I love your names, Diefenderfer Dallesandro and Bulluck Schmier.

Who are you? Where do you live? Why do you want to sell me viagra? Ah, it doesn't matter. I just love your names. No human mother would be inventive and loving enough to call their babies Diefenderfer Dallesandro and Bulluck Schmier. Your names have been given to you by a higher power. Let's do some genealogy. When Margot Diefenderfer met Claudio Dallesandro on Ellis Island in 1927 she fell in love with him immediately. Despite their cultural differences (she didn't speak any Italian, he didn't speak any German) they got married soon after and moved to New Jersey. John, their first-born, grew up under the tables of their Bavarian Pizzeria, his parents always busy with cooking and serving the customers from the bustling immigrant community. After the war John decided to go to a west coast college where he met Alice Grzybinski. The young student of theoretical physics first was hesitant to give up her studies for family life, but when she got pregnant in midterm, she was happy to move back to New Jersey. Between 1950 and 1966 John and Alice Dallesandro had five kids. After his mother's unexpected death in 1968 John suffered a severe psychological crisis which left him unable to work at the restaurant and shook his strong belief in god. He took comfort in investigating his German heritage more and traveled to his mother's home town of Heidenheim, where he spent a year taking cooking classes and learning German. Soon after he had returned from his overseas trip Alice Dallesandro found herself pregnant again. John was delighted. The couple named the boy Diefenderfer after John's mother's maiden name and started some attemps at bilingual education which they gave up after a while. Young Diefenderfer wasn't too talented with languages but showed a great interest in electronics. Although his first company didn't survive the burst of the dot-com bubble, Diefenderfer didn't give up. Today he works as a senior software engineer for an email marketing firm. He has tried viagra, but doesn't like the taste of it.

The dangers of deep ocean exploration

Tribal? No, varicose.

"Pretty wild tattoo for her age", I thought when the expensively dressed lady passed in front of my lawn chair. D'oh. No tattoo. Not even a patterned pantyhose. Sorry.

Stuff white people like

I don't know. What do I think about this? As a part of tonight's "Long Night of Museums" the Hamburg Museum of Ethnology featured a couple of activities dealing with Native American culture. At 9 pm Stormy Red Door, a Montana-born Dakota/Assiniboin now living in Northern Germany, performed the ceremonial act of lighting the fire. The crowd watched attentively, bison bratwurst in one hand, Beck's beer in the other while Stormy Red Door was waving his feathers in all four directions. After the ceremony he asked the audience in a very low voice to "please respect the spirits" or - as the museum staff put it –"Well guys, don't throw your cigarette butts into the fire". Now I ask myself: Can a performance like that ever be more than entertainment?  The museum itself says "We, as a Museum of Ethnology, try to contribute to a better cross-cultural understanding by encouraging other cultures to play an active role within our Museum." But: Can this "active role" ever be more than a role in a staged spectacle? 

Next item on the agenda: music and dances of the Plains Indians with the "Elk Singers" and the "Northern Dogs". No doubt - a great show, but hey... what's wrong with white people? Why is it always easier to identify with a foreign culture or religion? Because we don't have anything in our own culture and heritage that we relate to and dare to identify with? Why do so many people who set out to find themselves look in the most distant places? Why don't they just ring their own door bells? Maybe they're at home already! Is that it? Do we forget that we are at home already? That we have been all the time? That there is no way we can get lost, because there is no other place than here and now? I don't know. I truly don't know.

Second sculpture find in German cave reveals „penises probably overrated“.

The "Schelklingen John Doe"

The "Schelklingen Venus"

BERLIN – After the presentation of a 35,000-year-old ivory carving of a busty woman found in a German cave yesterday, archaeologists unveiled a second spectacular find this morning. The „new“ carving found in Germany's Hohle Fels cave depicts a completely ordinary man with a beer belly, flabby arms and a tiny penis.

The Hohle Fels cave discovery suggests the humans, who are believed to have come to Europe around 40,000 years ago, had the intelligence to create symbols and think abstractly in a way that matches the modern human. „Carbon dating reveals both sculpture were done by a woman artist,“ said archeologist Lisa Özdemir. „While the female carving expresses a vibrant sexuality, the male figurine’s physique is rather boring. This leads us to the assumption that the importance of the penis is probably overrated.“ Scientists from renowned international universities agreed that after the discovery of the "Schelkingen John Doe" penile history has to be rewritten.

Atlantis at launch pad after Hubble reports Horsehead Nebula completely made of hair

With the launch of space shuttle Atlantis just one day away, the final countdown status briefing is set for 10 a.m. from NASA's Kennedy Space Center in Florida. The briefing will be carried live on NASA TV, and participants will include NASA Test Director Charlie Blackwell-Thompson, STS-125 Payload Manager Debbie Hahn, and Shuttle Weather Officer Kathy Winters.

This morning, STS-125 Commander Scott Altman and Pilot Gregory C. Johnson are once again practicing landings in the Shuttle Training Aircraft. At Launch Pad 39A, the rotating service structure that surrounds Atlantis will be rolled back into its launch position at 5 p.m. EDT.

Late yesterday, Space Shuttle Program managers met and gave the green light for tomorrow's launch of this final mission to service NASA's Hubble Space Telescope. In a briefing for the media, Mission Management Team Chairman Mike Moses said launch controllers are not working any issues that would prevent an on-time liftoff tomorrow at 2:01 p.m. EDT.

Could I grant Google access to my brain?

Recently I have noticed a change in my dreams. As a child my worst nightmares were about falling off the railroad bridge in front of my kindergarten, the whirling witch who lived in the hall, and the unability to warn people of evil because I had lost my voice (analyze this!). The funny thing about the latter is that I still have dreams with the same content (no communication possible), but that instead of my silent screaming I find myself desperately texting on my cell phone, but I get all the letters and numbers wrong, there are no numbers at all, or the connection fails. To make a long dream short: I lose my digital voice. Interestingly enough those mashups also happen to me in the daytime. Where did I put the pressure cooker? My first thought is to give it a call and locate it by its ringtone. I subconsciously recognize a vibration - my cell phone? No, just a thunderstorm. Where is the book I just finished reading? My brain suggests searching the shelf with google. Is this scary? I don't think so. Actually I really, really need a strong search engine for my brain. Too many things are sitting in its dark and damp corners (like Latin, knitting or the recipe for lemon pie), inaccessible for the computing powers of my own mind. Unfortunately the buzz words "highly available", "on demand" or "scalability" don't apply to the cloud computing network that is my brain. I would love to get some support from Google here. 

New venue for cock fights in Hamburg opened on Tuesday.