Opposing the Straight Line

It was hot during the week, 35+ C (up to 100F), and actually too hot to be riding comfortably in full gear, but Saturday it was perfect, so we met with friends for a scooter ride through the cool shades of the Black Forest, and the vineyards of the Rhine Plains.
At Riegel (formerly Rigola, an old Roman settlement) a piece of curious architecture caught our attention. Previously a brewhouse this building had been converted into a museum.

The foundation hosts a variety of exhibitions, and currently they had artwork from Hundertwasser on display. Friedensreich Hundertwasser was an eccentric Austrian post war artist, and renown for his colourful paintings, and his bold architectural projects such as the Hundertwasserhaus in Vienna, Austria or the public toilet of Kawakawa, New Zealand), in which he defied using straight lines. He preferred the geometry of curves and spirals, as he found these shapes more natural.

Speaking of... so inspired we went on a quest of curves and spirals in the hills of Kaiserstuhl, where we got to play in the vineyards.

160km roundtrip

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Der Widerstand gegen die Gradlinigkeit

Es war heiß diese Woche, mit 35+C eigentlich zu heiß um sich in Motorradklamotten noch wohl zu fühlen, aber am Samstag war das Wetter perfekt. Bei zehn Grad weniger und einem leichten Wind verabredeten wir uns mit Freunden zu einer Rollerausfahrt durch den kühlen Schatten es Schwarzwalds und die Weinberge in der Rheinebene.

In Riegel (einer alten Römersiedlung, Rigola) erregte eine eigenartige Architektur unsere Aufmerksamkeit: Eine Brauerei, die zu einem Museum umgestaltet wurde. Die Stiftung hat wechselnde Ausstellungen, und diesmal waren es Werke von Friedensreich Hundertwasser, einem exzentrischen Österreichischen Künstler und Maler, der für seine mutigen Farbkombinationen sowie seine Kunst am Bau, wie das Hundertwasserhaus in Wien oder die Toiletten von Kawakawa in Neuseeland, seiner Wahlheimat, bekannt war. Ebenso bekannt war seine Verachtung für gerade Linien, welche er widernatürlich fand. Er hatte ein Faible für Kurven und Spiralen.

Das war unser Stichwort und wir machten uns auf, den Kaiserstuhl unter die Räder zu nehmen...

Germans and Football (yes, it's football, not soccer)

Football means for Germans, what Rugby means for Kiwis, Cricket for Eastern Indians, Hockey for Canadians, or this other armoured ball game with an egg shaped thing for Americans. It's the German Volkssport (the people's game), every kid grows up with it, and it's cheap as it doesn't need much equipment, so everybody can afford it.

Hence, we haven't slept much lately... we had to watch the World Cup every night. We cheered with the Dutch when they beat up Spain, and we celebrated even more when the German team crushed the Portuguese.

The ritual of watching a football match is best done in a crowd. Ironically we Germans abused the English language (once again, there sure is more...) and called this watch party "public viewing". Apologies for that. Every German however knows its Germanized meaning:

Put a big screen in front of a huge beer garden, bring on the beer and currywurst, and everybody: don your World Cup jerseys. Who said that Germans can't have fun, eh?

World Cup Statistics

Source: Finanz und Wirtschaft

Roland: I totally love useless statistics, and right now I am really having a lot of fun: the 2014 World Cup in Brazil is a few days old now, but we can already find many entirely fascinating and utterly useless statistics out there in the intersphere. So here is a collection of my favorites!

1. If you want to win a game you better concede the first goal. At the time of writing this nine games were finished, and five of them were won by the team that went behind 0:1.

2. Within the people of the 32 countries that play the World Cup there are two obvious correlations:
a) the less religious the people are the richer they are!
b) the more beer they drink the more uniformly distributed their income is!
Undeniable proof can be found here (sorry it's in German).

3. Brazil is the country where the most butt lifting jobs are executed, while in no other country more people are killed by their lawnmowers than in the United States (proof here: sorry, German again).

4. Brazil will win the World Cup: using a complex statistical forecasting method the website FiveThirtyEight predicts that Brazil will win the World Cup with a probability of 43% (followed by Argentina 13%, Germany 11%, Netherlands 7%). At the moment of writing this Holland already beat Spain 5:1, and now Spain's chance of winning the Cup is at 0%. I would not bet my fortune on that!

5. Brazil will win the World Cup: YouGov provides an analysis of polls in 19 World Cup countries asking who will win the cup. The result: 16 countries believe in Brazil, the Gauchos believe in Argentina, the Spanish in Spain and the Americans... in the United States! Unfortunately there was no poll done where the most clueless fans can be found...

6. Germany will win the World Cup: The most convincing of all statistics has been developed by a highly regarded scientific company called Electronic Arts. They found an extremely difficult, but unbeatable algorithm under the name of "Fifa World Cup Soccer 2014" that undeniably predicts Germany to win the final against Brazil with 2:1 after conceding the first goal (reference to statistics 1). Miroslav Klose will score the match winner with his 16th WC goal and becomes the player with most scores in the history of World Cup. Now this is proof that cannot be argued with!