Metamorphosism

Baryton

A baryton (that's what they call it here, not sure if it has the same name in English) is... what. Like if you had a cello and a gambe? And they mated and the egg hatched? It might be a baryton? Lots of strings - maybe six in front, and more behind the neck to be plucked with the left thumb. The neck is 3 times as wide as normal, because it has what looks like a resonance thing alongside it, for those rear strings. Of which there must be a dozen, judging from all the tuning pegs.
And the whole thing is topped off with a carved head of a guy.
And it was built in 1651, approximately. Mid 17^th century, anyway.
And it's being played by an instrument geek, played well, in a trio (violin/viola and cello, 18th century instruments) in the Ruprechtskirche, Vienna's oldest church.
Josef Haydn and Andreas Lidl.
Alpha and I were there last night, with Jessica and Brendan, the famous bloggers. You would think, with music that good, and company that interesting, and pews that uncomfortable, in a church that cold, it would be harder to fall asleep, but I managed. And I wasn't the only one, people were nodding off all over.
Still, it was brilliant.
The whole day was.
Here, if a sausage isn't unhealthy enough for you, they will wrap one in cheese and bacon and fry it if you want, and call it a Bernerwuersterl. I had one for lunch just to demonstrate it to our visitors. For dinner, we weren't very hungry so we all had sausages standing up at a sausage stand prior to the concert (we were standing up, the sausages were lying down, sliced into pieces).
We did a lot of walking.
We looked at a courtyard.
We had coffee at the Hawelka coffee house, which is miraculously still run by the original owners, who were in their seventies twenty years ago when I first went there. They are still there, ancient and sweet and apparently in love.

Okay, so someone else pitched the tent

Look, seriously, swear to god, Jessica just called, I'll just dart into Vienna for just a sec and pick them up, she and Brendan want to go for a ride in the Dobló and see the kids, be right back, it'll only take a sec, I'll do the tent when I get back, it'll be funnier with an audience, you know? Like the kids are going to go to bed before eight PM anyway, c'mon! I have plenty of time, what do you mean what are you going to do with a dozen kids full of birthday cake for two hours, let them bounce on the furniture or something. Let Beta and her friends herd them around, what're we paying them for? Look the sooner I get out the sooner I'll be back to pitch that huge, complicated borrowed tent in our livingroom...

When I got home with our charming guests, the tent was already pitched. Kids in pyjamas. Screaming that they wanted their scary story already, when am I finally going to tell them their scary story?

My guests and I crawled through the tent into our library, where Alpha sat with other parents, drinking wine. I sort of introduced everyone, except I was sort of disoriented by hurrying into Vienna and then back out and being excited at having real live guests so I sort of forgot some people's names and ended up just saying, hi everyone, Jessica and Brendan here would you like some more wine? One of our grown-up guests had pitched the tent, the girls' former nursery school teacher. She was giving off negative vibes, I suppose because the tent had been rough to pitch.

I told them you'd tell them a scary story, my wife smirked.

Story! Story! Story! they were chanting.

Let me finish this wine, I said. I was stalling. I had to think of something fast. I was on the spot.

The secret of a slumber party scary story is, you want to scare them badly enough so they'll be entertained, and a little more, so they'll stay in the tent at night and not wander around the house, but not so badly that they wet their sleeping bags.

Story! Story! they chanted. Gradually a story blossomed in my head. I drained my glass and entered the tent.

A Vampire Story
So you guys know I'm going to Slovenia tomorrow, right? But did you know I work for a vampire hunter? What? No? Didn't Gamma tell you? She must have told you I'm half werewolf, right? On my mother's side? What do you mean, how can you tell I'm half werewolf - I'm almost 45 and I still have most of my hair, dude. And you should see my sister, she's hairier than I am. Seriously.

