I've got a new blog. This blog was fun, though.

www.slowfireworks.blogspot.com

25 Dollars Worth of Bagel Crisps, Here I Come!

The hostel I am staying at has wireless internet, and thus I blog for you. I was going to go into Launceston tomorrow and pay a ridiculous amount of money to use the wireless an internet cafe, but now I can totally spend that money on orphans and shit.

Sometimes people tell me that I am crazy. How they can say such a thing when they're the ones completely covered in spiders is something I'm still working through. But anyway, it's what they say.

If I am crazy, and it's a possibility, I am forced to conclude that I am not as crazy as I could be. Today I was standing at the express line at a grocery store, with my purchase (detergent and bananas) clutched to my chest, when I noticed a man who was not wearing a shirt approaching from outside the row of checkers. It was obvious from a ways off that this man was not sober.

Grocery stores in Australia are not laissez faire about the proper way to enter a grocery store - there's invariably a set little channel you're supposed to enter through. This guy came elbowing his way through the express checkout lane, which is not the way. As he came, I had an opportunity to scope his well-maintained musculature and a number of burns on his chest and arms. I could also tell that not only was he not sober, he was extremely not sober, and mumbling to people as he came along, repeating the same thing every three or so people. It took me until he was almost upon me to suss out what he was saying: "Anyone got a ten cent piece?"

The correct response to this situation is to avoid eye contact and say nothing. My reaction was to point at the guy behind me who was purchasing meat and say "I'm guessing that guy has at least ten cents. How else would he be able to afford meat."

But I didn't say anything, and the man proceeded into the bowels of the store.

I Saw Your (Popular Music) Face In a Crowded Place (From the Perspective of A World Traveler)

You're beautiful.

You're beautiful.

You're beautiful.

You're beautiful.

You're beautiful, it's true.

But it's time to face the truth. I will never be with you. And I don't know what to do.


The hardest thing about traveling is not, as I may have argued in the past, a group Israeli backpackers sitting next to you while you're trying to write copy and boasting to three thick-necked Irish women about how tough they are after serving in the IDF. It is never knowing which of the totally awesome songs topping the charts in whatever country you're in will be popular in the States, or what songs are becoming cultural touchstones in the states while you're abroad.

For example, when I arrived home after four months out of "the loop" last year, one of the first things that happened to me was hearing a new song called "My Humps" on the radio and trying to tell someone about it, only to have them roll their eyes. Their eyes. Their eyes their eyes their eyes.

The only music I got on a regular basis from New Zealand radio was the entirety of the White Stripes discography and a song by a Kiwi guy with the awesome name of Donavon Frankenheimer called "If It Don't Matter To You." The thesis of this song was that caring about things was a) an obstacle to world peace and b) probably the lamest thing you could do with your god-given intellect.

I was convinced - absolutely convinced - this song would follow me to the States. I prepared a smug little grin to show my friend(s?) when they heard it for the first time and I got to explain to them that I was five months ahead of them on Donovan Frankenheimer worship. Then I would show them my poster, which features prominently Donavon Frankenheimer and his huge, huge moustache, which is the secret reason I am growing a beard in Australia. Seriously, this song was so catchy and great, it didn't seem possible that it wouldn't be a world-wide hit. But alas - and people who know me know I don't use the word alas lightly - the only place it lives on now is in my heart and on my iPod.

My initial assumption upon hearing James Blunt's terrific song "You're Beautiful, You're Beautiful, You're Beautiful" on several grocery store soundtracks in New Zealand was that James Blunt was an Australian and that I had better load up on his honey-dripping vocals while down under, or I'd face serious withdrawal upon returning state side. But it turns out that "You're beautiful..." is a hit in the US as well, according to the iTunes music store. So you never can tell, I guess.

Anyway, my beard is coming along nicely. I am now treated appreciably worse by service people than I would be if clean shaven. This never fails to prompt indignation, a feeling which lasts until I see myself in the mirror and am forced by the prudence that has become my hallmark to agree with those who despise me and the daunting aesthetic experiment I have made my face into.

Blogging with a quickness

I have two minutes and six seconds to make this blog post. Here goes.

I am in Melbourne, which is a nice place to be. The hostel I'm staying at has more elderly travelers than college aged backpackers, and I've discovered that older people are more particular about the kitchen arrangements in hostels than youngsters. This makes sense. Young people live in filth, and are used to it.

