Filler post

I needed to post something to bump the picture of this fucker (below) off the cover of my blog when you first come to the site. It was making me ill. So here is a photo of Dresden I took on New Year's a few blocks from my flat:

Unfortunate advertising coincidence

Probably not the best time for the shaved head - black t-shirt - scowling at the camera look right next to the headline of the VA Tech gunman.

FOX News knows...what the nation should be concerned about.

"we report...you decide"

I mean, 4 days after the worst shooting in American history, the death of 32 young college students and professors, I guess FOX News has decided it's old news, we've had enough, let's move on to more important things, like, oh, what Alec Baldwin said to his 12 year-old daughter on a voice-mail message. That was the biggest headline on the FOX news webpage yesterday, when I grabbed 3 screenshots of the major news outlets.:

MSNBC and CNN chose to stick with the news of the largest gun massacre in US history, and the reaction of the shooter's family, even though we've been listening to this for 4 WHOLE days now. I mean, who wouldn't rather read "WHO's THE PIG?" about Alec Baldwin's tiff with his 12-yr old daughter and movie star mother Kim Bassinger.
Fox even has a special video news section on this breaking news.

If you actually read this story and listen to the voicemail, you hear an angry father getting mad at his young daughter that apparently he has little control of. This is not shocking. He calls her a little pig. Fox news really seems to have an agenda here to really go after Baldwin. I mean, this was not abusive, this was a parent maybe going a bit over the top in enraged frustration with a rebelling teenage daughter of movie star parents.
But that's not the point. The point is WHO CARES. IS this really national news?!?!
I wonder if the fact that Baldwin regularly speaks out against the administration and FOX has seemed to take a personal interest, especially Sean Hannity, in having a little war with Baldwin, has anything to do with this.

It's pretty sad when your whole news organization takes this to such a level as to take a personal voicemail tape leaked by a bitter wife to the media, and bump a story like the shooting death of dozens of college students that has stunned a nation for a personal grudge with an activist hollywood actor with a giant headline "WHO's THE PIG?"
Can't FOX TRY to have some dignity?

Aww nawww. NAWWWW. no. nooo.

I just realized today that I'm going to be in Finland for a conference the weekend of Bunte Republik Neustadt. This is thouroughly depressing. I had already started looking forward to this. This conference better be fun. Which it won't. Or at least productive. gah.
Here's a shot from last year. From by bedroom window. It's a 2.5 day party that is just. real. chill. good times. good food. crap I'm going to miss it.

Chickens Regulate

The chickens hold down this coop. I actually laughed out loud the first time I saw this.


From Cynical-C via Shakesville

Whew

Why oh why oh why, of all the planes in the military, of all the names to give planes, would you choose to mark your arrival in various middle eastern countries by emerging from deep inside the giant belly of the Spirit of Strom Thurmond? I mean, my God, it's like this administration is just trying to be as ridiculous as possible, just throwing things in everybody's faces, as if to say "are we that stupid, or is every move carefully calculated and we are actually this mean and insensitive? Take a guess, but you know what, it doesn't matter because you can't do a damn thing about it."

An now Dick Cheney, who probably isn't thought of as exactly the least xenophobic or racially tolerant American, arrives in the memory of the man who once said this.

Freitag Abend Abendessen Blogging

Tonight was German Biergarten-style: Bratwurst, Brotchen, Senf, Hefeweizen.
I'm going to miss the after-work biergarten trips....

Germans love Ketchup

It is surprising, as I would expect that only Americans really love ketchup, but Germans take it to a new level. It is not just for fries and burgers, but rather an all-in-one sauce/condiment/flavor supplement that goes with anything. Witness a snapshot I captured today at lunch (the name of the owner will remain anonymous at their request):

What we have here is a slice of pizza, rice, and some sliced cucumbers. On both the pizza and rice is ketchup. This is not very strange here. In fact, I have actually seen "Spaghetti with Ketchup" on a menu here. It can be pasta sauce, it can be steak sauce. I've seen it on turkey, I've seen it on fish.

