yitz is an agnoster

Thoughts on the World Cup

Wed, 07 Jul 2010 15:44:15 GMT

The goal of this post is to collect a whole crapton of stuff I'd like to say about the world cup in one easy-to-ignore wall of text, rather than flooding Twitter with every banal little observation I have. (no, the banal observations will not stop - else why would I still have a Twitter account?)

Disclaimer: really, seriously, it's just me rambling in no sort of order about anything. This is like when you know you'll feel so much better after you vomit - it's not pleasant and you don't really want to involve anyone else, but you have to get it out.

First: I'm not a big sports fan. Heck, I'm not even a big football fan, I pretty much only watch it when the whole world gets wrapped up in the collective illusion that sports matter known as the World Cup. But I embrace it - one chance to actually feel like the rest of humanity, right? How bad can that be?

I'm not interested really in feats of athletic skill. If someone can run fast, or lift a lot of weights, or swim fast: great, but I have a horse, a forklift, or a dolphin that can beat you, hands-down. These are purely physical feats, so there's nothing essentially human about any of it. This is part of the reason I skip the olympics, it's like a parade of humans trying to do things other organisms/machines do better. BO-RING. And futile. Football, on the other hand, (and team sports in general, though I wonder about something like baseball) remain solidly human territory (at least for now).

And the reasons I like football, as an actual sport, may be particular to me. If the World Cup has shown us anything, an individual star player is nothing without solid teamwork to support them. The egomaniac divas in the Nike advertisements have all been sent home; many of the superstars hyped up ad nauseam pre-cup have gone home without a single goal. So, I like the collective aspect of it, being the dirty socialist that I am. I also like that it's so exciting - contrary to what Americans might say, the fact that so few goals happen is actually a draw, if you haven't been turned into an over-stimulated channel-surfing ADD-suffering twitch-junkie. At any point, a match can turn on a freaking dime - a goal comes out of nowhere, for instance. You never know when something big is going to happen, and that suspense is... well, exciting. So I get a kick out of watching, as a spectator.

Football is a near-universal language. Across 6 continents, you can go almost anywhere, and if you have a ball and two vaguely goal-shaped things - trees or walls or whatnot will do - you've got yourself a game, regardless of language or cultural barriers. Maybe this is part of why America doesn't like the sport: if the rest of the world likes it, clearly we shouldn't! See: the metric system.

But there are problems: mostly, ref mistakes and poor sportsmanship. Ref mistakes should be easy enough to fix - the technology exists to simply put an extra ref in a videobooth in radio contact with the ref on the field. This would have eliminated the need to have England and the US robbed of 3 goals between them, or Argentina and Brazil each being awarded clearly invalid goals. Some ref mistakes are more subjective - handing out yellow cards like they're candy, for the most minor of contacts, is simply a poor decision - but that's not something that can be fixed with technology. As we say in German, there is no pill against stupidity.

Poor sportsmanship might be something one could attack, with better technology it'd be much easier, for instance, to catch players taking a dive. While this would essentially end any prospects Italy has of seriously competing in the world cup again, it would undoubtedly be welcome overall - it's far more frustrating for an opponent to dive on you and profit from it, than it is rewarding to dive and get away with it. But sometimes the rules actually encourage poor sportsmanship, as was the case in the Uruguay-Ghana game, where a goal that would have clinched victory for Ghana was blocked by an Uruguayan player hitting the ball out of the goal with his hands. Much has been made of this - some even go so far as to suggest Suarez (the volleyball player on the Uruguayan football team) is some sort of hero. No. Breaking the rules to gain an advantage does not make you a hero, it makes you a cheater. Even if you are caught red-handed, even if you are punished, this does not excuse the act. "I wanted to win" is not an excuse for breaking the rules - that kind of ends-justifying-means mentality gets you corporations that will willingly violate regulations because the expected loss caused by a fine is less than the expected profit to be made from the violation. It's cynical in the utmost - that sort of flagrant disregard for the rules should, in my opinion, get some sort of lifetime ban. I know I can get ranty about this, but it really just makes me sick - thank God Uruguay was handed orange justice and knocked out by the Netherlands.

