With the help of a young and web-wiser friend, I am rebuilding my blog at this time here in Antville after it "crashed" badly - due to a bad oversight of mine - a few weeks ago.

I lost quite a few old entries, but will be trying to reconstitute the saved ones by and by.

Here's a running mini log of our activities at setting up:

• Mar. 14: Registered here as "lockjaw", attempted skin setting but failed.
• Mar. 21: Friend helped install std. "diary" skin - looks much better already! :-)
• Apr. 2: Same friend added a back-date field for blog entries, so I can add my old entries one by one now.
• May 8: Final misalignment in the minimum Jeeves CSS tweaked - now all links can easily be identified! :-)
• May 24: First new blog entry posted - yay!

For the second time ever - a few hours ago - I took in Wenders' best-known film, one with a failed since pretentious English title, so I won't mention that, but will describe the film well enough for you to recognise it. And it's about a Berlin pretty exactly two decades ago, so that alone motivated me.

In the '87 film we follow the "life" of two guardian angels in the then more ruined biggest German city. They cannot be seen by adult humans, but often hover near the latter, occasionally trying to soothe by touching them, or leaning their heads lovingly against their fleshly "children". Especially one angel, Damiel, played by German acting icon Bruno Ganz, becomes a yearning voyeur of human life and one human woman in particular, so much so that... But that would be telling a little too much.

Peter Falk plays himself in the movie. He does a Cassavetian acting job, in a film in which the actors often start off in their native tongues, and may or may not end up in German dialogues. The film has other literary attitudes (l.a.'s) - who cares? Some texts work rather well, and the l.a.'s never become loud enough to disallow glossing over.

What touches me most about the film is - what else? - the view of Berlin. It's a great, dark, often tawdry, bulk here, its grandeur mostly ruined by the pretensions of occupants gone by; in fact they are only briefly cited in a "film within the film" which is shot partly in the old Hitler bunker, a "film" that's being shot with Falk starring in it. At the end of the Eighties Berlin's an exciting city for young people to be, and it seems in the film a place where older people are still holding on to some of their previously whole lives. Especially the latter have all but disappeared by now - much else of the life seen in the movie seems to me to have remained the same. Of course one prominent feature was still standing when this production was shot: The Berlin Wall; it plays a major supporting role, and we are shown it in many guises, not only from the subversively colourful West side, but also from the pale East. So perhaps the film even contains mild political allegory.

The film captures well the rush young people felt when hearing of, or actually landing up in, Berlin. I was one of them in '86, although only visiting briefly then.

And the angels are cool. I wonder if my seeing it end of the Eighties made me keep my pony tail until now? All I still need to finally occasionally asymptotically achieve "cool" is a long dark coat and a lighter shawl. So simple.

I think angels and demons were the role-playing characters, at least in the minds of the Catholic devout, of centuries ago, when common people had to be much less open about their fantasies and desires than today. If I were to play the angel game today - okay, I still need the coat, I know, I'll buy myself one for Christmas, promise - I'd want to be Cambiel, please, the one responsible for allowing unconventional thought.

In Berlin we trust.

So let's end it.

About two weeks ago I started a thread in the German SF forum I visit daily, touting the title that is behind almost every headline in the nature/science sections of the news these days: The planet is heating up and we're all to blame! Well, on and off it's been a "heated" discussion with several folks there, which tends to go emotional in the beginning, to then either end in despisal of my extreme views or illogical arguments, or in quiescent semi-agreement that it is a true complex, hard to disentangle. Then silence.

What I'm missing here and in the "discussion" at large is someone thumping me and the occasional other doubter virtually on the soap-box-elevated speaker's shoulder, and crying heartily, "Good job for trying to illuminate the other side!" It is meant to be a scientific "debate", after all; and science supposedly thrives on founded opposition to its theories.

Why all the "d" words in quotes? Well, if you look and hear around, everyone agrees it's too late to "d" the thing anyway. Because we're already "c'ing" it...

All the media, and naturally all "with it" politicians, are repeating what's apparently the consensus among scientists: That we are on the brink of sudden climate change, of lots of ice condensing into water, urbanised coasts and whole islands disappearing, millions succumbing in the throes of Mother Earth's shuddering at the climb of several degrees in "her" average annual temperature in 90 (!) years or so.

But there is no consensus; some scientists disagree and that means that sleepy dragon Science is still kicking in a dream of its old objective hey-day high flights, and that we do not have that "c" word. The data is minimal, the obvious not necessarily true. (Isn't that obvious? E.g. only a fraction of all glaciers on the planet have actually been measured, when people talk of the majority melting - but how was this fraction selected, and is that a statistically representative sample?) And then we have computer models, lots of them, generating beautifully graphic, detailed future scenarios. Whatever happened to precision following accuracy? I.e., if computed models weren't able to predict our present levels of atmospheric gases, temperature and rain in the past, why should they be more accurate now predicting the near future? Yes, in just fifteen years, Al Gore tells us in An Unpleasant Truth, it'll all be over, if we continue doing nothing, all scientists and all models agree.

Well, perhaps by now, bloody-nosed, I, too, agree: We will be to blame in 15 years. If we do nothing. If we let this global computer game distract us from the really big problems - economic turmoil, poverty growing here and there "elsewhere", populistic extremism by men in too much power - we need to attack. Real soon now. So I agree with Crichton in his appendix to his badly disguised essay-as-a-novel State of Fear: Put the mouse aside, and go outside and meet the big bad breathing ice bear of worldly strife in the everyday. The chance to work for, to build, a respectable existence.

The balancing of wealth vs. a life on a pittance, of health vs. disease, infection and starvation, of a chance for personal and communal happiness.

And, perhaps, in fifteen years the weather will happen to be clement enough to see the global village handling global weather as another of the normal challenges of Life on Earth. And more of us simply making do.