An old friend of mine, reunited with me via the wonders of the internet, recently had the marvelous idea of organizing an excuse to be artsy-fartsy. Each week there’s a prompt, which one can respond to in absolutely any way at all. I’ve chosen writing because I can handle that at the moment.

I blew off a paper to write this, and will have to try to get that done in the morning. That’s going to be tricky, because I don’t have an alarm, so I have to rely on waking up naturally. (I like this lifestyle.)

The deadline for Arts and Farts and Crafts is Tuesday, so I didn’t want to miss it. Really, I probably should have slept. This was actually difficult to write, which is embarrassing for me, the highly esteemed and accredited author that I am.

Here is the prompt for this week’s entry:

My attempts at reason and quiet diplomacy fell on deaf ears as they began to wrap themselves in toilet paper from head to foot and chant “We want women.” I retreated to the relative quiet of my room and read the writing of a monk who lived alone on a mountaintop for thirty-seven years in search of a deeper understanding of the world. His main conclusion, when he came down, was that you can see very far on top of a mountain unless it is cloudy. Imprisoned for his radical ideas, he died several years later in jail. The only writing from this time period that survived is the line: “There are no clouds in a prison.”

-From The Autobiography of F.B.I. Special Agent Dale Cooper:  My Life, My Tapes (as heard by Scott Frost)

And here is the story.

A joining

Otto Gottlieb is a rusty old lamppost of a man. A lit cigarette in the rain. The ash collects like fallen snow in the crevices of his worn leather jacket and the rain sullies it. He stands articulated on a square in a nonexistent European town, waiting for a bus already come and gone.

He doesn’t want to answer his door. Without peering out the window, he knows the jaguars are walking about on two feet again. In the den, a clay sculpture of a Sphinx is pushed off the mantel and dashes itself against the stone beneath. Its head breaks off, rather than just the nose. Yet again, the universe fails to be as poetic as it could, if it cared.

Otto sits before a coffee table, face to face with the bust of a woman he never met. Alabaster? Porphyry? It doesn’t ever matter. He fingers the chisel fondly before dismantling her. The nose is the first to go. As the rock crumbles, he realizes his mistake. He flips the couch over and kicks the wolf hiding beneath it.

Wolves feed on rocks.

The roof splits. Embers breathe deep the new air and the fractured Sphinx writhes.

With an air repugnant of the feigned solemnity of ceremony, Otto lays his hand upon the wall of the fireplace, and dismisses it. Absolved of its comforts, the roof collapses. Rafters festoon the stage like compound fractures. Insanity incarnate.

The fire is placated by the light rain and hates nothing. More knocking at the front door, which is stupid, because the house is no more. Otto doesn’t want to let his son in. But the door is opened—by Otto, presumably—and the bipedal jaguar enters.

So, apple in mouth, Otto clambers onto the coffee table and reclines. The door is still open.

But his son refuses him, and stoops instead to collect the various fragments of rock from the shattered sculptures. He gathers a bit of ash in his paw and rubs it into his chest. After an extended bout of eye contact, he leaves abruptly, and Otto realizes he is naked.

He dismounts the table less than gracefully, paws around in the rubble his life has become, and extricates a Journal of Archaeology. No mention of him in this issue. No mention of anyone. Just a shattered ribcage of a house, rafters skyward in a sickly embrace with the still soft memory of some deity that slunk off during the night, staining the cover. No one remembers.

To meld with the loss of memory, the fire grows stronger. A pillar of desperate dancing smoke looms totemically above everything Otto has ever dreamed up. He sits naked, obscured by flames, and wishes for a Martian invasion. He wishes for a boat and a waterfall, with plenty of jagged rocks amid the crashing water below.

Otto reaches beneath the coffee table and pets the wolf hiding there. The wolf is dead, its skin coarse and hateful from the fire.

The door is still open.

Otto wishes his son would come back and eat him.

I shill for Google routinely. Or have shilled, at least. Now they’re all up in my grill and I wish they’d just chill the balls a little bit.

This seems like a good time to mention that Knol is a stupid idea and I’m against it. But I’ll probably also write a billion articles on all subgenres of death metal and try to make a buck.

What spurred today’s rant is that this morning I popped open my Netvibes page—before eating breakfast, as ever—and there was a damn Google search box cluttering up my junk.

Maybe that doesn’t piss you off, but it does me. Why do I need Google in my Netvibes? I don’t, that’s why.