So anyway, yeah, Slovenia. We werewolves and vampires are natural enemies, right, so I don't have much sympathy with them. And lately there've been all these little mummies turning up in Slovenia. It would seem there's a vampire down there lately that preys on small children, about six, seven years old. Sucks them dry. All people find is the dessicated husk of a child. A mummy. Weighs about as much as a loaf of white bread. The vampire, see, the vampire preys on the ones who wander off alone. The kids who ignore their parents' warnings and, you know, stray. Sneak out of tents at night, for example, or wander off on their way home from school.

So we're going to go down and look for this vampire.

Um... What was that noise? Just a pin dropping, I think. Don't be alarmed.

So anyway, yeah, vampire hunting. What do you mean, is this a true story? Of course it is. Would I make up something like this?

We caught another vampire once, down in Greece it was, in an old castle. It was almost night, and pitch dark, and scary, man. The vampire was hidden somewhere inside and had blacked out all the windows so it was dark. We were down to our last candle, and last match. We went from room to room. My boss had the stake, I had the mallet. We were going to catch the vampire in his coffin and drive the stake thru his heart while he slept, see. Cause he'd been drinking all these little Greek kids dry, see.

We went from room to room, kicking doors open and shining the candle in. But no luck so far. Then we finally got to the last room. The candle went out. We relit it with the last match, then kicked the door open. We could just make out a big box of some sort on a table in the middle of the room, when a gust of wind blew out the stub of candle and everything went pitch dark.

Then we heard the box creak open, and a fluttering of wings. Our eyes had adjusted to the darkness, but all we could see was the outline of a bat-like creature fly past, out the door and down the hallway. A man-sized-bat-like creature!

Stake and mallet in hand we chased it through the hallways, through dusty, cobwebby rooms, up and down stairs. Night had fallen outside and it was trying to escape but we caught it just before it went out the main door.

Boy did it squeak!

Did we kill it? Eh, well, we had it pinned down, you know, needle-sharp tip of the stake over its heart, mallet all raised to strike, but then I felt sorry for it. You can even feel sorry for a blood-sucking vampire, weird. We handcuffed it and brought it back to Vienna at night, to the basement of the national museum, where they have a lab. They're experimenting on it as we speak.

Seriously. Of course this is all true.

What, you want what? Garlic? Sure, okay. Tell you what, I'll hang some up over the front door of the tent, and some more over the back door, so you'll be perfectly safe all night, okay? As long as you stay in the tent. And here's some more, to take with you in case you have to get up to go to the john in the middle of the night.

Sleep well.

Results: I figured kids see a lot of violence on TV, right, so they could handle a story where no one actually gets staked. There was no wandering in the night, and no wet beds. One little girl, though, a classmate of Gamma's, refuses to go to school without garlic now.

breedster

Seriously, anyone want an egg? Who wants the egg Teh Bug made with Heather Champ? Huh?

to do

1. Pick Jessica and Brendan up at airport.
2. No, wait, impossible cause Gamma's having a slumber party at the same time. Run slumber party, pitch tent in living room for little kids, etc. Give visiting friends directions to their hotel instead and promise to pick them up in town instead, maybe.
3. Mail them a list of catacombs in Vienna just in case.
4. No, wait, must go to Sl*venia on business, so scratch the slumber party.
5. Wait, can't scratch a birthday party; force wife to do all the work instead. Engage other daughter and her beautiful talented friend to help out...
6. Calm down, it will all work out somehow...

Bach

Look, if you're a kid looking for something for your school report on Bach, move along, nothing of value here.

I just wanted to reiterate how great Bach is. Bach's sonatas for cello, of which he wrote six, I still think those are a pinnacle of human evolution. I know I've said this before, but Anner Bylsma playing them on an Stradivari cello, what a combination. Almost too much to take. Luckily, listening to him on a CD in a noisy Dobló on a busy freeway sort of brings it back closer to earth. But still nice.

I say this all the time. But there I was in my cello lesson this week, and my teacher says to me, Let's try a new piece. And I say, Okay. And he says, Bach wrote six sonatas for cello, didja know that? And I'm all like, Really? In the back of my mind, a voice was saying, "Anner Bylsma, you dork!" but I didn't listen to the voice. And then my teacher said, Let's try one of them. Some of them are easy and some are hard. He told me the final two were really tough - #5 was written for a 5-string cello (which were more common in Bach's day than they are now) and #6 was written for a cello with the A-string tuned down to G. Also - I got a glance at the sheet music - there are a ton of fiddly fucking little notes to navigate there as well. So forget those.

