Now, I rarely ski, but we Swiss do.  We also love watching people who practice skiing an awful lot hurtle down steep terrain at high speeds.  If you’ve ever wondered what that terrain really looked like, wonder no more:

Switzerland is an odd little country in several ways.  Among others, it’s not part of the EU, despite being surrounded by it; it just posted surprisingly good financial results; it still has a comparatively large conscripted militia; and it has its soldiers keep their firearms at home.  In other words, Switzerland is a large-scale experiment on gun control.
Switzerland’s voting on the latter point on February 13th, after an initiative was handed in that demands the army firearms be kept in the arsenal, that all firearms be registered, and that someone who wants a gun needs to prove his ability to use it and his need for it.  I’d been indecisive on the matter.  A national firearms register will cost a lot of money and make a nice dent in those surprisingly good financial results mentioned.  An octogenarian gun collector would have to prove his ability or render the guns inoperable in order to be allowed to keep them.  On the other hand, the army rifle is a killing instrument readily available to a large number of Swiss men, and guns don’t really have an awful lot of civil uses.

The arguments on both sides are mostly the usual useless stuff.  Dead teddies with a bleeding shot wound face off with scary gangsters pointing guns.  We’ll either kill our families or destroy the fabric of Swiss culture.
Time for a few numbers and facts.

In 2008, 259 people died in Switzerland because of firearms; 239 of these were suicides. (link)  In 1998, the numbers were 466 and 413.
In 2009, Switzerland had 236 homicides and attempted homicides; 55 of these involved firearms, and in those 55, 24 people died.  (same source as above)

A 2008 study compared suicide methods across Europe and found the rate of firearm use more than three times as high in Switzerland than the European average (about 33% versus about 10%).  (link)

Roughly 60% of homicides and attempted homicides are apparently due to foreigners, who wouldn’t have access to army firearms.  (link)

Apparently, knives kill more people than firearms.  (link)

In 2009, 349 people died in Switzerland on the roads.  (link)

And then, there’s an interesting observation following a drastic change in the Swiss Army.  In 2004, the army was reorganized, the maximum age of service lowered from 40 to 30, and it was made a lot more difficult to keep the army firearm after leaving the army.  Comparing the data from 1995-2003 with the data from 2004-2008 shows a reduction of firearms suicides among men aged 30-40 by 48.6%.  (link)  It seems that weapon availability has a lot to do with the suicide rate.  It also makes sense that the more popular methods can’t be outlawed, because people use knives in the kitchen and ropes to tow cars.
So, stricter gun laws would probably reduce the number of firearms suicides.  If we assume costs similar to Canada, roughly 100 million a year, and that we can cut firearms suicides and murders by half, we’re looking at spending ca. 700’000 a year per prevented death.

However, the study on the effect of weapon availability on firearms suicide rate also says that the changes in firearms suicide rate are lost in the overall statistics on suicides because of the large increase in assisted suicides.  If we’re willing to put that much money toward firearms suicide prevention, we should probably put serious effort toward decreasing the assisted suicides as well – but that’s not nearly as easily legislated as banning guns.

In short, we can spend a lot of money to perhaps reduce our suicide rate by 15%, moving down from 17.5 suicides per 100’000 people to 14.9 and thereby from rank 17 to rank 24 worldwide.  Or we can continue pretending that guns don’t kill people.  Do you understand why I’m still undecided?

There are more pictures up on salemsattic.com.  To see them, use the usual login/password (if unknown to you, ask me).  Some I put up because of the Christmas Letter we recently sent out, the others came in their wake as I rode out the wave of momentum.  Still no full wedding album, nor a honeymoon album, I’m afraid, but there’s an overview for our first two years and an album of the blessing of the marriage we had in Connecticut.

This is another post for solely archival purposes.  Someone once told me of a place called Dell’s Den, a restaurant deep in Alabama, where calling gets you a highly idiosyncratic (and barely understandable) answering machine message.  The number is +1 334-756-3336, and it is still worth a call.  If you like it, you can befriend the owner and answering machine stream-of-consciousness improv artist Henry Preer at facebook.

In order not to forget: in 2005 I stayed at the Ryokan “Choyokan Honke” (choh-yoh-kahn hong-keh) in Tokyo, close to the Tokyo Dome and the Korakuen park.  I wrote about it in my Nihon News 14, back before I wrote a blog:

“By the time Lukas Howald and I reached the Choyokan Honke, our ryokan for the first two nights, my arm was sore from pulling my suitcase around Tokyo, but the sprawling two-story tiled inn amidst highrises made up for the effort.  In order to ward off sleep, we headed to the Tokyo Dome city nearby and ate yakitori (grilled meat on a small bamboo spear) and oden (cooked – uh, stuff).  The yakitori guy was a young whippersnapper drinking coke he’d bought at the neighboring KFC, the oden vendor an aging smoker drinking his own sake to keep warm.  During the whole meal, traffic raced by and two men competed for the attention of passersby with their megaphones.  We returned via a restaurant where we had tea and dessert and spent the rest of the afternoon resting.  For dinner, we bypassed the establishment advertising “Coffee & Booze” and entered the Takanoya, where the staff seemed to have fun trying to explain the menu to us.  I ended up with a fish head and a potato salad and ordered a glass of Nigorishu at the end of the meal, a type of sake with leftover rice particles floating within, giving it a strong, earthy, almost bitter flavor.  They served it in a slender glass they filled until it overflowed into the high-rimmed saucer.  It looks stylish, but nets you sticky fingers.

