CIA fail!

One of the funniest, even though craziest, methods how the CIA tried to spy is the operation Acoustic Kitty that took place in the 1960s. A surgeon implanted a microphone in the kitty’s ear, a small radio transmitter at the base of her skull and weaved a thin wire antenna along her back hidden in the kitty’s grey and white fur.

Scientists tried to train the kitty to sit next to officials in order to spy for them. They tried to transform the kitty from a cute pet into “a living, walking surveillance machine”.

The first official test should take place in a park where the kitty should capture a conversation between two men sitting on a bench. But then happened something unexpected – the kitty ran away onto a street where it was immediately squashed by a taxi. Bad luck, CIA!! 20 million!

This was of course not the only animal, the CIA tried to turn into a spy. They for example constructed cyborg insects and cyborg rats which were called ratbots!

In some kind of way, this makes me feel even more uncomfortable when I find insects in my apartment. I keep asking myself whether this is a usual insect or a cyborg.

No, just kidding. I assume that I’m not such an interesting person that the CIA would really want to know what I am talking about with my friends.

However, I find it absolutely shifty and unacceptable that the CIA does not only spy, which is totally against human rights, but that it does even waste animal’s lives in order to get more and more information of which the major part isn’t useful anyway! This is a real waste of life for nothing at all without any qualms!

Funny Facts!

Surfing the web, I found a site collecting funny facts about the world. Here I collected the most fascinating, stunning or funny ones:

• You’re more likely to die from a falling coconut than a shark attack
• Donald Duck comics were banned from Finland because he doesn’t wear pants
• The chance of you dying on the way to the lottery is higher than your chance of winning 
•  Cows have best friends
• Before colonial rule, Africa was divided in 10,000 different states with distinct languages and customs
• The phrase “to get fired” comes from an old clan’s custom. Instead of killing people they wanted to get rid off they burnt their houses.
• Around 2500 left-handed people die a year because they’ve been using equipment designed for right-handed people (I couldn’t really believe this and therefore proved it here: http://www.mirror.co.uk/news/weird-news/scientists-calculate-odd-ways-die-282884 ; it’s true!)
• In a statue dedicated to a person:

Ø If the horse has both front legs in the air, the person died in battle

Ø If the horse has one front leg in the air, the person died of the wounds received in a battle

Ø If the horse has all four legs on the ground, the person died of natural causes

(When I tried to prove this, I found out, that this is hardly ever the case!) 

• Otters sleep while holding hands

• Russia classified beer as a soft drink until 2011!

--> I proved all these facts on the web; if you want to know more funny facts, check this link: http://www.pinterest.com/pin/522487994241292423/ 

Stockholm - Venice of the North

Visiting Stockholm was not only a great opportunity to explore a new city but also a nice chance to 

 meet new people.

We saw the old town, the wonderful harbour with its even more wonderful ships, the VASA dating back to the 17^th century etc. For all these things I (and I think I can claim this for my friends too) liked best that we met so many new people from all over the world. When we arrived in our hostel we first of all saw an Iraqi doing the vacuum cleaning and an elderly, nice Swedish woman waiting for us at the reception to hand us over the room key.

We spent the first afternoon in the park of a church nearby our hostel. We were just enjoying the fresh air of the harbour and listening to the numerous seagulls, when suddenly a man asked if he could take some photos of the three of us. He then explained that he was taking part in a photo competition and needed to show the difference of winter the upcoming summer. As we all fancy photography we were very pleased to serve as photo “models”. It was great fun first sitting there with our jackets, pretending to freeze and in the next moment sitting there without shoes, only wearing a t-shirt pretending to enjoy the hot sun (that in fact was not there, it had something around 15°C !).

This may sound lazy, but the best time of the day was always the evening. No, not because we went out so many times but because we always prepared tons of food in the kitchen of the hostel and were always having a delicious dinner. The later it was the more people started to meet in the kitchen (which was also kind of a living room) starting to talk about their home country, about their culture, their experiences in Stockholm... And so did we. We met people from Germany, France, Sweden, GB, Finland, Italy, Iraq, Egypt, Colombia, States .... While having a good time with all those people playing card games or something, we also had the chance to practice our language skills in Spanish, English, Italian and even Norwegian! We are still in touch with some of those people, which makes the whole journey even more valuable as we gained friends.