But #2 has an easy part. Not easy, exactly, but not off my spectrum of possibility. I played it. "That sounds familiar," I said, ignoring the little voice in my head saying, "Bylsma, bylsma."

Look: here's a metaphor. Imagine something exquisite. Who's exquisite at the moment? Just for example imagine Monica Bellucci. Okay? Imagining her? Now imagine Monica Belluci made out of flattened tin cans held together with old chewing gum. That's what it sounded like when I played it the first time - barely recognizeable and not as grand as possible.

Yeah, yeah, you're getting there, my teacher said. You're getting the idea. Then he played it. Monica Bellucci. Not at her full potential, perhaps, but definitely Monica Bellucci. Monica Bellucci with a headache, maybe. Monica Bellucci after a long drive and all she wants is a fucking smoke by herself out on the balcony to gather her thoughts.

Bach is so cool. Cello is too. If you're still reading this, kid looking for information on your school report, and by chance you're learning the cello, keep it up, dude. Good going.

Allegedly a wreck

It was raining, but traffic was good until my exit where it backed up about a hundred meters from the offramp. I was behind a semi with its hazard lights blinking. I turned mine on to reduce the probability of the next person piling into me - my wife's car was crushed by a Mercedes that way once.

Traffic was moving at a crawl, but a steady crawl, and in a couple minutes it became clear what the problem was - a car, a four-door-plus-hatchback sort of car, had creamed the guardrail on the right side, then bounced off and creamed the guardrail on the left side and was now turned to face oncoming traffic in the fast lane. Hard to tell to what degree other vehicles had been involved, as none were parked anywhere in sight.

The driver's door was open and empty, and the front driver's-side tire appeared to be flat, and the rear one was missing entirely. The car was tilted that way, so perhaps the tires on the passenger side were still okay: every cloud has a silver lining, I guess. The car looked to be the color of the pavement, closer to asphalt than macadam, which is the color a car takes on after such a wreck, I suppose. It was now shaped like the steel box frame around the passenger compartment, and the frame around the engine compartment, all wrapped in crumpled metal.

There were parts of the car and parts of the guardrail, including a gigantic bracket of galvanized steel that must have weighed at least fifty pounds strewn about the surface of the freeway. Off to the right side, in the grass on the outside of the guardrail, at the top of a steep slope down to a creek or something, paced a dejected-looking man. The car-owner, I surmised. He was probably thinking, here I am, just had a life-changing experience, and none of these people give a shit.

Well, car-owner, you were wrong. I, for example, was totally worried I was going to drive over a piece of sharp debris and get a flat tire and you know, flat tire in the rain, what a pain in the ass. But luckily, no flat tire. I assumed the man or someone else had already called police. Assumed.

I planned to tell the big wreck story to the rest of the family when I got home, but by the time I got home I'd forgotten about it. I remembered again when I drove past the spot on my way to work the next day, and thought I would write about it here, but by the time I'd arrived at work, it had slipped my mind again. Also our Internet connection was down.

Driving home that evening, I had my kid in the car and when we passed the spot I told her about the wreck. Of which all evidence had been removed. Not a single shard of glass, not an inch of rubber. "Right there," I pointed. "Right there by that shiny new strip of guardrail," I said to her.

Lost in transit

An explosion of beggars.