Mashable has some coverage up about it, but the comment thread doesn’t have nearly enough pissed off people in it for my tastes. I’m all about a cool site like Netvibes making a buck, but can someone please partner with someone other than Google?

For the record, Flock is sponsored by Yahoo. That’s a point in their favor, I guess.

I’ve been working for quite some time on securing a scholarship to spend this coming fall at a university in Taiwan. I got the scholarship. Unfortunately, the scholarship did not bestow upon me any prowess with basic paperwork or timekeeping, and so it was only with nominal surprise that I noticed—today—that today was the postmark deadline for application verification materials.

I need signatures and scads of paperwork from various officials. And I have nothing.

So, I wrote an e-mail to the scholarship committee, donning my most humble of humble miens, explained that I’m an epic douchebag failure.

I’ve already heard back from someone within the scholarship organization, someone who either works in a west coast office or has a brutally dominating boss, given the timestamp on the e-mail, and it’s all good.

Everything works out. Always. I learn no lessons.

Ever.

One of the things I most dearly missed while away in Germany this past year was my assortment of guitars. I have one for everything: a flying V I tune down a whole step or to drop-C to play all the contemporary American metalcore and thrash revival stuff; a 7-string I keep either in standard or tuned up a halfstep, so I can jam with the Swedes; a beautiful Floyd Rose-equipped number that stays in a halfstep down, in tribute to the classics; and of course an acoustic, for netting the babes.

Without even an acoustic, I almost went mad, so bereft shredding was I.

Now I’m back in the States in a small apartment, and I’ve so far only brought an acoustic guitar with me. It’s not at all how I envisioned my homecoming, which was way more like the duel from Crossroads.

Not having guitars doesn’t mean I’m not thinking about them, though. In fact, quite the opposite: I’ve been chatting with metal friends constantly about jamming, and an interesting fellow I’ve had the good fortune of getting to know via the wonders of the internet recently proposed that we work on a musical collaboration. He lives in Greece, but will be moving to Sweden in a few months, at which point I’m sure I’ll lose him to the babes and shredding for which that nation is so rightly famous. So I’d best make the most of it now!

Check out Hermes’s piece called “Time Dissection” available on the MySpace for his project Mandrache. He describes the music as “Metal / Minimalist / Progressive.” I like.

During our conversations today, we started talking about stagnation as a result of too much opportunity. My deprivation period, if you will, in Germany, has very much motivated me to write again, something I’ve always wanted to do but never really bothered with. I had to starve myself to make myself hungry, essentially. We talked about how hardcore sucks, and about experimenting with different tunings, just for the sake of making everything fresh again. After all, Mikael did it.

So today I scooped up my acoustic, tuned it to open D minor, and tried to find chord shapes. Here’s what I came up with, three layers of improvisation.

My favorite part? At the end you can hear police sirens in the background, even though the windows of my apartment were shut when I recorded it. Ahh, Philadelphia. It’s good to be back!

Personally I’m not at all impressed with what came out during this improvisation, but the experience of playing was wonderful for me. I’ve always had a disease where I see music instead of hear it, which means that when I get a great riff idea, I usually experience it visually as a geometric pattern on the fretboard. Everything is shapes, not tone colors at all.

Playing in a new tuning, however, none of the shapes I knew and was familiar with made sense. For the first time since I can remember, I had to play based on how the chords sounded rather than how they felt in my hand. Groping my way awkwardly through oblique motion, I had to piece together melodic sense and rediscover tonality. It took about 40 seconds. I will never forget it.

The intervals between the higher strings, however, where the melody is played, were no different than standard tuning. Thus that melody was plodding and piecemeal, because I wasn’t trying anything new.

I am going to do more of this in the future.

A quick note about the title of this post: Hermes mentioned to me that in the outro to his “Time Dissection” (starts at 5:19, voiced by piano), he bases his phrasing on the Fibonacci sequence. Hopelessly nerdy, no? That’s why I love the guy. He also told me that Tool did something similar in Lateralus, which was completely believable to me, but certainly something I didn’t know. Unfortunately, I believe the guitarist from Tool used drop-D throughout that CD, and not open D or open D minor. So it’s not the best title. But it had a nice story to go along with it!

Update:

It should be noted that I was inspired to try this new tuning by my wonderful friend Sascha, whom I sorely miss. I was tired when I wrote this and never properly credited him for his influence in this. Wasn’t sure how to phrase it, then got distracted by tangents in my writing.

I miss you, man.

