.

Lagniappe

The scientific world was excited when James Clerk Maxwell published "A Treatise on Electricity and Magnetism" in 1873. So was Ludwig Boltzmann, another giant of physics who had just joined the University of Vienna as a professor of mathematics.

 

Like many others, he tried hard to understand the four "simple" and beautiful equations describing all electromagnetic phenomena.

Boltzmann had difficulties and fell into one of his frequent depressions. His colleagues urged him to take some holidays.

The evening before his departure, his best friend opened Boltzmann's luggage. On top of all the clothing lay Maxwell's "A Treatise."

Later in his life, Boltzmann lectured theoretical physics. When he taught his students electrodynamics, he always referred to a line in Goethe's Faust, "War es ein Gott, der diese Zeichen schrieb … ?" (Was it a god who wrote these characters?).

Ludwig Boltzmann is famous for his interpretation of heat as a statistical phenomenon. Max Planck honored him by introducing the Boltzmann constant.

In 1906, while on vacation, another depression made him commit suicide.

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Non-Fiction Into Fiction

The title reminds readers well-versed in the Bible of Isaiah 2:4, "swords into plowshares," and this was my problem during the recent ZOOM meeting of the Freiburg Writers' Group.

Indeed, the topic of the evening was "Revision as an act of violence," i.e., in the worse case, breaking an existing oeuvre into pieces and using these as building blocks for a new creation. 

How do you "break" a text? The possibilities of "breaking" a text are endless. Here are a few examples proposed by our master of ceremonies:

cut it up à la Burroughs

delete every xth word

n+7 (replace every noun with the noun that comes seven places after the original noun in the dictionary)

retype the whole text/single sentences/single lines backward

switch perspectives

change the setting

change the tense

insert new words, new sentences, new paragraphs, new pages, non-sequiturs footnotes endnotes bifurcations, interpolations endlessly nested parentheticals

anagram it

again mart

Maria gnat

Most participants took one of their poems, omitted words, starting from the end, or even took the existing words, mixing them into a new text and eventually worrying about what to do with the remaining unused words.

While all others worked hard, Red Baron desperately browsed through his 787 blogs, looking for a short contribution that lent itself to be "broken."

When the time was up, I was astonished by what I had written in the past but concluded that non-fiction does not allow modifications, or should I try to transform non-fiction into fake?

During the following discussion, the idea was born to revise a non-fiction text into fiction or, as proposed, "switch perspectives."

Here is a short section that I took from one of my blogs in 2015: Deutscher Wald. There I made some excursion into the reoccurring plots of German fairy tales concerning German woods and then started a new paragraph: :

Enough of those atavistic reflections. Instead, let me dig into the BZ article: The trees and we. I learned that German attachment to their woods dates back to the Middle Ages when arable farmland was scarce and generally insufficient to feed families with many children, given the poor agricultural yield in those times. There was no room for pastureland; thus, farmers drove horses, cows, and pigs into the woods to look for their food. Those pigs were particularly happy. They ate acorns and beechnuts for lunch, dug for cockchafer grubs for dinner, and closed their meals with truffles.

While the Grimm brothers had left Hansel and Gretel hungry in the woods, my "stroppy" fiction goes like this:

Hansel and Gretel's stomachs growled as they marched in the woods. The boy started to weep. "Get hold of yourself," Gretel snarled at her brother, "The pebbles you took from home we cannot eat, but there is plenty of food in the woods."

She gave a pig digging for truffles a beating with her stick. Squeaking, the saw took to her heels. Gretel bent for the black tuber, and her eyes started to glow, weighing it in one hand.

"I can't eat this, " whined Hansel. "You fool," retorted his sister, "We will become rich selling truffles. Let those pigs work for us," and ordered poor Hansel to run after them.

And he ran happily after the pigs, ever after.

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Corona News, Corona Blues

Note the Easter holiday dip in the otherwise rising curve.

Germany is in the tight grip of the third wave of Corona. Infections are rising, with the more contagious British variant responsible for 90% of all cases.

 

Presently, the Corona incidence rate in Freiburg is 73.5 per 100,000 people, higher than at Easter, 66.6, but still low compared to other regions in Germany.

On March 23, step 4 of the federal opening plan became effective, i.e., if the corona incidence rate stays below 100 cases per 100,000 people over three consecutive days, indoor non-contact sport is allowed.

