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– taken with my new Panasonic HDC-SD9. The AVCHD format is a bit of a pain – because its new many of the editing tools haven’t quite caught up yet. But it’s good. Take the HD link at the bottom of the video if you click through to YouTube.

In München, mein erster Besuch seit mehr als einem Jahrzehnt, für eine kurze Vor-Weihnachts-Urlaub. Niemand macht Weihnachten besser als die Deutschen und die Münchner tun es am besten von allen.

Helen und ich dachte, wir würden in ein paar der Sehenswürdigkeiten der Stadt – vor allem die riesigen und prächtigen Residenz, dem ehemaligen königlichen Palast in der Stadt. Wir zahlen, um zu sehen, das Schatzamt, das Museum und das Theater dann versucht, geben Sie die ersten von diesen, sondern ein alter Mann am Eingang darauf zu meinem Rucksack, mit Angabe Ich war zu prüfen, sie in, und Helen’s Neues Manfrotto Stativ und Kamera sagte, sie konnte nicht, dass entweder, weil sie “professionelle” Ausrüstung.

Helen erklärt, sie sei nicht ein professioneller Fotograf (hier ist ihr Flikr Foto-Stream) und dass sie einfach wollte, um einen guten Fotos. Der alte Mann auf andere Besucher im Inneren, wobei verschwommen Bilder in der Dunkelheit mit ihren crummy Point-and-shoot snappies. “Andere Menschen haben kein Problem“, sagte er.

Wir haben gesagt, dass der Hand gehaltene Kameras und lange Forderungen würde Fotos. “Also du sagst, ich kann und darf ich Fotos, aber sie müssen schlechte Fotos?” Die Frage, Helen. Ohne Ironie dieses alte Deutsch – sicherlich alt genug, um lebendig wurden während des Zweiten Weltkriegs, antwortete – “Ich bin nur nach den Regeln. Regeln sind Regeln.”

Um zu verstehen, was wirklich passiert ist hier, wir sollten ignorieren traditionelle Vorurteile der deutschen Charakter und die erstaunlichen Bemerkung aus dem alten Mann und stattdessen beziehen sich auf die Entwicklung des relativ neues Konzept in Wirtschaft, “rent-seeking“.

Rent seeking tritt auf, wenn ein Agent macht Geld nicht durch Reichtum, sondern durch Manipulation des rechtlichen Rahmens zu extrahieren unkompensiert Wert. Rent seeking macht keinen Beitrag zur Produktivität und ist oft ein Monopol Wirkung von Missbrauch. The Economist definiert es als “Schneiden Sie sich ein größeres Stück vom Kuchen anstatt den Kuchen größer. Der Versuch mehr Geld zu verdienen, ohne mehr für den Kunden “.

In dem Beispiel der verrückt Regeln auf die Residenz, durchaus in der Lage Fotografen, die gezahlt haben, um die Zimmer sind nicht gehindert Fotografien aber verhindert sind gelungene Fotos. Dann die Veranstaltung, dass die Kontrollen der Residenz ist in der Lage zu verkaufen, die nur gute Fotos von der wunderschönen Innenausstattung.

Es ist verabscheuungswürdig, aber berechenbaren Verhalten. Mein Rat ist zum Besuch der Residenz, wenn Sie es wünschen, aber nicht alles kaufen, von dem Geschäft.

In Munich, my first visit for about a decade, for a brief pre-Christmas holiday. Nobody does Christmas better than the Germans and no Germans do it better than the Münchner.

Helen and I thought we’d take in a few of the city sights including the splendid and immense Residenz, the former royal palace in the Altstadt. We paid to see the Treasury, the Museum and the Theatre then tried to enter the first of these but an old man at the entrance pointed to my rucksack, indicating I was to check it in, and to Helen’s new manfrotto camera tripod and said that she couldn’t take that in either because it was ‘professional’ equipment.

