First Heer Schirmütze

[Friedrich-Berthold]

My own twelve step program to overcome my bad habits has as little prospect of success for rehabilitation and the conquest of inner voices as was the case in the year 1988 or 1974.

[BenVK]

FB, you are simply too modest which is a fact and I will attempt to expain why.

In my own personal opinion, before you croak it!, you should turn your hand to writing a book. It doesn't really matter on which subject, so long as it's one of the many that you are passionate about. You have that skill of drawing people in and keeping their attention, at least in my opinion. Put it this way, I've read quite a few "best sellers" on the tube these last months and none of the authors could light a candle in comparison to how you can.

Some might consider this as blowing smoke but it's not true. I read 20 pages of a novel between 5.30 and 7pm everyday on the train home and then read one sentence FB has written and I'm either in tears laughing or pondering what he said or both more usualy!

[Friedrich-Berthold]

Thank you, Ben, but in my native land authorship derives neither merit nor much acclaim. In my adopted land, however, this syndrome of anonymity is less the case, and my literary effort is focused there.

[Friedrich-Berthold]

When I was a child of an impressionable age, the emphasis was getting the man on the moon and resisting the ill effects of flouridation, for which my literary talent was extraneous to primary and secondary education. Skills in the new math in the follow on generations of rocket scientists were uppermost for repulsing the international communist conspiracy, the aptitude necessary to make a more accurate circular error probability for ICBMs and large IBM 360 computers.

The needs of national security translated into primary education fifty years ago meant that I was in the dumb group in grammar school at the time of nuclear drills and first strike anxieties, actually. This was quite a bitter experience, truth be told, and contributed greatly to my bad habits.

Out of this disappointment arose an interest in foetid wool, not unlike that degeneration that in some seizes upon silken stockings in their incapacity to experience human warmth and intimacy in an upright manner.

[Friedrich-Berthold]

In fact, I lived cheek by jowl with the hippies who transformed computers into personal computers, as if such an idea made any sense at a time of the total mastery of such machines by IBM (akin to ICBM) in a world of corporations, and grey flannel men, and the high frontier. I paid no attention to the hippies, or to the corporations, or any of it, really.
My impression was that the world had lost something vital since the first third of the 20th century.

[Friedrich-Berthold]

The question really is: what will the last visor cap be....? Or the last foetid woolen altogether?

[ObKrieger]

"Out of this disappointment arose an interest in foetid wool, not unlike some seize upon silken stockings in their incapacity to experience human warmth and intimacy in an upright manner."

If you were to write the aforementioned book, I would be more than happy to read it. I agree with Ben. You are able to turn a simple post of a thread about black SS uniforms into a literary work of art and your posts definitely draw me in. I have to ask, how do you speak English so well? I have never met a native speaker of English who spoke as well as you do.

[Friedrich-Berthold]

FB, you are simply too modest which is a fact and I will attempt to expain why.

In my own personal opinion, before you croak it!, you should turn your hand to writing a book. It doesn't really matter on which subject, so long as it's one of the many that you are passionate about. You have that skill of drawing people in and keeping their attention, at least in my opinion. Put it this way, I've read quite a few "best sellers" on the tube these last months and none of the authors could light a candle in comparison to how you can.

Some might consider this as blowing smoke but it's not true. I read 20 pages of a novel between 5.30 and 7pm everyday on the train home and then read one sentence FB has written and I'm either in tears laughing or pondering what he said or both more usualy!

My favorite novelist of the moment is Josef Roth, who also wrote short stories. He wrote beautifully, and loved Vienna even more than I could ever do, since he experienced it in the years prior to 1914. However, I generally only read history books, and seldom fiction. My teachers always wanted me to read more fiction, but I always had so many monographs to read, since there has always been so much to learn.

[Friedrich-Berthold]

Another author, whom I like, and is more or less similar in biography to Roth, is Hannah Arendt, though her life was far less tragic than Roth's surely.

[Friedrich-Berthold]

But our goal here is to make sure that our young man in Ireland gets a real, first cap, and I am sure that some of you reading this will enable the thing.
That is the sort of thing one does at Christmas, after all, is it not?