Author: john
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We’re legal!
Und so… Yesterday morning at a distinctly not-bright but early 8:00, we show up for one last go at the Ausländerbehörde visa office. Our friend Gülçin bravely met us there, despite the hour, to translate. In theory this was just supposed to be my visit, while Aimee would return next week. But when we got…
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When Hell freezes over
OK, a quick word of explanation. Last week I flew to Geneva to visit the Large Hadron Collider that CERN is building there, which will be the most powerful particle accelerator in the world by a factor of about 10 when it turns on next year. Amazing, inspiring stuff, which I’ll write about for Wired…
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Three cheers. Now comes the tricky part.
Hoorah for the Dems, two years, or four years, or six years late, depending on how you count. This will mitigate the disasterous policies that Bush is able to pursue. I expect it will make other congressional Republicans extraordinarily wary of agreeing with him in public. The next two years will be positioning for 2008.…
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Birthday snow
Snow for the Geburtstag. Who would have thought? We sat inside a warm Italian restaurant, and when the flakes began drifting though the lights outside, the normally staid Berliners erupted: “Das ist unglaublich! Was ist das!” Apparently this is earlier than usual. We, however, wandered home through the cold, running after the few flakes we…
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Enter winter, doing a little numerologist’s two-step
Today’s weather report (in that Fahrenheit system): Highs of 60, lows of 44. Tomorrow: Highs of 44, low of 30. Hello, winter. I particularly like that it’s not even going to bother heating up tomorrow. It’ll just pick up where it left off tonight, and keep on falling. That’s pure German efficiency for you. Needless…
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Melting the ice. And not in that $#^#$ GOP way…
My German teacher (and official saint-of-the-month) Christian says there’s only one way to deal with German bureaucracy. You don’t push hard. You don’t plead, you don’t argue. You melt the ice. Und jetzt: The ice is finally melting. We visited the Senate office for Business, Work and Women (don’t ask) today, and met with Frau…
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Reich online, a Web-style birthday
Last weekend the Whitney Museum in New York had its 70th birthday concert for composer Steve Reich, featuring some of the city’s best new music groups (Alarm Will Sound’s transcriptions of Aphex Twin tunes are a must for anyone who loves geeky contemporary and geeky electronic music). Now they’ve posted the entire 4-hour concert on…
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Pärt dedicates works to murdered Russian reporter
On this side of the Atlantic, the apparent contract killing of Russian journalist Anna Politkovskaya a few weeks ago has been big news. She has been consistently one of the strongest, and bravest, media critics of Putin and Russian policy. On the eve of publishing a big story about Chechnya, she was killed. Much speculation…
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We *are* in Mittel-earth
Spotted at the store, and of course taken home: Hobbit cookies. Or biscuits, it was unclear first exactly what they were. Bright orange wrapper, with “Hobbit” written in bold letters. And no, as far as we can tell that means nothing in German. Verdict: Oh, so delicious, for second breakfast AND Elevensies! Oatmeal cookie goodness.…
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Hurdy-gurdy, the automatic vioin
We were walking up Nerudova to the Prague Castle last week, when I heard around a corner a strange droning music, a little like bagpipes, but not at all reedy. We turned the corner and an old street musician was there, sitting in a chair, with an unfamilar stringed instrument in his lap . It…
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Just when you think you’ve got the paperwork down…
So, our Fiktionsbescheinigungen (temporary visa extensions) expire this week, so it’s back to the Ausländerbehörde to get real visas. We thought we were set; last time, we filled out documents, they sent our applications to the Arbeitsamt (work-permit office) to get our standing as self-employed journalists approved, and said it shouldn’t be a problem. This…
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Living under, or on, the medieval thumb
Somewhere, way back in history, a guy on a horse stumbled across a bend in the Vltava river, in what’s now the southern Czech Republic. Or not a bend — a whole series of bends, so that a little thumb of land was surrounded almost wholly by the river. He scratched his head for a…
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Help a writer. This is why the Net is groovy.
Here’s a confession: I’ve never made it through the Illuminatus trilogy, despite trying several times, despite it being a canonical text (or maybe symptom) of the conspiracy prone, paranoid culture that led also to Gravity’s Rainbow and, say, Dick Cheney. Now its co-author, cult hero Robert Anton Wilson, is apparently sick and poor, and close…
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Another Rome comparison. No, it’s not a happy one.
It’s getting way too easy to make comparisons between the current U.S. and the late Roman Republic. Sure, they’re not spot-on. But maybe someone there in Washington ought to be reading some Plutarch. Today in the NYT novelist Ed Harris points to a critical moment in the pre-Empire years, in 68 BC, when pirates attacked…
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The little steps on the way to catastrophe
So many people around the world believe Bush and Cheney and the rest are power-mad fools who have failed miserably in their Iraq war. It is sometimes hard to remember that they’re still in power. Dangerously so. Now Congress is ready to pass a law on so-called enemy detainees that goes against the spirit and…