What a German whistles in the shower.

I was just up at the shower block, having a shower, and I heard an amazingly deep voice, ‘singing in the shower.’

I cannot be sure who it was. The only person that I know in the Marina that has a voice that deep, is a German friend that had entered the building just before I did. I had stopped and visited with a couple of friends that I ran into near the entrance, and so I do not know for certain if my German friend was the singer. But I assume that he was.

Perhaps you can imagine my surprise when he finished singing a German song, and he switched to whistling, “The Battle hymn of the Republic.”

Somehow I was surprised that the German would have the words of that song close at hand:

“Mine eyes have seen the glory of the coming of the Lord;
“He is trampling out the vintage where the grapes of wrath are stored;
etc, etc

And I wondered if there was a German song with the same melody. They’re not many words when you whistle.

So I have a look at this link:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Battle_Hymn_of_the_Republic

I did not read the whole thing but it looks like there is not a similar German song.

Why would I even wonder such a thing? Because I remember learning that the American National Anthem has a British melody.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Star-Spangled_Banner

And, COMPLETELY changing the subject. But, it has to do with melodies that have vastly different meanings to different cultures.

The common melody or riff, “Shave and a haircut, two bits.”
http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/d/d9/Shave_and_a_Haircut_percussion.mid

Is commonly heard with Americans and Britts knocking on the bow of my boat. However, when we were in Mexico, we were told that it was an almost unimaginably offensive insult. I will let you research what it means, because it is too gross to be published here. But it involves the insulted person’s mother being a prostitute and gets much worse from there.

As a group, Mexicans revere their mothers, perhaps second only to a devout Catholics opinion of the Virgin Mary.

We were told, and I believe, that if, for example, you were stuck in traffic, and honk your horn in that manner, and a Mexican, who thought your honking at him, got out of his car and shot you. That all the police would do, would be to help push your car out of the road until the tow truck could come.

As a traveler, even within the United States, one always takes a chance on unintentionally offending another culture, that has different rules.

I do my best to not do so, but my backup defense is that, “Hey, I’m not from around here. Please cut me some slack.”

Years after visiting French Polynesia, I learned that, apparently, in that beautiful land, is extremely rude to talk to a person, while wearing a hat or sunglasses. Anything that covers your face and head. They want to be able to see you when they talk to you. I wish I had known that when we were there.

I am not offended when someone does that with me, however, I do find it weird to be talking to someone with opaque sunglasses on, and therefore I cannot see their eyes. I wonder how often I forget, and do it to someone else.

I worked with a man one time that told me he had previously worked with a woman who had grown up in an area where women wore modesty veils. Only their eyes showed to the public.

Now that she was in America, apparently she was comfortable not wearing any head covering at all. So, at first, she looked totally ‘normal.’

Yet, he noticed within minutes of meeting her that there was something strange about her. Not bad, just something unusual. But he could not figure out what it was. He had known her for some time before he finally found out about her past life and then the pieces fell together. She had VERY expressive eyes, but the rest of her face was not very expressive. In her formative years it had not needed to be. Or, at least that was his theory.

Human expression is very complicated. Or, at least I think it is. And I was really impressed with how well Janet could sometimes mimic someone’s expressions and mannerisms when she was making a comment about them. At those times she was absolutely frighteningly good.

I also respect greatly, actors and their directors, when a male or female actor, conveys a million, powerful words, in one brief expression. How do they know how to do that?

Poker players and people pretending to be psychic are very good at reading the subtleties of expression. Kind of the basis of the Sherlock Holmes series.

But, I need to get back to organizing my computer data. It has been a glacially slow process.

Back in the 1990s with my first computer, I understood the idea of backing things up to CDs, DVDs or, later other hard drives. But, I never got around to ‘throwing out the trash’ and combining the bits that I did want to save, into one collection, where I could find things I want them. And very often I backed up a hard drive, that already had backups on it. So I had backups of my backups. But, do you think I could find anything very easily?

A year ago I had something like 12 TB of backups on 10 hard drives and countless CDs and DVDs with similar collections. I have, so far, boiled that down to about 400 GB of data. Is that just over 3% of the original size?

I still have lots of useless files to be cleaned out of that 3%. But, the stuff that I know how to automate, to sort hundreds of gigabytes automatically, with the computer just running unattended for 24 or 48 hours, has been done.

Now I’m into the, ‘opening each folder to see what is in it,’ and all too frequently opening each file. This is slow work, but I only have 111,000 files, and 43,000 folders left. And, hopefully most of those I want to keep. Time will tell.

Have a wonderful day…

“Mine eyes have seen the glory of the coming of the Lord;
“He is trampling out the vintage where the grapes of wrath are stored….

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