Just another Saturday in the 'berg.

Cool... a guy dressed as a Purple Elvis with log chained to his leg (and a picture of a girl nailed to it). Either he's getting married really soon, or he was chained to a tree for some reason, he's escape and god help us all.















Break dancing buskers, how retro...
(no it isn't how I took the photo, no one is watching them)


(and they did bring their own lino)










And a pedal powered dustbin... kind of strange, perhaps there's a rabbit living in it or something....

accidental beauty....

iPod and coffee... seems to sum up my life right now

Blood Diamond

Went to see Blood diamond last week. I was actually quite impressed. It gives a pretty scary glimpse of the Sierra Leon civil war. It does a pretty good job at shocking you and generally convincing you that African civil wars are pretty nasty (lots of chopping off arms with machetes). It also goes into child soldiers and how kids are brainwashed/made to fight.

There's also a nice bit of ambiguity about the role of westerners (or whites in general). First there are the mercenaries who are 'employed' to clear fight/clear things up, and also smuggle diamonds out of the country. Second there are the diamond cartels who help indirectly fund the whole thing and lastly the role of journalists who report on the wars. I especially like the journalists, who are portrayed as a mix of do-gooder/adrenalin junkies, who don't really believe that what they do makes a difference, and are mainly looking for 'something new' (rather than the usual pictures of hungry/dead people). There's a very nice scene where a press bus arrives at the site of an ambush and all of the journalists pile out and start filming.... its only after a minute that the hero (not a journalist) actually goes to help the injured people.

The kind of depressing take home message, especially from the journalist parts, is that, in the end its hard to move people for more than a short time, sometimes you can shock people enough to get them to donate money, but mostly they will have forgotten about the shocking things they saw on the news by the next day.

On a lighter note, I have to admit that I was also impressed that Leonardo DiCaprio can actually act, and does a very good South African/Zimbabwean accent.

So worth watching, as long as you are not prone to nightmares.

Spring is here...

Spring has finally started and to mark the turning of the seasons we got 6 inches of snow last night... lots of snowball fights outside work today....

Fake flowers...

I inherited some fake flowers from Juliette, who moved back to Paris a while ago.
Didn't really feel like throwing them out, didn't have a suitable vase/pot, found a couple of these guys going cheap... decided to improvise.

Hug me?

I saw this guy on Hauptstrasse a while ago....
What was kind of sad is that no one was going near him....
Kind of says something about the lack of intimacy in modern society (or just that this isn't a great way of getting hugged).

Handywork...

Got a bit bored of working in my kitchen, and its quite hard to cook when there are litres of copper sulphate and bits of brass tube everywhere... So decided to build a desk.
I found a nice sturdy old tabletop in a junk shop for €5, then managed to assemble some bits of wood into legs.... Considering my general lack of formal training, its actually quite sturdy....

Have learned a couple of valuble lessons... such as sandpaper sands everything, including hands... you can use a hacksaw to build furniture, it just takes a while.... and there is a difference between thinking you can cut a straight line and actually cutting one (about 1-2mm in my case)

Wanderings...

The last couple of weeks (early March) have been quite nice, so I've been wandering the hills...
found this quite nice little path with a fallen tree that looks a bit like a scene from Lord of the Rings or something.... just needs some black riders..

Steam fun....

Had lots of fun trying to make steam powered candles....

Ended up making a little wooden raft with some brass tubing which spins around when the candle is lit.... (and also appears to hypnotize girlfriend)













Then went on to make a little seam powered boat which spend most of an evening rattling around in my bath. I now have a bunch of cut in half tin cans littering my house....