As I type this, it is 12:30am Saturday, January 29th in Cologne, Germany.
Since I woke up at 3:30am Thursday, January 27th in the US Pacific time zone, this means I have been awake for 37 hours straight. And yet I am still not tired. I tried to sleep on the plane, but ended up watching The Social Network again (a little more boring that the first time, but still awesome), Salt again (liked it even more the second time around), and Scott Pilgrim Saves the World again (which sucked even more the second time around, because whiny, dorky Michael Cera is NOT lady-killer slacker hero Scott Pilgrim... AT ALL. This movie could have been sheer perfection if the lead role weren't so hideously miscast).
Anyway...
The flight from Seattle to Amsterdam via Delta Airlines was bliss. I wasn't upgraded, but the plane was so empty that I had almost an entire row to myself, which was super-sweet. Except for the not-being-able to sleep thing, it truly was a flawless experience. As was my connection at Schiphol, as usual. Looking out the plane-window at sunrise, it was looking like a glorious day in DutchyLand...
Except... it was freezing cold. Even after the sun was out. Much like it would be when I finally ended up in Cologne. As I landed, I noticed that Gowalla had rolled out their new flight-tracker status updates, which is wickedly cool...
Not shown is my flight from Wenatchee to Seattle... probably because Wenatchee hasn't been considered an airport yet?
Anyway... after checking in at my hotel and then getting some work done, it was time to head up to Essen for some dinner with friends. While waiting at the train station, I ran across an awesome poster... I just love good advertising! That's the hugely tall Cologne Cathedral buried in snow there...
"Ihr Beitrag zum klima? Mehr Bus & Bahn fahren!"
Dinner was with my fellow Hard Rock Cafe fans, Marc & Mechthild... with vegetarian pizza hand-made by Mechthild herself, which was as beautiful to look at as it was delicious...
Easily the best pizza you'll find in all of Germany. You may commence being jealous now.
But the truly unexpected surprise of the evening was the beautiful salad that was served. I still have no idea what kind of greens these were... or even if there's a US equivalent... as I had never seen them before. Marc & Mechthild called them "winter salad," as there doesn't seem to be an equivalent name for it in English (they looked!). The greens appear to be some kind of thick four-leaf clover type-thing, tasting buttery and sweet. There's absolutely no bitter notes in the flavor at all, which made the whole thing taste like frickin' candy when tossed up with a lovely vinaigrette. I shit you not, CANDY...
If all salads tasted like this, I'd be eating a lot more fucking salads!
After-dinner conversation was all Hard Rock Cafes and world travel (two of my favorite subjects!). The time went flying by and suddenly it was 11:00 and time to take the train back to Cologne. The evening was loads of fun, despite the fact that I really should have been dead from lack of sleep. Praise be to the power of the internet for continuing to find me wonderful friends around the globe!
And now it's 12:56am here in Cologne, which means I've been awake for 37-and-a-half hours straight.
Still not tired.
I have no idea what my deal is, but I sure don't want to be around when this lack of sleep catches up to me!
Alas, I have no choice...
As somebody who endeavors to take the high road in most things, I ended up deleting the blog entry I hammered out for today. Sometimes it's better to just let sleeping dogs lie.
At least for now.
As always, I reserve the right to unleash my righteous fury at a later date.
I both love and hate shopping for groceries at late hours during weeknights. On one hand, there's very few people and you're pretty much left alone to shop in peace. On the other hand, the people that you DO run into are... errr... "colorful" to say the least.
Tonight I drove into Wenatchee for a late-supper blogger meet with Brandon, Eclectic, and Matt. Since "eating" is a highly-specialized activity for me now that I'm trying to recover from side-effects of Getting Healthy, I had to eat my salad and beer bread at super-human speeds so that I could finish before my food deadline. I don't think I injured anybody, but it sure made trying to hold a conversation interesting.
After dinner (and an obligatory stop for drinks) I decided to make my afore-mentioned trip to the grocery store. Albertsons was, as expected, mostly empty at 10:45pm.
Except for the hipster rejects, gangsta posers, redneck zombies, drugged-out hippies, whack-job crazies, Jersey Shore wannabes (WTF? How is this a fashion trend?)... and me. Oddly enough, I fit right in. Society's outcasts have nothing on me.
And now I'm home and reading about the whole "We Won't Fly" movement, where people are protesting the new airport "scanners" (which I wrote about two days ago) by refusing to fly. There's even a website about it where they are advocating a "No Fly Day" boycott on November 24th. "Hit the airlines in the pocketbook until the scanners and gropers are gone. Make the airlines work for us."
What a crock of horse shit.
If I wasn't already flying on November 24th, I would actually change my travel plans to fly on that day.
What the fuck do the airlines have to do with airport security? Nothing. That's what. Airlines operate at the pleasure and direction of the Transportation Security Administration. They aren't in a position to dictate shit. Sure they can protest that the new security measures are harming their business and hope that the TSA comes up with a better plan than these pricey scanners (which many claim won't make us any safer and may actually be dangerous to human health), but that's about it. They don't make the decisions as to what the TSA implements for airport security. Punishing them as if they do is just stupid.