If you want, I can buy you a duckling from Victoria Market. The ducklings are incredibly cute. One of them watched me the entire time I watched him and his little friends.

Ok, I have to go now. This has been fun.

Do You Speaka My Language

I got into an argument in the LAX airport domestic terminal with the hostess of an establishment calling itself "Chili's, Too". The deceptive idea of this name is to imply some sort of connection with the Chili's restaurant chain, as is made clear by the identical decor and uniforms and menu style.

"I don't see Awesome Blossom on this menu."

"Oh, we don't have that here."

"..."

"We have most things on the Chili's menu, but I think the Awesome Blossom requires an oversized Deep Fryer or something, and we don't have one."

"[muttering] Poop."

"Our kitchen is really small."

"I have to go. My plane is leaving. Have a nice night."

It wasn't so much an argument, this exchange, I now realize, as it was the worst thing that has ever happened to me.

I am typing this blog post in Sorrento, Victoria, which is at the very tip of the Mornington Peninsula. Last night I paid for a hostel room here in Sorrento with a four pack of horrible Tasmanian beer, ate two dinners under the vague umbrella of research, and slept through the showing of Munich I had planned on seeing for the sole purpose of blogging about the incongruity of watching a serious examination of the ramifications of terrorism and anti-terrorism in a beach resort in Australia.

I'm pretty sure the time I'm spending on the internet right now is going to cost me more money than my room did last night, but it doesn't look like I'm going to have any more internet for the next week, so I'm willing to take the financial hit if that's the only way for me to get my story out to the world. This is my story:

I wore the sweater I put on in Boston for the first three hours I was in Melbourne, which was experiencing a massive heatwave that had somehow knocked out the AC at the three places I visited in town. It was only until a very nice YHA employee named Jaye mocked me in front of other hostellers that I found myself persuaded to "take off [my] idiot jumper, mate."

I watched Curtis Hanson's In Your Shoes two and a half times on the 14 and a half hour flight from LA to Sorrento. The screaming baby two rows ahead of me was unimpressed by Cameron Diaz's ability to walk the tight-rope between emotionally fragile but free spirited and obnoxious basketcase, but I thoroughly enjoyed her prancing and overlarge reptile smile. The flight attendant in my section of Economy strongly resembled George Hamilton, who's now on the second season of Dancing With the Stars and who previously starred in Zorro: The Gay Blade and who is most famous for having a wicked tan. I was near the front of Economy Class, which allowed me to read the following bulkhead sign: "Please Do Not Enter the Business Class Cabin Except In Case of Emergency." For hourse eight through ten of the flight, I fought a strong compulsion to burst through the curtain screaming "Emergency! You guys are dicks. Emergency!" I'm not sure where that urge came from, but I think it may have been leftover resentment from the Chili's, Too debacle rising in my subconscious like floodwaters over an ill-built dam.

The sun is finally fully up here, and I imagine things are starting to open for me to research. My biggest fan so far in Australia are all biting insects. Later today I will be driving to Phillip Island, which supposedly has many many adorable penguins. The last time Let's Go sent me to a place which supposedly had adorable penguins, I disovered that the adorable penguin colony had been wiped out by a devastating avian dyptheria epidemic. Keep your fingers crossed, re: alive penguins.

In conclusion, I love you.

Hallejoobydoobydooya.

If this post is not as hilarious as you might expect, it is because I am distracted. As I write this, the family dog is nosing the one remaining kernel of dog food around and around his food dish, apparently in an effort to tire it out before devouring it. I have lately come to appreciate the strategic dimensions of the household pets with a frightening acuity, as I have been alone with them for the better part of the week. The cat, for example, has taken to watching my bathroom door from the moment I go in to the moment I go out. I'm pretty sure he's chronicling the frequency of my bowel movements for some purpose not entirely medical, not entirely unmedical. Of course, I can't be sure of this, as cat's can't talk.

Evangelical christians, in one of many points of departure between their mental ouvre and that of the common housecat, can not only talk but sing. And sing they do, apparently. Austin's classic rock station, which is lodged in what I can only term FM dial prime time, has switched formats to "positive music." It's also changed names - it now goes by 102.3 "The River." I think this transparently allegorical title is something that should have clued me in to the more precise meaning of "positive music," as, of course, the love of Jesus Christ resembles nothing so much as a great, life-giving river, which sometimes gives us the strength to make it through tough times and, at other times, makes us wish we had sprung for flood insurance, or at least a rowboat with which to drag our sopping family to safety.