As any good Twitter user knows, the service is notoriously unreliable. Sure, they can have uptime of 99.9%, but that’s not really good enough for a microblogging service.

Ever since I started twitting¹, I’ve been torn about whether something is more appropriate for a blog post or a twit. Some hold that it is possible—and perhaps even commonplace—to twit too often, and things too inane. I most certainly do not fall into that category, although I cannot substantiate that with examples of inane twits, because the damn service is down.

Trying to load the webpage, all I see is that damn whale graphic:

“There is a wisdom that is woe; but there is a woe that is madness.”

Kind of embarrassing that I had to Google for Moby Dick quotes, because I never read the book myself. I mean, had the folks at Twitter decided to use an albatross graphic or something, I’d be all over that. But so it goes.

I shall suffer through this madness by constantly refreshing When Twitter Is Down.

About a week ago, my The Onion RSS feed got all clogged up with gaybashing stuff—not that there’s anything wrong with that.

It still hasn’t cleared up yet, so I figured it’s Gay Awareness Week or something, but Googling for that hasn’t helped me very much. Can anybody explain this?

I mean, it’s raising my awareness alright.

Amazing, no?

It only bothers me because the articles are syndicated from years ago. If the writers at The Onion keep depriving me of relatively fresh sardonic content, I’m going to gather them up like bundles of sticks and burn them to death—not that there’s anything wrong with that.

Update:

There’s a banner big as life on the homepage that says “CELEBRATING GAY PRIDE.” Funny that because I only ingest media via RSS feeds, I never saw that. Ah, well. Still, I’d like to know why Googling for “gay week 2008″ doesn’t explain this cosmological event to me, and instead points me to:

Aspen Gay Ski Week

Another year, another great Aspen Gay Ski Week! We have hardly had a moment to miss all the fun times, great snow and friendships made during Ski Week 2008. …
www.gayskiweek.com/ - 13k - Cached - Similar pages

Best search engine my ass.

I don’t have the most meticulously well crafted schedule this term. Classes in the late morning, then nothing, then classes in the evening. It’s about a 20 or 30 minute walk from my house to campus, so it’s hardly worth coming back home for. Today, in my 3 hour break, I reposed on the grass in the sun and surprised myself by polishing off a book.

Finishing a book in the daylight is an odd experience. Much like how one is always surprised upon leaving a movie theater to see that the day hasn’t yet died (this is a phenomenon confined to summer, I think), I was puzzled that my day hadn’t ended along with that of the characters’. (My, how that double genitive marvel of English never ceases to amaze me.)

The book is gone, yet already envelops the rest of my evening. The shadows cast by the falling sun weren’t even dramatically long. This footprint, this echo, a puddle, an augury, adds flavor to the day that I cannot wash out of my senses, not even with the stale taste of a hotdog from a lunch truck as I make my way to my next class.

I think I’m starting to like this not-having-a-timepiece lifestyle.

Come November, I’ll vote Republican—because “change” is the last thing this country needs.

On a related note, my goal in life is to express every desire with deadpan sarcasm.

Today is Download Day over at Mozilla, conveniently coinciding with the launch of Firefox 3 final. They’re shooting (obliquely) for a record of most downloaded software. Understandably, the press coverage would be quite nourishing to their cause.

As of this writing, there are just under 2 million downloads recorded. Given that Download Day extends until 17:00 UTC on June 18, 2008, I think we’ve only seen the beginning of this. I’d bet on at least 3 million, possibly 4 million, too.

Let’s watch.

Download now.

Update:

OK, I guess I should have looked up some usage statistics before guessing about download numbers, because according to the counter Mozilla has running, they’re already over 7 million downloads. Goddamn!

Let’s hit 10 million, damn it!

I think it’s obvious that I absolutely freaking love the German language. I’m been practicing my High German at every opportunity, but unfortunately the jobs I work at dictate that I need to be able to understand the Bavarian and East German dialects (which are worlds apart both culturally and phonetically).

Recently I was speaking with an American who mentioned a commercial that mocked German accents in English. That’s right up my alley, so I YouTubed it. Behold.

Classic, no? I can’t tell you how many times I’ve heard this kind of accent around here, and I’ll never grow tired of it. In fact, I think I’ll adopt it when I’m back in the States. I bet it gets all the ladies.

Speaking of getting all the ladies, I love this guy, Stefen Raab. The name of this song is “Maschendrautzahn” which just means chain link fence. He uses a sample of an old lady, I think from Hessen, saying that word as his chorus. I love the song because it’s simultaneously mocking and celebrating the American lifestyle, like all contemporary German culture, and it’s also mocking and celebrating the goofy accent of the woman. One commenter on the video writes the word as she says it “Moaschendrahtzoaun.”