It's like boycotting McDonalds because they don't have cocaine on the menu. Boycotts against persons, businesses, or organizations for things which are outside of their control doesn't make any sense to me. Sure, go ahead and boycott McDonalds because they won't put fried pies back on the menu, or boycott the airlines because they force you to sit in seats with no leg-room and pay extra to check a bag... those are decisions they made. But boycotting them for decisions and rules they have to follow which other people made? WTF?.
Now that we have "No Fly Day" I'm going to reiterate the same request I made for "Shutdown Day" back in 2007...
Look, I fully admit that I'm opposed to the new scanners and support a person's right to opt-out of having to use them. I know that the TSA claims that these devices are no more dangerous than mobile phones (mobile phones are safe, right? RIGHT?). I understand the images are not saved. I appreciate that the person viewing the scanner images can't make out who is in the machine, nor can they look out and see the person being scanned. I concede that the TSA has rules in place which would prevent scanner operators from recording what they see. Blah... blah... blah... I just don't care. Experts have said that these scanners can be fooled, and so the invasion of my privacy and possible health risk just aren't worth it. Nor is the enormous cost, which we will all have to pay for. Because if there is a way to fool the scanners, terrorists will find out about it, and then where will we be?
Showing our junk at the airport for no good reason.
And for people who feel the same as I do, they can opt out of the scanner and get groped by a TSA agent instead. Yes, that's not much of an alternative. And, no, I don't like it. That's why I will be writing my senator (which is apparently Patty Murray again), calling my Representative, and blogging about it. Hopefully continuing action AGAINST THOSE ACTUALLY RESPONSIBLE will be enough to eventually let sanity prevail. But, in the meanwhile, I have to fly and this is the price I pay for it. And I'm not going to punish the airlines because they want to keep operating and have to play by the rules and conditions they're given by the TSA to do so.
And in happier news...
The incomparable Betty White is now an honorary forest ranger!
Photo by Morigi/WireImage, from NY Daily News.
She has done so much to support and advocate for animals and their habitats that this is a well-deserved honor.
It's nice to end the day with some good news for a change.
I have to get up early, early for work in the morning, so I did what most bloggers would do in these circumstances... spend what precious little valuable time I have making appearances at two other blogs!
Unfortunately this means I don't have any time left to spend on my own blog. Well, at least not if I want to have time to read yet another exciting chapter of the genius that is "Pinheads and Patriots: Where You Stand in the Age of Obama" by Bill O'Reilly*.
Anyway, here's where you can find me in the blogosphere tonight...
That's two, two, TWO Canadian guest blog posts in one day!
My work here is done.
*And by "Pinheads and Patriots: Where You Stand in the Age of Obama" I actually mean the latest issue of "Penthouse", which is far more politically insightful.
Seriously... AGAIN?!? I keep getting some kind of "connectivity error" when I try to post...
Just my luck I've been hacked or something.
Actually, that would be lucky for you... I don't feel very lucky at all.
That's okay... I didn't really feel like blogging tonight anyway...
Every fucking time my site goes down, Media Temple has some new excuse as to why it's happening. Then they mark the issue "resolved" even though I know damn well another outage is just around the corner. This has been happening for YEARS, ever since they moved their shared-hosting accounts to a "(gs) Grid Server" architecture. And even though the "Grid Server" has been a massive, catastrophic bucket of FAIL! since day one, they continue to cling to it like some miracle is going to happen any day now, and it's suddenly going to be the stable, reliable hosting platform they promise in their advertising...
RELIABILITY? SERIOUSLY?!? It's this kind of delusional bullcrap that drives me bat-shit insane... even more so than the outages themselves. HELPFUL HINT: GRID SERVER DOES NOT WORK! IT NEVER HAS! Even when it's running, it's still slow as shit... sometimes to the point of being unusable. And lest we forget that Media Temple offers NO BACKUP SERVICE. That option was removed from my control panel when I was moved to the "Grid Server" and has never returned (it was promised for a while, but now this critical service which even the cheapest web hosting companies offer as standard equipment has been forgotten). So on top of being unstable, unreliable, and unresponsive, Media Temple hosting is also unsafe.
It's everything you dream of in a web hosting company!
I am so sick and fucking tired of Media Temple treating every new incident as an individual problem that can be checked off as "fixed" when the Big Picture is that their "Grid Server" hosting sucks ass and will likely NEVER be fixed. On the contrary, things just keep getting worse and worse as the problems become more and more frequent.
I have just over six months of my contract before I can walk away from Media Temple's busted-ass bullshit hosting. I am literally counting the days...
Hopefully I can last this long so I don't end up losing all the money I put into my contract.
I am writing this entry knowing full well that I won't be able to publish it (just as I haven't been able to publish my Bullet Sunday entry from yesterday). It may seem insane, but if I get out of the habit of writing every day I'd probably stop blogging altogether. I'm a creature of habit that way.
