How on earth can you fall asleep while counting sheep?
If you don’t pay attention, you’ll lose count and have to start all over again!
And because you make those damn beasts up and don’t have to feed them, they are infinite in number. Baa! Baa! Baa!
That way you’ll never fall asleep, right? Argh!
The road through Ajam’s village on the dry plateau is a soft and colorful carpet almost all year round. Literally.
Ajam’s mother runs the local carpet workshop, where carpets in many different designs, colors and sizes are woven or knotted by hand by women and children.
Her mother told her that some of the most intricate designs have been made the same way for hundreds of years.
And when they’re done, Ajam helps spread the carpets out on the sandy road, so their colors can fade in the bright sunlight.
The villagers walk over the carpets. And they even let their donkeys and goats walk over them. Ajam and her friends play on the carpets, and the boys from the village play football on them.
And every now and then a car or a motorcycle drives through the village, also over the colorful carpets.
About once a week …
No AI (Artificial Intelligence) was used in the making of this Blog.
Everything you see and read on this Blog was made by me and is the result of my imagination, my creativity, my thoughts, my feelings, my intelligence, my knowledge, my individuality, my memories, my experience, my attentiveness, my fallibility, my sense of language, my talent, my effort, my faltering concentration, my perfectionism and my perseverance.
I have not illegally copied any sources of knowledge, violated any copyrights, or committed any intellectual theft (plagiarism) for creating this Blog.
Artificial Intelligence, on the other hand, is nothing more than super-fast reproduction and combination of other people’s data. Data that in many cases has been obtained illegally.
I don’t think intelligence is the right word for that.
What it lacks are empathy, (various levels of) awareness, conscience, feeling, morals, memory, self-correction, interaction, and everything else that distinguishes us humans from super-fast copy and combine software.
I wonder: …
They changed it, the sidewalk
in front of their house. They
put up a little bookcase there,
their ‘Little Free Library’.
Therewith they have changed
the experience of walkers and
cyclists on that sidewalk forever.
Henceforth those will think, whether
they like it or not, of books,
of reading, of shall I or shall
I not, of I’m actually in a hurry,
and I have no bag with me.
Or of: …
suddenly through holes
in the fresh green canopy
burning summer sun
As they checked the last messages on his phone, before erasing them and setting the device aside to later give it to a niece or nephew who didn’t have one yet – after all, grandfather had been buried and no longer needed it himself, and they were engaged in the emotionally demanding task of sifting through some sixty years of collected items in his cluttered little retirement home and deciding what to divide among themselves, what to take to the thrift store, and what to the container park – they saw that the last message he had received while alive was from his granddaughter Maddie. It read ‘Have a nice day, grandpa!’ They were touched. Maddie was only six years old, had just learned to read and write, and had only had her first phone for a month.
Three weeks later, at the end of a fun day at school, Maddie said goodbye to her classmates before going home. She had first taken her friend Joris aside and solemnly wished him ‘Have a nice day, Joris!’, to which Joris had said with a smile ‘Thank you!’; after all, the day had already largely passed and she had looked so unusually serious. He watched her as she hopped away.
The next day Joris did not come to school. …
Everyone is free to believe what she or he (or they) wants and everyone else is free to agree or disagree.
Life knows no absolute and unchangeable truths, no matter how much we try to capture it in our stories and firm beliefs.
Having said that, I am of the opinion that some people have misunderstood the subject of multiple lives.
You cannot convince me that there will be other lives for me after my death.
Not as a human being and not as another living being, such as a favorite animal.
And it just seems pointless to me if such a next life is all about punishment or reward for the current one.
The shelf life of a living being is finite.
I’m more into science and not into wishful thinking, also where my own life is concerned. When I die, it’s over for me, and that’s fine.
I also don’t like the pseudo-science that would have us believe that our ‘soul’ is a tangible thing that *poof* leaves our body at death and that, weighing about 300 grams, then makes its way to a newborn next living being to live on in and learn new lessons in.
No, I think that, like all other living beings …
She sits at her computer and types in the search window: ‘google search’
And gets the answer: [Unknown.]
‘I want to use google search, but I can’t find it on my pc anymore’
[But BeaG, that’s not necessary, after all, you now have SAI Search.]
‘oooookaaaay….’
[What do you want to know?]
‘fireman’
[We don’t use the word fireman anymore, BeaG.]
‘fireman!’
[Firefighters can be either male or female or both or neuter.]
[And you really can’t extinguish fires with that little attached hose.]
‘what goddammit is the definition of a fireman?’ …
One of the reasons we humans love music so much is that it gives us a grip on time. The time that often makes us feel powerless, by flying by relentlessly. We grasp it with music, connect it to tones, to rhythms and to melodies. We give structure to time and arrange it so that we can enjoy it. The basis of music is usually a fundamental rhythm, much like our heartbeat, or, on a grander scale, the coming and going of hours, days and seasons. That rhythm, that variable beat, dictates the tempo and keeps track of time for us. Precisely because life is so fleeting, we naturally like patterns and repetitions, recognizable rhythms and arrangements and unexpected deviations from them. Music influences our heartbeat and triggers emotions in us. We can influence our perception of time with the help of music and shape it to our own pleasure. And, unlike clock time, which is already behind us before we are aware of it, we can experience music over and over again whenever we want.
Because when you get up, longer and longer, but shorter too, sat on the chair, that you look at things from a higher perspective, but from a smaller angle, from up there, to down down, yes, twice down, look, but just not see, because when you get up and get taller and taller, stay, stay in the same place; you can imagine that you down, that you go down, or maybe even back on the chair, but certainly not too long, and then she said, because you still have to, you, today, still do so much and think of so much, and then she said, but for that you have, that you don’t have time to get up, no dówn, to sit up dówn, but you must now actually go, or to descend, but that you today, that you now, would rather descend up than ascend down.
Makes herself bigger and wider than she actually is, steps so close to the offender that he forgets what personal space means again, finally accepts the glass of beer that she had refused time after time until then, pulls the young man’s half open white shirt under his black leather jacket forward, and pours the contents gracefully over his almost hairless chest, with a most friendly smile followed by a definite ‘I said NO.’