Speaking of Ketchup, I found that your standard Heinz ketchup tastes different here. sweeter, maybe. And it feels so wrong, but they sell McDonald's brand ketchup in the stores, and I think it tastes better than the Heinz.

Shucks.

This was the first headline I saw this morning, actually first on the Fox news site. But this piece in the New York times is nice.

Kurt Vonnegut died.

I've only read one book of his to date, Slaughterhouse 5, given to me by my mother when I decided to move to Dresden. And it was good. I still want to read more of his stuff.

I've spent some considerable time trying to research exactly where in Dresden Vonnegut was during the firebombing. Curious to see from where he witnessed it, as he also describes somewhat in this novel. Surprisingly to me, there is very little info available on this. I thought maybe there would even be something around for tourists, surely American tourists coming to Dresden are curious about this too, right? There is hardly anything out there, even in all of the vast internet. And there are some false leads, too. For example, the Alter Schlachthof ("Old Slaughterhouse") on the north side of the Elbe, is NOT where Vonnegut was. But I was able to narrow down where he was to a complex of buildings that once housed slaughterhouses and now is also the site of the Dresden Messe, a kind of convention-center type thing. One article I found, that was in German, as far as I could tell said that, in fact, there is at least one underground slaughterhouse on the site still intact that was from that time. I couldn't find it though. I had even contemplated writing to Vonnegut to ask him if he could help me with this, but I figured he had much better ways to use his time. Although I read he had returned to Dresden much later in his life.

He had a brief appearance on the Daily Show with John Stewart recently, and while the 6 minute interview was nothing worth linking to, it was interesting to see him "in person", see his cynical humor at work. Now I feel actually I'm motivated to go back, find some of Vonnegut's interviews, pick up some more books, re-read Slaughterhouse 5. It's one not to miss, an particularly interesting for those living in Dresden.

The Pope: Just another Leftist Moonbat buying into the liberal media.

In his Easter address, the pope said "nothing positive" is happening in Iraq.
This will surely enrage the good folks in places such as Little Green Footballs and The Gateway Pundit, who regularly criticize the lefty-driven mass media for not telling us all about all the great and positive things happening in Iraq, while focusing on the day-to-day run-of-the-mill bad stuff, like hundreds of innocent people dying every week.

I would like somebody to ask Bush, or Tony Snow, or Dick Cheney, if they disagree with the Pope when he says that nothing good is happening in Iraq.

Samstag Abend Abendessen Blogging

Tonight is German-bachelor style: Instant Kartoffelbrei, instant Sauerkraut (Bayerische Art), Rotwein.

German Chocolate Cake is all Texan and NO German

One of my favorite cakes since I was little was German Chocolate Cake. I always assumed, as the name implied, that it was some variation on a German dessert. But living in Germany, I could not find a single German that was familiar with this cake. (of course they probably wouldn't call it German chocolate cake - like when I asked a friend if he got some good chinese food when he was in China - he was like "yeah, but there they just call it "food")
Of course the internet comes to the rescue and settles my confusion - German chocolate cake gets it's name from the type of chocolate bar originally used in the recipe, which was named after Sam German, an Englishman, in the 1800s. But the cake first appears in Texas in 1952 in a newspaper recipe submitted my a Dallas housewife. Score another one for Texas.



By the way, a popular cake in both the US and Germany that IS German is the Schwärzwalder Kirschtorte (Black Forest Chocolate Cake), of which I was recently treated to a large piece homemade by a real German.