All my attempts to fix Blogography have failed. I think something got seriously screwed up when I tried to update an entry during one of my web hosting company's many, many service failures. Now the entry is "stuck" somehow, and nothing works. My only option is to delete my blog, do a fresh installation of the software, and then import all my templates, entries and comments back into the system.
It's a little scary to realize I could end up losing seven years of my online life if things go terribly wrong.
In other news, Frank Frazetta, one of my favorite artists has died. Though many people may not recognize his name, it's certain they have been exposed to his work. As one of the gods of fantasy illustration, Frazetta has churned out countless works of originality and stunning beauty for everything from posters to book covers. I first became aware of his work from the covers he created for several Edgar Rice Burroughs novels, including the "John Carter of Mars" books...
Thanks to Mr. Frazetta for helping to fuel my imagination for so many years. Though lost to us now, his work will endure.
UPDATE! Thanks to kind suggestions from one of my readers, things are up and running again! Thanks, ManBearPig... whoever (or whatever) you may be!
It's only 9:00, but I'm already in bed. I feel that I've earned it seeing as how I woke up at 3:30am this morning to try and get caught up on work. The only problem is that A) I have a blog entry to write, and B) Somebody in the neighborhood is working on a construction project with hammers and power tools. As if that weren't enough, C) Today was an altogether bizarre day, which means my head is not is a place conducive to sleep.
I can break down the bizarre happenings as follows...
And now that hammering has finally stopped, so I guess it's time to try and get some sleep. Tomorrow is another very long day.
As the clock edges ever closer to midnight I sit here trying to think of something I can blog about, and hoping that something interesting will happen in the world very soon now just in case I draw a blank. Such is the life of a blogger in boring February.
Then Twitter lights up with the news that a massive earthquake has struck in Chile, generating a tsunami warning that could very well threaten the entire Pacific Rim.
If this isn't the perfect example to be careful what you wish for, I don't know what is.
All my thoughts are with the people of Chile as I mentally prepare myself for the onslaught of tragic imagery that is sure to be awaiting me when I wake up in the morning. I'd like to think that after the horrific photos released from Haiti that I'd be numb to this kind of thing by now... but it never happens.
Just one of the down-sides of being human, I guess.
Having a blog can sometimes be a very, very strange thing.
Mostly because of the people who end up reading it. Well, not you, obviously, but you know... those people.
You know, the people who happen across a blog, read ONE entry, then feel that they know absolutely everything about you and have all the information they need to judge you. The people who feel that their opinion is the only one that matters, and if your opinion is contrary to theirs, then you're wrong and evil and stupid and don't deserve to live. Yes, I'm talking about those people.
Usually, I just delete the comments and emails from those people because their abuse just isn't worth it. They've already condemned you, and nothing you say or do will ever change their mind.
Oh, sure, every once in a while I get a comment that is so outrageous that I simply can't stop myself from publishing it... like the crazy-ass pageant mom who trashed me in a comment over something I never said or even hinted at. But that's rare. Most of the time I just don't bother.
Like when I wrote an entry in support of the National Equality March on Washington and got a comment telling me that I am a "condescending fuck" and "demeaning to gays" (or something like that)... for supporting gay marriage. Apparently, only gays can offer words of support and encouragement to gays or else they're just being snobby patronizing elitists. DELETE!
Or when I wrote how much I enjoyed The Holy Land Experience theme park and called it "inspirational, even if you're not a Christian"... only to get a comment telling me that "people like you" (heh) "only go there to mock Christians and ruin the park for everybody with your Godless perversions" (or something like that). Apparently, only Christians are allowed to say nice things about Christian things or else they're just being snobby patronizing elitists. DELETE!
Or when I wrote about my worries over having intestinal distress from my doctor-mandated restrictive diet and got a comment telling me that "real people suffer from intestinal problems and their lives are made worse by ignorant assholes like you who only want to make fun of them" (or someth... no, that was exactly what they said). Apparently, only people with severe intestinal disorders can joke about having diarrhea or else they're just being snobby patronizing elitists. DELETE!
Honestly. You can't make this stuff up.
Tonight while I was watching Food Network's Throwdown with Bobby Flay, the challenge was making Belgian Waffles. This reminded me of a comment I got when I wrote about my favorite thing about visiting Paris...
This resulted in a bizarre, profanity-laden comment from some American guy who was tired of "ugly Americans" (such as myself) insulting foreign cultures and making us all look bad.
Because I like waffles.
Well, damn. Apparently I am just a snobby patronizing elitist no matter what I do.
DELETE!
That comment still hurts, even after all these years.
Which is why I ended up healing my pain by buying a new Belgian Waffle baker from Amazon tonight. Just to be sure I didn't suffer a relapse, I also ordered some Stonewall Kitchen Waffle Mix.
Don't judge me.
Sometimesa little retail therapy is all we snobby patronizing elitists have to keep us warm at night.
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