Which leaves us at the current situation: Spain and Germany are about to play their semi-final to decide who goes on to meet the Netherlands in the final. Germany's already won 3 world cups, while neither Spain nor the Netherlands have ever won one before. In a way, I feel it's high time one of them got it. Paul, the psychic octopus who's been predicting the results of German games with astonishing accuracy (if you ignore the fact that there are about 10000 animals out there in the world being used to make predictions, and one of them's bound to get it right enough to convince people there's supernatural trickery going on) seems to believe Spain will win. And while it would be nice to see a new team win the Cup, I have to say I'd love to see Germany take it home. It's hard to describe what it's like here if you're not seeing it yourself, but people are just... "begeistert" is really the only word, and there's no good translation for it in English. Some combination of rapt, enthusiastic, enthralled, thrilled... there are German flags flying everywhere, people smiling, it's really a great atmosphere. Reminds me a bit of the World Cup 2006 (though that was a special joy because we were hosting). That's some good shit. Bear in mind, the Germans hadn't had anything even mildly resembling patriotism since the war - deservedly so, perhaps one might say - until the 2006 World Cup brought the world to our door and everyone was like "hey, you guys are awesome" and the Germans looked around and said, "huh? ... Maybe we're not too sucky!"

So I'll always like the World Cup. I'll always like getting caught up in the emotions and the drama - thank God it only happens every four years!

Going to the Standesamt and we're gonna get married...

Mon, 05 Apr 2010 06:20:24 GMT

Man, I never post on this thing. But joaniechachi and I are getting married this summer, that seemed worth mentioning (already facebook-official and everything). And no, this doesn't mean we're going to settle down and be monogamous and start making babies. Well, ok, babies maybe in a couple years. Us getting married is not so much because we love each other and want to spend our lives together and make a family - we do, but it's unrelated - and more because then Joan can get a work permit here in Germany. Although I do feel somewhat more comfortable getting married somewhere where it's also possible for same-sex couples to marry, that helps ease the pain of feeling Judeo-Christian and hetero-normative. I'd say "you shouldn't need a piece of paper to prove your relationship is serious", but in Germany you need a piece of paper to prove everything, so I guess it makes sense. Also maybe it will be easier to explain that non-monogamy doesn't mean you're not committed to each other.

Just got a ton of paperwork to deal with to make it all happen, particularly because my last name will (in all likelihood) be changing to Wolkerstorfer...

Okay, back to your regularly scheduled program of radio silence!

Fri, 19 Mar 2010 12:39:54 GMT

Dear Livejournal and Chrome -

Why do you guys conspire to crash whenever I want to write a comment? It is most odd.

- Yitz

Thu, 08 Oct 2009 12:04:09 GMT

I've done some math. My courseload is 30 LP, or "Leistungspunkte" (Achievement Points?), each LP is estimated to be 30 hours of work. The semester is about 13 weeks. 900 hours over 13 weeks comes to about 70 hours a week, plus my 80hr/mo job (19ish hours a week)... my schedule's gonna be pretty packed. I've been more on less on vacation for months now, not sure how I'll adjust.

Oh, and I am expecting my German citizenship approval in the mail any day now, meaning it'll be time to go down to the American consulate and formally renounce my citizenship.

Whoa.

I blame Obama that I don't really want to. Such is life!

State of the Yitz

Thu, 09 Jul 2009 07:47:59 GMT

I haven't written anything here in a while, so I guess a sort of update is in order. For a while there was nothing to say, really; it was just same-old-same-old.

I quit my job at Yahoo!

Visited friends in LA, Boston, NYC

ScavHunt!

Moved to Berlin

Joan's getting here in less than a week

Went to the Bürgeramt to get information and forms to apply for German citizenship

Probably getting my citizenship in the next 6 months or so, which involves giving up my US citizenship before I get my German one, meaning I'll be without any citizenship for a couple days. (Any suggestions of interesting legal situations I can create during this time?)

Looked at apartments, probably going to just wait until Joan gets here to continue

Looking for a job or going back to school - I don't really have a focused enough topic to start my Ph. D., so I might do a master's first

And that's pretty much where I am now.

Don't forget, soon Joan and I will have an apartment in Berlin with a guest room and everything. Visitors welcome!

P. S. Following up to my previous entry, my main laptop in now named Gilgamesh, and my little netbook is named Tock.

Important business!

Sat, 21 Mar 2009 05:28:46 GMT

So, I'm officially unemployed now and I'm moving back to Berlin end of May. But that's not why I'm writing my first post in a long long time. It's because there is a pressing question to answer: What do I name my new laptop? (Work took the other one, much to my surprise. I thought it was complimentary!)

