I was down at Potsdammer Platz Friday night with Robbie, some other students from the Berlin program, and a few of their visiting friends, watching the Olympic opening ceremonies on the JumboTron they’ve got in the Sony Center. The show was pretty cool, and only one person gave us trouble about cheering for the American team (as if the divers and the high jumpers had just come back from personally bombing). Anyway, it finished a little after 11 Berlin time, and people were getting ready to go their separate ways, and I wanted a snack before I took off. I knew there was a Dunkin Donuts on the main street just outside the courtyard we were sitting in, so I wandered over there for a late night glazed chocolate treat. Now this particular donut establishment was a franchise of a big, multinational company, was situated right in the middle of one of the city centers, in a city where going out until after sunrise is de rigueur no less, and that even had an internet café on the second floor. And the Dunkin Donuts chain, as those of you familiar with it will know, is particularly proud of its coffee, a drink that tired people use to stay awake. So it didn’t even occur to me to doubt that the place would be open. It’s exactly the kind of store a reasonable person would expect to see open 24/7, closing only on Sundays and the occasional holiday. But no. This centrally-located, coffee-hawking, internet-service-providing junk food outlet had not a single donut to sell at 11:30 on a Friday. There were none forthcoming, either, so it wasn’t like I’d caught the tail end of a Donut Run, where everyone stampedes to withdraw their savings in the form of pastry before the currency collapses.
This was dumbfounding, and launched an immediate discussion about German late-night eating behavior. Did any of those club-hopping twentysomethings ever get hungry or stop for a midnight snack? And if not, where did they get their energy from? Can they absorb it like plants from flashing disco lights, or perhaps convert the sonic poundings of their curious electronic music into life-giving carbohydrates? What do they do at four in the morning when they’ve been up all night an have a craving for a J-Box chicken sandwich? There’s no dollar menu to be found. These revelations were so deep and startling, I despaired that I would ever be able to explain them in my two remaining weeks in the country. Such a prophecy of failure would be self-fulfilling, and I chastened myself for my lack of faith and resolved to redouble my efforts. I would get to the bottom of this mystery.
Monday, August 16, 2004
Naked Sports on TV
This being Europe, they approach nudity on TV from a slightly different angle. The rules seem to be that the sort of thing that would furnish an R rating stateside, the occasional exposed breast or snippet of explicit dialog, is perfectly okay any time of day. No big deal. But then at midnight, it’s like some switch flips, and the channels, including he major networks, suddenly light up with soft-core pornography. All of the ads switch too, now promoting various intersections of the libido and wireless telephone service. In addition to the standard phone-sex come-ons, you see ads for pornographic background pictures for color cell phones (both of real women and of Japanese cartoon teenagers) and, most bizarrely, phone-text-message-sex hotlines. Now I can understand how smoldering love letters from the Victorian era could be quite erotic, but I feel certain that punching out “what r u wearing” on a touch-tone dial pad has to be missing a certain je ne se quoi. “9 44 2 8 …” just doesn’t do it for me, anyway.
One of the nudity-presenting pretenses Robbie and I stumbled upon was a special, no doubt inspired by the original Olympics, about nude sports competitions. The show ranked these in a top-10 countdown, according to some metric that wasn’t entirely clear but that did seem to correlate fairly strongly with the attractiveness of the competitors. This meant that the show actually got worse as it went on. Naked surfing and marathon running, visual aesthetics aside, really just don’t make for compelling television. But the program opened with fat old nudists vacuuming the living room or barbequing in their backyards in the buff. Indoors, the camera shot from down low, turning the participants into blobby pinkish giants shoving around enormous roaring obelisks of black and beige plastic. It was easily a strong contender for the funnies half-minute of television ever produced.
