Jumbo Barking

Spreewald

Karin and Donna (my buddy from German Class)

Donna and Tim

Spreewald is a little resort down in East Germany. It's where all the trapped people used to vacation before the wall came down. There are cool canals (almost like Amsterdam, but not quite) running through the villages. And they're famous for their pickles, the official pickle of the DDR. You can buy little buckets of garlic pickles on the side of the road.

Donna and Tim are from California (the Bay Area). Tim has a PhD. in European history with a concentration on German political activism in the 60s. He's here on scholarship, doing research. Donna's a nurse who has (temporarily) sold her soul to the German language. Donna plays bass and sings, and Tim plays guitar and sings. I just found out yesterday that they once opened for Neko Case who I love! Unfortunately (for Karin and I) they're both moving to Boston in June.

Arabic Birthdays

People in Arabic cultures don't know their birthdate and don't celebrate their birthdate. If they need a "date of birth" for an official document, such as a German driver's license, they just make one up. Needless to say, they're not big fans of astrology either.

Ivory-billed Woodpecker

A researcher in Arkansas spotted and filmed a bird that scientists thought was extinct, the Ivory-billed Woodpecker. According to the BBC, to biologists it's kind of like finding out that Elvis is still alive.

Debbie "I Want Blue" Dickerson

I was thinking about Debbie Dickerson last night during an attack of insomnia. She was my first best friend. Well, I was a friend kind of like a weak cell mate becomes a boyfriend in prison. Wait -- let me rephrase that. What I mean is that she kind of *made* me her friend and you didn't argue with Debbie. Sometimes I think that Madonna is really Debbie Dickerson (except that Madonna's a bit older). Picture a mini Madonna and that's Debbie. They have the same style. You can see it in the face. Pretty and smart, but manipulative and domineering. Slightly evil, but you want to be around them nevertheless. When I first met her (at age 10), I was still hanging around with the boys on the block. She kind of showed up at the fence one day and stared at me like Damien from "The Omen" until I walked over in a trance and signed a contract. We had fun though. Here are some of the things I remember about her kooky family:

1. There were nine kids from three separate fathers.
2. Her mother was always standing in the kitchen with a million dirty dishes and her voice was always horse from screaming.
3. One time Debbie's mom put hot pepper sauce in Bobbie's mouth because of something he said.
4. Dougie used to bang his head on the wall every night in his sleep and say: "A-Momma, a-momma, a-momma." He had a permanent red spot on his forehead because of it.
5. One of her twin sisters broke her left arm falling off the porch and then the other one broke her left arm less than a week later. People Magazine came out to do a story about them.

To be continued ...

To Bury or Not To Bury

Are there alternatives to burying or cremating dead people? Yes, but they're not popular. Why should alternatives be explored? Because burying and cremating bodies is bad for the environment and, in some countries, the cemeteries are filled to capacity. Because of this, people in all parts of the world are considering other methods. For example, a man in India has stated in his will that, after he dies, he wants his body to be left in the forest as food for the wild animals. This is, of course, the way it used to be. Humans would die and their bodies would remain wherever they happened to be at the moment of death, and afterwards wildlife would take care of the remains.

Laurie Anderson

As part of her new project, Laurie Anderson, spent a month or so living with an Amish family.
She had high expectations, imagining that she would experience some heightened sense of intimacy since the Amish are a tightly knit group, untouched by media and other social polutants. As it turns out, she found the whole thing very depressing. What she discovered was that the Amish don't know how to talk to each other. They sit together at dinner and just stare. Maybe all they need is a subscription to Newsweek magazine.

"Paradise is exactly like where you are right now -- only much, much better." -- Laurie Anderson

Magic Motorcycle Ride

People often ask: How did you and Karin meet? But what they really want to know is when the magic started. So, we met at a party in San Francisco. But the magic started when she took me for a motorcycle ride through the Presidio. I was sitting behind her, afraid to hold on, and she kept speeding through stop signs so eventually I had to.

I'm busy trying to get together some old pictures of my mom for her 80th birthday party. Here's one of her in 1940 at fifteen. I like this picture. It was taken by someone in the neighborhood who was probably about 17 at the time.

German Poem

Here's a poem I wrote in German class today (and people think I'm not working hard!):

Das Leben ist wie eine Achterbahn.
Manchmal sind wir nach oben.
Manchmal sind wir nach unten.
Wir müssen uns festhalten.
Und wenn du schreist,
werde ich dabei sein.
In dem Sitzplatz neben dir.

English translation:

Life is like a rollarcoaster.
Sometimes we're going up.
Sometimes we're going down.
We have to hold on tight.
And when you scream,
I'll be there ...
In the seat next to you.