There are some good contestants, but first, a roughly-chronological list of computers I've named thus far:
Paladin
Hal
Shiva
Marvin
Jezel
Kelvin
Spork
Jubal
Hiawatha
Knork
Azrael

Looking over the list now, I realize my server names tend towards the more whimsical end of the spectrum and my personal computers to the epic. So, I'm mulling over options, and would like to hear any thoughts you have on the subject. Zarathustra and Gilgamesh are my current favorites, but not so much so that they might not be unseated by a fresh young upstart, so the conclusion is far from foregone!In related news, now that I'm unemployed I'm going to try working on a personal project that is audacious enough to keep me busy for a while but not so much so that anyone would actually care if I do it or not. The basic overview is... card games, I like them (in particular I've had a healthy dose of chinese poker (technically Big Two) injected into my week thanks to Daniela visiting). So, like everything else I like, I want to analyze, formalize, and program it. But of course simply writing a program that allows me to play chinese poker with other people I'm not in the same room as would be too simple*, so instead what I really want to do is develop a way of expressing the rules of any card game (played with standard playing cards - have to concede to at least one constraint) in a formal language that's simple enough for non-programmers to write. Then, have a website where users can play the games I and others create, with scorekeeping and tracking popular games and whatnot. Oh, and of course you should be able to play over facebook. And iPhones. And possibly carrier pigeons. Bonus points if I can establish a peer-to-peer mode that doesn't require a trusted server to "deal" (though something tells me information theory makes this impossible with any card game where opponent's hands should be secret from each other).

* - Doable in finite time, and thus not interesting enough

Quote of the day

Fri, 09 Jan 2009 21:49:02 GMT

"Any sufficiently analyzed magic is indistinguishable from science."

- Agatha Heterodyne

President-Elect Barack Hussein Obama

Wed, 05 Nov 2008 04:56:51 GMT

That is all.

Conflicted!

Tue, 21 Oct 2008 21:44:02 GMT

via the Guardian

Not sure what to think about this. What do you think?

Yitz's opinion will be determined by the lucky participant presenting the most cogent argument. Void where prohibited, places of participation may vary, some restrictions may apply.

"You can tap my phone or my wallet, but not both." -- reddit

Thu, 10 Jul 2008 01:27:57 GMT

(Thanks, TechCrunch. ThtechCrunch.)

Well... that sucks. I've never used the "mood" thing on LJ before... but it looks like it doesn't have a "dejected" option, anyway.

I don't disagree that oftentimes uncomfortable compromises are necessary, but this was not one of those times. Obama said, "My view on FISA has always been that the issue of the phone companies per se is not one that overrides the security interests of the American people." In effect, he's claiming national security trumps the right to privacy, the constitution, even the rule of law itself (law with ex-post-facto immunity isn't a law at all). What in the hell happened to "give me liberty or give me death"? Compromise isn't a bad thing, but there are certain things you cannot compromise on - certain, shall we say, unalienable rights.

Maybe I shouldn't have hoped that this time would be any different.

(it's because -1*-1=1)

Fri, 21 Mar 2008 19:37:56 GMT

Apparently, two wrongs do make a right. I hate rap music and French, and yet I can't stop listening to this:

Link

Fri, 14 Mar 2008 23:19:48 GMT

Europe, suffering from the crippling effects of universal health care and high, progressive taxes, overtakes the US as world's #1 economy

Also, here's the new $3 bill. Hott!

(Funny story - my raise means I'm earning the same amount in Euros that I was last year this time. Lol, indeed.)

Fri, 14 Mar 2008 18:24:06 GMT

Brainless moron botches marriage proposal to materialistic bitch

I don't think anybody should be accusing teh gays of ruining the institution of marriage. Straight people are still waaay ahead.

Math is hard, let's go into journalism!

Mon, 10 Mar 2008 20:21:20 GMT

CNN estimates that Obama leads Clinton by less than 100 delegates, 1,553 to 1,438.

-- CNN (a bit less than halfway down the article)

*facepalm*

EDIT: They fixed it, but not before I grabbed a screenshot Ryo has a point - doesn't journalistic integrity require visible corrections? I want it to be like "track changes" or Wikipedia. Guess I'll just have to start my own news organization... hmm...

