-
A moment of mourning for lost sky-blue seas
It’s not that I don’t like Berlin. I do. It’s a fabulous place to live and work, to free yourself from the fetters of a daily office. But returning last night from a vacation in the Greek islands, the Hauptstadt’s foggy summer and distinct lack of crystalline blue Mediterranean shorelines were almost hard to take.…
-
Beating a dead Marx
I fear the good people in the Republican party are getting desperate. Not only are they bringing up the specter of communism once again,they’re even going all the way back to Marx (minus, of course, anything like fidelity to Marx’s actual ideas): Mitt Romney’s comments on Hillary Clinton: “Hillary Clinton just gave a speech the…
-
Rodent, run
Is this a bad omen? I’m riding down Kollwitz Str. today when a big gray rat runs across the street in front of me, apparently gets spooked by my onrushing bicycle of doom, and turns back right into my tires. I swerve a little, and feel a bu-UMP. I look back; it gets up, shakes…
-
To the East pt. 1: Witkacy
We’re back from two weeks in Poland, Hungary, and Romania, of which more, including pictures, later. But first a bit about Stanislaw Ignacy Witkiewicz, or Witkacy, a Polish artist who dominated that portion of our trip. The son of an impossibly stern 19th century artist and critic with Nietzschean ideas of modern education, Witkacy was…
-
Off to Mordor we go
Well, to visit Poland, Hungary and our friends in Transylvanian Romania, really. But this map here, which places Middle Earth on the real map, says we’re actually going somewhere in the vicinity of Mt. Doom. Probably will skip the whole destroying-the-ring-of-power thing this time around, but we should get some pretty good mountain views. Tho…
-
From the heavens, a phone came to save us all…
The iPhone is here. I already feel myself to be a better, more fulfilled person. I’ve heard that the problems in the Mideast are under control now, as a result, and the bombs they found in London today were really what you’d call celebratory, not aggressive per se. Simply by repeating the mantra, or should…
-
Back in the nation of daydreamers
Almost twenty years ago I brought home a cassette copy of Sonic Youth’s Daydream Nation from Cellophane Square records, stuck it in my parent’s car deck, and began an obsession with the band that hasn’t stopped. 1988 was a good year for me, music-wise; it was the same year that Nirvana started playing in Seattle…
-
Blind? You wish you had it so good, you pervert
From a health column in a Nigerian newspaper, a timely warning on the dangers of masturbation. That’s right, this means you, you pervy 98 percent of men and 89 percent of women: Nonetheless, other dangers of masturbation as spelt out by medical experts include psychological guilt. A chance masturbator stands the risk of nervous-depressing permanent…
-
I love the smell of hype in the morning
One reason I’m very glad I’m not covering daily technology news at this particular moment: I don’t have to be a bit excited about Apple’s iPhone. I’ve seen a lot of hype in my time, but this product pretty much wins the gold medal. Fully years of speculation. So much breathless writing since Apple’s pre-announcement…
-
A German fusion recipe to avoid
The task in front of me was simple: Make dinner with what’s in the fridge. I struck out a few times — no rice for the average stir-fry, no peanut butter for peanut sauce — but finally settled on a simple Pad Thai recipe. Aaaand then looked in the fridge. Real Pad Thai probably doesn’t…
-
Globalization’s ills, from the left and (even) the right
Economists these days are buzzing about addressing globalization’s problems, and particularly a growing income inequality in the United States that’s taken us back to 1928 levels — a particularly foreboding statistic, given 1929’s banner economic news. This has long been an issue on the left, but recent economic data, and the rising power of protectionist…
-
Happy Bloomsday…
…even in Berlin. …O that awful deepdown torrent O and the sea the sea crimson sometimes like fire and the glorious sunsets and the figtrees in the Alameda gardens yes and all the queer little streets and pink and blue and yellow houses and the rosegardens and the jessamine and geraniums and cactuses and Gibraltar…
-
Flickering storms and by-the-gallon rain
More crazy storms last night, lightning flickering outside so that we thought first, before the thunder was evident, that some light in our courtyard had started going south. Then came the rain, hard enough to make a monsoon downpour blush at the competition. We’d left a window open a crack, and I woke up again…
-
Ludwig II and his fairy tale half-life
Poor Ludwig II of Bavaria, a king that should have born in the middle ages, or better, inside the pages of some fairy tale; but instead presided over the loss of Bavaria’s sovereignty and the assimilation of his alpine wonderland into the decidedly less romantic Prussian empire. This Saturday we drove with T & K…
-
Slippery slope: from the big bang to netpr0n
The Economist writes about the new Creation Museum in Petersburg, KY, where bible-believing parents can give their tots a look at dinosaurs set into the context of creation; because everyone knows (or should) that the Tyrannosaurs were created in 4004 BC along with Adam and Eve, and that there were a few, probably young adults…