Can’t forget a shout-out to my Chinese sista, Deborah aka Debo, who shares the town of Pittsburgh with the superheroes Grantastic and Ben Roethlisberger. Whatup / Go Steelers. Have a good’n y’all. Peace/Benno

Dog! The answer is dog, OK! Happy New Years! Chinese that is, bitches. No, but I’m granting myself some fevered poetic license at the moment considering that the virus I fought off a few weeks ago is back and wants revenge. Either that or the sushi from Thursday night was just a few ticks west [...]

Behold the American Embassy in Berlin (click pic for enlargment) …was there this morning @ 10:30 to see about some passport issues. We didn’t get far but the gatekeeper dude gave us a card with an URL (subtitled “United States Diplomatic Mission to Germany”) for filling out some forms and a 1.89 eur/min phone [...]

Susanne Osthoff (German archaeologist abducted-n-released in Iraq) is found with USD 5 grand in rubber-banded bills. The press says it’s most likely Germany did pay a ransom, to the tune of USD 1 million. As for the found bills, people don’t know what to think: did she just get compensated for her rough treatment or [...]

Starting mid-April, a new marathon ‘world series’ will begin, cover two years with Berlin, London and Chicago in between, before it ends in New York. One million USD will be split up between the five men and women who gather the most points between the five world marathons. REU / AP

Norwegian Ingrid Kristiansen, the only [...]

So the city is tearing down the Palast der Republik1, after the GDR demolished the WWII-bombed Prussian Hohenzollern royal castle on the same spot in 1950. Pretty sad if you’re a communist–or a historian. There are plans to rebuild the castle, but until they get the money2 it will be a simple and supposedly temporary [...]

Note: ‘hell’ is German for ‘bright’ so I’m not actually cursing.
A big snow dump truck just delivered on Berlin last night. I haven’t seen snow like this here since like, I dunno, ever. Anyway, last night was somehow way surreal. My good old friend Sara von Sweden is visiting and wreaking havoc (actually no, but [...]

Riding the U-Bahn today, I saw a middle-aged hipster lady with a skull-logo-emblazened skull cap reading the German translation of Kurt Vonnegut’s Slaughterhouse-Five (Schlachthof 5). I note this only for the benefit of my brother Micah, who would say ‘cool’ or whatever Chicago college liberal arts hipsters are saying these days.
Sara is inda hizzy. Malmö. [...]

I thought this was interesting. Walking back from Kotti via Dresdener Strasse this weekend, I noticed an air-masked, German-army-jacketed gentleman spray-painting a brick wall in front of an elementary school. Upon closer inspection, I see he’s doing quite the professional, stay-in-the-lines job. The colours and curves tastefully matched with the vicinity, nothing really grasping for [...]

Unbeknownst to me (until just now), comments have been bounced for the last two days thanks to WordPress 2.0’s stupid/awesome disk cache functionality. The problem has sinced been solved so y’alls can now again drop comments like a bunch of little comment smurfs. In case you have WP 2.0 and you want to disable caching [...]

Today was weird enough already what with two people at the office celebrating a birthday on the same day. It was weird enough with the birds flying upside down and people disappearing in my periphery.
I knew I shouldn’t have said anything about BVG a few days ago, but sure enough today (late for my early [...]

There’s only so many ways you can make eggs. You can fry, scramble, boil or poach, for example. Omlettes are good, but somehow about 55% of the time I manage to get a bit too creative and throw in something beyond the event horizon of what a normal omlette can withstand. Boiled eggs can be [...]

(This makes today’s blog entry easy.) A choice Witz sent to mission control1 this morning:
George Bush goes to a primary school to talk about the war. After his talk he offers question time. One little boy puts up his hand and George asks him what his name is. “Billy.” “And what is your question, Billy?” [...]

As far as I know, this is not in the English-speaking press, yet (dpa).

Remember that Disturbed song, “Get Down with the Sickness”? I always liked that one, as far as you can, you know, ‘like’ nu metal. So Friday night I start with an intensifying fever that doesn’t even try to let off until sweaty Saturday night, by which time the headache starts to kick in. By Sunday [...]

Hey y’all. If you got an email from my gmail account today asking you to join something called Frappr, sorry about that. I was just fooling around with it (a friend-mapping thingy that uses Google maps) and off went pretty much my whole email contact list. Yes, I know what a bcc: (blind carbon copy) [...]

…was Sommer vorm Balkon. I mentioned wanting to see this film a few days ago. You know for such a filmed (most recently Aeon Flux1) and film-loving city, there doesn’t seem to be enough films actually made in and about the city itself. Since Lola Rennt (Run Lola Run) there has been something of a [...]

Ah man, I was so happy to hear about Intelligent Design getting the smack-down in Pennsylvania. Dover, PA. (Wasn’t that the city near Grove City where the ‘boys’ went to play some billiards before your wedding, Deb0?) Way more then the divine initiative of the Prez, this is probably the most ‘controversial’ topic around my [...]

Just thought I’d say that as the clock was hitting it just as I sat down to write this. That’s all for now.
Oh yeah: King Kong is mos def worth seeing. It somehow reminded me of seeing The Empire Strikes Back when I was 10 years old. Kinda big, brash, dumb and romantic, like an [...]

At the front end of a new year, people like to make grand pronouncements and resolutions. It somehow seems appropriate that for many [adults] the first day of the year begins with a hangover (mine was mainly Ouzo-induced this time around) and proceeds with crawling across the floor trying to get a handle on things. [...]