When Amy started thinking for herself, we had to nip it in the bud with Obay(tm)

Wed, 20 Feb 2008 00:30:30 GMT

New Year's resolution

Sat, 02 Feb 2008 16:40:46 GMT

I made a New Year's resolution. I mean, not really. I don't make New Year's resolutions, but I did more or less make a decision for this year: I'm leaving the USA.

I'm not certain exactly what I'm doing next. There are lots of tempting possibilities: going back to Berlin, maybe doing a start-up with my friend Julius. Going to Dublin, get in touch with my Irish roots (now that I've done that with my American roots) and work in a strong EU tech sector. Maybe do technical development aid in Morocco, learn some Arabic, do some good.

Right now the most likely is, I think, go back to Berlin and finally get my German citizenship. It's something I've been putting off for a while (since having a US citizenship helps when you want to work here), but gosh, it would be nice to vote in a real parliamentary democracy. And my German has gotten noticeably rusty, which always leaves me shaken - this is the language of my home, and I don't even speak it any more? That's scary.

Why now? Well, in October I'll have lived in SF for three years, after living in Chicago for three. I can tell I'm getting more an more American - when Ron Paul starts to sound like he's making some good points, that's one way to know. It's getting harder and harder to leave. I have fantastic friends I don't want to leave behind, but ultimately, I don't want to settle down in America, so I don't want to get stuck there. Every reason to stay is becoming a reason to leave, now before it's too late.

So I'm starting to think - what's on my checklist? If I have less than a year in America, what should I do? Learn to drive? Road-trip across the country? See the Grand Canyon or Yosemite or something?

EDIT: Everyone seems to agree, road trip. Have to admit, a "Goodbye, America!" road trip around the country, visiting friends, maybe having them tag along for bits, is sounding better and better!

He's so dreamy!

Fri, 01 Feb 2008 14:35:11 GMT

You know, two weeks after Bloody Sunday, when the march finally reached Montgomery, Martin Luther King Jr. spoke to the crowd of thousands and said "The arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends towards justice." He's right, but you know what? It doesn't bend on its own. It bends because we help it bend that way. Because people like John Lewis and Hosea Williams and Martin Luther King and Coretta Scott King and Rosa Parks and thousands of ordinary Americans with extraordinary courage have helped bend it that way. And as their examples call out to us from across the generations, we continue to progress as a people because they inspire us to take our own two hands and bend that arc.

-- US Senate Speech by Barack Obama

Gave some more money to Obama. It's possible that you can, too! And anyway, if you're not voting for Obama, we should talk. Maybe we can learn something from each other!

The problem I find with trying to make my case for Obama is that there are so many reasons for it, so where do I start? Do I talk about how he stands a much better chance of winning the general election than Clinton? Or how he's more likely to get stuff done because he knows how to work together with politicians on both sides of the aisle? What about his staunch opposition to the Iraq War from the beginning? Maybe the symbolism, both to America and the world, of having a black President named Barack Hussein Obama? The way he has inspired a grass-roots movement and given hope to people that our political system isn't broken beyond our ability to repair if we try? His commitment to open and transparent government? The simple fact that his rhetoric is an exhortation to us all to be a part of government that bends the arc back into the right direction? His academic manner of finding the right solution by listening to all sides of an issue, with a compass that is moral but not ideological? How he won't shy away from calling the economic argument against immigration scapegoating, or addressing anti-semitism and homophobia in African-American communities? His ability to unite Democrats, Republicans, and Independents as part of one America?

I think what it comes down to is - yes, there are many reasons to like Barack Obama, and why he would be a fine president - but it's not just about the individual, it's about the movement. Obama knows that it will take more than a change of personnel in the White House to right the wrongs in America. Obama is getting new people involved in droves - new voters, first-time contributors, new political organizers, and this is just the beginning. A democracy cannot function without an engaged populace, and that is, I think, the great hope of the Obama campaign - that we can once again become inspired and involved. It is our responsibility to bend the arc of the moral universe, and yes, we can.

