Halfway down the Danube

Visiting the planets (or, wish I could do tables)

I need a "total nerd" category.  Ahem.

We've been visiting other planets for almost 50 years now!  But we've visited some much more than others.  Mostly, that's because some planets are much easier to reach than others... Mars and Venus are closer both in distance and in delta-v (basically, the energy a spacecraft needs to get there).  The outer planets are very far off; Mercury is so deep down the Sun's gravity well that it's very hard to reach.

Just for the hell of it, I did a tally.

Die dunkel Ecke; or, Fifty North

Fladungen sits at fifty degrees, thirty minutes north latitude. 

That's further north than I've ever lived before.  It's the latitude of Winnipeg, or Vancouver or Kiev.  And while central Germany has a milder climate than Manitoba or the middle Ukraine, it shares the same long summer days... and long winter nights.

We're coming now into the dark corner of the year.  Sunrise today was 7:53; by that time I've been up for an hour (Claudia may have been up for two or three), Alan is out the door to school, and we're getting the other two boys ready for kindergarten.  Sunset will be at 4:20, which is just around the time I bring David and Jacob home.  (Pick them up from kindergarten at 4:00, but we sometimes take a roundabout route home: looking at chickens, and such.)  The day is just eight and a half hours long, and every day is about two minutes shorter than the last.  The noon sun peaks around 20 degrees altitude -- less than a quarter of the way up the sky.

Garbage

It's a thing here.

We produce five streams of garbage: compost, paper, glass, metal/plastic, and general.  This is, I gather, standard for Germany.  Learning what goes where is no small thing.  (Milk cartons, for instance, are treated cardboard but go with plastic.) 

H.A. Rey's Stars

I was maybe twelve when I read this book for the first time.

The Stars has had enough rave reviews over the last 56 years that it hardly needs more from me.  But it's just an awesome damn book.  Anyone who can read at an eighth grade level can pick it up and, with very little effort, become a competent naked eye astronomer.  That's incredibly hard, and Rey makes it look easy.

Here's a thing about H.A. Rey: he and his wife were German Jews who fled to America to escape the Nazis.  (They got out of France just ahead of the Wehrmacht, riding bicycles that Hans assembled from spare parts.)  I didn't know that until recently.  But it made a lightbulb flash: when you look at the Curious George books -- especially the first two or three -- you can see that the backgrounds are a weird mix of New York, Paris, and Hamburg.  The policemen seem to be German; the firemen seem to be French.  The city that George escapes into has the broad boulevards and sidewalks of New York but with dignified Weimar-era burghers peering into Parisian shopfronts.

Circadian

Circadian is the technical term for biological rhythms that run on a daily cycle. 

Lately I've been more and more aware of mine.  I'm not sure if this is because the rhythms are actually getting stronger (though they may be) or because of the life I'm living just now.  I'm not going to work every day; and while the days are pretty full, I have a lot more liberty to notice how my energy and attention seem to rise and fall through the day.

Justification (beta)

"David, don't -- stop, I said don't -- do not throw that snowball at the chickens!"

"Why not?"

"Because... chickens are harmless.  They're not bothering you."

"They are bothering me!"

"How are they bothering you?"

"They're looking at me!"

A track in the silt

Via 3 Quarks Daily comes a neat bit of recent science; You remember I wrote a while back about large single-celled creatures living on the ocean floor?  Turns out there are several sorts of them (.pdf), and one has an interesting surprise:

Slowly rolling across the ocean floor, a humble single-celled creature is poised to revolutionize our understanding of how complex life evolved on Earth.

A distant relative of microscopic amoebas, the grape-sized Gromia sphaerica was discovered once before, lying motionless at the bottom of the Arabian Sea. But when Mikhail Matz of the University of Texas at Austin and a group of researchers stumbled across a group of G. sphaerica off the coast of the Bahamas, the creatures were leaving trails behind them up to 50 centimeters (20 inches) long in the mud.

The trouble is, single-celled critters aren't supposed to be able to leave trails. The oldest fossils of animal trails, called 'trace fossils', date to around 580 million years ago, and paleontologists always figured they must have been made by multicellular animals with complex, symmetrical bodies.

Tit dumplings

This sounds so much worse than it is.