"Fun" with Conservapedia


If somehow you haven't yet heard of or visited Conservapedia, by all means, check it out.
The idea behind it is that Wikipedia has an ultra-left leaning bias, and does not properly recognize or give credit to Christian and American beliefs/values. That Wikipedia has been also hijacked my liberal agenda-promoting editors that will not allow such things to be posted. Conservapedia's goal is to be unbiased. Conservapedia is still in its infancy, as evidenced by clicking the "random page" button, which most likely brings you to a page with a one- or two-sentence entry. But it may also stay there. Occasionally you do come across some real jems, which make visiting Conservapedia "fun", or, at least, kind of entertaining.
For example, there is an entry for Unicorn. Did you know that the existence of unicorns is "controversial"? There is even a drawing of a Unicorn skeleton, and clicking on it details that it represents the remains of a unicorn that perished in the great flood. Which also brings me to the entry for kangaroo. Unfortunately, the statement that kangaroos originated in the middle east has been removed. But you can still see the reasoning in the "origins" section - how else could the kangaroo made it on and off of Noah's Ark? (Interesting side note, there is a link to this very question "How did animals get from the Ark to places such as Australia?" - apparently the criticism that Noah could not have possibly traveled the world collecting animals is put to rest by the answer that he didn't have to - God caused the animals to come to Noah.)
There is a outline of decent length on the origins of the kangaroo. Three paragraphs relating to God's creation of the kangaroo and it's trip on Noah's Ark, and then two sentences on "other" theories, one on the Aboriginal theory that kangaroos were "sung" into existence by their ancestors, and the second on the evolutionary theory that kangaroos evolved from another animal that lived millions of years ago. The aboriginal theory is mentioned first.

If you look up Evolution, there is a lengthy entry, apparently discussing various aspects of the theory of evolution. There are 117 citations/references throughout. However, when you look closely, more than half of these are from the following sources:
answersingenesis.com (35)
creationontheweb.com (9)
creationscience.com (6)
creationism.org (4)
adam.com (3)
allaboutcreation.com (2)
creationresearch.com (1)
and the best,
evolutionisdead.com (1)

Clearly, these are the foremost authorities on Evolution.


Lastly, as a nod to the conservative American flavor of conservapedia, without the religious aspect, see the conservapedia entry for Heath Evans, a player in the national football league, and a relatively obscure one at that. I happened upon it from the random search. His entry contains 491 words. I then looked up Sigmund Freud and Charles Dickens, out of curiosity. Freud garners 212 words, and there isn't even an entry for Dickens. To be fair (or, rather, liberal-biased), I compared Wikipedia's entries for the three above:
Heath Evans 437 words, Sigmund Freud 9064 words, Charles Dickens 6047 words


Update: Also check out the entry for Beta Decay The only reference is "Wile, Dr. Jay L. Exploring Creation With Physical Science. Apologia Educational Ministries, Inc. 1999, 2000"

Classic Photo

The best part is this NY Times article never mentions anything about Cheney.
This couldn't have been better composed with photoshop



Maybe it's just a cardboard stand-up that the White House staff occasionally places to keep Bush focused during press conferences.

My new bag

I just got my new messenger bag. It's very exciting. It was a Christmas gift (thanks, mom) and the brand a recommendation from my brother. It's from Chrome. After 2 years of carrying around my laptop and a only little bit extra in a 10 euro backpack from the Schnäppchen-Markt at Karstadt Sport, it was high time for something bigger and better. And it IS big.

And it's brown, so it matches my bike.

Funny Work E-mails, Part 2

I just could not wait to post this one. This still cracks me up. Scientists gettin rowdy.

---------------------------- Original Message
Subject: parties
From:    "xxxx xxxx"
Date:    Tue, March 22, 2005 2:28 pm
To:      "MPI staff"
<MPI-cbg-staff@scan-srv1.mpi-cbg.de>
--------------------------------------------------------------------------

dear all,
parties are great and in particular our parties at
MPI-CBG are really  fantastic.
However you should remember that alcohol too much
gives work for our  cleaning ladies. Our toilets were
in an awful shape after the last  party. Please
remember this next time.
Moreover the use of tissue culture bottles for private
purposes, in this  case filling Sangria in this
bottles is not a good manner. Please bring  the
bottles back and do this not again.
Silke

--

Max-Planck-Institute of Molecular Cell Biology and
Genetics
xxxx xxxx
Pfotenhauerstr. 108,
01307 Dresden

Funny Work E-mails, Part 1

Hello Everybody,

against popular believe in this lab, deletion screen plates don't send off strange smelling fumes. In fact they smell like regular worm plates and certainly not like dead cat.

