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Here is a video of the instrument and inventor.  What do you think about having a fluid piano?  Does it have a place in western orchestras?  Does its versatility give the instrument higher aesthetic value?

No, this isn’t a sequel to The Producers.  Just a pinchie about the National Socialist Party.  Many people assume that they were Christians, as had been most of the anti-Semites leading up to this time.  But in fact, the National Socialists were secular, and Hitler had plans for establishing his own religion. 

This made Christmas an interesting feat - check out this blog article on how the National Socialists still celebrated the holiday

(ii) Never us a long word where a short one will do.

(iii) If it is possible to cut a word out, always cut it out.

(iv) Never use the passive where you can use the active.

(v) Never use a foreign phrase, a scientific word, or a jargon word if you can think of an everyday English equivalent.

(vi) Break any of these rules sooner than say anything outright barbarous.

These rules sound elementary, and so they are, but they demand a deep change of attitude in anyone who has grown used to writing in the style now fashionable. One could keep all of them and still write bad English, but one could not write the kind of stuff that I quoted in those five specimens at the beginning of this article.

I have not here been considering the literary use of language, but merely language as an instrument for expressing and not for concealing or preventing thought. Stuart Chase and others have come near to claiming that all abstract words are meaningless, and have used this as a pretext for advocating a kind of political quietism. Since you don’t know what Fascism is, how can you struggle against Fascism? One need not swallow such absurdities as this, but one ought to recognize that the present political chaos is connected with the decay of language, and that one can probably bring about some improvement by starting at the verbal end. If you simplify your English, you are freed from the worst follies of orthodoxy. You cannot speak any of the necessary dialects, and when you make a stupid remark its stupidity will be obvious, even to yourself. Political language — and with variations this is true of all political parties, from Conservatives to Anarchists — is designed to make lies sound truthful and murder respectable, and to give an appearance of solidity to pure wind. One cannot change this all in a moment, but one can at least change one’s own habits, and from time to time one can even, if one jeers loudly enough, send some worn-out and useless phrase — some jackboot, Achilles’ heel, hotbed, melting pot, acid test, veritable inferno, or other lump of verbal refuse — into the dustbin, where it belongs.

Twenty years ago, the Berlin Wall ceased it’s hold on the divide of Berlin. Widely considered the “day that changed the world,” the accidental release of the “imprisoned” East Germans from Soviet rule on Nov. 9, 1989 was a sign of the  Soviet Union’s already weakened grasp on its reign.   To the United States, it signaled the end of an era in which the US reign for superpower of the world was threatened by another confederation of states.  As Americans, we are encouraged to think of today as a victory for capitalism, a victory for the West, a victory for the US.  But in actuality, it’s naive to view international politics with the west and it’s ideology as its center.  Behind the Cold War PR, the McCarthy trials, the “ich bin ein Berliner” speech, the wall needed to come down.

In the Yalta Conference after WW2, Stalin requested all of Germany’s industrial might. Some was transported to Moscow, but the majority was heavily concentrated in East Germany.  East Germany received some of the most radical Russian policy, with conditions and regulations harsher than in other bloc countries.  Every man and woman worked.   The stores carried one type of clothing, one type of food, and there were two television channels.  All was equal, all was muted. I could go on here, but you get the gist.

The fall of the Berlin Wall wasn’t about the victory of the west over the east, of capitalism over Russian communism.  It was the liberation of a people who were forced into inhabiting a country which was not their own.  People who, with one fateful conference, were swung away from their families only miles away and oriented towards Moscow. 

After the accidental opening of the wall, many people migrated to the west, leaving family on both sides with a simple phone call;  “I’m in the west, im alright” said one German woman, who would return to her native east in a few weeks, but this time of her own will.  Suddenly East Germany had bananas, Coca Cola, and a picked wall, and almost a year later, in October of 1990, East Germany was no more. 

Today, people have gathered all over the globe to celebrate the spark which lit the fire of revolutions across eastern Europe, the capsizing of a symbol that represented the opressive reign of the late Soviet Rule in the bloc countries.  But let us remember that this is not a story of economic systems or tyrranies, but rather that of liberation and reunification.

Here we go.. next week is Humans v Zombies UGA edition.  Get your nerf guns ready, kids!