At this point, some of you are probably all "what are you typing about, you crazy Jew bastard!???!" First of all, guys, I'm not jewish. I'm a lapsed presbterian. And it's not even like I split from the church in some climactic, acrimonious ruffling of theological feathers, either. I simply chose, at age nine, to start looking for a church where my fellow parishioners, namely Transcendant Dickface Russell McFarlane (hereby TDRM), wouldn't push my face into the gravel during Sunday school playtime. The search continues to this day. Secondly, my parents got married as soon as they could afford to, so get off your high horse.

So, anyway, it quickly becomes clear - somewhere around the third time I caught Amy Grant's little sister singing Our God Is An Awesome God, that what I have on my hands, our hands which are neither full of lightning nor near big enough to hold the whoooooooole world, here is a Christian rock station.

My favorite of the 20 or so songs I've heard so far on The River has the following chorus "I was thinking the other day/what if the cartoons got saved/ they'd be (unintelligible) singing praise/ in a whole new way." The rest of the song consisted the singer imagining how, for examble, Scooby Doo or Elmer Fudd or other cartoon characters with speech impediments - not bad speech impediments like the ones that will hopefully befall TDRM's ugly clubfooted children, but delightful speech impediments - would say the word "hallelujah."

The question that drives, that will come to drive, that has always driven the conclusion of this post is obvious: was I floored?. That question is so quickly answered you probably feel like a complete idiot for asking/preparing to ask/having asked it. I WAS FLOORED. Someone had managed to take the brilliant songwriting approach of BareNaked Ladies - snorting a bunch of pixie sticks and paying a gerbil to produce whatever you happened to produce in the resulting sleepless night - and apply it to your savior and mine, the big J. Rock on. So anyway, I'm not getting much sleep these days, and just yesterday I cried blood for over an hour, all over my new silk sheets. That's where I'm at.

A More Detailed Take on White Night

I wrote this in my journal, and not my blog. This is why I should never be allowed to do things - any things; you name the thing, I will agree that I should not do it - in parallel tracks. My dream of one day being a railroad track? Dead. My aspiration towards one day being a parallelogram? Kaput. I can think of no other things that a parallel. Here are some words I wrote, for you, my secret friends:

France was fun, and uniformly hassle-free. The expected pitfalls – rude Paris waiters, long lines at museums, tedious political discussions with earnest British co-hostellers – all failed to materialize, and except for one miserably rainy night, the weather was unimpeachable. I had time to take a couple of long, aimless walks, as well as for extended visits to the Louvre and Musee D’Orsay, and a couple of nice cafes. I happened to be in town for Nuit Blanche, a four-year-old Paris street festival that brings pretentious, occasionally incomprehensible new art together with pot-smoking, wine-swilling French youth. In Paris, incidentally, it is impossible to be unemployed. Men are merely spending some time away from professional opportunities to give fuller attention to their awesome ponytails, while the women are taking a sabbatical to ride the metro and look wistfully at fellow passengers, advertisements, and the little metal poles they have to steady yourself on. In conclusion, France is the only place where the entire population is just shy of an actual job offer from being a classics professor at a small, Midwestern college with a horrible football team. C’est la vie boheme!

I think my favorite, and the most generally indicative, part of Nuit Blanche for me was the 15min. film being projected over and over again, from dusk ‘til dawn, onto the wall of the building opposite my hostel. The film - entitled The Dukes of (Industrial Age Misogyny) Hazzard Ride Again!!1[sic]!! – was silent and consisted entirely of a 30ish woman in a long-sleeved mesh shirt and panties running away from the camera man through a power plant. She was running in slow motion, so you know right off that the cameraman has an early advantage, an advantage he entirely squanders by taking a number of breaks to film close-ups, split-screens, and shots that seem to be shot through a great deal of humidity, which I imagine would prove hazardous to the efficacy of the power plant if it wasn’t some sort of special effect. Let’s keep our fingers crossed. In case you were wondering, yes, all of the special effects shots were of random pieces of machinery in the power plant.

Also there was woman lying on top of some sort of big, cylindrical power supply device, dead, half wrapped up in a body bag, with a blood-pressure cuff attached. A no-less than two minute shot was devoted to the metrics on this cuff. For the record: Systole: 0. Asystole: 0. Dead!