Helen explained that she wasn’t a professional photographer (here’s her Flikr photostream) and that she simply wanted to take good photos. The doorman indicated to other visitors inside, taking blurry shots in the darkness with their crummy point-and-shoot snappies. ‘Other people have no problem’, he said.

We tried to point out that hand-held cameras and long exposures would result in bad photographs. ‘So you’re saying I can take photos, but only bad photos?’ asked Helen. Without irony this old German – certainly old enough to have been alive during WWII replied -  ‘I am only following the rules. Rules are rules’.

To understand what was really happening here it’s probably best to look beyond traditional prejudices about the German character, move quickly past that unnerving remark from the old man and consider instead the relatively recent development of the concept in economics of rent seeking.

Rent seeking occurs when an agent makes money not by producing wealth but by manipulating the regulatory framework to extract uncompensated value.  Rent seeking makes no contribution to productivity and is often an effect of monopoly abuse. The Economist defines it as ‘Cutting yourself a bigger slice of the cake rather than making the cake bigger. Trying to make more money without producing more for customers‘.

In the example of the insane rules at the  Residenz, perfectly capable photographers who have paid to view the rooms are not prevented from taking photographs but are prevented from taking good photographs. Then the organisation that controls the Residenz is able to sell the only good photos of the wonderful interiors.

It’s despicable but predictable behaviour. My advice is to visit the Residenz, if you wish, but on no account buy anything at all from their shop.

Thinking about our holiday hotels in the States reminds me of the town of Durango and the Days Inn. With the exception of the peculiar Craig Motel, The Durango Days Inn was by far and away the worst motel in which I’ve ever stayed in all of our trips to the US.

Of course you might like dimly lit, ochre-coloured rooms with cigaretter burns in dark green carpets. In which case, the Days Inn, Durango, is the place for you.

When a colleague, himself recently returned from Las Vegas, asked about my holiday plans for touring Colorado and Utah he said, “I suppose you’ve booked all your hotels“.

Well, no. My partner Helen always takes on the bulk of planning and she books in advance only the first night’s hotel, because we’re always late in from the airport and on previous visits to the US we have been required to write down at least our first night’s address on the green entry cards (although I noticed on this most recent holiday we were allowed to write that we were touring). Helen usually also books the last, or last two nights, at the end of the holiday. The rest we leave to chance, wherever we go. Such a careless strategy always works and in the States anything else seems completely unnecessary and hardly ever regrettable.

So most of the nights are spent in inexpensive Holiday Inns and Days Inns and Comfort Inns and Super 8s, booked in the evening when we turn up in a town. Most US towns have a strip with the budget motels and fast-food chains and there’s nearly always room at the inn.

Except twice. In 2004, we were pushed to find a room in Visalia, CA after we’d spent an afternoon walking in the Sierra Nevada and arrived rather late in the evening. This year, after a fruitless trip to Dinosaur, Co (the previously-open dinosaur beds were closed to tourists) we drove on towards the Rocky Mountain National Parkbut decided to break the journey in the small, undistinguished town of Craig. In wasn’t too late and we didn’t expect any problem – except it was hunting season and Craig’s a base used by enthusiastic game hunters. Nearly everywhere was full except for the eponymous Craig Motel, to which we were referred by a helpful desk clerk at the Craig Holiday Inn

The Craig Motel, Craig, Colorado

We were welcomed into a ramshackle office by the owner, a Chinese woman who’d spent a few years in Birkenhead (UK) and escaped to the States as soon as she could. She was very pleasant but our rooms were dark and smelled of disinfectant and air freshener.  The bathroom was fairly clean but the toilet slowly leaked water from the cistern to the bowl so every time we flushed, the first flush would be entirely dry and we had to wait for the cistern to fill again. Neighbours in the courtyard of ground-floor rooms were hunters or longer-term residents who seemed to have settled in with their families. On the other hand it was very, very cheap.