Thu, 31 Jan 2008 17:26:03 GMT

Thanks to reddit for reminding me of some of my favorite jokes, including:

At a world brewing convention in the States, the CEOs of various Brewing organizations retired to the bar at the end of each day's conference.
Bruce, CEO of Fosters, shouted to the Barman: "In 'Strylya, we make the best bladdy beer in the world, so pour me a Bladdy Fosters, mate."
Bob, CEO of Budweiser, calls out next: "In the States, we brew the finest beers in the world, and I make the King of them all; gimme a Bud."
Hans steps up next: "In Germany ve invented das beer, verdamt. Give me ein Becks, ya ist Der real King of beers, danke."
Paddy, CEO of Guinness, steps forward "Barman, would ya give me a doyet coke wid ice and lemon. Tanks."
The others stare at him in stunned silence, amazement written all over their faces. Eventually Bruce asks, "Are you not going to have a Guinness, Pat?"
Paddy replies: "Well, if you fookin' pansies aren't drinkin', then neither am I".

Lambda calculus ponderings

Wed, 30 Jan 2008 10:55:12 GMT

Yeah, I've been posting a lot. Don't worry, this probably doesn't interest you - I just wanted to muse out loud.

So, Arc's out. Arc (for those of you keeping score at home) is Paul Graham's "new" Lisp he's been working on for the past 6 years or so. If this is at all the kind of thing that interests you, check it out - if not, you can probably stop reading now, because the rest assumes some (though not much) familiarity with Lisp and the Lambda calculus.

Arc's mostly some nice syntactic sugar and conventions. For instance, you write (fn (x) x) instead of (lambda (x) x) for an anonymous function, which seems small, but when you consider how often you have to write lambda, it adds up. And fn is a much better choice than do (as in Nu - another new language that has Lisp syntax, a Ruby heart, and an Objective-C foundation). I also like the concision of single-value lambda expressions, so that (fn (x) (+ x 1)) can be written as [+ _ 1] (the underscore is the single argument, though support for multiple positional parameters would be nice, as square brackets would simply be anonymous functions of any type. Another somewhat more questionable decision is to use = as the assignment operator, since it breaks Lisp convention pretty badly, though it's much more pleasant to say (= foo (list 1 2 3)) than (setf foo (list 1 2 3)) or (setq foo (list 1 2 3)) - and the way you can use = to set inside other data structures is nice, too. If we have set foo as in the previous example, we can say (= (car foo) 0) and the value of foo becomes (0 2 3). Very nice indeed.

But the single development I liked most was the following: in Arc, every data structure is an accessor function to an indexed binding. For instance (again using the example foo) (foo 1) would evaluate to 2, because the list foo acts as a function that, given an index, returns that binding - in this case, the list contains 2 at the second position. But going further, we can set on this as well: (= (foo 1) 5) would result in foo being the list (0 5 3). And going further still, this works with hashes - no more (gethash myhash "keyname") - just (myhash "keyname"). If you're used to traditional array[key] notation, this is actually a mapping from M-expressions - fn[arg1, arg2, ...] - to S-expressions - (fn arg1 arg2 ...) - which McCarthy described in his original paper on Lisp. They're isomorphic, and in fact S-expressions contain less characters than M-expressions, but of course if you're used to one the other looks weird for a while (of course, I'm quite sneakily leaving the question of infix operators out).

So, this brings us to my lambda calculus question - how would we define basic operations like cons, car and cdr in order to use something like Church numerals and get this behaviour? Typically, we use the following definitions (using L for the Greek letter lambda):

cons = L h. L t. L f. f h t
T = L a. L b. a
F = L a. L b. b
car = L l. l T
cdr = L l. l F
0 = L f. L x. x
1 = L f. L x. f x
2 = L f. L x. f (f x)
+1 = L n. L f. L x. f (n f x)

However, as you can see the application of these definitions doesn't give us the behaviour that the numbers can be used as indices for a list by applying the list to the number. I'd rather redefine cons et al. than the Church numerals, simply because the Church numerals have a very elegant definition: the Nth Church numeral is a function that takes a function and returns its N-fold composition.

So, any ideas?

GASH wants YOU!

Wed, 30 Jan 2008 00:03:01 GMT

So, the Graduate/Alumni ScavHunt team has a facebook app.

If you're at all interested in joining - even if you're not entirely sure if you can, or if you can't physically come to Chicago - go sign up! People who we can call on do an item or two from afar, or even just help decipher the list, will be a tremendous asset.

Scav Decision

Mon, 28 Jan 2008 17:50:17 GMT

For many reasons - none of which, I must emphasize, is the way the residents of Snell-Hitchcock smell - I have decided to scav with the Grad/Alumni team. Dearly as I will miss my brothers and sisters in arms at Snitchcock, it is time to move on, into the future, which is obviously the Grad/Alumni team.

