Category: Uncategorized
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Coca-Cola with Constantine
We, my wife and I, started to take nightly bicycle rides through Tallahassee at the beginning of the Covid-19 pandemic six years ago. To this day, we still do those bike rides one or two times a week to have dinner at The Bark, a picnic at Railroad Square or a night out in College…
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Reflections on the Bible Belt
The Bible Belt is the region in the Southern United States where regressive evangelical Christianity has a strong cultural influence. Regressive means Confederate flags, white nationalism-supremacy and a literal interpretation of the bible, like the Earth is 6000 years old and evolution does not exist. Of course, marriage has to be between a man and…
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Jackson, Mississippi
Jackson is the largest city and the capital of the poorest state in the US: Mississippi. Known as The City With Soul, Jackson is steeped in Civil Rights history and home, or at least gateway, to many blues and jazz legends. One entertainment landmark is the historic Alamo Theatre, build in 1949, on North Farish…
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Snow in the South
Obviously, snow is very rare in Florida. However, occasionally there is measurable snowfall in North Florida. Two events stand out. The first one was on February 12, 1958, when Tallahassee got 2.8 inches, the largest amount of snow ever measured here. The most popular photos from that events are from the Florida State University campus,…
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From Good Guy to Villain
I have come full circle. In the late 1990s I was a Ph.D. student in Physics and Climate Research at the University of Hamburg, Germany. At that time the later German Chancellor, Angela Merkel, was Minister of the Environment and was interested in anthropogenic climate change. In 1998 she visited the German Climate Computing Centre,…
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Before and After the Storm
The weather in the Deep-South is noteworthy. Extremely hot and humid summers; actually late spring, summer and early fall combined to add up to six month with maximum temperatures at least in the 90s most of the time and minima in the 70s. Over the last couple of years it became so hot that the…
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Church Self-Portrait
In the past, when we watched American movies like Footloose that showed religion in rural regions in the US, we always considered the depicted piety of some characters an extreme exaggeration of real life America. However, since living in the Deep-South for almost two decades, we realized that (evangelical) Christianity here is really as backward…
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Barkeepers
I have always been enthralled by barkeepers, in particular female ones. As a 16 or 17 year old teenager in Bremen, Germany, in the 80s it was a big deal, full of excitement, to make it past the bouncer at the door of a popular club or bar, to be admitted into the world of…
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African-American Men: Pride and Prejudice
Good photographic portraits have typically something in common: They all show the pride and humanity of the photographed independent from the situation or environment the subject is in. Class, wealth, profession, outfit or other external circumstances should not matter in a portrait that captures the humanity of the subject. For example, in August Sander’s seminal…
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Outdoor Chess
By now it is well documented that during the pandemic many people got tired of online work, online school and too many Zoom meetings. Because of that, many folks and families started to look for social off-line distractions like board and card games or puzzles. In fact, puzzles and board games saw their strongest sales…
The Unknown Florida 