SPOILER ALERT!

The film ends with the woman – the mesh shirt and panties one from the opening acts - doing standing-up ab work-outs of some sort in front of the camera. There is a cycle of close-ups of her abs, her eyes and her lips. In the penultimate cycle, we see a drop of blood run from the sad young lady’s lips. Bummer!

The best part, and maybe I should have mentioned this earlier, is that the whoever was in charge of Nuit Blanche had shut down an entire street to allow as many people as possible to sit, in the middle of the street, drinking French bier, and watch cycle after cycle after cycle of this masterpiece.


Nuit Blanche (Night of Self-Loathing) is set up as a series of walks through the center and innermost outskirts of Paris, each walk leading from one free, open-all-night installation or museum exhibit to another, to another, to another. Many, many cafés and stands are open all night, as well as the Paris metro system. It’s a pretty neat idea, especially as a lot of corporate sponsorship has started to flow in – the festival costs each Parisian taxpayer the price of half a cup of coffee (espresso, cappuccino, or mocha?), according to an official brochure I was handed by a young gentleman at Chaletet Des Halles. The gentleman then tried to sell me some grass.

Around 4am things started to get a little iffy on the not-getting-a-bottle-thrown-at-your-head front, as all the college professor types returned to their underdecorated, over-sculptured flats and drunk, angry Paris youth took control. I saw a fight break out between a guy in a van and a guy specializing in drunkenly pulling people out of vans and punching them – guess who one. Making things a little more dangerous was the apparent absence of police officers for the whole affair – there were a bunch of what appeared to be privately hired security people, but by the time things got rowdy, they were clearly stretched beyond their capacity.

I had a train to catch at 8 something in the morning, so I skedaddled to my hostel and read in a common area until the sun came up, which was fun, as I was occasionally harassed by members of the Swiss high school group who were taking up much of the hostel, all of whom cycled through four or five languages in which to ask me for a cigarette before settling in English. One of these guys passed out on the floor near my table while waiting for his friend to use the vending machine – his friend decided to leave him there, which was a move I tacitly endorsed. A few minutes later the security guard came by and told me, in French, that I was going to have to do something with my friend. I told him he was mistaken, that my only friend was adventure (I couldn't tell him about you, my secret friends, for obvious reasons), and we shared a good laugh. Then he showed me his cellphone's phonebook, to indicate that he had many, many friends. C'est la vie.

A Day At The Market

Where are there a lot of Turkish people? This is a question that follows me around like a cocker spaniel, exactly like a cocker spaniel save for the fact that not once has it provoked furious anger in me. Just curiosity, warm and perplexing. My first guess (vis a vis where Turkish?) was Istanbul. No, you’re right, too obvious. Ankara? That is a made up name. My third guess struck gold – Berlin. Because Berlin is vastly underpopulated – before WWII it had 4.5 million people, now it has 3.5 - and because there’s more work here than there is in most of former East Germany, which isto say some a lot of immigrants come here. Specifically Turkish immigrants. Much has been made about there being more kebap stands (doner, falafel, etc) than wurst stands in Berlin, but this ruckus ignores the fact that wurst, for the most part, is sort of gross, and kebap, when done well, makes Jesus Christ our savior look like gutter trash.

One of the best things about Berlin is a market held every Tuesday and Friday in Kreuzberg, near Jesse Andrews’ old apartment. This market is a Turkish market. I go at least once a week to purchase hummus and sesame rings and the occasional set of ingredients for a misguided curry. Once we got butter cheese there, my girlfriend and I, under the correct rationale that if someone offers you cheese with a higher fat content, you should purchase it or die trying.

The best thing about the Turkish market is the cheap and plentiful food goods. One of the worst is the crowding, the shoving, the loudness that emerges from tourists who don’t speak German well or at all arguing with vendors who don’t speak German well or at all. An amusing but still somewhat horrible thing about the Turkish market is the abundance of 70ish Turkish and Lebanese women, the tallest of whom is 3 ft. tall and the least square of whom is completely cubical, wandering like enchanted concrete barricades through the narrow central aisle, pushing either their grandbabies in strollers or a large personal shopping valise, or both. Sometimes they bring friends along, to walk around them in circles pointing at things and knocking into people.

