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Grand city, and cocktail robotics
I’m in Vienna for a few days, covering the extraordinary evolution of cocktail robotics. Roboexotica is an art show and technologist’s playpen, where towers of tubes and slides can make a decent mojito, a little blowtorch attached to a bottle can make what is by reports a truly awful (but fiery!) Spanish Coffee, and the…
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The winter sweats, and hallucinating trees
We wander through the city with our friends from New York, who we sternly warned to bring warm clothes, because, you know, Berlin winters are cold. Instead we get beautiful blue skies, sweatshirt weather. Last week one of the newspapers carried a complaining headline: “Unsere Wetter hat einen Fieber.” (Our weather has a fever). And…
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Bad jazz. Didn’t Dante have something to say about that?
There are some musical instruments, and harmonic progressions, that have moral implications. Hear me out. Take the soprano sax. Look at those initials. Coincidence? I think not.
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The beer really is better. But you have to hike for it.
Belatedly, our last week: We visited T. and K. last weekend in München, where they moved two months or so ago despite our extreme and desperate protests. Their new apartment is lovely, in a quiet neighborhood northeast of the old town, within a (long) walk to the University where T. is beginning his PhD program…
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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…