One of the nudity-presenting pretenses Robbie and I stumbled upon was a special, no doubt inspired by the original Olympics, about nude sports competitions. The show ranked these in a top-10 countdown, according to some metric that wasn’t entirely clear but that did seem to correlate fairly strongly with the attractiveness of the competitors. This meant that the show actually got worse as it went on. Naked surfing and marathon running, visual aesthetics aside, really just don’t make for compelling television. But the program opened with fat old nudists vacuuming the living room or barbequing in their backyards in the buff. Indoors, the camera shot from down low, turning the participants into blobby pinkish giants shoving around enormous roaring obelisks of black and beige plastic. It was easily a strong contender for the funnies half-minute of television ever produced.
Lie to the Dirty Foreigners
A low-intensity political argument broke out when few of us got together Monday night for dinner at a Cuban restaurant to celebrate somebody’s birthday. A pair of conservative (for Stanford) students were trying to delicately argue that one could conceivably disagree that the president was the root of all evil even without being wholly and unreachably evil oneself. This can be tricky to do. Anyway, at one point I was telling one of them, Malcolm, how I thought the Bush administration handled international affairs with a lack of tact and nuance that bordered on recklessness. Another student brought up the Kyoto Protocol, and Malcolm objected that the agreement was never going to be ratified in the Senate, which was true. Are we supposed to simply pretend that we’re okay with it, he asked, to act like we’re just dragging our feet or haggling over details when in fact there’s no way we’re ever going to ratify? Isn’t it better to just say up front what we think? I had an epiphany. No, no it wasn’t better. I want a president who will lie to foreigners, who has the patience and the presence of mind to play the little games of diplomacy, so that when the rubber hits the track and we need to get things done, we’re more likely to get our way.
Bill Clinton was the guest on the last episode of the Daily Show’s international edition (which we only just discovered). I was listening to him talk about his terms in office and the war in Iraq and the upcoming election, and I was nodding along – everything he said was just so right! I caught myself; Slick Willie was just working his usual charismagic, and I had been completely caught up in it. Then I smiled fondly. That’s the kind of man I want to send to deal with France.
Bill Clinton was the guest on the last episode of the Daily Show’s international edition (which we only just discovered). I was listening to him talk about his terms in office and the war in Iraq and the upcoming election, and I was nodding along – everything he said was just so right! I caught myself; Slick Willie was just working his usual charismagic, and I had been completely caught up in it. Then I smiled fondly. That’s the kind of man I want to send to deal with France.
Monday, August 09, 2004
Fifth Letter from Berlin
I wasn’t planning on writing any more of these things, if for no other reason than because I wanted to still have a few stories to tell when I got home. But then Mike e-mailed me today. He works more hours a day than I do in a week, and apparently my scribblings are one of his few sources of joy in the world, so I guess I’ll help a brother out. You have my permission to thank, or to blame, him for this week’s update.
First of all: it’s official. We three are the Voodoo Tenants, a trio of accursed real estate customers who bring naught but misfortune and entropy to wherever we lodge. Last weekend I was reading on a sofa in the living room when I began to hear a pang, pang, pang dripping noise coming from the kitchen. I walked over and looked in the sink, but the tap was solidly off. Suddenly, a milky water droplet whistled by my left eye. I looked up, to see water dripping down from the ceiling, streaking the molding along the top of the wall and pattering down around me. Soon, the wall began to bulge and bubble, and then to split at seams in the wallpaper and sluice out great splashing waves of black water. It was some real Exorcist shit. Turns out the people who rent the flat above ours were replacing their washing machine. Unfortunately, the water shutoff valve in the wall didn’t actually turn the water off, so when they took the hose off the wall, the plumbing started pumping water through a three-quarter in pipe onto their bathroom floor at a gallon a minute. Also, this was the hot water line, meaning it came out at a healthy 180 degrees F, and the family couldn’t try to plug the leak without scalding themselves. Then the Hausmeister, or building manager, was drunk and didn’t quite remember where the main shutoff for the building’s plumbing was, so we wound up repeatedly mopping up the floor and dumping the results out the window for around an hour. We’re not liable for damages (duh), but it’s still scary to see the walls start bleeding on you.
