Heavy Metal Parkplatz


Every year, the quiet northern German farming village of Wacken becomes the site of the largest metal festival in Europe. South Korean documentary maker, Sung Myung Cho, recently went along to see how the locals deal with this annual weekend of metal mayhem. Here’s the trailer of the film that resulted. Via Metafilter

I want to see this. I think the metal fans in Wacken will kick the asses of the fans in this video….

Pink Delicious

Last night I did sound for local gender-crashers Tussika. It sounded good despite the setup. They played well despite being nervous. I haven’t mixed a live show in years. I still got it what it takes though. Somebody should hire me to do this. I’m really good at it. Being behind a mixer, either in the studio or live, is one of few areas where I really feel like I know what I’m doing. In the event that I don’t know, I can fake it pretty good.

After the show things got a little crazy, what with the 1€ drinks and all. Among the detritus of last night there are supposedly pictures of me that rule out any and all possibility I might have had left for running for political office. Instead I will just leave you with this…

Sniff

Dude!

The weather is awesome. It cooled off a bit there for about a week, but know the springtime is in full swing. The only bad thing about spring are my allergies. Sometimes it’s bad, sometimes I don’t notice.

Tonight I went to the Wunderbar to go see Mama Boom!. I have heard a lot of cool things about them. Hmmm. The band played very well musically. They definitely got the people moving, no doubt due to the awesome drummer holding it down and serving it up. The singer got on my nerves though, or as they say in this neck of the woods, got on my cookies.

I had to bail out early though because I had a sever allergic reaction to something. I started sneezing like crazy and my eyes started watering. It became difficult for me to breath and I started getting a headache. Maybe it was someone’s perfume. Maybe it was a dirty bomb. Whatever it was, I left and 5 minutes felt much better.

Alright off to bed.

okthnxbye

Summer in April

Tag Auf!

For the last few days the weather here has been fantastic. Shorts and T-shirt. I went roller-blading on Saturday from Rettmer to Amelinghausen and on Sunday I ran non-stop for 90 minutes. A new record. I am actually training for a half-marathon sometime in late June or early July. A year ago I would have never imagined I would be doing something like that but I am.

On easter weekend we had some visitors here and we went to Hamburg and pulled an all-nighter consisting of the Reeperbahn and the Fischmarkt. That was a lot of fun.

Now I am going to go check out a beer garden and enjoy the fine weather. Tomorrow the temperature is supposed to dive back down and clouds are expected to roll in.

How to Annoy Germans

I think I discovered the perfect way.

But first a little background…
In most places in Germany all plastic is recycled. It is all put into plastic yellow trash bags (Gelbesack) and they are hauled away about every 2 weeks.

Last Sunday night I briefly looked at our schedule that tells us when and what kind of trash is being picked up (zum Beispiel) and saw that Gelbesack was being picked up on Monday. I took our one bag and put in in front of the door, locked up and went to bed. In the morning, while waiting for my ride to work, I noticed that a few other houses had put their Gelbesäcke out as well. On my way home from work I noticed that all the bags were still outside. Hmmm. Some houses had quite a few. The hair salon up the street had a huge mountain of yellow bags piled up.

This is funny for two reasons.

  1. I looked at the calendar wrong. We just had pickup last week. No wonder I was the only one with bags in front of their door when I put it out there. Silly me.
  2. It also means that someone came outside or looked out the window and saw my one lonesome bag and thought, “Oh, heute ist Gelbesack.” Then they got theirs and put them outside the door. Some neighbors saw theirs and did the same. And on it went all the way down the street.

So now they have two choices.

  1. They can either leave them outside for 2 weeks, where they will be at the mercy of the elements (weather, wild animals, bored teenagers). They will also have to endure the disapproving looks from their neighbors that actually looked at the pickup schedule (Ha! Only about 4 or 5 it seems). Lord knows we can’t have that.
  2. Or they will have to bring them all back inside.

Ha! Ha!

So, there you go kids. Try it out in your local German city and see if it is as much fun for you and your neighbors as it was for me and mine.