The doorbell rang

The doorbell rang.
No, wait, someone knocked.
"You get it," I said. "One of you guys get it, seeing as how I'm not wearing any pants."
Like puppies climbing over each other to get out of their basket when the mailman rings the doorbell, they all ran to the door.
See, I was going to be painting a table, so I had come downstairs in the teeshirt I'd slept in and a pair of underpants, because I'd planned on putting on my paint-covered overalls, which are in the cellar. And then they'd called me in for breakfast as I passed the kitchen, and so I was sitting in my kitchen at nine in the morning on a sunny Sunday.
I heard voices. "Whoever it is, dude, don't let them in, since I am sitting here in my underpants, you know."
"He's in here," my wife said.
"Thanks," the music school director said.
"Would you like some coffee?" my wife asked the music school director.
"That would be nice," she said.
"Good morning," I said, and shook her hand, because in Austria it's polite to always shake someone's hand when you meet. "Pardon me for not getting up, but I'm sitting here in my underwear."
She was carrying the draft of the school newspaper I do for them. "Didn't you get my mail?" She had sent me a mail saying she'd drop by on Sunday, but didn't give any particular time.
"No, no, I got it," I said. "Look, would you mind if I went and put on a pair of pants?"
"No, go right ahead," she said, politely looking somewhere else.
"Would you like milk with your coffee?" my wife asked.
"Yes please."
"Sugar?"
"Yes, please."

Breedster

Hi mig,
Dlixx has mated you.
4 eggs were produced.

You too can receive mails like this every morning! Believe me, it brightens up your day. I've got all these eggs now, because all these young female, Dutch-speaking (women? insects?) are fornicating with me, which permits me to invite people to participate in Breedster. Breedster is, as near as I can tell, a thing where you (to quote one of my children there) eat, defecate, and run out of energy. So it's a lot like life, only with more copulation. As far as I can tell, there's no strategy other than that, but it could theoretically serve as another web networking tool: like Friendster, but with BUGS.

So if you want an invitation, let me know and I'll drop you an egg. First come first serve.

No skid

Traffic was light on the freeway this morning. In the field the last mist was burning off and there were about eight deer grazing. Traffic was light and then it bunched up and we all had to slam on our brakes and pray no one piled into us. I have some antiskid system on my car, and it stopped well with no screeching tires, but it still took me five kilometers to get most of the other people's burnt rubber smell out of my cab. I call where I sit in the Dobló the "cab" because that makes it seem more like a truck. It's not really a truck, so it's not really a cab, but I appreciate sitting up a little higher where you can see more. Although if I can see more, why did I have to slam on my brakes? Because there was a real truck, a delivery truck, a couple cars in front of me blocking the view, maybe. I general have a lot of sympathy for truckers, and give them plenty of room on the road. They're working men with a job to do. I'm thinking it must be a hard life, being a trucker. The road must be full of morons and idiots when you drive a truck professionally. Everyone else is an amateur, tailgating you, cutting you off, slamming on their brakes, passing you dangerously while you're simply trying to get a job done, a hard job, a damned hard job, moving those tons of machinery or pipe or other freight on schedule and changing the channel on your radio and getting that crack pipe lit all at the same time. Changing the CD and picking your amphetamine tablets out of the seat down by your crotch where they all spilled when you opened the bottle. It's hard and people need to appreciate that more.

Then I was parking in front of my office and couldn't remember how I got there.

Silence

But if he could describe it all He would be an artist. But if he were an artist there would be deeper wounds Which he could not describe.

Resurrection

At church on Easter -- which was packed, by the way but luckily wisely (having learned our lesson the previous week) we went early and got good seats pews, near where the pan-flute player (specially engaged for Easter) would be playing only he had fallen ill and a woman was playing the recorder instead and obviously had not had enough time to rehearse so her version of that Titanic song was a little shaky, not to mention you're supposed to play that with a tin whistle, or at least a theremin and not a bloody recorder -- the priest, speaking of resurrection and so on, said something about the grave some of us find ourselves in right here in life, and the resurrection we experience when we climb out of that or whatever and that for some reason spoke to me.

Little girl with flyswatter & glitter: [Runs into room] Dang! Where are all the flies? [Runs into next room]

And so I've been thinking about that. As far as thoughts upon which to meditate go, that one has some good elements -- the creepy/morbid grave image, the rebirth image. Because I wonder about that a lot, in view of the American -- is it only an American? -- obsession with interest in changing oneself: can that be done? Do we change ourselves when we think we're changing ourselves? Or do we only change our behavior? Is there any difference? Are we our behavior?