The Curtis Hotel, Denver, on 14th and Curtis

The prize for the most amusing hotel has to go to The Curtis, Denver, which we booked for our last two nights. Each floor of the Curtis is themed and ours, the 13th, was the horror floor. The lift spoke as it slowed to a stop: “Here’s Johnny“, Jack Nicholson in The Shining, and opposite the lift door was a large photo of Leatherface from The Texas Chainsaw Massacre. The rooms themselves, thankfully, eased up on the theming and there were nice touches like an iPod holder and player, even if it was built into the radio alarm clock shaped like a VW Beetle Convertible…

The Denver Art Museum has on display a poorly executed but anthropologically interesting painting called, ‘The Cutting Scene, Mandan O-kee-pa Ceremony‘, by George Catlin:

Interior of a Mandan timber medicine lodge depicting the limp bodies of two young Native American males hoisted in the air with ropes attached to wooden splints inserted through the muscles in their shoulders and chest. Below tribe member seated around a small fire watch as the two young men adorned with shields, spears, and animal skulls slip into unconsciousness during the ceremony.

The Cutting Scene, Mandan O-kee-pa Ceremony, Art Inventories Catalog

You may have seen a film representation of the O-kee-pa ceremony in the 1970 movie, ‘A Man Called Horse‘. Richard Harris plays an aristocrat who is captured by Native Americans, eventually gaining the respect of his captors and tormentors and finally joining the tribe. As part of his initiation into tribal customs he undergoes the excruciatingly painful vertical suspension by hooks embedded in his chest.

Nobody, as far as I know, has objected to the ceremony’s depiction in , ‘A Man Called Horse‘; yet the Denver Art Museum claims Caitlin’s painting provokes controversy for its exploitation of the Native American religion; or because of its goggle-eyed sideshow approach to a sacred rite; or some other such reason.

In the American fashion of obeisance to all minority cultural and religious traditions, especially Native American ones, however silly or repugnant they may be, the Museum presents the work to visitors with an apology that labels it the most controversial painting in the collection and devotes adjacent wall space to an interactive display that gives the views of art lecturers, cultural historians and Native Americans, encouraging the public, especially schoolchildren, to contribute their own remarks, which are duly and unnecessarily apologetic for the imagined offence.

According to the Museum, the ‘the tribe feels it’s wrong for the sacred ceremony to be seen by outsiders’  – although,  as the painter had been invited by the one of the tribe’s holy men to view the ritual, it seems that today’s tribal representatives (the last full-blooded Mandan died nearly forty years ago) are ignoring the wishes of other, long-dead inhabitants of North America, riding roughshod over their views of their religioun in an unhesitant act of cultural annexation.  We all visit the past as foreigners: today’s 21st Centry Native Americans are barely  connected to the 19th Century Mandan religious ceremonies or the 19th Century Mandans, or to the clearly expressed desire to share with Catlin this particular rite.

Further on in the gallery, a large canvas by a contemporary artist depicts a crucified naked woman.  This reference to a sacred symbol of Western religion provokes from the Museum no similar, sensitive exposition  of the meanings of the work, careful regard for the sensibilities of Christians, an acknowledgement of the possibility of giving offence, or interactive contrition for children. The accompanying blrub says,

Did Barbara Kruger make this image to offend? Possibly. Or it might be an ironic statement…to draw  attention to our expectation that modern art is offensive

Like Serrano’s Piss Christ, the work is understood  – as the postmodernists of the Denver Art Museum’s captioning team might have put it – as an articulation in the ongoing narrative of art and culture – against the background of a dying religion,  clung to desperately – as Obama says – by hicks living in the flyover States. No need to apologise to them.

I first visited the States in 2001, just before 9/11, and I’ve holidayed there every couple of years since. By the end of this summer I’ll have been to: Georgia; South Carolina; Alabama; Arkansas; Louisiana; California; Nevada; Arizona; Washington DC; Virginia; Tennessee; Mississippi; Kentucky; West Virginia; Colorado; New Mexico; and Utah.