In Berlin, nobody has cars, and at Berlin stores, you have to pay quite a bit for bags. So when people completely flip out and try to buy more food than they can fit in whatever shoulder bag they have with them, they either have to have a canvas sack on them or, in emergency situations, they have to carry this huge wheeled carrying case with them. If they don’t have someone to watch their children, and they almost unexceptionally don’t, they bring their kids as well. To make this somewhat difficult aspect of shopping more harmonious, most Berlin supermarkets have complicated gates to push through in order to get into the store.

Which is fine. But sometimes a crazy capitalist fever comes over me when I’m in the Turkish Market, and I become convinced that the hummus stand I like will either run out of hummus or burn down before I get to it. And having to wait for people negotiating a small, inanimate army of packaging becomes mad stressful.

Usually after the ordeal of the Turkish Market I treat myself to a falafel at KING OF FALAFEL, a small stand Jesse claims is the best Falafel provider in the city, but is in fact second to Babel, a falafel stand near my apartment. Why go to KING OF FALAFEL, then? Because it’s adorable. KING OF FALAFEL is run by the King and Queen of Falafel, both of whom are constantly bemused, if a little frustrated, by the task of creating and selling falafel sandwiches. Every step – adding the garlic sauce, frying the chickpea balls, wandering to the back of the stand to look for something they don’t actually need, scratching their head between their hairline and the cool fez the King of Falafel wears, prompts a fair amount of consternation. Yet the finished product is high quality. High enough, anyway, to make up for the occasional 30 minute wait for a food that should take 2 minutes to prepare from scratch. The last time I was there they made me free tea – an act that, while appreciated, added another 5 minutes to my wait, to apologize for their slowness. Or at least I think that’s what happened – the Queen doesn’t seem to have cottoned to my not being a German speaker.

James Joyce Can Suck It

And so can Jesse, for that matter. Inspired by a number of things, mostly suffering as documented by several of Berlin’s topnotch museums and a long walk down the most touristed stretch of oh-so-touristed Paris, I’ve managed to put together, at least somewhat, a few of the story ideas I’ve had so far into what I think might eventually become something worth reading. I’m not quite ready to start writing the first draft, but I’ve outlined a basic mythology and story arc and am doing character work right now. I don’t know what any of this means. Sure, my topnotch education can define mythology for you, can hunt it down like Dog the Bounty Hunter to it’s greek routes, pin it to the terra cotta floor, and mace it! Mace! But I don’t know what it means in terms of preparing a story of any scope. But, having blogged about it, it will happen. More to come? Surely.

Since this would be a very short and even-more-than-usual self-congratulatory blog post, I’m going to take some time to describe what is either the coolest or most horrible, depending on whether or not you’re a real estate appraiser/Basquiat fanatic outlet of creativity I’ve discovered in Berlin. This passion – mania? No, just passion – don’t get carried away, Sparky – is shared by virtually every inhabitant of this troubled, vibrant city, from the 2 foot tall Lebanese ladies who constantly throw themselves at my shins when I try to walk past them in Kreuzberg to the good shoppers ant ExtraX, the goth superstore – no joke – next to our apartment. I speak, of course, of writing indecipherable things on things you don’t own.

The most famous example of this is the Berlin Wall, specifically the still impressive East Side Gallery – 1.1 km of the wall left standing to preserve the bright, peace-and-freedom celebrating graffiti put up on it surely before much of the rest of the wall fell in 1990. The least famous example is the obscure tagging done in plain sight of me and anyone else who happened to be walking by the front door of my apartment on a pane of murky glass by an otherwise unremarkable German lad.

Quick note on how to look German: wear a Yankees cap. No joke. It’s also very important to respond to any question including the words “ball” “championship” or “you must be pulling my leg with this faux-New Yorker crap, goateed Berlin hipster” with “Go Yanks!” or people will begin to suspect that you know nothing of baseball, having a job, or not listening to the entire Sean Paul song you just downloaded on your cellphone, which, look at you, you’re actually doing even as I type this
.
In any case, this eighteen or so years old German kid sees me sitting outside my apartment, sees me seeing him, then tags the door, opens it, walks out towards me, giving me a faintly confrontational look – not threatening, really, but more of a “what’s with you, bro?” – and walks off. And I came off feeling weird.

