| krank |
[Nov. 24th, 2009|10:39 am] |
So ... shit. I picked up some kind of viral eye infection. In the span of 6 hours I went from normal to one eye swollen mostly shut. I can look forward to the other eye taking part in the fun soon. Because the virus is very communicable, I am what's known as "krank gescrieben", that is, I have a doctor's note to stay home the rest of the week.
I think about this and shudder at how it would have went under the American health care system. Here I basically called up my doctor at 8:30, found out what I need to do (it turns out a general practitioner here doesn't treat eye infections), called up a totally new eye doctor I hadn't seen before and saw her 90 minutes later. No Appointment, just walk in at 9:30. I got a prescription and was told to stay home. It cost 10 euro. |
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| Yo La Tengo |
[Nov. 23rd, 2009|08:17 pm] |
Yo La Tengo tonight in Astra (affectionately known as the Hartz IV area) ... I'm totally excited to see them. Such a long way ... and on a school night :)
jetzt geht der Abend los! |
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| visiting |
[Sep. 20th, 2009|10:52 am] |
Hi, looks like I haven't written in a while. It could be the summer slump, I don't know, maybe I just haven't been a little less plugged in recently.
Anyway I have a bit of news... I will be coming to Boston to visit in late October. I'm really looking forward to seeing a lot of people, it's been about 2 years since I moved away and I have only been back for a very short trip more than a year ago. It's amazing that it's already been that long. Cambridge in my mind is frozen in 2007.
I'll be going up to Homecoming at Dartmouth as well, so I hope I'll see a lot of people there too. |
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| happy Swiss National Day |
[Aug. 1st, 2009|09:49 pm] |
Happy Swiss National Day! We have a Swiss bar down the street where we celebrated. I had a Cervelas and a swiss beer that I can't recall the name of, but it was good. More of a belgian style than German.
Then a choir sang some beautiful and difficult yodels. This was actually even cooler than it sounds, if you can believe it. |
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| das Klammbrett |
[Jul. 10th, 2009|07:46 pm] |
A collegue of mine said how he has a Klammbrett by his bed so that he doesn't forget stuff.
"Was ist ein Klammbrett? Like a blackboard?" I asked.
"Yes." Answered a third college. "Well, not exactly, there's a specific word in English for it. It's a board with a clip".
"A clipboard?" "Yes."
"Nee ...", answered the college with the Klammbrett, "Clipboard ist Zwischenablage." |
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| my friend's observations on american tv |
[Jul. 4th, 2009|10:54 pm] |
My Pakistani friend and I just watched the Sox game over the internet. He's a cricket fan so I watched a Pakistan game with him, and this time he would watch the Red Sox on July 4th. At some point near the 7th inning, he remarked,
"All the ads are for food, and they keep showing random people eating!"
which I had to admit was true and did strike me as a little odd. Especially when it's the broadcasters in their booth eating burners behind a closeup of a Dunkin Donuts sign, and this has nothing to do with the game whatsoever.
Then during the seventh inning stretch we saw the independence day celebration, a uniformed soldier singing 'God Bless America' in front of an enormous 50ft tall flag hanging on the green monster while jets flew over. Now, I understand nationalistic displays are appropriate on national holidays, I just find it a little odd that it's during a sporting event, and that this itself is not particularly notable. Singing about God and Country and having jets and giant flags actually have meaning, and that's good to celebrate your country.
What's odd is when the celebration lasts 5 minutes and casually interrupts another event. Ponder this for a minute. |
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| more English errors |
[May. 14th, 2009|07:14 pm] |
2 things to note on the way-past-immersion thing.
First, I asked an American tourist in the train station if he could make a picture of us. :(
Second, the number one written the American way now looks wrong. I expect it to have a serif to the left which extends about 3/4 the way down to the base so that it looks like a little hat.
that's all. |
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| The Torture Memos |
[Apr. 21st, 2009|10:36 am] |
One of the things people are saying now about American torture is that we the people don't really want to know about it. Americans don't want to think about it. I believe that a large percentage of them just want to be safe, and they don't want to know. They think these things are done and need to be done, that there's a purpose to them.
If you read the memos though, we find that one particular terrorist, Khalid Shaikh Mohammed -- I'll call him a terrorist right out, my point is not to reduce what he's done -- was waterboarded 183 times in one month. I want to know what the purpose of the 4th time was. The 99th time. The 182nd time. What changed between the 182nd and the 183rd time, where the interrogators decided, it's not necessary anymore? What did they learn after the last time that made them decide to stop?
Obviously, nothing. It was not necessary to waterboard anyone 183 times. The point was simply to inflict wanton cruelty on a prisoner.
You have to break the prisoner, so that he believes there's no more hope, so that he'll tell you what you want to know. That's the idea anyway. Yet I don't believe that Khalid Shaikh Mohammed withstood 182 sessions of waterboarding and then broke on the 183rd and suddenly started talking. I think he told them whatever they wanted to hear and they continued torturing him for a month.
They tortured prisoners for revenge. That was the point. And when they had taken revenge, they kept torturing because they could. Legally, these are war crimes.
I sense though that people think this is different. The entire premise is that America is a free democracy, and it's not the Nazis or Soviets or Pol Pot. Plus we are at war. We are a legitimate country but our enemy is not. This rogue group, Al Qaida, is outside of the system. That's what America argues allows us to hold terrorists outside the Geneva conventions. They aren't soldiers, they are terrorists. Al Qaida isn't bound by laws and doesn't know boundaries of decency or humanity, they judge all Americans to be guilty and they will behead prisoners on camera and torture. We're different because we don't do that.
