Three

About this time three years ago I was arriving in Germany to start something new. I brought a huge Suitcase stuffed till bursting and a few hundred dollars in cash and was really nervous about what I was about to do. I was leaving my friends and family thousands of miles away. I didn’t speak the language. I knew only a few people. I had no job. Luckily however, I had a room in an apartment that I had never seen. I had Meike but we had never really spent so much time with each other like other “normal” couples do. I didn’t really know if it was going to work out between us or not.


I got to Lüneburg and crashed for a few hours and then it was time for “Tanz in den Mai”. I wasn’t sure what that was but I found out. Go here for more info. Two days later I was introduced for the first time to German bureaucracy as I had to register myself at the Burgeramt/Auslandsbehörde letting the local government basically know that, Hey I’m here and I’m a foreigner. then a few days later I signed up for German classes at the Deutschinstitut in Hamburg. A week later I started my classes.


The rest, they say, is history.

Not much new here. Just raging against the machine that is UPS. They are holding my iPod hostage.


I just saw and heard Dubya on CNN say “If we had something to hide we wouldn’t have met with them in the first place”, in regards to his and Dick’s unrecorded meeting with the 911 commission. Umm, excuse me dumbass. Didn’t you guys fight against having to testify under oath for weeks, months even maybe? The fact of the matter is that you didn’t want to. You tried to invoke your executive privilege, so that you wouldn’t have to testify. You arrogantly implied that, because you are the president, you don’t have to testify. The only circumstances under which you would do it, was if there was no public or private record of what you said. That makes quoting you hard doesn’t it? It sure makes it hard to hold you accountable for what comes out of your mouth.

Back when Clinton was president, I could never understand how some people could hate the president to much. I mean sure he was a bastard and he pulled a lot dirty things as well but he was getting it done somehow. When I read about all the crazy shit Bush has pulled and all the shit he will pull if he is re-elected (reinstating the draft for example) I now understand how someone can hate the president so much. Man, I miss Slick Willie


ANger!!!11

I had a fucked up dream last night:


Me and somebody, (was it Jens? Ben?) were at a Sonic Youth concert in California somewhere but it was Sonic Youth circa 1989. Thurston Moore was wearing a dress and Kim Gordon was super angry launching into one angry song after another. So we were there rocking out and we start hanging out with P!nk (as in M!ssundaztood). I’m not really into Pink although she often tells cool drug stories in interviews. Anyway we started rapping about records; “Did you hear the new 7-inch from so and so?” or “Isn’t that the side project from blah blah blah?” WTF?


Then I woke up and I was amazed at what a cool rock and roll experience I thought I just had, and I thought to myself, “Self, you gotta write about that in your blog.” So I got out of bed, walked over to the computer and only just then did I realize it had been a dream. So I went to work and decided to relay this story to y’all when I got home.

There you go. Interpretations as to what the hell that all means are welcome.

Hmmm. Very interesting. I’m gonna have to get the book. Courtesy of This Modern World


    Prince Bandar enjoys easy access to the Oval Office. His family and the Bush family are close. And Woodward told 60 Minutes that Bandar has promised the president that Saudi Arabia will lower oil prices in the months before the election – to ensure the U.S. economy is strong on election day.

Hmmm. Even more interesting…..

Courtesy of Scoop. Click here for full article.


    Given the recent scandals to the effect that the U.S. president was privy to the 9/11 plot, they might try to immediately announce the discovery of weapons of mass destruction in Iraq in order to overshadow the scandals and prevent a further decline of Bush’s public opinion rating as the election approaches.

    Sources in Iraq speculate that occupation forces are using the recent unrest in Iraq to divert attention from their surreptitious shipments of WMD into the country.

    An Iraqi source close to the Basra Governor’s Office told the MNA that new information shows that a large part of the WMD, which was secretly brought to southern and western Iraq over the past month, are in containers falsely labeled as containers of the Maeresk shipping company and some consignments bearing the labels of organizations such as the Red Cross or the USAID in order to disguise them as relief shipments.

There are sure to be some amazing pre-election discoveries this fall. Just wait and see. Tin-foil hat theories aside, it is stuff like this that makes Noam Chomsky sound frighteningly convincing.

Vincent: But you know what the funniest thing about Europe is?

Jules: What?

Vincent: It’s the little differences. I mean they got the same shit over there, that they got here, but just… just there is a little different.

Jules: Example?

Here.

NYC: It was a blast. I’m really grateful to my friend Bob for letting us stay at his place on the Lower East Side. It is so much better to be able to hang out with locals and check out their haunts rather than hang with tourists and watch them get drunk and spill hot-wing sauce on their midwest teddy-bear sweatshirts. It was especially good for Jens because he got to relax and hang out in NYC and just check it out at his own pace.

We pretty much just walked around and took pictures during the day and went out to bars at night.

My friend Bob is the type of guy that like to sarcastically suggest that you do stupid things that would have dire consequences. For example he’d say something like “Hey, why don’t you go over there and slap that cop in the face. It’ll be alright. He won’t do anything.” These comments can usually just be ignored.

In one of the bars we were in there was a large rambunctious dog barking and howling trying get its owner’s attention. Bob said, “Dude, you should go kick that dog. It’s just playing. It’ll be alright. He won’t do anything.” To which I replied, “Shut up dick, drink your beer.”

First let me say that this bar, 151 I think it was called, was very dark. A few moments later I got up to go to the toilet and on the way I kicked the dog right in the head. He was laying on the floor in the dark. The beast instantly latched its jaw to my foot and I could feel its teeth through my shoe as I yelled, more out of fright than pain. He let go and I went to the bathroom. When I came back Bob was very proud of himself for pulling the Jedi mind-trick on me.

A few minutes later while he was outside using his phone, I went to the toilet again and, remembering what had just happened, started to slow down in case of a dog laying in wait. Too late. This time I kicked it in the ass and the same thing happened all over again. Bob was very disappointed that he missed the second attack.