Kieser gym in Freiburg on Grünwalderstraße has taken advantage of this opening, and Red Baron had his first muscle training on March 24.

Clients must register and reserve their hours of practice in advance. They do their workouts and leave.

Five new people may enter the Kieser training premises of 500 square meters every 15 minutes. Half the machines for muscle strengthening are blocked. With such a timely and spacious distribution of customers, Kieser over fulfills by far the distance rules.

Due to the low occupancy, the gym's opening is not worthwhile economically, but as the Kieser spokesperson claims, "Our focus at the moment is on maintaining health." Thank you, Kieser.


The rise of corona cases of the third wave in Germany is alarming. The chairman of the World Medical Association, Frank Ulrich Montgomery, warned, "We are now being caught up in the clinics by the infections that took place four weeks ago."

With more and more older adults getting their jabs, now the age group between 30 and 60 is concerned. The head of the Robert Koch Institute, Lothar Wieler, said that according to data from around 70 clinics nationwide, more and more younger people had to be treated in hospitals because of severe respiratory infections. Intensive care units were filling up rapidly. He added, "This development, unfortunately, shows that the situation is very, very serious."

 

Intensive care specialists hit the alarm, for it is easy to predict that a percentage of those infected now will later find themselves in intensive care wards. Besides, young people struggling for their lives remain in the hospital for extended periods.

Hospitals nationwide are once again preparing for an onslaught of new and, this time, younger patients. Will Germany's intensive care units enter into a period of triage?

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Hans Küng R.I.P.

The outstanding Swiss theologian, who reached the biblical age of 93, died in his house in Tübingen last Tuesday.

Hans Küng was one of the best-known church critics in the German-speaking world. He repeatedly criticized the structures of his Catholic Church and expressed doubts about the dogma of papal infallibility.

 
It is no wonder that the Church revoked Küng's teaching license in 1979, but he remained at the University of Tübingen as a faculty-independent professor of ecumenical theology.

Red Baron is always interested in the fundamental question, "Why do we exist?" So, Küng became my trusted and loyal comrade in my search for God.

Here are some of his books (from left to right) that I read: On Being a Christian (1974),
Judaism: Between Yesterday and Tomorrow (1992), Christianity: Its Essence and History (1995), Islam: Past, Present, and Future (2007), Eternal Life: Life after Death As a Medical, Philosophical, and Theological Program (1984), Credo: The Apostle's Creed Explained for Today (1993), What I Believe (2010), and The Beginning of All Things—Science and Religion (2007).

There is an anecdote. During a three-month scientific stay at the High Energy Accelerator Research Center (KEK) in Japan in 1980, I stowed the heavy volume On Being a Christian in my luggage to study it carefully while at KEK.

On February 8, an article titled "Kueng: Member of the Loyal Opposition" appeared in The Japan Times. It informed about the ousting of Küng as a professor of Catholic theology. The paper's tenor and most letters to the editor harped on the Church's inquisitional attitude.

On the other hand, in a letter to the editor, Red Baron deplored Rome's inflexibility. I claimed that changing times require a fresh interpretation of the gospel. For me, Küng was a modern evangelist, a herald of good tidings.

In the early 1990s, Küng initiated his project Weltethos, of which he became president. Küng described the Global Ethic Project's goal as "Peace among religions, cultures, and nations based on some common elementary ethical values, standards, and attitudes."

©Gunther Schenk/Wikipedia

Here is a picture from those younger years: Mayor Boris Palmer, Old-Chancellor Helmut Schmidt, and President of the Global Ethic Foundation Hans Küng (from left to right) on May 8, 2007, in Tübingen on the occasion of the "Global Ethic" speech organized by Küng and delivered by Schmidt. Palmer still serves as Mayor of Tübingen.

The query "Why do we exist?" still haunts me. In 2005, after finishing Küng's book Der Anfang aller Dinge (The Beginning of All Things), I felt fit to address the religious war on evolution, giving a talk on Intelligent Design versus Darwinism at the Freiburg-Madison-Gesellschaft.

In 2010, I read Küng's book Was ich glaube (What I Believe) and was later deeply disappointed by Stephen Hawking's book The Grand Design.

In December 2012, after more input to my religious quest, I concluded with the Beatles, "All you need is love."