Dedicated readers of this blog will remember the tits.  Well, they don't migrate.  Tits are tough little things, and will try to survive the winter.  People appreciate this, and lend a hand. 

Meiseknoedel -- literally, dumplings for tits -- are little balls of beef tallow rolled full of seeds and then hung in a little net bag.  You can make them yourself (people do) or buy them at any store.  They're hung from tree branches.  The mesh of the net keeps out the bigger birds, but the tits will cling to it (endearingly upside-down) and peck out a balanced meal of seeds and tallow.

I was a little dubious about these things, but by God they work a treat.  We hung four around the house yesterday, just outside the largest windows at eye level.  By midmorning today we were attracting a steady stream of tits.   Lots of people do this, so the tits know exactly what to look for. 

We also attracted some larger birds -- a starling, a magpie, the graceful little songbird that the Germans call Kleiber.  The Kleiber was able to get some food out through the mesh; the others just hung around hopefully for a while, then eventually flew off. 

It definitely added something to a snowy morning: life and motion against the silence and white.  So, tit dumplings FTW.

Can't wait to see what kind of google searches this attracts.

Let it snow

Got the yard finished last week -- leaves raked, apples picked up and sorted.

Wood-burning stove hooked up a couple of days later.  Several hundred pounds of wood unloaded and stacked over the weekend.

Winter tires on the car since Thursday.

And... right on time.  Two inches of snow yesterday, another inch today.

I'm not really a winter person.  Don't mind it if it doesn't drag on too long, with "too long" being more than 60 days.  (Don't laugh.  Armenia had brutal winters, windy and bitterly cold with plenty of snow, but they were 60 days exactly -- mid-December to mid-February.  I was fine with that.)  Fladungen is in a microclimate that has almost Scandinavian weather... it will continue snowy and cold for the next four months or more.  I'm not bubbling with anticipation.

But these first couple of days weren't bad.  Today I took the boys and the baby for a long wandering walk around Fladungen, out into the fields ("the Muir Expedition, to deepest Antarctica!"), down to the train station (if you climb up a siding and drop a big snowball onto the tracks, what happens?) and up the stream that runs through town (not frozen.  yet.).  Snowballs, snow angels.  We made a small, troll-like little snowman.  And Claudia had hot turkey breast waiting for us, and then there was a fire and naps.

Well: that's two days.  A hundred or so more to go.

How Fladungen became part of Bavaria

Because it wasn't always. 

The modern Land of Bavaria is a nice, regular blotch on the map.  It's roughly a rectangle running north-south, about the size and shape of Indiana.   But that's a relatively recent development -- just the last couple of hundred years.  Before Napoleon, Bavaria used to be smaller, and rather differently shaped.  The southern half of the modern state was the "Electorate" of Bavaria.  Most of the northern half, though, wasn't Bavarian -- it was "Franconia".  Which was a geographic expression rather than a state; Franconia was a dog's breakfast of little city-states, Bishoprics, and minor principalities.  Meanwhile the Elector of Bavaria owned some land along the Rhine, in what's now the Rhineland, and some bits of what's now Austria.  It was a mess.

It got cleaned up by two guys: Napoleon, who everybody knows, and a fellow named Maximilian, Count Montgelas, Prime Minister of Bavaria during the Napoleonic years, who is not so famous.  Which is a pity, because Montgelas seems to have been quite a guy.  When his boss, a minor prince, became Elector, Bavaria was completely bankrupt and militarily helpless -- it was a football field for France and Austria.  When he left power, 18 years later, he'd nearly doubled the size of the country, raised his prince from Elector to full King, reformed the currency, stabilized the finances, and -- well:

Munich and back

So, went to Munich for a day.  No reason but to see my friend B_____, who was there for a day.

This involved seven hours on trains, which was fine -- I like trains, especially in Germany.  Knocked off Nixonland, of which more anon.  Played a couple of games of Civilization IV, which I never have time for otherwise.  (Short games.  At Monarch level, I can win maybe one time in four.)  Watched the green scenery of Bavaria flow past.

One thing I noticed: while all the trains are in great condition, very clean and well kept, the tracks vary.  The big intercity routes are fine, but the little spur line that runs from Schweinfurt up to Erfurt?  Not so great: you can feel the ride, vibration and swaying.  Not sure what if anything that signifies, but there it is.