Modest Needs

I was really impressed the other day when I heard about the guy from Munich who bought the domain name www.Pabst-Benedikt.de a day or two before the Pope chose a name. He researched Ratzinger and determined that there was a good probability Ratzinger would choose the name Benedikt. So, he spent 5 bucks on a domain name and sold advertising to a big publishing company for 10.000 euro. It makes sense since Ratzinger has written lots of books and the site, pabst-benedikt.de, gets about 100,000 hits a day. Anyway, now I'm hearing about a guy from Florida, Rogers Cadenhead (on the left), who did the same thing, but he's not selling the domain name on eBay or selling advertising, he's just using www.BenedictXVI.com to direct hundreds of thousands of people to a charitable organization called ModestNeeds.org.

Pferdefleisch

You can get horse meat on your pizza here.

Why do humans have to eat everything?!?

The Cerebral Workout

There's one thing that keeps concerning me in life. Why is it that Germans like to read on the weight machines? I've never seen anything like it in the U.S. They sit there for extended periods of time reading books and newspapers instead of exercising. I mean, it's not really what I would call comfortable seating. Sometimes, I find myself waiting for a machine while some guy is sitting there absorbed in a novel. It ain't right. He should be doing three sets of 15 with no more than 5 minutes of rest in between, dammit.

Sanddorn

Okay, this is Sanddorn (sallow thorn). See the bush with the little berries on the label? I bought this half liter of pure sanddorn at a market the other day. Very bitter or sour, I'm not sure which one. But it's good in yogurt with a bit of sugar, stevia extract, or whatever your sweetener of choice is. 

You Decide

We have a new German teacher and today was her first day. At some point during the grammar lesson I pictured her falling in front of the class, and I thought: That would not be good. In other words, I didn't *want* her to fall! But about 20 minutes later, she fell. She tripped on the legs of the chalk board and her knees hit the ground. Psychic moment? Or was it just that I looked at the legs of the chalkboard and predicted in a matter of fact way that she would fall?

Dear Mr. Pope,

Don't you understand love? It's not something that a gigantic super structure like the Catholic church needs to squash. Really. Love isn't hurting anybody. The men in Spain who want to spend their lives with other men, and the women in Spain who want to spend their lives with other women, aren't out to destroy the world. They just want to be with a "puzzle piece" that fits. Is that so terrible? Is it really fair to call gay marriage "evil?" I mean, evil is a pretty strong word. Are gay people really such a threat to civilization? Or is the bigger threat in our world today coming from religious extremists who crash planes into buildings and blow up trains in the name of "God?" 

Sincerely,
Nancy "Forever Evil" Thompson

LISA

Einstein said that planet Earth is like one big bubble and gravity keeps us clinging to the surface of it, and the bubble is expanding on its way to an inevitable dead end. Eventally stars will blink out and oceans will freeze over. Before Einstein was born, a priest in the 1600s theorized along these same lines and consequently, the church folk burned him alive because he challenged everything they believed about God. Nice, eh? Anyway, the physicists of our time believe that the cosmos is not made up of only one bubble, but many bubbles that sort of sprout out from each other. As it turns out, we may not be a universe; we may be a multi-verse. And the Earth could have been "born" from another parallel universe; a bubble from a bubble more or less. Anyway, sometime in the next ten years (around 2011) scientists will be launching the world's largest satellite system, L.I.S.A., to help explore these "multiverse" theories among other things. L.I.S.A. is actually three satellites connected by lasers and they create one big satellite that's three million miles long! It will be one colossal triangle in the sky gathering information (vibrations) from stuff like black matter that's invisible (due to lack of light), but can be understood according to gravitational pull. In fact, they've already "bumped into" things out there that might be parallel universes. One more thing Einstein said about the cosmos: It was something like, "Harmony like this could not have been an accident." He thought of the cosmos as God's brain. But he didn't believe in Genesis; God as a being saying  "let there be light." 

Nice. Photo from snowsuit.net in Detroit.

GAZELLE. A bike on tranquilizers.

This is pretty much what my bike looks like (not this exact model though). It's a Gazelle made in Holland. I was pretty sure I wanted this kind of bike because it's really comfy to ride. It's like the Cadillac of bikes and we found one secondhand for a good price. But now, I want SPEED! And you just can't go fast on these things! Anna was right. I think it's better to have a more minimalistic, lightweight bike for the city. Live and learn. I do still like the Gazelle and I'm lucky I even HAVE a bike, for God's sake. I just feel myself getting into the whole "bike as sport" thing. Speaking of which, I hope Lance Armstrong wins his final Tour de France in July because it will be his last race ever and he's a good guy.

Frog Dreams!

I'm in big trouble now, according to this interpretation of frogs as symbols in dreams. Last night they were crawling all over me, and ... the "Jude Law guy" from my Russian German class was watching!

Mark Bittner and the Birds

I would love to see this documentary. Doubt if it will come to Berlin, but you never know. Basically, it's about a guy who cares for a flock of wild parrots living in an area of San Francisco called Telegraph Hill.
I can't tell you how many times I've walked those steps, looking up, hoping to see a parrot or two. You gotta take a look at his blog: The Parrot Pages. Or read the book. Lucky birds. And here's a picture of Telegraph Hill (from the book). Those steps go all the way up to Coit Tower on the left.