A Fistful of Dollars

A FISTFUL OF DOLLARS

Originally uploaded by Bristle’s Film Posters [ A ].

Hey, what a great movie! Why didn’t anyone tell me about this before?

 

This post reminds me that I never managed to illegally download the film ‘in Bruges’. bah, i want to see that…

So Bruges was fantastic. Using my super-spiffy Digital SLR visual interpretation device, i captured this beautiful and evocative photo

Actually the Frites Museum, where we took this enthusiastically-rendered picture, was great. I now know far, far more about potatos and fries than a normal human should. In fact, I might empathize too much with the noble tuber. Their blockbuster journey from the highlands of Peru to my belly is one of the more underappreciated stories of the last 500 years.

Oh, and Bruges was pretty

Many more photos can be perused on ‘the flickr’.

My only regret is that I failed to drink Chimay on tap.

Oh, and I also regret that I saw the Wallonian town of Charleroi. What a shithole!

 

In Bruges

Well, i’m not actually in Bruges yet – but I hope to be eating fries with mayo and drinking a Trappist ale at this time tomorrow.

 

A further sign of Western civilization’s downfall

Someone has turned George Harrison’s ‘While my guitar gently weeps’ into a rap song.

I demand vengeance.

 

AIMing for failure

Does anyone remember AOL Instant Messenger? I lived, slept, and defecated in that program from 1997-2002. As did everyone else with a friend. Oh, I know, some people used ICQ – but these people sucked, and didn’t deserve my friendship.

Just for shits and giggles, I signed into my account this evening. Not a single one of my contacts was logged on. Not a single one of my 54 ‘buddies’ was even accidentally logged in. Not one. You can easily talk about the total failure of AOL’s business model – holding onto dial-up and protected content for far, far too long. But these guys had the original social network 1.0. And now it’s dead.

 

Indians (Feather)

I’m currently enjoying Jared Diamond’s ‘Guns, Germs, and Steel’. I’ve read about most of the subjects he touches on before, but it’s cool to see the ‘original’ argument in one well-written place.

I came across an incredible article today in the atlantic about the history of Native Americans.

Read it,

and be damn impressed.

 

Obama won the nobel peace prize

Why?

 

More Slovenia

After a few days in the extreme north of the country, we spent a day driving down to the coast.

Our first stop was Predjama castle. It was awesome.

Our next stop was the Skocjan caves, which was also awesome. And picture unfriendly as well. Besides being dark, photography was simply not allowed. Not that this stopped the group of chinese on our tour. They happily left the trail, touched the stalagmites, and set up their tripods anywhere they damn well pleased. They laughed when told to stop photographing. They were strangely disrespectful of authority for a people coming from a dictatorship.

We spent the next four days in Piran, exploring the istrian coast. As always, we drank significant quantities of beer and wine

Jana enjoying vino at our favorite Taverna in Piran

We stopped in Trieste to admire the old churches and beautiful mechanized port (ugly industrial stuff not pictured).

We did find this awesomely paranoid piece of street art. I don’t know how the dude manages to sleep at night. It’s a conspiracy!

And that was our vacation.

 

Jeruzalem without angry people

Slovenia isn’t famous for very much, but it should be. It has a couple of mini-Venices, some of the largest Alps in the area, and is lucky enough to have both good wine AND good beer. It even has it’s own Jeruzalem, which is much improved by a severe lack of arabs, jews, and all-around crazy people.

I think I read somewhere that the region was named Jeruzalem by returning crusaders. I don’t think it particularly resembles actual Jerusalem. Although if I was some poor sod drafted out of a pesant village in france, forced to march across europe into the welcoming arms of Saladin, I would happily name the next hilltop village ‘Jerusalem’, marry the local farmer’s daughter, and avoid all the holy war nonsense.

The slovenian Jerusalem is a bit of a geographic oddity. The entire region surrounding it is flat agricultural land, eventually merging into the Hungarian Steppe. But around the village of Ljutomer some rather dramatic hills rise up, which caused me no insignificant pain when we took our bikes out for a look.

The area has one industry, which it happily displays frequently in giant-wooden-sign form.

The wine was good, the biking was tough, and the scenery never failed to impress.

Next up: the trip south

 

Eastern Slovakia

My friend and colleague Pavol invited me to visit his hometown in early August. Below are some observations

This is one of the saddest pieces of Ugly Public Art that I’ve come across.

More inappropriate English-language graffiti in inappropriate places

Pavol demanded multiple pictures of himself with his new car.

The so-called ‘Slovak Sea’, which we did not swim in due to its being a source of skin diseases.

The mysterius East slovak babuska of liberty

Pavol with his parents, who are possibly the nicest people in central europe