While trolling around on YouTube, I also found a pretty decent video of a German doing accents in French, Italian, American English, and Spanish. The American sounded slightly too French to me, but of course I’m picky, because nobody can do an American accent in German like I can.

OK, three video threshhold reached. If you’re interested, do make sure to check out Arnold Schwarzenegger doing interviews in German. He’s Austrian, so his German does sound a little silly to me, but it really puts his accent in English in context.

Please let me know vat you sink of ze videos.

I like my job at O2. I have to wear a suit and act like Windows Mobile is anything but a joke, but for the most part it’s a good job.

I do object, however, to having to deal with stupid customers.

Sometimes you get a customer that you just want to grab by the hair and slam their head against a table of cell phones, again and again and again. Of course, you’d have to resituate your grip every few blows, as their hair would be coming out in clumps. But you’d keep slamming, which gets easier as it goes on, because after the fifth blow or so (I presume), they go limp.

But you still can’t get over that they asked where the 0 key was on their cell phone. So you press ever onward, reveling in the burn of lactic acid in your arm. After about a minute, the bone around the temple softens, and things get messy. The display phones are covered in hair and brains, the counter now an altar to intolerance.

But the offering must be complete. You adjust your footing so as not to slip on the gore, now flowing off the table onto the floor. Customers who have yet to be addressed wait patiently in line.

After the splashing decreases to but a spurt every few hits, and the physical feedback becomes less satisfying, as what’s left of the head makes only a soft slap on the table, you situate the body on its knees. In that reverent posture, it is ready to be totemized. You smash the protective casing around a cell phone, any cell phone, and pick away any stray shards of plastic, so as not to taint the ritual.

Then, reaching carefully in through where the ear used to be, you place the phone in the throat of the corpse, while chanting the UMTS creed.

You wipe the the blood off the metal surface of your nametag, and turn to the next customer, addressing them politely in the honorific.

Seriously. He asked where the goddamn 0 zero was. When I showed him—without violence—he argued that it should come before the 1.

Years ago, I came to Germany on a brief trip with my high school. I don’t think the trip was even 2 weeks long, and it was designed to provide a general image of Germany, so we stayed in several major cities at most 2 or 3 days. I had an absolute blast, and my German was crap back then.

Toward the end of the tour—at least, I think it was toward the end—we cruised through Bavaria and the tip of Austria. The pictures I took down there, with an old, rather beaten-up 35mm which my girlfriend at the time had lent me for the trip, are still the iconic pictures of Bavaria for me.

Years later, but still years in the past, I went to Bavaria again, this time just for a week-long stay. I had been offered a scholarship to study in Munich for a year (one which I declined—later, the scholarship I’m now taking advantage of fell into my lap, and I couldn’t say no again), and this brief stay was meant to be an introduction and a tease for what was to come.

We of course took a trip to the Alps, my second.

Even now, after having actually lived here for the better part of a year, these pictures still come to mind whenever I need to think abstractly about Bavaria. Nothing helps more to understand the Bavarian people than to take a look at these few glimpses of the landscapes. As I mused in an earlier post,

I’ve often noticed that Bavarians aren’t always looking over their shoulders at the revenant of the war, that they remember instead the cobalt blue of the Alps in the distance on that one day when autumn came so quickly.

I’m no de Tocqueville, but I stand by those words all these months (and Maßes) later.

I hope you now know at least a little better what it feels like to live here. The weather is changing. It now rains for two days and then is sunny for one. More pictures to come, I hope.

In my building here, there’s a delightful little Russian by the name of Pavel. Pavel boasts sundry endearing specializations, such as drinking a lot, opening bottles of beer in truly bizarre ways—with a CD-R, sans jewel case; with a 1 dollar bill—and regaling us with tales of Russian humor. By far, my favorite joke is that which is dubbed “Russian logic.” I’ve tried Googling for it to no avail, so who knows, maybe this actually happened to Pavel’s family or something.

I warn you, it’s weird.

In a small farming town somewhere in Russia, a family noticed that their cow had gone missing. The men of the family conclude that the cow has been stolen, and proceed to determine the thief. The grandfather says, “Whoever stole this cow must be homosexual. Only homosexuals steal cows.” His son, the father of the farming family, replies, “Then whoever stole the cow must be short, too. All homosexuals are short.” The grandson chimes in with the capstone to their investigation, concluding, “The shepherd that lives at the edge of town is short! Therefore he must be the person who stole our cow.” They all agree to go beat up the poor shepherd.