The smell seems to be coming from the hyperactive vacuum pump sitting under my bench and Gegenbau is going to take care of it.

So, don't panic.

Susanne

This was funny enough to me, but I imagine it is pretty strange to people outside of the lab or science. I'm tempted to go back through my old emails for more little gems now.

Sometimes the light way..is the RIGHT way...to enjoy the High Life....

These are some of the best commercials I have ever seen. I remembered "Scurvy" and "Deviled Egg" from when they aired on TV. But I had no idea there were so many! And so many are so good. And didn't know these were by Errol Morris. I really like the camera angles and depth of field tricks, and of course the guy's voice is priceless. They are soothing and funny and stereotypically masculine all at the same time.
Also particularly good are: (and I'm only halfway though)
Broken Window strikes a chord living in Europe now :)
Boat Yeah, I have an SUV, and my pops taught me how to tow things.
Cheating Can't say I'm there yet...but as a Texan....I understand
FlamZ
yes yes yes. This last one reminds me of a embarrassing and funny story. My first year in graduate school I was set up on a date with a nice young woman. I think it was the second date, and it involved going back to her house, getting a bite, and watching a video. She had a fireplace, and I suggested we make a fire, it'd be fun, and I could show off my masculine prowess at building and lighting a fire from scratch. Long story short - or rather short story shorter - I spend 15 minutes being a man building this "fire" and unsuccessfully getting it to light. repeatedly. But I wasn't going to give up. I mean, c'mon. But then her (female) roommate comes in, asks if she can help, and in about 20 seconds has the logs and kindling rearranged and then lit. beautifully. I don't remember exactly, but there may have even been some sort of light arguing on how to build a fire just prior to that. Anyway, that was the last date this girl decided she wanted to see me....:)

Following the Elbe

I was looking back at some pictures from when my friend Julie visited over New Year's and found these two from the train back from Prague. I didn't notice before but they look interesting juxtaposed with similar colors of the blue, red, tans.....

(taken with my phone - not too shabby, eh?)

Sachsens Kneipen bald rauchfrei

I don't believe it. No way. This can't be true. No more smoking in bars in Saxony? I mean, Germany has been about the last civilized country holding out on this, and I thought it would never happen. As it is all bars AND restaurants are all-smoking, all the time. I think the smoking sections in restaurants in Texas went away in the 80s. But even with these changes, restaurants will still be allowed to have smoking sections here.

But wow, this is great news. I think I get headaches from the quantities of smoke inhaled at bars here. And who would have thought in the 21st century you would still be sitting enjoying an elegant meal at a nice restaurant and the guy behind you lights up a nice long smoke, ruining your meal completely? And with nowhere in the restaurant to find shelter.

I have to say, though, alot of my friends won't be so pleased.

And I do have to wonder what of Hebeda's, the bar down the street, who's ambiance is largely based on the smoky/cozy/dive-bar feel. but it's also my favorite bar in Dresden, even with the horrible smoke. I hope it just gets even better, and doesn't fade away.

Luckily, in any case, I've already taken a few pictures for prosperity:

Taken with 35mm SLR



Carsten in the back room - Taken with my digital Canon S40

Taken with my cell phone

Hebedas has a kind of DDR feel to it, which is quaint. And the beer is cheap. 1 euro 80 I believe for a half-liter Beck's. And there's usually good music. And it's about 30 seconds from my flat. I sure hope the vibe stays.