Little girl with flyswatter & glitter: [Runs back into room] Where are all the flies? I can't find a single fly!

Dad: Oh, there's one way up there. May I? [Takes swatter, kills fly.]

LGWF&G: Yay! [Picks fly up by legs, examines closely] Yay!

Dad: You want to feed Alpha II?

Mom: [Looks up from newspaper, narrows eyes]

LGWF&G: [Nods emphatically, eyes big]

Dad: [Reaches over, places Venus flytrap in front of LGWF&G]

LGWF&G: [Holds fly over gaping mouth of Venus flytrap, a little leery, finally drops it in.] It didn't shut!

Dad: Eh, the fly landed in the corner. Hang on. [Blows fly into middle of flower, it snaps shut]

LGWF&G: Eek!

Dad: Wonder if we screwed up his karmic cycle?

LGWF&G: [Grabs swatter, resumes hunt for more flies]

Fan Art!

Bauke, a Bug fan of the first order, mailed me this high-quality image a long time ago. Sorry it took so long, Bauke, but as you know by now I am a big procrastinator especially when it comes to posting creative work that is better than anything I could do.

Coming soon: a Bug strip by D. Until then, try chatting with EBug. The link is in the right column on the main page.

cell

Four-day weekend here over Easter. The Easter Bunny got up before five in the morning on Sunday to hide eggs and baskets in the back yard. Some he hid waaay up in trees because he was sooo sleepy. Then he ate some cereal and went back to bed. The little one woke up around six and her big sister stalled her just in case and my wife woke me up and said, Are the baskets hidden? And I said yeah and went back to sleep, or tried, except the Easter Bunny had neglected to hide baskets for his in-laws and some elderly friends of theirs, thinking it didn't matter as they weren't going to come over anyway and, like, look for them or anything, but this turned out to be a bad idea since, What if Gamma should ask, where did these baskets come from? So the Easter Bunny snuck out the front door and hid the other baskets in front of the house, although Gamma had asked him, earlier, "Are you the Easter Bunny?" to which he had replied, "nah, nah" and Gamma accepted this, since kids aren't stupid and prolong any myth that results in presents.

The kids got clothes and stuff. My wife got a watch. I got a new cell phone. Because I had exhausted any patience and brainpower hanging cabinets in the bathroom, my fourteen-year-old daughter had to program the fucker. I like how every cell phone company makes theirs a little different to program, since that's good for customer loyalty: "it was so hard to learn how to program my Altoid Callmaster, no way am I switching to another brand now...". So I was sitting at the PC last night, trying to layout a newspaper for someone, and my daughter is sitting beside me going, "Oh! Your phone has Snake! Mind if I play a little Snake on your phone, dad?" and my wife is reading articles aloud to me for some reason, like, "this guy ate only cottage cheese for a month and lost weight!"

Anyway, apparently the phone is programmed now. Will they someday make a mobile phone that is, simply, a phone? And nothing else? I even have a free advertising slogan for them: "It's just a fucking phone, for chrissakes." Or will people like me be dependent on teenagers all our lives?

Monday, my wife made steak and boy can she cook steak. Then we all went for a walk in the woods and dug up a couple flowers that I sure hope aren't protected and planted them in our yard when we got home.

One evening he realized he was a ghost

It was twilight and it was raining lightly. Cloud cover was thick and black but thinned towards the western horizon. It is essential to the story that you see the light conditions this produces: the light came from a single direction, but not harshly, and it was horizontal and the rain washed dust and pollen from the air and gave everything a shiny, reflective surface. Although the clouds were low he could see for miles across a flat landscape from which the colors grey and beige had been removed. Even the dried grass standing in the fields had taken on a yellowish, orangish cast and the greens were intense in this rainy spring dusk.

Although it was still light enough out to drive without his headlights he turned them on after dropping his daughter off at the eye doctor's for a vision exam. His wife was there with the other daughter and would drive them home later. He took a narrow back road, an access road that ran parallel to train tracks along a field behind the sugar refinery. The pavement ran out after a hundred yards and he had to slow down and this was good because he had to marvel at the evening.