Upon arriving at the shepherd’s hut, the grandfather declares, “Give us back our damn cow, you faggot.” The shepherd explains he knows absolutely nothing of any cow-stealing incident, and his three accusers decide to take the issue to court.

Once in the courtroom, the shepherd uses as his defense the absolutely absurd chain of logic the men used to accuse him. The judge inquires as to the nature of the reasoning, and the men explain. The judge says, “Well, let’s test the validity of this logic.” With that, he points to a box sitting on a table at the edge of the courtroom, and asks the grandfather, “What is in that box?”

The grandfather thinks for a moment, then replies, “Well, it’s a box, so… it probably has another box inside.” The father says, “A box inside a box would probably hold something round.” The son finishes it off with, “If it’s round and inside a box, it’s probably an orange.”

The judge says, “Just give them back their damn cow, you asshole.”

This joke has become a party classic, and it gets better the drunker Pavel is, because then his English is mangled and newcomers to the joke aren’t sure whether they missed something, or whether the verdict by the judge really is the punchline.

I was inspired to tell this story by reading an article about a Russian doomsday cult that just came out of its cave, evidently having had their doomsday date wrong.

Thirty-five people took refuge in the cave in the Penza region, about 650 kilometres southeast of Moscow, in November, threatening to detonate 400 litres of gas canisters if authorities tried to remove them. The cave dwellers, members of a group calling itself the True Russian Orthodox Church, said they were waiting for the end of world, which they believed would come sometime in May

Oh, yes. What an honor to be a parishioner of the True Hardcore X-treme Russian Orthodox Church, complete with a badly dilapidated cave as demesne and 400 liters of gasoline as a characteristically Soviet tithe.

The story gets better when the cult members explain their decision to leave the cave.

Vice Governor Oleg Melnichenko said more of the cave had collapsed around dawn Tuesday, and cult members told emergency officials that a divine vision overnight had instructed them to leave.

Last Friday seven other cult members emerged as melting spring snows caused part of the shelter to cave in, sparking fears that the entire structure could collapse.

Well I’ll be damned, there’s that comet speaking to you again—you must be a prophet! Just how do you tap into these cosmic messages? What did the comet say this time, anyway? “Get the hell you, you drunken idiots, this shit is falling down!”?

Maybe they’ll get the date right next year.

The guys and gals over at the Mozilla Corporation have been making remarkable strides on the next version of everyone’s favorite browser. Firefox 3 has been in beta testing for months now, running late from its initial target of October 2007. (I can’t find any citations for that, so just take my word for it.) Fortunately the delays are paying off. Take a look at a section of the release notes for Beta 3.

[Improved in Beta 3!] Memory usage: Over 350 individual memory leaks have been plugged, and a new XPCOM cycle collector completely eliminates many more. Developers are continuing to work on optimizing memory use (by releasing cached objects more quickly) and reducing fragmentation. Beta 3 includes more than 50 improvements to memory use over the previous beta.

That in itself is fantastically impressive. Maybe we won’t see so much Hungry Hungry Firefox RAM-gobbling in the near future.

While I acknowledge that such massive code cleanups require a considerable number of man hours, I have to ask myself whether that’s really enough to keep Firefox 3 running so late. My theory is that although the code changes might be significant, the real drain on time is the constant reworking of the Mozilla robot for each new beta release.

I mean, don’t you think that’s a bit much for each release? I applaud their focus on presentation, and I’m sure it pays off to treat your beta testers well, but really now. You guys can’t think of anything better to do with all those ten of millions of dollars of Google bucks you’ve been getting annually? The bubble burst, my ass.

At least the newest beta (Beta 5 at the time of this writing) is rock solid and fast as hell.

A friend was kind enough to point me to a somewhat recent Slate piece about the resurgence of mead in American beer culture. The best part is that they credit geeks and nerds for bringing it back.

Without the nerdy obsessiveness of early hobbyists, we’d all still be crushing corn-fed lagers against our foreheads. Instead, we’re drinking double IPAs and imperial stouts. The many new mead-makers in America are almost all lapsed home brewers who smelled the honey.

[…]

[T]he recent interest in fermented honey has morphed it from an esoteric item that only a few bearded Dungeons & Dragons players indulged in to a small yet legitimate commercial enterprise.

