The first (and only) Dirty Dancing post on this blog

I hate this movie.

The first time I watched it was on a Band trip – our bus was lost in Aggieland and the girls initiated some kind of coup. Overall a dismal experience.

The movie was on CzechTV the other night, as part of some Patrick Swayze retrospective. Jana requested that I call her into the room from her clothes-washing duties when the big dance scene starts. She arrived just as Swayze delivered his famous line, ‘Nobody puts Baby in a corner’.

And I didn’t get it. Baby was just sitting at the table, and had leaned back into a small fold in the wall. She was chillaxin’ and watching her sister do that awful screeching thing on stage. Swayze acted all like Baby’s dad had insulted him by shoving his teenage lover in the corner as some kind of punishment. Hey, dance instructor dude: meet Statuatory Rape laws.

I hate this movie.

 

London

As with the previous post regarding Poland, it’s time to explore Nick’s trip to London! I saw a lot less weird shit, and the city took a lot more of my cash. A couple of friends were kind enough to show me some cool stuff that I wouldn’t normally have seen, so I sincerely thank them for that. To the pictures!

I found this to be a bit literal

This emblum of worldwide empire seems a bit alarmed

My buddy Reuben chose to pose next to this cool scooter. It is not his.

Lord Nelson ignores the drunken Celtic fans debasing his square

Richmond, where my friend Sumeet introduced me to his old college drink, the ‘Snake Bite’.

I really enjoyed this trip, especially since it was the first (and only) time I’ve experienced London without the local drizzle.

 

The greatest Sci-Fi TV show of all time is Battlestar Galactica

Many people would probably disagree with the argument above. Luckily very few geeks read this blog, so I stand little chance of being beaten to death by 45-year old virgins with plastic lightsabres.

Jana and I finished the final episode today. I don’t want to discuss themes or acting or anything. I just love this show. Sure it’s a silly, melodramatic, plot-hole-filled mess. But it sucked me in, a couple of my french friends found themselves addicted, and my Bridget Jones Diary-loving girlfriend even enjoyed it. And if a Texan, Frenchman, and Female can all enjoy the same Science Fiction TV show then you know that someone is doing something right.

 

Trip True-Up

I’m off to Slovenia next week, and realized that I had failed to post any pictures from my recent trips. So to start off the series, here a a few weird ones from my trip to Wroclaw, Poland back in July.

The local Graffitos didn’t mince words here…

Here’s a shrine to the Glove. Still don’t understand the love.

Optimus Prime and mates are having a tough financial crisis.

St Frances celebrates mass with some local spacemen.

And this is just the weirdness that I could document without calling too much attention to myself. Strange, though impressive place.

 

Decadence

Just moments ago I experienced my first Lady Gaga music video. I’ve already made a mental note to get an STD test.

Though it is now a forgotten cliche, this is a perfect example of why the terrorists hate us. Surrounded by a gyrating crew of stylish heroin addicts, Lady Gaga just told me that she wants to ‘ride my Disco stick’. Although a child of the eighties, and therefore unschooled in the sexual mores of such world renowned acts as Blondie and the Bee Gees, the subtlety of Lady Gaga’s message was not lost upon me.

Transvestites in leotards do not pickle my fancy, so I promptly changed the channel in an ultimately unsucessful search for Bear Grylls and his eyeball-eating entertainment.

 

London calling

I’m off to london for a bit of sightseeing and beer drinking. If anyone is around please send me an email and let’s meet up.

 

Who was referred to nick this week

I love looking in my blog stats and seeing what people typed into Google on their way to Outsourced. Good stuff.

pivobrani zizkov 2009
how to keep elderly patients entertained
hvar dress and what to wear
escort girl + bratislava + in door call
terra cortereal
“texas it’s bigger than france”

I don’t know what the poor guy looking for whores was doing on my site, but I can definitely say that I’m the expert in the ‘texas is bigger than france’ battle.

 

Entropa

Jana and I went to the DOX art gallery to check out ‘Entropa’ a few weeks ago. Entropa was originally commissioned by the Czech government as a Brussels-based celebration of European diversity. Luckily they got this guy to put it together.

Yes, that dude is David Cerny, designer of the famous Prague TV tower babies, and of course ‘Shark’, which is perhaps the greatest work of satire as art that I’ve ever seen.

Anyway, back to Entropa. It’s designed to look like those plastic things that hold toy parts when you first open up the box. Each country is included, but designed to play a bit to stereotype.

This was the first to cause anger and merriment. Bulgaria here is make out of Turkish toilets. I can’t confirm the validity of this, but the EU promptly made Cerny remove the Bulgarian toilet, adding another empty slot (along with that of the UK, which is seen as not wanting to be in the EU).

There was some hand-wringing and compaining about Romania being a Dracula theme park, but no one found anything worse on it so it was left alone.

By worse I mean this:

At first Italy didn’t seem to be too bad. Football Players! Yay! Forza Italia! But like every piece of this exhibit, you need to take a closer look

Yes, when properly plugged in the Italian football players masturbate with soccer balls.

My favorite is Denmark. Originally it just looked like denmark made out of Legos. But look closer…

The legos are actually in the shape of the famous Danish cartoon of Mohammed with a bomb in his turban. Awesome.

A few more I enjoyed:

Poland is a field of potatoes, with some priests raising the Gay Pride flag

And Germany consists entirely of highways in a rather odd pattern:

All my pictures can be seen in a flickr set here.

 

travel season

The travelling of Nick has been limited this year. The company has a travel ban in place, so no heavy drinking sessions with colleagues so far. I tried to go to Germany, but got thrown off the train and almost immediately incapacitated myself by breaking a toe. My more recent forays outside of the neighborhood have resulted in bleeding and filth. So I”m looking forward to visiting the Moravian town of Mikulov, a festive burg known for both aesthetic charm and wine. Jana and I are taking a three day weekend, so I can’t ask for much more. Pictures, and updates on any newly acquired injuries will follow on Monday.

 

Creative ebbing

I like to flip back through my old posts on occasion. There’s plenty of nonsense coupled with a dangerously high number of references to beer. But there’s some good humor and fun stories, some of it surprisingly well written in retrospect.

I wonder if, like a band that has recently discovered sobriety, some of my creativity has ebbed in recent years. My blog hiatus was for many reasons, but mostly I didn’t feel like I had something to say to the world at large. Perhaps to discover my creative flow I need to resize my audience to something more internal and managable.

Or maybe I should just go back to writing the stuff that annoys my mother. That was much more fun.