what a remarkable recording. january 1960. leonard bernstein (then 42) explains the problems and the joy of interpreting art, especially — but not only — music. a 100% male new york philharmonic orchestra. appearing later: glenn gould, who was 28 at that time, eileen farrell (40) and igor stravinsky, conducting the intro of his firebird symphony. stravinsky already quite frail. he was 78.

the city of cologne was first mentioned in the london times on dec. 2, 1785. quoting the “rheinkurier”: lots of things for sale in frankfurt…

four years ago i was pretty sure, hillary clinton would win the race for the US presidency. like many, if not most others i was mistaken.

a friend of mine commented that, after becoming president, trump would soon resign. why? because he had accomplished all, and because the job was too much work. during that discussion i mused about the republican party under trump: this president would dismantle the party completely.

all wrong.

i found the bush administrations highly dangerous because of the wars they invoked. dick cheney and donald rumsfeld were genuine criminals with a clear imperialist neocon ideology. what a huge relief came with the obama adminstration, not only because, with one exception, he tried to bring some peace to the world.

trump turned out to be totally incapable of handling basically anything. he tried, with some success, to ruin values created by previous administrations such as obama‘s healthcare. him ignoring the corona pandemic cost hundreds of thousands of „his“ citizens their life. at least, due to incompetence, he did not invoke wars. financial wars have always been his only expertise. he built his business imperium mainly by threatening other people and organisations. as a president he threatened states such as china and, well, michigan (“free michigan!“).

amazingly the republican party stands behind him. the members of congress and the senate had to swallow an enormous amount of hate to keep supporting trump. actually, they did not have to swallow this, but they did. if trump loses the 2020 election — and i think he will — the republicans will be troubled. not only when they look into the mirror and wonder where that dream of the past four years had vanished. they look paralysed.

joe biden is a weak competitor, but with his frail health and high age and his biography and psychological pain, he is the only competitor who deeply constrasts trump in all respects. biden as president will put together a team of probably very interesting people.

after the open minded and transparent obama administration, in hindsight it is clear why people were longing for someone quite different. but after four years of trump‘s longing for admiration it‘s time for some decency.

exchanging the sky of one photo with the sky of another has been a typical photoshop task for decades. the 2021 version of the software, however, does this with just one single click. i loaded the rather dull original photo (top left) into photoshop 2021, applied one of the sky templates (top right) and was done. no selection necessary.

the photo on the bottom left was done with a single click: i just used another sky template. only the bottom right image needed some special attention and hand work.

dieses brot ist federleicht und besteht aus genau fünf komponenten: mehl, wasser, weizensauerteig-anstellgut, frischhefe, korianderkörnern. ich habe diesmal, angeregt durch den besuch bei einem kölner großbäcker, die zweite phase des backvorgangs verlängert und die temperatur dabei abgesenkt. das heißt: statt 45 minuten bei 200°C 70 Minuten bei 170°C.

today my youtube channel reached the number of 10,000 subscribers. it’s mainly about computer animation, which i teach in my free time, for fun. 20 years ago i created the first computer animated films for german children TV and taught animation at the university of aachen, germany. i wrote several books about the high end animation software → maya, which is at the core of this channel.

i started the channel as an experiment in late 2016 in german language to serve the german speaking audience. half a year later i switched to english and, after it reached 1,000 subscribers, i started branding the channel as → uhr24.