Overall the article is a pleasant read, but I don’t think I enjoyed a single word of it more than I did the viking clipart gracing the margin.

If that happy character doesn’t make you want to start a home brewery, there’s something wrong with you.

For the time being, though, I guess I’ll stick with my weissbier.

A few days ago, I resolved to undertake on a project to record the church bells of all the various cathedrals around Munich. Every day, no matter where I am, I hear them ringing all over town, and it never fails to move me. Sometimes I’m grocery shopping, counting out my coins to give to the cashier, and I hear them come rolling through the street outside. Other times I’m in my room, balcony doors ajar, listening to music while reading articles about culture and technology, and I stop everything to listen to the bells as they wash over the courtyard behind my building.

Last night I’d set an alarm for 10am today, giving me plenty of time to rouse myself, make breakfast, and walk over to the church nearest me, St. Benno’s. The alarm went off, and as usual, I didn’t get up. Except this time I was so tired and confused, I shut the alarm off instead of just snoozing it. Damn. At 11:30am, though, I’m awoken by rolling church bells even through my shut balcony doors, and I realize I’m missing the Easter mass bells. Damn! I roll out of bed, charge my MP3 player (which has a shoddy built-in microphone I must use to make the recording), throw on some warm clothing, and I’m out the door.

On the walk over, I listen to some Technical Death Metal by my favorite band. The air is cold, and even the bakery was shut today, a sign that all things must rest.

And it came bearing gifts
Of pain, frankincense, and her
None had a home here, none but the pain

The church is only about five minutes away by foot, though tucked away on its own plaza behind some apartment buildings, nestled among interlocking streets. I arrive by about ten before noon, and I sit down on a bench outside. It’s snowing softly.

The plaza is still; I assume most everyone who will be attending the mass is already inside. I pause my music to listen to a dove, perched in the hole left by a missing stone on the church’s main facade, indignantly declaring the plaza his own. I resume the music.

The chilling chants of the carcass choir
Rosaries inverted and strung upon the razor wire

I admire the facade of the church, the massive twin towers adorned less than gracefully with a sundial and an ornate clock, hands wrought of gold. Mere minutes remained until noon, so I stopped the music and started recording. Here is the excerpt of that recording which just includes the bells, as well as various other courtyard noises, such as wind, talking passersby, and the clip-clop of high heels.

I apologize that the quality is not better. As I mentioned, the device I used to record was my ancient iRiver, and the built-in mic is hardly stellar. I spent a considerable amount of time editing out the gusts of wind by normalizing and compressing, but they’re of course still quite audible. In addition, the recording here is a 192kbps MP3 file. For the lossless version in FLAC, please click here. At 17MB, it’s only about twice as large as the MP3 file. Oh, and one noise I absolutely could not remove was the spinning up of my MP3 player’s hard drive in order to dump the buffer to disk.

What I wish I could explain here is how shocking the bells were when they began, even though I’ve heard them literally hundreds of times before. The dove even was awed, or at least recognized the futility of trying to speak over the bells. As I sat and listened, trying to shelter the microphone from wind without muffling the beautiful sound, a child was carried past by his father. The child’s face was contorted in distress, his ears covered by one hand of his own and one of his father’s. The child’s free hand was clutching a small paper cone of roasted almonds.

When the ringing ended, and the last vibrations of the bells moaned on, the birds around the courtyard started to speak again. Not the dove, but others, chirping all around me amid the falling snow. I checked that the recording was still going, then stopped it and put on more music. I walked home with headphones on.

Standing west of God
We are united in regret

A happy Easter to you.

From the bottom of my heart, I don’t think there’s anything better in the world than this. It’s perfect. Just perfect.

I just walked home in a cold spring rain with freshly baked bread warming my hands, crossed glistening cobblestone streets as the tram clattered by, the church bells splashing down the quiet corridors of shops, trying to remind me why people bake bread at all.

I don’t have any pictures of this, I didn’t record the smells. I failed to capture the warmth of that bakery, made real to me by a few locks of wet hair sticking to my face. My glasses fogged up when I entered. I mumbled something about the weather to the kind lady on the other side of the counter, and she handed me bread.

Everything is more than OK. I don’t mean in my life, I mean in the world. It’s all going to be fine.

Don’t try to save the world, because it doesn’t need it. Save the bakeries. Because once we lose them, all is darkness.

That last post was more or less a tribute to this epic testament to enthusiasm for food, “Look At These Fucking Peppers.” Maybe you’ve seen it before. (Click to enlarge, or just right-click and download the original resolution version linked to.)