Except now we do. We don't follow our own laws when it comes to the war on terror. We recognize no human rights. There is no point to waterboarding a man 183 times, other than the fact that you hate him. The goal is not to beat the enemy but rather to maximize his suffering.
And America seems more or less okay with it. 250,000 people across America protest what is for 95% of them a tax decrease. The same week, memos are released where a lawyer concludes "Confinement With Insects" is a valid interrogation technique so long as the prisoner isn't lied to and told the insects are poisonous. Doesn't it all seem too absurd to be real? Has the country gone mad, has the country drifted so far from moral standards that they can't recognize something which is acutally dangerous? Realize what has happened in plain language.
America reserved the right to sport accused enemies of the state to secret prisons to be tortured, not for information, but in order to torture them because they are the enemy.
Orwell understood something about government torture: "We know that no one ever seizes power with the intention of relinquishing it. Power is not a means, it is an end. One does not establish a dictatorship in order to safeguard a revolution; one makes the revolution in order to establish the dictatorship. The object of persecution is persecution. The object of torture is torture. The object of power is power. Now do you begin to understand me?"
Tell me, now that we have proof that the USA started down this road, is it possible to back up and all agree to act like it didn't happen? This is a compromise born out of absurdity. In 8 years when it's a different president, when he says "America does not torture" will anyone believe him? Or will questions of torture be written off as old news? It matters, what America does about it today. |
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| On billboards |
[Apr. 12th, 2009|10:03 am] |
"Do laws that discriminate against outdoor advertising discriminate against every other medium? The answer is yes–if you regard Outdoor as an advertising medium, which I don’t."
www.howtolookatbillboards.com
I thought this was somehow obscure since I found it somewhere in my newsreader, but it's actually from kottke. I'm posting it anyway. |
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| Führerschein und Warteschleifenmusik |
[Mar. 16th, 2009|08:40 am] |
2 small observations:
I get to transfer my Massachusetts driving license for a small fee, while certain other states have to take an exam. The regulations about Mass drivers are recognized and appreciated by the Germans! This is very lucky, as getting a German Driving license from scratch will easily cost over 1000 Euro.
The music on hold when you connect to the Berliner RMV is a midi elevator music version of Eine Kleine Nachtmusik. You have to love how entirely sweet they are when dealing with the bureaucracy. |
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| Willkommen bei Hannover |
[Feb. 27th, 2009|12:15 pm] |
This time the trailer is heated! Tis the season to fill up on bad Wienerschnitzel und Gummibärchen.
Hannover is the Kansas of Germany. Not much changes, it's not a particularly edgy or interesting place, and it's mostly notable for having the most neutral German accent. It fits; Hannover is a very neutral place.
I am working until 10pm each night on fixing problems ... I think today thankfully there are no fires to put out and hopefully it stays that way. The show begins in 3-4 days so it's the final push. Looking good ... |
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| no pause |
[Feb. 23rd, 2009|10:59 pm] |
aw hell, I wish I got a chance to write to yall, I have a backlog of things that I am meaning to comment on. It's just too busy, too much of a rush to get things done that when I get a break to stop then it's not at the front of my mind to write anything down. I know it's not unusual, but I just have a hard time forcing myself to do stuff. Just like everyone.
So, tomorrow I go to Hannover. Hannover is like the Kansas of Deutschland -- they speak the language with a perfectly neutral accent, but it's kind of a boring place. I am there for CeBIT which starts in something like 2 weeks. I am there for the Aufbau um zu unterstützen, which means I could have a lot of work or very little work. Probably a lot towards the end. Maybe I get a short break but even that's being optimistic.
In ein bisschen Cool news, I was an extra in my Roommate's film this weekend. Very interesting how much work it is to film. And while you're a part of it, everyone is watching you. All the external things go right one time, synchonicity, and then everyone knows that the shot was *right* , even though no one did anything different. It's odd. Nothing was different but it just clicked. And then you move on to the next shot. And then it's over.
Then you step out of the train that you've taken over for 4 hours, and suddenly you're back in the real world. It's not special anymore. Weird. But a ton of fun.
Okay, muss ich einpacken. Two weeks in Hannover, so viele Spaß.
Es tut mir wirklich leid, ich will mehr aufschreiben aber es gibt immer was anders zu tun. Ich kann nicht micht beklagen. |
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| sick |
[Jan. 18th, 2009|01:02 pm] |
I hate flying. The 11 hours in a plane with recycled air, then the not being able to sleep for a week, and what do you know I've picked up a cold now. So I don't know if I should force myself to wake up at a reasonable hour to get past the jetlag, or just sleep until noon on the weekend because I need the rest.
Plus the Bürgeramt hasn't returned my email requesting an appointment, and I need to get my Visa renewed and soon. I am going to have to start to get pushy tomorrow, something I am overall quite bad at, and I am in no mood to worry about this stuff with my trouble sleeping and feeling ill and having a lot of stuff to finish up at work before the release at the end of the month. Of course the wrong time zone and busy at work problems will be replaced by a much bigger problem if my visa gets ignored.
At least everything shuts down on Sunday so that I can get a little more rest. |
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| an announcement |
[Jan. 17th, 2009|12:34 pm] |
Geklaut von Metafilter:
"On another note, since the weekend has begun and there is no government on Monday, President Bush's term of service is effectively over right now. Right now.
posted by Astro Zombie at 3:09 PM on January 16" |
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