It's time to break the game theory stalemate. Don't say "I'll do it if my friends do it" - just do it, and then convince your friends to come. Join the Facebook group, message Sam Friedman and let him know you'll be there (and if you want to be an officer).

The clock is ticking, ladies and gentlemen. We have a scant 100 days to mobilize the greatest army Scav has ever known - and I do mean that. The group has 77 members right now, the most experience, the scavviest scavvers. Our goal is not to make an impression, or to beat Pierce, it is simply this: Victory.

Oh, and Rockin' Good Times. Victory and Rockin' Good Times.

Yes, we have logistics to work out. Where will be build shit? Where will we sleep? Are the squirrels going to eat us if we camp out on the quads? These will be dealt with. The order of the day now is to stand up and be counted.

Scav be with you. And to my fellow scavvers from Snitchcock to Max, from FIST to... all those other ones, I must recall the words of Lincoln: "We are not enemies, but friends. We must not be enemies. Though passion may have strained, it must not break our bonds of affection[, even if we are so going to kick your asses]."

Sun, 27 Jan 2008 16:10:22 GMT

If you want to build a ship, don't drum up the men to gather wood, divide the work and give orders. Instead, teach them to yearn for the vast and endless sea.

-- Antoine de Saint-Exupéry

People say Obama may be an inspiring figure, but that he doesn't have the political savvy to get things done. I disagree, of course - his bipartisan record in the Illinois legislature is, I think, just a preview of what an inspiring, unifying politician can achieve. But perhaps it's also because I come from a family in which words matter. Words have inspired humanity to great achievements and horrible failures, terrible atrocities and acts of courage and kindness alike. Don't tell me words don't matter - and don't tell me we wouldn't be better off with a President who can speak to the people and remind them that they matter, that we can resolve our differences with words, and that we can believe in a better world if we are willing to work for it.

ScavHunt decisions

Fri, 25 Jan 2008 01:25:10 GMT

Okay. So you all know, presumably, that I live and breathe ScavHunt. If you don't, you don't know me.

Now, I have a bit of a tricksy decision: historically, I've scavved ad majorem snitchcocki gloria - for the greater glory of Snitchcock - but some people are putting together a Grad/Alumni team. There are some arguments to be made in favor of both, obviously, but I won't go into my current mode of thinking. The question is - what do *you* think? Any alumni thinking of doing the Grad/Alumni team who might be swayed with a few more compatriots?

Sat, 29 Dec 2007 01:23:28 GMT

POP QUIZ
1) What comic do you have the longest or most important relationship with?
2) What webcomic do you miss the most?
3) Which webcomic do you wish you could see more of (i.e. would update more frequently)?
4) What is your latest webcomic discovery?

My answers:

1) Girl Genius, to which I was introduced by the ithych (with this page, I believe) and I've re-read approximately 70 bazillion times. I know I've extolled its virtues many times before, but it bears repeating. Also the only webcomic available in printed form in my apartment. Runners up include Nukees (sensing a Mad Science pattern here?) and QC, but neither of them fill me with the kind of breathless anticipation before an update that GG does - seriously, I'll stay up at night until the update comes. If I had to pick a page to sum it up... it's already been done for me.

2) I miss Men In Hats quite a bit. The website puts it best:

Men in Hats is the gripping story of 6 guys who stand around in the desert... talking... sometimes they have breakfast.
It was eventually determined to be too beautiful for this world and discontinued.

Bitterly clever, it illustrates all the cruelty and heartlessness of the human condition in a way that you can't help but laugh at.

3) Dresden Codak is one of my current favorites - the new storyline is engaging and poignant, in a post-morality purpose kind of way - but it seems to update on a geological time scale. But, philosophy role-playing game!

4) New webcomic (new to me, that is), and the reason I wrote this entry: Templar, Arizona. If you're not familiar with it, read the archives - it'll be one of the stranger and more delicious hours you'll spend. Or, I think it was an hour... but I may have lost track of time. It's culture fiction about a place in an alternate history, delightfully and exuberantly portrayed.

So, what have you got for me? Don't adhere to strictly to the questions. Change 'em if it makes for better answers.

Mon, 24 Dec 2007 16:56:19 GMT

I got to Berlin. Mind you, I left a good 40 hours before I got here, but that's a story for another time. The moral is "don't ever fly through Heathrow before Christmas - or under any other circumstances, for that matter."