It’s still a really good time for me. But while googling for it, I found another very interesting take on this kind of copy moxy.

Dude, that’s fucking funny.

Some days—and by that I mean every single day ever—all you need is some sandwiches. Today, of course, was one such day.

Will you just look at that? That’s a freaking feast right there. Turkey, cheese, lettuce, black pepper, bacon, toasted bread… then some juice and milk for good measure.

I remember one time, walking back from a beer hall with some friends, my good brother Carl said, “Man, you guys are great. But not as great as sandwiches.”

Indeed, Carl. Indeed.

I love languages. English, German, Mandarin, Java, Hypolocrian—it’s all good. I’m not yet fluent in any of these, but I like to tinker. I like to catch thoughts as near back to the core of their creation as possible, then contort and pervert them, stretching them across strange jungle gym formations in my thoughtspace.

Here in Germany, I’m quite proud of my linguistic ability. German is far and away my strongest foreign language, so I can have some serious fun with it. (I still suck at Bavarian, Frankish, and Swabian, so don’t go there.) Although I still have a deplorable American accent, I’m quite fluent, and can joke and converse freely. When I first got here, it was quite a challenge for me to learn casual, slangy German, as I first learned the language on paper, and had no experience speaking it or even hearing it be spoken.

Some of the Americans here have a different perspective, and have picked it up mostly through conversation, not by combing through Goethe line by line or translating poetry for fun. These individuals are completely lost when it comes to differentiating between the dative and genitive case, who are clueless when it comes to proper declension of adjectives, because Germans typically slur over that stuff when speaking. To quote Mark Twain:

I say to myself, “REGEN (rain) is masculine–or maybe it is feminine–or possibly neuter–it is too much trouble to look now. Therefore, it is either DER (the) Regen, or DIE (the) Regen, or DAS (the) Regen, according to which gender it may turn out to be when I look. In the interest of science, I will cipher it out on the hypothesis that it is masculine. Very well–then THE rain is DER Regen, if it is simply in the quiescent state of being MENTIONED, without enlargement or discussion–Nominative case; but if this rain is lying around, in a kind of a general way on the ground, it is then definitely located, it is DOING SOMETHING–that is, RESTING (which is one of the German grammar’s ideas of doing something), and this throws the rain into the Dative case, and makes it DEM Regen. However, this rain is not resting, but is doing something ACTIVELY,–it is falling–to interfere with the bird, likely–and this indicates MOVEMENT, which has the effect of sliding it into the Accusative case and changing DEM Regen into DEN Regen.” Having completed the grammatical horoscope of this matter, I answer up confidently and state in German that the bird is staying in the blacksmith shop “wegen (on account of) DEN Regen.” Then the teacher lets me softly down with the remark that whenever the word “wegen” drops into a sentence, it ALWAYS throws that subject into the GENITIVE case, regardless of consequences–and therefore this bird stayed in the blacksmith shop “wegen DES Regens.”

Speaking German is a real party and a half. Although I’ve repeatedly assured friends here not to stress about these grammatical trivialities in casual conversation, as der, die, das, and dem pretty much all become dɛ when speaking quickly, there’s something alluring about mastering such absurd complexity. Understandable.

Well, it turns out that at least in French, native speakers can’t make up their minds about gender.

Fifty-six native French speakers, asked to assign the gender of 93 masculine words, uniformly agreed on only 17 of them. Asked to assign the gender of 50 feminine words, they uniformly agreed only 1 of them. Some of the words had been anecdotally identified as tricky cases, but others were plain old common nouns.

[…]

There’s an even more interesting twist in Ayoun’s native-speaker results. Her native speakers fell into two groups: 14 adult speakers and 42 teenage speakers. On most grammatical tasks, for all intents and purposes, teenagers’ native-language abilities are identical to adults’ abilities. But when she broke down the gender-assignment task results by age, she found that teenagers showed considerably more variation than the adults. On the 50 feminine nouns, for example, the 14 adults all agreed on 21 of them, while the 42 teenagers agreed on only one: cible, ‘target’. Of the 93 masculine nouns, the adults agreed on 51 of them, while all adults and teenagers agreed on only 17 (of 93!!)