This was the road he used to take when he drove his eldest daughter to daycare ten years ago. He drove a different car then, smaller and so unreliable his daughter used to pray in the back seat when he started it. In the distance he could see other cars on the new road. He saw their headlights first, and then when he concentrated he could make out the cars. There was an overpass where the new road crossed the old road and the railroad tracks. Driving beneath that he saw where there had been a small landslide on the overpass embankment; engineers had miscalculated the maximum slope or the subsoil was too rocky and when the topsoil had saturated in the rain it just slid down ten feet, the grassroots couldn't hold it; it left a jagged scar along the top and made a bulge along the bottom.

Beyond the overpass the old road curved to the right, crossed the train tracks and curved back left. He stopped the car because he couldn't drive anymore he had to look at all this. Anner Bylsma playing Bach concertos on a Stradivarius violoncello from the Smithsonian collection certainly had an influence on his mood, but when he turned off the car engine, the music stopped and he sat there in the near silence, just the hiss of the rain, and was still paralyzed. There were no other cars on the old road. The new road intersected with this one at no point anywhere. He was sitting in one era no one cared about or even remembered, looking at another. No one took this road anymore: it was bumpy and had ruts and big puddles when it rained. Rain or shine, your car needed a wash after you took this road. He watched the headlights crawl along the other road, if going 100 km/h is crawling.

Ghosts don't hate us, he thought, not some ghosts anyway. Some feel sorry for us, sorry as in pity and sorry as in apology, as they watch us move along our new roads.

Arles, 1888

Paul Gaugin: The light here rocks. Doesn't the light here rock? Have you ever seen light like that?
Vincent van Gogh: Lalalala.
Paul Gaugin: All the same, eh. [Drains glass] It's like... how should I say it. It's as if in an alternate universe there were a small boy, about five, with a pig shave and a shit-eating grin, with a hose in his hands. And he's kinking the hose so nothing can get through. And this hose is the hose through which the cosmic energy flows to my brain. Or my soul or something. You know? [Refills glasses]
Vincent van Gogh: Sigh.
Paul Gaugin: I dunno. It's a feeling like being constipated and entirely shat out at the same time.
Vincent van Gogh: [Takes drink, stares at so-so-looking waitress] Mmm.
Paul Gaugin: As if it were late spring, after a long debilitating winter and the tulips are finally budding, only their buds are like, tiny, because the garden hasn't been fertilized in ages, and the bulbs are withering, so you wonder if they'll even blossom this year.
Vincent van Gogh: ...
Paul Gaugin: Vincent? More absinthe?
Vincent van Gogh: I beg your pardon?

Norway, 1893

Edvard Munch: Happy birthday, honey. Anything special you'd like to do for your day of days?
Mrs. Munch: Where are my flowers? I asked for nothing but a simple bouquet of flowers once a week.
Edvard Munch: Eh, I figured so many people would be giving you flowers today, I'd wait a couple days, you know, until those wilted and stuff before I started...
Mrs. Munch: Right.
Edvard Munch: Don't get mad, honey.

