I am an American expat living in Germany. It's a far away land on the other side of the ocean. It's interesting and often weird here. If you read this and want to comment then email me at nate(the at symbol)chillmost.com. If you find any spelling or grammar mistakes, you can keep them.
Boy oh boy where to begin?
I will start with some geek stuff. At work we have been getting pounded by these worms, Netsky and MyDoom. We don't have to worry about getting infected because we have an almost all Mac network but our inboxes fill up with the messages anyway. 20 every time your email client checks your mailbox is pretty annoying.
So I try installing this filter based on a perl script that scans incoming messages for attachments. However, in order to do that I needed to install MIME-tools that run with perl. But that required an update to Perl 5.8.1. That required downloading, compiling and installing. I had never done that before and was always put off by things that required me to get down and dirty in the shell/Terminal. I usually look for a Mac OS X specific package somewhere and install that.
This time I couldn't find a package that worked. So I got my faithful Unix PowerTools and figured out some stuff, did some research and figured it out. So it was a very good experience. I'm very proud of myself.
So enough of that.
I've been tutoring this 11 year old in English. He had been getting 4s (kinda like Ds) and last week he had a test and got a low 2(B+). Tomorrow his parents are having me and M over for dinner to thank us. I get paid in beer, cigarettes, and the occasional meal. I'm not really comfortable with making money with it yet because I don't really know what I'm doing. What if he got an F and his parents shelled out cash? Then I would feel like I ripped 'em off.
All I do is go over the homework with him and explain why something is right or wrong, correct his spelling and work on the pronunciation. I think it is the extra one on one attention that makes the difference. I have no training in teaching so I don't really know what I could do better.
I did give him a copy of Sgt. Pepper's and told him to listen to it a few times and we will go through a song together. I'm thinking "When I'm Sixty-four" or "Fixing a Hole" or maybe even "Getting Better". The lyrics for those songs are pretty much straight forward. The other songs are a little too far out there to try to translate and explain to someone. We'll see.
I went to Hamburg last night see Damien Rice play. I heard a few songs beforehand and to be honest was not too excited but I was invited and M accepted the invitation on my behalf. It was a good show. Kinda of like David Grey but a little rougher around the edges and without the wacky drummer. For the encore, Vyvienne the cellist, played Seven Nation Army by the The White Stripes alone on stage. It was very cool. The opening act was Josh Ritter. Also good. Very entertaining. The show was at a club called Knust, which I am told means the heel of a bread-loaf in Low German.
So it looks like Kerry is going be the democratic candidate. I hope he's tough enough to deal with the super neocon republican media smear tactics that are sure to come his way. And seeing as he is a politician after all, I hope he will be able to dish it back out.
If I was voting with my conscience I would be voting for Kucinich. I voiced my support for him already a few times here. This time, however, it's all about beating Bush. Kucinich brought up some good issues and was a strong critic of Bush. Unfortunately nobody cared. I hope he never shuts up. He is the kind of strong critic that needs to be there telling it how it is. As far beating Bush was concerned, he never had a chance. So if Kerry is the one, so be it. Somebody has to beat Bush. I hope he does.
A cool video but I dunno about the song though.
Steriogram | Walkie Talkie Man
Getting ready to write a short entry when all of the sudden.....
Schatz, hab ich den letzten Zug verpasst. Kannst Du mich abholen?
Time: 12:30AM
I do it cuz I'm in love
I hate spammers.
But at least they provide me with something to do at work.
Yesterday I went to see an exhibit in Hamburg called Verbrechen der Wehrmacht. This controversial exhibit deals with the crimes committed by the German army during WWII. When one thinks about all the nasty stuff that went down back then, they usually think that the SS was behind it. This exhibit shows that the regular enlisted army was also involved in some of the atrocities especially on the eastern front against the Soviet Union.
The exhibit is pretty text intensive with photos and actual correspondence from back then, along with short video clips and interviews. Unfortunately, they don't have anything in English so if you don't speak German it will be hard to understand what it is about. It took a real long time for me to read everything because of the different military style language used in some of the displays but I go through.
It was pretty tough. A lot of scary horrible stuff went down back then. When you read about it you get a sick feeling in your stomach and you wonder how in the world could that have happened. Sometimes I find it really strange that this happened in the same country I live in and yet I don't see how it could happen here today.
I think that because of Germany's history Germans have their government on a much shorter leash than other countries. It seems that if people here are displeased with some sort of government policy they will voice their dissatisfaction en masse. And that's good. Some lessons have to be learned the real hard way. Anyway that is just the way I perceive it. Some Germans might disagree. But you don't have to ask a German what he or she thinks because he or she will tell you. Kinda of like how you don't have ask a rapper what his name is either. He'll let you know in the first 10 seconds.
Weird. I see an ad in "Der Spiegel" for Mazda. There is a red sports car, the new RX-8, blasting around a corner. Up in the right corner there is a barely visible face of the communist revolutionary Ernesto "Che" Guevara. He's looking down approvingly like a some sort of spirit from the afterlife. The tag line is, "How does one start a revolution? With the ignition key."
Although it is pretty cheesy it shows what kind of pop-icon revolutionary freedom fighter status Che has over here. I don't think, and I could be wrong, that you would see and ad like this in America. Using images of evil commies to help sell cars? In America? Doubt it. Just shedding light on a cultural difference.