Must be all those damn lolcats. (I would so love to see lolcats in French.) While it’s quite easy to have a “damn teenagers” attitude about this, I’ve found it quite remarkable here in Bavaria how many of my German peers seem able to flip effortlessly between blessed High German and whatever dialect is native to them (e.g. Bavarian, Frankish, Swabian). While it could be construed that such frequent transition would facilitate the proliferation of variation and inconsistencies, I must note that the young people I speak with very consciously categorize their speech patterns. In other words, they know that in High German it’s “die Butter,” and that only the goofy old Bavarian people around town say “der Butter.”

Polyglotism has a lot going for it, to be sure. I’m not convinced, however, that it contributes as substantially to the occurrence of linguistic variation as monolingualism does. Either way, I’m damn glad to know that it’s “wegen des Regens.”

I remember the first time I came to Munich, about two years ago now, I was stunned at how quickly and drastically the weather patterns could change.

I still have a vivid memory of drinking in a beer garden with some friends, enjoying the glorious late July sunshine in the park, when hordes of patrons suddenly started scrambling for their bikes and heading home. Whole tables were freed up in a matter of minutes. (I think empty tables in a beer garden in July is a sign of the apocalypse.) My friends and I thought that maybe the beer garden was closing soon, but quickly realized the absurdity of such a notion.

Within minutes black clouds rolled in overhead and there was an epic downpour. We tried to join the masses huddling under the safety of the Chinese Tower in the beer garden, but the crowd was packed so tightly we had to press against people to avoid the sheets of water cascading off the upper levels, making a really cool waterfall inches from our chests.

Check out this picture, taken earlier this year, on an afternoon that couldn’t decide whether to be pleasant or apocalyptic.

This morning, Jesse comes knocks on my door and wakes me. I told whoever it was to come on in, and when Jesse sees me still in bed, he asks whether I missed the storm this morning. Upon hearing that yes, I did miss it, he asks again in disbelief, describing the intensity of the storm, and how there’s no way I could have slept through it. He caught his tongue on that last part, as everybody here knows I can sleep through just about anything.

Apparently there were powerful winds beating the building all day, following by pouring rain, then snow for about 10 minutes, and finally glorious sunshine. I got up and joined him on my balcony and sure enough, there was snow in the courtyard, which melted quickly in the golden daylight and vanished within the hour.

I thought this was an interesting occurrence. Later this afternoon, however, I learned that Germany had a freaking hurricane today. This makes sense. Last night, while watching a movie in my room with a bunch of friends, the wind started to pick up. It got so bad that the pair of jeans I had hanging on a nail out on my balcony were completely horizontal, hanging by a single beltloop. More pictures of the devastation here (article in German).

Fortunately, being all the way at the south of Germany, there’s no discernible damage here. But I watched the news with a friend today, and there’s bad flooding and destruction up north.

Oh, well. I’ll go back to enjoying this tranquil Bavarian evening, balcony doors open and my curtains stirring softly.

Hanging out with a bunch of friends, so don’t have much time for a post, but I thought this warranted special attention.

I loves it.

I am not a web designer. But I am someone who likes to complain. I should probably look into being a full-time copy editor, because I’m just so compulsively critical. This example, though, from PBS.org’s homepage yesterday, is something that pretty much everyone can complain about.

Doesn’t that look like Castro’s brother won an Oscar? Or that the golden-man-baton of presidency was conferred upon him?

Ridiculous.

Until I got my camera jacked at a party because I was intoxicated and relatively inattentive, I took pictures everyday. Of everything. People always asked me why I wanted to take pictures of such mundane things, and I almost always replied, “It would make a nice desktop.” For instance, check out this picture of a rusted fire hydrant. The full resolution version (I had only a 3 megapixel camera at the time, I believe) makes for one of my favorite desktops ever.

Honestly, I spend so much time in front of my computer that it’s really important to me that it be a visually pleasant experience for me. So understandably, I was quite thrilled when I found this masterpiece, which now graces the altar of volume icons that is my desktop.

Epic or what? It seems this is a portrait prepared by Todd Lockwood for a World Of Warcraft card game. Something tells me we’ll never see it implemented.

(As always, click images to see a larger version.)

Everyone’s supposed to have seen the “Yes We Can” video by The Black-Eyed Peas by now. It’s a nice effort. I find it interesting how much high-profile support the Obama campaign has garnered. A complement to that, of course, is the irrational vitriol against Hillary gushing out of every media outlet. But that’s the topic of another post.

I just wanted to share a great parody of the “Yes We Can” video, ripping on McCain for being a nutso hawk.

Great stuff, isn’t it? The “Bomb-bomb, bomb-bomb Iran” comment was especially hip.