So Munich.  Nice!  Very European, very German.  Didn't do much but walk around for hours and hang out with B____, but that was just fine.  There are some great parks.  They've done a lot with their river.

It was just a... goof off, hang out with a friend day.  Those are very rare these days.  (Obviously: Claudia had to deal with three little boys and a baby for a day and a bit, alone.)  But very pleasant.

Naargh

Lost post.  My increasingly elderly laptop does that sometimes, and I forgot to do "ctrl-A, ctrl-C" before hitting "publish" because I'm just tired.

And now I'm really too tired to write the damn post again.

And I'll probably not post tomorrow, either, because I'll be in Munich for a day.  Dammit.

Um.  Talk among yourselves? 

World enough, and time

Things I would like to do, if I had a few years with nothing else to do.

• Learn calculus past differential equations.  I got to the beginnings of diff-e in college, and it seemed like it was just getting interesting.
• A semester or two of organic chem.  Had one, hated it -- all I remember is IUPAC nomenclature.  But now I think I'd like to try again.
• Get up to carrying a tune on a musical instrument.  Yeah, I know.  Everyone says that.  But to be able to bang out a simple song on a guitar or piano would be something.
• Twenty simple magic tricks.  (I have three or so now.  The boys are almost old enough for the cup-and-ball routine.  Looking forward to it.)
• Run a 10k in under an hour.  Actually, I think I may have done this already.  But I wasn't keeping track!  It was back when I was training for the marathon.  I'd sort of like to do another marathon, too.  But this is a list of things I haven't done yet, right.

The mirror image of this list is the list of things I probably wouldn't do, even if I had five years and a million dollars.  For instance, there are not a lot of books I think I absolutely must read.  I've already hit the high points of the Western Canon.  And while there are plenty of books I'd like to read -- Braudel's history of early modern Europe for instance; I've read only a few excerpts, and it looked really good -- I don't feel this is something I really want to do before I die.  Similarly, there's no language, ancient or modern, that I feel compelled to pick up (though I'd like to improve my French and German).  And while there are some places I'd love to visit, right now I'm not thinking I *must* see Nan Madol or the Pyramids, or ride the Trans-Siberian railroad or whatever. 

And then there's a whole category of things that are worthy, even wonderful, but that just don't interest me much... gardening, say, or anything mechanical,or team sports.  Don't hate those things, just don't think I would seek them out.

But anyway.  If you had a few years, a modest amount of money, and nothing else distracting you: what?

Smile on

She's smiling.

She was smiling beore.  But not much, and they were those sort of wandering random baby smiles. Then suddenly today, like a switch turned on: smiles! And smiles at us.  And more vocalization, too -- she was sort of quiet before.  Now we're getting lots of those "aaah"s and trilling sounds.

Rushed to finish the yard work today, because snow is expected the day after tomorrow.  Finished painting the new wall in the morning; the oven guy came in the afternoon and hooked up the wood-burning oven.  I'm looking at it right now.  We won't discuss how much it cost.  It's nice.  It's the last major change to the house for the next little while.  (There are a lot of things we might do with this house, if we keep it.  And if I get a job that lets us start putting money away again.)

Claudia ordered the winter tires for the car.  Clear and cold tonight. 

Things I learned today

(Because I'm too tired for an organized post.)

1)  Fladungen has a thing that involves climbing a big pole to get sausages.  The pole is up now.  It's like 100 feet high; the sausages are maybe halfway up.  More on this as it develops.

2)  Germans do have commemoration ceremonies for the dead of the two World Wars.  I know because I attended one this morning at the war memorial down the street.  For a town the size of Fladungen, they got a decent turnout -- I'd say 50-60 people, not counting the small band and the honor guard. 

3)  Naegleria Fowleri "the brain-eating amoeba" is pretty disturbing.  (No link.  If you're curious, google it.  Just, you know, disturbing.)

4)  You can make a decent omelet really fast like so:

• whip however many eggs in a bowl, adding a tablespoon of milk for every two eggs.  Whip with a fork until you get some bubbles.
• melt some butter in a pan.  Chop an onion, sautee the onion in the butter, dump the sauteed onion back into the whipped eggs. 
• melt some more butter, dump eggs into pan, add whatever else, cook, fold over, cook on low until done

Yes I know this is not a great recipe, and many of you know better ones.  But I am no sort of cook, and this is fast and gives something half a cut above scrambled eggs.