Mrs. Munch: What are the chances of you installing that bathroom furniture?
Edvard Munch: [Sigh] No problem! Right away. [Gets some tools, returns.] Man! I really have to do something about my shop! That's a mess!
Mrs. Munch: That's what I've been telling you.
Edvard Munch: Hey, this cabinet is busted. It... sheesh!
Mrs. Munch: They gave it to me for half off. I figured you're capable, you can fix it.
Edvard Munch: It's really fuc... it looks as if it fell from a great height. Look, it's totally... [sigh] I'll get my glue and vises.
Mrs. Munch: Good luck with the sink table thing.
Edvard Munch: I'll do that first.
Mrs. Munch: I think it's a couple centimeters higher than the old one.
Edvard Munch: [Measures] Eh, it's a couple centimeters lower.
Mrs. Munch: I must have measured wrong. Oh well. You can do it.
Edvard Munch: [Stage whisper] I'll survive this as long as I can finish before her father comes and helps me and makes everything even more complicated. [Normal voice] Honey, could you get me a bucket?
Mrs. Munch: How about this one?
Edvard Munch: No, the other one. The low one. And some paper towels. And newspapers. And a toothbrush and a coat hanger. [Stage whisper] And a pistol and one bullet. Or a long rope. Sheesh. Wonder what this does?
Mrs. Munch: Ick!
Edvard Munch: Years of hair, baby. Take some soap and whiskers, mix well, let sit for eight years, that's what you get.
Mrs. Munch: You're planning on cleaning up after you finish, right? The sink's not level, you know.
Edvard Munch: I'm not finished yet. I have to shorten these little pipes here a bit because they used to fit but now with the lower sink they're too long. [Stage whisper] At least, I think so. [Goes to his workshop, fetches hacksaw, steps in bucket, falls onto stack of tires.] [Addresses cat watching from shelf] What're you looking at?
Cat: I'm waiting for you to leave so I can piss on everything.
Edvard Munch: [Returns to bathroom, saws 1.5 centimeters off each little pipe, reassembles everything for the third time.]
Mrs. Munch: Oh, dad's here! He can help.
Edvard Munch: [Holds inhaler over face, breathes deep]
Edvard Munch's father-in-law: Sink's a bit high. Faucet seems to be holding it up. The little pipes are a bit long. They're chromed copper pipes, usually, you know. Also the reticular matriculating verticulizer, have you checked that? I'm just saying.
Mrs. Munch: Hrm.
Edvard Munch: I, yes. It is. They are. I, I just cut a centimeter and a half off. Before that I had to drill a hole in the shelf so the pipe would fit.
Mrs. Munch: You should have seen that. That freaked me out.
Edvard Munch: I'll cut another half a centimeter off. [Takes eveything apart again, cuts pipes, reassembles]
Mrs. Munch: Sure you're doing that right?
Edvard Munch's children: Can I wash my hands yet? Is it safe to flush the toilet?
Edvard Munch's father-in-law: Plumbers can just bend that stuff with their bare hands.
Edvard Munch: I just got a great idea for a painting!
Mrs. Munch: You and your painting.

How to get into the UN without having to run a gauntlet of about a dozen security checkpoints manned by elite police

Don't go at the same time Kofi Annan is visiting.

Sheesh.

OTOH, now I have this story to tell*: finally get in, really have to pee on account of drinking bottled mineral water all morning and then the cold outside/warm car interior/cold outside/warm UN interior changes; head for nearest restroom. Guy comes in, takes urinal next to me.
Being the kind of person who ignores other guys in the restroom, I ignore him. But I can feel he's looking at me.
"Mig, right?" he says. So I have to look over at him. It's Kofi "F*cking" Annan.
"Mr. Annan? How do you know me?"
"I read your blog," he says.
"You're joking," I say. Must not look at Mr. Annan's johnson, I think. Which, of course, makes it harder more difficult not to. See, I once took a whiz next to Boris Yeltsin in a men's room at the Moscow Airport, and the one thing everyone asks me when I tell them that story is, So, Boris have a big one?
"Turtle doing okay?" Kofi Annan asks.
"Greek land tortoise," I say. "Yeah, she's fine."
"I liked the post about her and the harp," he says.
"I admire your, uh, work," I finally say.
He just chuckled a deep chuckle.
I couldn't stand it any more and looked. I wish I hadn't.
He followed my gaze, and shrugged. "Don't be dismayed," he said. "I do represent the African continent, after all," he said.
"It's very big," I said.
"I call him my Peacemaker," he said.
"That's a better nickname than Blue Helmet, I suppose," I said.
He chuckled again, shook off his Peacemaker, and left.
I mean, of course he tucked it back into his pants, too, and zipped up, and washed his hands. How much detail do you want?

______________________
*I have this story to tell because the security arrangements for Mr. Annan's visit inspired it, not because it really happened.