Correctly, it seems, because virtually all of Berlin – and, please remember, this city is somewhere between 6 and 9 times the size of Paris – is covered in graffiti. Most of it is what I refer to as “banal tagging” – the kind of stuff you see everywhere in big cities, except more so. Some of it, however, shows signs of being the result of some sort of mass hysteria. On, for example, the East Side Gallery, which, as you might have guessed, draws its share of non-artistic graffiti, somebody saw fit to write a crude slogan, a command – let’s call it “dance with my cousin” for proprieties sake, in Spanish. And then, for no apparent reason, most of the people who passed that oh so clever ejaculation felt the need to write the same thing, again in Spanish, somewhere near by. Sometimes they would try to outdo each other with emphasis: “dance with MY cousin, friend” etc. Like hundreds of times. What? What?

Shhhh, darling. Do not ask that. It’s Berlin. The answer to your question - to all questions? Maybe - is “Berlin.”

All Apologies

Thus far, my blogging of my trip to, through, around, and under the surface of Europe has been lacking, if only because I have made no blog entries about the trip. Was I going for minimalism, you ask? Shut up.

In reality, my failure – and there has been exactly one (1) – has had more to do with two insidious forces acting upon my otherwise charmed life: the lack of discipline that comes with travel and the lack of internet access that comes with living in an apartment 20 minutes or so from free wireless. At this point you may have some objections, two objections, to be specific, both of which are valid, but stupid at the same time. Objection one: you blogged New Zealand, and you were traveling then – what’s the deal? Yes, this is true, but when I was traveling in New Zealand I was working and writing and sending copybatches through the internet all the time. All three of these factors made a) having indisputably blogworthy things happen to me, b) having a natural reason and opportunity for blogging and c) having regular access to the internet just sort of happen, like magic. Your second objection: if you have access to free internet, shouldn’t that make it more likely that you’d post blog entries, not less? O-ho, merry prankster, not so fast. I have free internet available 20 minutes away. By subway.

An aside about socioeconomics and societal mores in Germany, particularly in Berlin. For the most part, they don’t exist. There are two items of etiquette I’ve discovered to exist so far: don’t cross the street on a “don’t walk” symbol, even if there are no cars coming, even if the traffic lights are clearly malfunctioning, even if your joke friend Hans has put a crudely drawn don’t walk symbol in lipstick on your bathroom mirror, just to see how long you will stand silently, waiting. Hans has some gender issues, but you probably do too, so lay off. Jesse described this phenomenon as part of a sort of a “why hurry” approach to life shared by the cosmopolitan, enlightened Berliners. In my mind, a fatal flaw to this characterization is that German people are robots.

Another item of etiquette: don’t eat on the subway. Europeans, in general, don’t seem to be so much down with the walking while eating/eating on the go thing as Americans, possibly because literally two of them have jobs, and both of those guys work at a restaurant under the Eiffel tower. That said, you will occasionally see people chowing down on falafel as they walk down the street. But until I caught a glimpse of myself in the window opposite chowing down on some delicious fried rice (3.50) between the Senefelder and Rosa-Luxembourg-Pl. stops on the U2, I had yet to see anyone eat on the subway. It was something of a revelation – I had never before thought of myself as a rulebreaker. It is permitted to carry open bottles of beer around with you all the time, including the subway, however. Especially if you’re prone to angry shouting. In any case, riding the U-Bahn in Berlin is not what one would refer to as a “pleasure sport,” which explains my reluctance to take the 20 minute ride down to the free wireless in the SonyCenter – shaped, no lie, like Mt. Fuji, on purpose, wow – to check internet.

But, of course, because I have free internet theoretically available, I’m loathe – loathe! – to pay for it at any of the many cheap internet cafes near by. Complicating matters is that every week or so – literally three times since we’ve been in country – a random tendril of wireless connectivity will snake its way down through the Soviet-era pavement that encases my apartment in Prenzlauerberg, and we’ll have free internet at the apartment for 20 minutes or so. Free internet in the apartment means no s-bahn ride, no scary germans, and, perhaps most importantly, no pants.

In any case, apologies for the lack of bloggy goodness so far. I’ve got a bunch of stuff written down, which I’ll congeal into a really, really offensive take on the continent when I get back. I’m about to put together a few more blog entries to add to this one, and I’ll put them online soon, certainly before you read them.

Awesome. Until you scroll down (up? I don't know. Look, a kitten!) a bit…

(I apologize for lying to you about the kitten.)