5)  Floppy comic books are slowly dying.  (Okay, I didn't really learn that today.)  It remains to be seen if the new recession will speed up the process and finish them off.  Probably deserves a post of its own.

6)  Woo, did Strom Thurmond do a number on Abe Fortas back in 1968.  I had no idea. Mind, it's probably a good thing Fortas wasn't confirmed -- he had skeletons in his closet.  Still, that raises a question: what were the positive accomplishments of that generation of Dixiecrat legislators, the ones who were mossback Democrats and then turned Republican?  There must have been some, right?

Yeah, pretty random.  Weekends are tricky.  Will try a real post tomorrow.

Short Saturday night post

Because we're all tired.  The baby's injection had her restless all last night; she kept me up past midnight, and then had Claudia up on and off until 7 am.

Leah-the-baby reminds us more than a little of Alan-the-baby.  There are six and a half years between them, but we still remember: Alan was always restless, physically active, and tended to fuss.  The one thing that consistently shut him down was a ride in the car; he liked rhythmic sounds and vibrations, and it rarely took more than five minutes in the back seat to knock him out.  Leah, same same.

So I was driving her around after midnight last night, out of Fladungen to Oberfladungen (yes, really) and then up to Leubach on the edge of the Hochrhoen, the upland moor that lies at the head of our little valley.  The old border with East Germany runs right across the Hochrhoen, and I may have gone across it before turning back.  Twenty years ago I'd have been shot, except that I wouldn't have reached that point -- the road was closed a quarter mile or so before the border.  Claudia's great-grandfather was the baker in Fladungen, and he used to deliver bread every morning to a couple of villages over the border; Claudia's mother A___ was a small girl when the border closed, but she still remembers the day he had to stop.  That would have been in 1952; they just closed the road one day, and it stayed closed for almost 40 years.

Anyway.  The Hochrhoen is between 600 and 800 meters up -- say 2,000 and 2,700 feet.  Not exactly the Colorado Rockies, but high enough to be a different microclimate.  Going up the hill to Leubach I hit a solid wall of fog.  Leubach itself was absolutely silent and a little spooky... a small Bavarian hill town, now dark and sleeping in the November fog.  I had an odd urge to keep driving up onto the moor proper and wander around in the fog for a while, but the top centimeter of forebrain was awake enough to say bad idea, Doug -- turn around now and go home and put the baby to bed.  So I did.

Today was the first day of Fasching.  Ostheim had a big silly parade, which we attended.  The theme was America!  (There's always a theme, apparently.)  Lots of flags, cowboy hats, cheerleaders with pom-poms, one Harley and a vintage Chevy Impala.  Oh, and an oompah band with some guys with black stockings over their faces and signs saying "Change" pinned on their suit jackets.  Better than blackface, I suppose...

The baby seems to have mostly recovered from the booster shot and was dozy most of the day.  We'll see how that plays out.

And so to bed.

Friday odds and ends

Not even linky.  Sorry.  We have guys in the house all day ripping out a wall to install our new wood-burning stove, which should be nice when it's done but is a little distracting at the moment.

Politics: the transition seems okay up to Day Ten.  Interesting that they're concentrating on White House staff first, while putting Cabinet picks off until later.  That seems reasonable.  I guess we'll find out.

In the comments to an earlier post, Josh Trevino noted that Obama was not "a man forged in the fire of adversity, here; no lonely warrior vindicated by history and a grateful America."  Well, maybe not.  But recent history suggests that's exactly what Americans don't want.  In all five of the last Presidential elections, without exception, Americans have gone for the candidate with less military experience.    America just doesn't seem all that interested in being led by warriors, lonely or otherwise.  As for adversity, while "biracial child of a single mother" is well behind "POW for five years", it's well past the 50th percentile mark for recent presidential candidates.

Meanwhile: very very funny, if true.