 

One especially interesting man was a 34 year-old Vietnamese. One morning I couldn’t sleep anymore and went to the kitchen. He was already sitting there, having noodles with beef as breakfast. We started to talk about our cultures and how different Asians and Europeans are. At some point, he told me about foodstuffs in Vietnam. And this was completely new, I would even say a little bit weird (not negatively) to me. For example, men in Vietnam don’t eat food containing mint, soymilk or cinnamon because otherwise it is believed that men would turn into rapists! On the other hand, women aren’t allowed to eat watermelons or chocolate as this would cause infertility. Quiet different to European culture, right?

One day we took part in a free guided city tour through the old town leaded by a Swedish girl. She told us a lot about Stockholm’s history and facts, but what I found especially interesting was when she told us that the Swedish are very patriotic. They would always pretend that Sweden is such a great country to live and that Sweden has lived in peace for over 200 years. But – and that is something none of us knew – the Swedish are one of the biggest arms dealer countries in the world. So, I ask myself – do they really live in peace?! They support wars just to get money, does that mean to be peaceful? It’s not only the tour guide who answer this question with no, but also me.

Our group of the Stockholm tour

Back to funnier stuff, we took part in the pub crawl. Some of you might have already done this in some city and I would really recommend to do this whenever you got the chance! Sweden is a very expensive country, particularly when it comes to going out. For the pub crawl we only had to pay €20 and got free entrance to 4 pubs and 1 club (the entrance fee for the club usually is something around €25!). But not only that it is cheap but also that we again met people from all over the world again. In the very first bar, we met 3 Swedish guys who actually didn’t take part in the pub crawl. But as we got along so well with each other, they bought a ticket and joined our group even though they live in Stockholm! Besides that, there was a men having his bachelors party and had to fulfil 20 exercises. Unfortunately, he was a bit shy and did I think only 5 them. The best one, however, was when he asked a female police officer to have a photo with him. Surprisingly, she said yes!

Pub craw!!;)

However, after six days of having one experience after the other and meeting one interesting person after the other, we were quiet happy to go home again. Still, I am already looking forward to our next trip. – Helene! -> Sarah and me are going to see you in Spain next year!!!!!!!!!!

P.S. I’ll do a post that focuses more on Stockholm itself, no worries ;)

Eurovision Song Contest - disgrace or honor?

Recently I read a statement on Facebook that said Austria’s ESC participant, who is transsexual and openly shows this to the world, is a disgrace to the Austrian state and its population. I then read the comments on this statement and was more than upset and shocked when people did not only agree to this but even called Conchita Wurst (the participant) disgusting and revolting. Well, I see that some people may find it unnatural and don’t like seeing transsexual people on the street because they find it repulsive in some kind of way. Still, I can’t understand why people need to call them names and insult them on a public website like Facebook. They really don’t need to share my opinion, which I would say is quite liberal, but they don’t need to denounce them either.

When we - some people and me who think those people must not show their intolerance so very obviously - started to show our point of view and told them, what we think is wrong about their opinion, they immediately started insulting us. What really left me speechless was when they generalized our “liberal” point of view by claiming that we probably wouldn’t say anything against people watching child porn. And at that point I joined the conversation – I mean, how the hell can they compare child pornography to transsexuality?!! Do they really consider different sexual orientations just as cruel, violent, terrifying, illegal, traumatic etc. as child pornography?

When the discussion went on they ran out of good arguments, as they kept repeating the sentence: “They will not learn”.

All this took place yesterday before the grand finale of the ESC.

The same night Conchita Wurst won the contest and so did Austria.

The next morning Dave (who is very tolerant and open-minded) wrote a provocative remark by saying that the world had shown those intolerant people that it doesn’t share their opinion on sexual orientation. After that, they answered that the evaluation of the song contest couldn’t be taken seriously anyways because some Austrian people in the show said something negative about Russia’s participant (Don’t ask me where the connection is!), though Russia saved us Austrians and Germans from the NS-regime. Honestly, did they? Didn’t they only want to avoid Hitler conquering more and more European countries and didn’t they want to hit back, because Hitler had also tried to occupy Russia?

Even if it was Russia, who defeated the Nazis, do we still have to support everything they do? Do we, almost 70 years and 7 generations later, still have to be thankful and can’t criticize them in any kind of way? And what does all this have to do with Conchita Wurst, the transsexual, awesome singer who won the Song Contest FOR Austria? Nothing at all! I can only say we live in the 21^st century, so stay tolerant and go with time!

P.S. I would be very pleased if people commented on this 
(by the way, here's the link (unfortunately the 'conversation' was held in German):  https://www.facebook.com/pamela.schroll/posts/10202656289705616?comment_id=10202661226909043&offset=0&total_comments=86&notif_t=feed_comment_reply )