I think I was most impressed by the wildness and beauty of the country on the northern Pacific coast of California, and the deserts of Nevada and Arizona. I was most powerfully reminded of the founding principles of the US in Virginia and DC. I have been, incidentally, delighted by the politeness of Americans everywhere I’ve visited; as an exemplary anecdote, the kid who must have been around 12 years old, holding the door open for Helen in some building in DC,  who – when she said, ‘Thank you’ to him, replied; ‘You’re welcome ma’am’. Simple, direct, automatic, polite.

A wonderful country stuffed full of really pleasant people. Happy Birthday.

As we’re off to Denver shortly for a tour of the … what do you call the area … the Southwestern States? The Mountain States? Well, anyway, we’re probably going to be taking in bits of Colorado, Utah, New Mexico and Arizona.

A couple of years ago two black bears ran right past us as we sat picnicking in the Shenandoah National Park, Virginia.

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And a few years earlier, I think we very nearly came across a mountain lion (cougar) when we climbed up to a fire watch tower in the Sierra Nevada, California:

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On the first part of the walk, before we started climbing up the rocks to the fire tower, we walked along a sandy path between the fir trees; on the way back down, there were large cat-paw prints in the sand that hadn’t been there before.

So, bears and a cougar on previous visits to the States. I’m wondering what we might encounter this time. Colorado’s a pretty wild State so I’m breaking the list up by category. First off, the Serpentes.

Venomous Snakes

Osage Copperhead

Western Rattlesnake

Eastern Massasauga Rattlesnake

Western Pygmy Rattlesnake

Non-venomous snakes

New Mexican Blind Snake

Glossy Snake

E. Yellow Bellied Racer

Prairie Ringneck Snake

Great Plains Ratsnake

Plains Hognose Snake

Texas Nightsnake

Common Kingsnake

Milk Snake

Green Snake

W. Coachwhip

Northern Watersnake

Bullsnake/Gophersnake

Texas Longnose Snake

W. Ground Snake

S.W. Black-headed Snake

W. Blackneck Garter Snake

Texas Brown Snake

Lined Snake

Rubber Boa

On my first evening in California, I was stopped by a police car – or highway patrol car, or whatever – for shooting a stop sign. But as John Staddon observes in The Atlantic Monthly,

Consider the stop sign. It seems innocuous enough; we do need to stop from time to time. But think about how the signs are actually set up and used. For one thing, there’s the placement of the signs—off to the side of the road, often amid trees, parked cars, and other road signs; rarely right in front of the driver, where he or she should be looking.

Then there’s the sheer number of them. They sit at almost every intersection in most American neighborhoods. In some, every intersection seems to have a four-way stop. Stop signs are costly to drivers and bad for the environment: stop/start driving uses more gas, and vehicles pollute most when starting up from rest. More to the point, however, the overabundance of stop signs teaches drivers to be less observant of cross traffic and to exercise less judgment when driving—instead, they look for signs and drive according to what the signs tell them to do.

The four-way stop deserves special recognition as a masterpiece of counterproductive public-safety efforts.

John Staddon, Distracting Miss Daisy, The Atlantic Monthly

So soon I’ll be driving again in the US, around Colorado, Wyoming and Utah. I’ll try to remember not to overtake yellow buses, I’ll try to bear the crawling overtake as two lanes of cars set their cruise control speeds only the tiniest fraction apart, I’ll curse the absence of roundabout and marvel at the lights strung across intersections on crossroads miles from anywhere. and I hope i wont be adding to the stats that make the US a considerably more dangerous place to drive.

Last year we went to southern Spain – I’d only been up north previously, around Barcelona, Pamplona and Bilbao and I was a little unsure about flying down too close the the Costas but it turned out to be a very interesting holiday. Here’s a map of our trip, with a few photos.

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This year we’ve decided to return to the United States, this time flying in to Denver. We’ll be out of the place shortly before the Democrat National Convention, thank goodness.