Science: you know, there are some awesome biology blogs out there.  I've mentioned Tetrapod Zoology.  My latest is Catalogue of Organisms, which has terrific articles about stuff I've never heard of before, and Lord Geekington, who doesn't update often enough.  There's a species of giant mistletoe in Australia that looks like a flowering bush, but that parasitizes other plants' root systems by growing razor-sharp little clippers and snipping their roots off underground!  Ginkgoes have their own superspecialized fungus that eats nothing but dead ginkgo leaves!  There's an entire family of marine arthropods called the "Godzillidae"!  Who knew?

Bedtime stories

Sometimes a book or a comic book, sometimes a "tell-story".  For the latter, I turn the lights off and lie on the ground beside the bunk bed.

Last night was the story of the Phoenix lander.  You remember the Phoenix lander, right?  Parachuted down to the north pole of Mars a few months ago, did some soil testing, discovered ice, saw snow falling.  Then gradually ran out of power.  Martian winter -> long nights -> less energy from solar panels, plus cold forcing it to run internal heaters longer, plus dust storms; the Martian high arctic is not so friendly.

Well, a few weeks ago some bright person at NASA gave the probe a Twitter feed.  "Phoenix" was brave and spunky, fearless in the face of certain death, and prone to saying things like "Still hoping to get a bit of strength back & maybe do more science" and |In case we don't get this chance again, thank you all so much for the questions, comments & good wishes over the mission. It's been awesome."  This may sound idiotic, but it turned into one of those internet things , with tens of thousands of people logged on to get "Phoenix's" messages on their cell phones or whatever, and an outpouring of grief when the probe finally succumbed to the cold and "died".

Vaguely science-fictiony open-ended speculation about oil

Interesting factoid: about 94% of world oil production gets burned, while about 6% is used as feedstock -- piped into factories to make chemicals, fertilizers and (especially) plastic.

There's been a fair amount of discussion about how to gradually phase out oil in transportation.  I haven't seen any about the feedstock issue, though.  Go figure.  The world drinks a huge amount of oil every day, and 6% of a huge amount is still a lot. 

Presumably petroleum products run the gamut from stuff that could easily use other inputs, through stuff that would be possible but very hard and expensive to make without petroleum, to stuff that cannot plausibly be made with any other input.  I'd guess offhand that a lot of plastics fall into those latter groups, but I really don't know. 

This led me to a few moments of speculation: imagine a future where all transport has shifted to hydrogen (or whatever), but a small crude oil extraction industry stays alive to provide high-end plastics.  Which are luxury goods, of course, and status symbols...

But no.  The price of petroleum-only products would hit a ceiling once it the price of oil rose high enough to make petroleum synthesis profitable.  That would be high by today's standards -- hundreds of dollars a barrel -- but not high enough for plastic jewelry to replace gold and platinum.

Still: soaring crude prices must have various industries looking around for alternative feedstocks.  Wonder why we're not hearing more about that.

Autumn cleaning

First frost this morning.  We had snow a couple of weeks ago, but not frost until today.

It was lovely.  Clear morning, very still.  White all over everything.  Alan goes to school before the sun is up, but by the time I walked David and Jacob to kindergarten (8:30 or a bit before) the sun was up and streaking it all with gold.

I mentioned the war memorial fountain down the street from us.  Well, one of the town workmen (I think there are three of them... whenever I see mowing, hedge trimming, or whatever, it seems to be the same three guys) was standing inside it, all wader boots and rake.  Cleaning all the dead leaves and muck before winter.

Okay, I said no politics for a while

But this is just awesome.

(Explanations here and here.)

St. Martin's again

St. Martin's Day last night.

Our previous St. Martin's Days together have all been abroad.  Last year, in Armenia, we threw a party at our house, hosting about sixty people in our yard.  That was nice.  This was nice, too, in a different way.  There was a big organized gathering -- all the kids under age eight or so, at the kindergarten -- and then the kindergarteners sang songs and acted out a skit.  There was an oompah band (older kids from the high school) and sausages and mulled wine and cookies.  Then a torchlight procession all around the town (maybe 15 minutes walk... it's not a very big town), under a hazy November gibbous moon, kids holding lanterns, little ones on their parents' shoulders.  And back to the kindergarten playground for eating and drinking and running around screaming.