Monday began with a traditional Japanese breakfast at Choyokan Honke and continued with a fax from our distributor, Matsuda-san from Tec Corporation, telling us we wouldn’t meet until 1:30pm, so Lukas and I headed past the Tokyo Dome to the Koishikawa Korakuen garden, where a variety of birds like the mejiro, a green sparrow-sized bird with a ring of white around its eyes, flew back and forth among the blossoming plum trees.  The formal garden design and the reigning quiet provided a stark contrast to the noisy chaos of the surrounding metropolis.  Even the highrises look serene when viewed from the small hill where vestiges of an old fortune-telling hall slumber in the shade of the surrounding pines, and the only outside noise penetrating into the garden was that of the roller coaster racing down its tracks.”

I was reminded of it by a piece of paper I found cleaning up, which I’d like to toss, so I’m storing the information here, just in case one day I’m in Japan and want to stay in a ryokan without internet or English-speaking employees (they labeled my shoe space “Stuecklin” and Lukas’s “Stephan,” that’s how much they understood us).  The ryokan’s address is 1-28-5 Hongo, Bunkyo-ku, Tokyo; the phone is +81 (0)3 3814 8181; the fax is +81 (0)3 3814 8177.  You can book it here or find contact info here, and here is the yahoo map.

We all know that the Basel / Mulhouse airport (or Basel Mulhouse Freiburg Euroairport) is an odd case.  It’s binational, with a French side and a Swiss side; it boasts three airport codes (that I know of): BSL, MLH, and EAP.

What I didn’t know was that the code can make a difference.  Search Air France for a flight from BSL to ORY (Paris Orly, where I flew this Monday), and the site sends you on a Basel-Lyon-Limoges-Paris touristic excursion that takes half a day to complete.  Search Air France for a flight from MLH to ORY and there are several direct flights a day.  I’m glad I insisted, and I feel a bit proud that I beat Routerank.com for the quickest trip Basel-Orsay (3:15 instead of 4:44).

What I also didn’t know was the power of real-time GPS.  With the traffic information the GPS had, we got from the customer site to the Orly airport with nary a snag – and several times peered off bridges onto bumper-bumper traffic.

And a final thing I didn’t know was that I can smuggle a small Swiss army knife on board.  I discovered I’d forgotten to put it in my check-in luggage and decided it was worth a try stuffing it with all my other pocket junk in my jacket.  Nobody blinked an eye.

But I’ve heard rumors that for those small ones it’s again legal and maybe my smuggling adventure was just a exercise in misinformation.

In response to SursumCorda’s request on IrishOboe’s blog, here’s a video for all who want to see the early crawling stages.

Crawling and then smiling for the camera.

What probably came afterward was tears at the yellow ball having disappeared from sight…

Yesterday we took advantage of the warm fall weather and went for a little walk in the Bruderholz area.  It was the first time in 364 days we went geocaching, as I later saw in my caching log – the last one was Hallowe’en last year with a pre-engagement Phil and Ana and a barely pregnant Janet.  The cache we picked was the “Chäppeligraben” cache, which takes the cacher down a wooded gully which was decked out in the whole palette of fall colors.  Joseph spent some time sleeping in the wrap, most of the time in the gully looking at the leaves and the sky, and most of the way home complaining – whether because of the wind, the wrap, or the wet diaper we will never know.  The cache itself is easily the cleverest I have seen so far (of eight…) and worth the challenge if you’re in the Basel area.

Today we dressed Joseph in his Virginia Tech Hokies onesie, and have photos to prove it.  As always, if you’ve forgotten the login, or don’t know it, write me.

One of the benefits of working for Nanosurf is the easy access to fiddly tools and clever people.  With Lukas’s help, we bent back the CF card pin that had somehow been bent down.  It looks like it has scoliosis, but it works!

So, to celebrate, there are more pictures of Joseph up.  If you’ve forgotten the password, or don’t know it, ask me.

We are starting to go a little crazy with the video camera, which means a lot of videos to choose from and a lot of hard disk space used up. Here are my favorites from the last few weeks.

The heartwarming sight I wake up to every so often. (0:18)

Joseph performing some kind of slo-mo baby kung fu. (0:33)

Joseph playing with his handlecube and showing off his strength. (2:12)

Janet showed me this video and suggested we sign Joseph up for the circus. (0:58)

Naked happy baby. (1:19)

Joseph is becoming quite talkative (locootious?), especially when he plays with his beach ball. (0:41)

Another one of Joseph soliloquizing away. (0:46)

Laughing with Joseph. These moments make my day!

My SLR camera is currently broken, which means you’ll be getting proportionately more videos!