Again, in December, but two years later, I read an article about "True Religion." When I finished, I repeated the author's conclusion, "All religious movements are based on faith; and faith, which is belief in the absence of convincing evidence, isn't true or false, but simply irrational."

But there is hope. My favorite astrophysicist, Neil deGrasse Tyson, published Cosmic Queries, StarTalk's Guide to Who We Are, How We Got Here, and Where We're Going.

If Neil doesn't answer the query, "Why do we exist?" will he at least teach me where we are going? I am eagerly waiting for Cosmic Queries to become available as an e-book.

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Happy Easter

Let me take the occasion of Easter to present you with a few splinters. The information is too small for entire blogs to write.

This morning I went downtown to the Minster Market. While waiting for the streetcar, I noticed a long queue aligned on the other sideway.

White Asparagus

They will pay any price for the white gold.

Those people keeping their distance patiently stood in line to buy the year's first asparagus. Faithful readers may remember that Germans are mad about white asparagus. Red Baron likes the vegetable too, but this year may have to do without it if Freiburg's specialized restaurants remain closed during the asparagus season (April to the middle of June).

A Cashpoint

A month ago, this cash dispenser suddenly appeared near my streetcar stop and immediately became the talk of the town. The ATM machine, placed on private ground in a recess of an existing building, waits for customers. Up to now, I haven't seen anyone getting cash from the banknote dispenser.

Although no cash is dispensed, the landowner cashes a monthly fee from the teller machine's operator.

The reason for the machine being idle is twofold.

All primary and saving banks in Germany have their own cash dispensers where customers fetch their banknotes free of charge.

Although Germans love their banknotes and despise credit cards, they need less cash with retailers and restaurants closed during the pandemic. So all banks in Germany have already reduced their cash dispensers by 20%.

While people in my quarter think that the cash dispenser is in the wrong place, it is definitely there at the wrong time.

Holbeinpferdchen

©BZ

©Lindt

Red Baron blogged about the foal named Holbein before. He also accompanied the slimming-down action.

Now the foal was dressed up as the well-known Golden Easter Bunny.

Although marked "Lindt," don't bite into the fake bunny!

Kieser Training

Following the opening of Kieser Training on March 22, Red Baron has used their equipment extensively, always coming home feeling stiff and aching.

Will they still be allowed to operate in 10 days? It all depends on the Covid-19 incidence rate in Freiburg. Yesterday the city was at 66.6.

If the figure exceeds 100 over three consecutive days, Kieser must close again. I keep my fingers crossed. My weakened body needs exercise!

Magnolia in Blossom

Remember my blog about my personal spring indicator? The magnolia in front of my kitchen window came into full bloom just for Easter. 

A Happy Easter to all my friends and readers.

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Royal Donuts

are on everyone's lips, or as we say in German, they are in everyone's mouths.

New. Royal Donuts on Bertolstraße 4 near Bertoldsbrunnen

Well, not quite for last Friday, shortly before 1 p.m., the doors of the "Royal Donuts" in Freiburg on Bertoldstrasse 4 were still closed, but the line in front of it already stretched all around the block.

Do they really keep their distances? (©BZ)

Around 50 people, all under 30 years old, had lined up - and there was no end to it. "I've been waiting for half an hour," said a teen. 

All this for donuts? Yes, but not those simple ones with icing. At Royal Donuts, the not-quite-low-calorie treats come in every shape and color. The current range of donut variations includes 120 varieties - all Royal Donut stores' assortment being the same.

©Royal Donut

Suppose you don't find what you like. In that case, you can put together your donut on Royal Donuts' homepage according to your preferences, e.g., a donut filled with peanut butter, glazed with Nutella, garnished with After Eight, Bounty, and Mars, and doused with a lotus sauce. These many bells and whistles come at a price: 6 euros for the calorie bomb.

Royal Donuts is a franchise company from Cologne founded in 2008, operating 130 stores in Germany and abroad. In Freiburg, a Swiss couple operates the shop. They have been running a fitness studio in Switzerland and are approaching their new challenge with great joy and confidence for a good reason. "The demand is enormous! It is the combination of eye-catchers that photograph well and good taste," says Nadia, with her partner Andreas nodding.

The takeaways (©Royal Donut)

Her original plan was to open a gym in Freiburg. Then it became the donut store. The life and business partners' concept was well thought out: eat first and then off to the gym; otherwise, you will have those few seconds on the lips, forever on your hips.

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