There was a group of disabled kids in wheelchairs.  First I'd seen.  Germany is a First World country, and pretty disabled-friendly -- handicapped parking, ramps, and such -- but other than a few older people, I hadn't seen anyone before.  Random chance?  Fladungen, again, is not that big.

I'd bought some sparklers a week or two back.  (Claudia: "That's not a St. Martin's tradition."  Me: "No, it's an American tradition.")  Took the boys to the back of the playground and lit up.  Yeeaaahh.  Jacob got scared and kept dropping his -- a bit intense for a little boy who's just turned three -- but Alan and David liked their sparklers a lot.

Another year.

Barr '08; or, Fail

I haven't seen anyone -- not even the libertarian blogs -- mention Bob Barr. 

So, why not.   Shouldn't take long.

There was a time when people thought Bob Barr might get three percent of the vote nationwide.  (There was a Zogby poll at one point that showed him over five percent.)  It was thought that he might swing various states -- Georgia, Montana -- from one party to another.  That in a year when voters were nervous about both parties, he might be a strong voice for an alternative way.  That he might be the strongest Libertarian candidate for President since the party started running back in 1972.

As it turned out, not.

Was raking

when the bells struck eleven.

Claudia called to me that I should run down to the city hall for the ceremony.  Fladungen's city hall is just a stroll around the corner -- most of Fladungen is a stroll around the corner -- so I did.

Nothing.  Some towns do a thing, some don't.  Ostheim (Claude's home town) makes a big deal of November 11, but apparently Fladungen doesn't.  I went into the city hall to get the yellow bags for recycling plastic, and then I stopped at the bakery for some bread and some apple tarts, and then I went home and went back to raking the yard.

Here's a thing: November 11 is also "Faschingsbeginn" -- the start of the long winter carnival season.  And Germans celebrate this by dressing up in silly costumes and building floats and all that.  But it's also a day of mourning, the day World War One ended.  It doesn't seem to have the emotional resonance that Veterans Day does in the US, or Armistice Day in Britain, but it's recognized.  I'm not sure how the Germans deal with having these two completely different things on one day.  Solemn ceremonies in the morning, wacky costumes after lunch?

Avatar, the Goonies

Need a "kid stuff" category.  (I said that was enough politics for now.)

Avatar: The Last Airbender is a pretty good kid's cartoon.  Oh, it's not the solid wall of awesome of, say, Justice League Unlimited or Samurai Jack.  But it's consistently good in a way I respect: good art, decent stories, well-choreographed action scenes.  Also, it bucks the current trend of gender differentiation in kids' cartoons (which just bugs the hell out of me),  While it's more of a Boy's Adventure kind of thing, there are female characters who are important and get to Do Stuff, and it spends a fair amount of time on character development and relationships.  A boy between 5 and 12 will probably like this; a girl of the same age might not, but then again she might.

Avatar is from Nick, which is a bit of a surprise since Nick's animated works tend to, um, suck.  Even the better ones -- Danny Phantom, Hey Arnold!, and of course SpongeBob  -- are pretty formulaic and limited.  But Avatar is telling a big epic story that's designed to extend across a certain number of seasons (five, I think) and end up being a more or less coherent whole.  And it's doing a pretty good job of it.  It's a kids' cartoon, but it feels like good YA fantasy.

That ineffective wuss Obama

This seems to be the emerging conservative reaction.

Obama is a charismatic nonentity, an empty suit.  He's never done anything much with his life, and he's not going to start now.  He won't be able to handle the challenges of the next six months, never mind the next four years.  He'll be a one-termer, quickly forgotten, notable only for being the first African-American president. Another Jimmy Carter, if you like. You can see this in a variety of places -- here, for instance -- but I've also heard it from a family member, and via e-mail with a conservative acquaintance.

Well... maybe.

November Saturday

Quiet Saturday afternoon here. 

We had considered a field trip to Erfurt -- there's a nice children's park there, and also dear old IKEA -- but it's sort of grey and glum outside, and also we're expecting a friend this evening (James from England) and want to clean up a bit.  So, boys reading and playing Nintendo, baby dozing on and off, Mom and Dad cleaning and hanging around online.