Date

I have a date with a pretty 14-year-old girl this evening.
Someone remind me before 17.00 Central European Time, so I don't drive home and leave my daughter standing in front of the Sex Shop on the Mariahilferstrasse where all the junkies congregate, wondering where the hell dad is.
I forgot my cell phone today, so it's just me and my memory against, you know, entropy and obliviousness. Tag-teaming. Battle Royale in The Cage.

Announcer: [fixes toupee] It looks bad for Mig, folks. Entropy has him in a propellor spin. Ready for takeoff... ouch!
Entropy: Yawn.
Mig: Oof. Eh. Feel so sleepy.
Announcer: Uh-oh, Entropy is tagging his partner, Oblivion! Here comes Oblivion, and he doesn't look happy!
Memory: [on the sidelines] Mig! Are you there? Tag me, man!
Mig: Something is nagging me, at the back of my head, around the corners of my consciousness.
Memory: Shit, dude! Helloooo!
Announcer: Oblivion is erecting his impenetrable Wall of Silence and ennui! There's no way out! This is what sent The Rock to Hollywood, if you remember! And that governor guy! And El Diablo!
Entropy: Give up, Mig. Memory, you stay where you are, he didn't tag you. Give up, give up, I always win! The belt is mine!
Mig: What the hell was it? I see a sex shop. Why am I thinking about a sex shop.
Entropy: That's not fair, Memory! He didn't tag you!
Announcer: He's struggling back! And now for a word from our sponsor.
[INSERT COMMERCIAL FOR FIAT DOBLO. The Spice Girls all pile into an orange Doblo at the beach. They are wearing bikinis. Sporty Spice says, "back when I was slim, I could ride in anything. Now that I've packed it on, I need a Doblo! This is great!" Spice Girls in unison: "In a Doblo, we're the Space Girls!"]
Announcer: Welcome back, folks. Sorry you missed the climactic bit where Mig remembered what he was forgetting. Here it is in slow-motion:
Mig: HHHHHhhhhrrrrrrrrrrmmmmmmmmmmmm. OOOOOhhhhhhhhhh yyyyyeeeeeeaaaaaaahhhhhhh.
Entropy: Dang.
Oblivion: How'd he get past the Wall? Dang.
Mig: Eh, Beta's gonna be pissed. Better hurry.
Memory: [squirts ionic energized oxygen drink all over Mig's head] Atta boy.

Condoleeza Rice in a bikini

RileyDog's back.

Kafka on the shore

Haruki Murakami's latest novel, Kafka on the Shore, seems to have just hit the bookstores here in Austria (in German). I saw it in the window of every book store I passed on my lunch break, out walking around, accidentally following women (you know that? Where you're apparently heading the same place they are, for blocks and blocks, until you start feeling bad and hoping you're not creeping them out?) and jonesing for this electric cello in the window of the music score.
However, I would prefer to read it in English.
However, it is out of stock at Amazon.com. Tons and tons of shitty books they have in stock, but not this one. All the disgruntled books of revelations by disgruntled Bush insiders, but not a poetic masterpiece (I assume) by Haruki Murakami, my favorite famous living writer, more or less.

Improving the sound of your cello

I want you to try something, he said. What, I said. Let's try playing with exact intonation, he said. He played the notes on the piano, I played them on the cello, correcting them until they were exactly right. All I can say is, huge difference. There is a bad habit I have acquired, and that is accepting approximate intonation when I play. If it sounds approximately like the song I'm supposed to be playing, close enough for government work, as they say.

But now that I have heard the difference, I know this to be false. Even if the intonation is very, very close, too close to really hear that the notes aren't perfect, you're playing a different instrument. When the intonation is perfect, the cello resonates differently. The body of the cello, and the other strings, resonate with the overtones in that perfect note.

Or something like that. Sounds great, in any case.

Doesn't sound like such a cheap cello, I said. Even expensive celli are like that, he said. They don't sound really brilliant until the intonation is perfect. When it is, then you notice the difference.

Creepier than Nixon

John Dean has a new book, and boy is he disgruntled.