In the news: Obama lost Missouri, barely, but picked up that one electoral vote in Nebraska.  (Apparently Nebraska Republicans are already trying to change the law to switch Nebraska back to winner-take-all.)  Also, he had his first press conference.  His supporters are, um, very enthusiastic.  Okay, some of that is having a President who speaks in complete sentences and doesn't smirk.  But still: it was very short, he said "uh" a lot, and he ended up having to apologize to Nancy Reagan.  I can't see that as pure 200 proof win.

Oh, and he picked Rahm Emanuel for his Chief of Staff.  Which makes a lot of sense to me!  That's a position where you want a complete SOB.  Let him break heads, and let the President be Presidential.

Young Americans

Okay, that Bowie track.

Young Americans is not considered one of Bowie's great albums.  He was out of his mind on coke at the time, of course.  And in a somewhat tentative and experimental space musically -- glam rock had run its course, and it wasn't clear what was next.  So the album is kind of a mess.  Basically there are two tracks to take away from it: 'Fame' and the title song.

But they're good tracks.  Flawed, but good.  'Fame' was Bowie's collaboration with Lennon, and if you haven't heard it, go listen.  And 'Young Americans' was... well, it's hard to say exactly what it was.  But it's worth five minutes of your time.

(Note the saxophonist and the backup singers.  Bowie was experimenting with soul and with funk.  He'd get better at putting it all together later, but this is a pretty promising rough first draft.)

The day after

Wednesday morning I went to the airport to get Claudia.

It turned out that waking up at 2:30 was -- I can't say a mistake; I'm really glad I saw history made.  But I'm perpetually a little short on sleep, and losing half a night made me really, really sluggish and stupid.  So much so that I had to pull the car over at one point and put my head down for five minutes.  Alan was in the back seat (he has vacation this week; the other boys are still in kindergarten) and he poked me after a while.  "Get up, Daddy!"

Then I made a wrong turn on the autobahn -- this on a route I've driven perhaps a hundred times -- and ended up making a vast circle around Frankfurt, losing an hour.  Poor Claudia had to stand and wait, wondering what had happened.

Well: we did all get home in one piece at last.

3:30 a.m.

Pennsylvania for Obama, Georgia and West Virginia for McCain.  NC and VA still out.  At this point it's looking like a win,but no landslide.

Loathsome Senator McConnell squeaking out a win in KY.  (My goodness, there are some unpleasant Republican Senators up for re-election this cycle.)

CNN on TV ("we're getting very close to a major projection"), dailykos, FiveThirtyEight, Andrew Sullivan and the rest of the Atlantic group.

The heat went mysteriously off.  Noticed it when I came home this evening.  Fiddling with the downstair's burner produced encouraging humming noises but no actual heat.  Annoying!  Finally found what seemed to be a restart button a few minutes ago.

Obama ahead in Florida and Ohio, but nothing is called yet.  Ohh, so close in NC. 

More in a bit.

3:45 -- Ohio for Obama, which means it's pretty close to over.  CNN shows the McCain central campaign rally: they have Hank Williams,Jr. live on stage but the TV turned off.

...there's really no way for McCain to win without Ohio or Pennsylvania.  It's over.

4:00 -- Iowa for Obama.  That gets him to 202.  The three locked-up west coast states have 73.  Win.

Oh my.

Just before 5:00 -- Virginia for Obama.  Polls closing on the west coast. McCain expected to concede within the hour.

Few minutes later -- CNN calls it for Obama.  Pan after pan of shrieking Obama supporters.  I was maybe doing some shrieking myself!

Later -- Watched McCain's speech, which was weary and (I thought) pro forma, but which everyone is calling gracious.  Then Obama's speech, which seemed more like a stump than an acceptance.  But, well, so what?  It's a new world.

Okay, shower and coffee.  We leave in an hour for the airport.  Good night and good morning!

Predictions

Everybody's doing 'em.

I did a set for the midterm and, um, not so great.  I was too conservative, guessing the Dems would win a "razor thin" majority in the House and miss the Senate by two.  Well, I was okay with being wrong. 

Nonetheless, here we go.

All Souls Day

I always liked this holiday. 

But we didn't do anything about it today.  Still single parenting -- three more days.  Some TV in the morning (must... cut down... on TV) and then over to the in-laws for lunch.  Then mother-in-law A____ took the boys to an small-animal exhibition in downtown Ostheim (chickens, ducks and bunnies!) while I took a nap on the couch (nap!).  And that was pretty much the day.

But I don't want to spend the entire month blogging about our everyday lives.  So let's see.

A while back -- um, like a year ago -- I started a short history of the Armenian Republic.  (Part One, part two.)  I should finish that.  Not tonight though.  -- What brought it to mind: an article today about the Presidents of Armenia and Azerbaijan meeting yesterday in Moscow to sign a joint declaration about Nagorno-Karabakh.  This is one of those "nothing actually happened, but just them being in the same room was a huge deal" kind of things. 

Kid's movies and TV.  Yeah, I want to write some stuff about that too.  It seems like something of a fallow season... the best thing on TV right now is "Avatar: The Last Airbender" which is pretty good but not, you know, great.  (Carlos watched the pilot episode of Samurai Jack when he was here -- the one with the talking dogs -- and was bouncing up and down on the couch over the Kurosawa references.  Samurai Jack really was all that.)  But not tonight. 

I guess this is more of a coming attractions kind of a post.  Way to build reader interest, there.

Trivia: hedgehogs eat mice, apparently.

Okay, it's Sunday night, tired, I got nothin'. 

Anybody vote early?  Anybody not planning to vote?

Hedgehog

Oh, almost forgot: we caught a hedgehog today.

We were out in the yard raking leaves (okay, I was raking, the boys were sort of goofing around) when Alan suddenly yelled, "Daddy, an eagle!"  Or that's what I heard.  Of course he said Igel, which is German for hedgehog, but it did make me stare wildly up at the sky for a few moments.

Anyway, there it was, a little gray-brown spiky lump by the side of the plum tree.  I sent Alan upstairs to fetch David (Jacob was asleep) and we watched it for a minute.  It didn't do anything.  So I got the red plastic bucket and very slowly crept up on it.  This turned out to be unnecessary; it didn't run or even startle.  When I got close it curled up a little, and I was able to scoop it into the bucket easily.

True thing: I've never seen a wild hedgehog before.  Well, we don't have them in the US.  We have skunks, raccoons, opossums, and porcupines, but no hedgehogs.

Well... it was interesting.  They can curl up, you know?  And the texture of the spines is pretty neat.  David reached into the bucket and touched it readily.  Alan was more cautious -- he's heard they have spines, and was wondering if that meant it could sting or such -- but eventually both boys were gently stroking and poking it.  The hedgehog just curled up a bit more.

There was the discussion you'd expect: what do they eat? slugs and earthworms (I think) -- and the question of keeping it was raised and vetoed: it's a wild animal, it has a life out here -- and then I tipped it gently back out of the bucket and we went back to raking and swinging on the swing and hanging around.

After a few minutes Alan yelled, "Daddy!  It's moving!"  And it was.  Not in any hurry, mind.  (Do hedgehogs ever hurry?  They must sometime, right?)  It sort of waddled across the back lawn to the big juniper berry bush that grows by the back terrace and disappeared into the leaves.

And that was it.  They're not very dramatic animals.

Still... neat.

And we're off

Day 1 of 30!

So last night was Halloween.  Germans are still figuring this one out.  Apparently it's caught on in recent years, but it's not yet remotely as popular as in the US.  So, a few people do pumpkins, a few families get kids together for trick-or-treating, and that's about it. 

Also, some little details are off.  Like, German pumpkins aren't bred for carving yet, so their shells are all woody and hard as hell to work with.  And when the boys came home, someone had given them a couple of complete Milka candy bars -- the big ones that cost about $1.50 each.  Nice, but...

Still, it gave the boys a chance to go out -- which they missed last year; long story -- and they loved it.

November's first day was unexpectedly clear, warm and sunny.  By (recent) tradition, Saturday is the day the boys can (1) eat crappy sugary cereal, as much as they can stomach, and (2) watch lots of TV, with "lots" being a couple of hours in the morning and another hour or two after dinner.  So we did the TV thing in the morning, and then I chased them outside and did some more yard work.  (Still not finished.  I'll need at least one more clear, dry day next week.)  I also finished the last (I hope) revision of the Burundi report.  Hope they like it, fingers crossed...

Oh, and I spent way too much time compulsively checking the Internet for election stuff.

And that was day one.