I have found places in Germany to buy books in English, so now I’m putting my commutes to good work and burning through paperbacks like a German Shepard through bratwursts. I read The Blank Slate by Steven Pinker, who told me a lot of things I already knew about human nature, but also told me what research had been done to prove it. I read Atlas Shrugged, where Ayn Rand says that everyone who’s not a libertarian lassiez-faire capitalist is a nihilistic death cultist. I read this clever little book told first-person by an autistic kid in England. I read Cryptonomicon, which was so good I went out and bought other stuff by Neal Stevenson, Snow Crash and Quicksilver. Snow Crash is great fun and would make a really badass movie – it’s sci-fi not in a ‘this is how the world will be in 20 years’ way but in a “let’s dream up a crazy cartoon future, because that will be more fun” kind of way. The main character is named Hiro Protagonist, a hacker/concert promoter/pizza delivery boy for the Mafia whose business card announces him as the “Greatest Swordfighter in the World.” Yesterday afternoon, I read Fight Club, which is just like the movie, but with a creepier ending.
Speaking of Fight Club, I went out to a party at somebody’s apartment on Friday and got into this huge, sprawling argument with this smirky German guy (no, I did not kick his ass. The Fight Club connection comes later). We started off friendly; he sat down at an empty seat across the table in the kitchen where I was hanging out, and I introduced myself and we shook hands and he asked me if I had any cigarette papers. We talked a bit about what we were doing and I talked about my job and how it would be really interesting if I still was interested in natural language processing, but that instead I’d recently decided to go to law school. Ah, he smirked, then you will be miserable your whole life. I started to explain how perhaps many people would, but that I actually enjoy he process of working though subtle logical arguments, and that I don’t love money enough to kill myself working 60+ hours a week, but by then he was already off and running, trying to explain to me how the American legal system is irreparably unjust, corrupt, and just generally bad.
Europeans are always doing this: trying to tell you things you don’t know about your own country, because you live there and haven’t had a chance to read this really insightful book by this one guy whose name they can’t remember and whose references never even existed. At first I did the little bit I always do at this point, sweeping my arms wide to encompass the whole room and all the space beyond, putting on a warm smile and telling him, “Welcome to planet Earth. We are the species Homo Sapiens, or humans for short, and this is what we do.” But he persisted, calling the American legal system one of the worst in the world, nay, one of the worst ever. Top twenty. Some perspective was needed here. I tried explaining how the United States, though far from perfect, could be a whole lot worse before it even began to approach the level of the vast majority of most systems of law in world history, which tend to go something like, “we’re the biggest guys around, and we’ve got swords, so just give us what we want and maybe we won’t hurt everybody.” But no. Because in Fight Club, the character played by Edward Norton makes cynical calculations about automotive recalls without considering the cost of human life. And because people could sue McDonalds for millions of dollars for spilling hot coffee on themselves. And because there really was no social mobility in America, because descendants of indentured servants from the seventeenth century were still poor today, and did you know that indentured servitude was actually worse than slavery, according to this book I read by this guy whose name I don’t remember… and so on. All of the previous examples are real, and not hyperboles I’ve dreamed up for comic effect.
Actually, one major difference here was that I was familiar with nearly all of the relevant data. I kept saying things like, “actually, according to the 2000 census, fully half of the Americans in the lowest quintile of income earners in 1990 had left it” “no, the firebombing of Tokyo was in fact a far more deadly attack,” and “Well, according to the National Institutes of Health..” and so on. He held that genetics research that did long-term studies of twins was both immoral in inaccurate, because the Nazis were also interested in twins, and that statistics were just clever ways to disguise the truth, could never convey real information about the world. I pointed out that the Nazis were also interested in cars and airplanes, and that these seemed to work fine, and that the Oakland A’s general manager had made clever use of statistics to take a small-market team deep into the playoffs for years, but he was of a Platonic bent, and appeals to reality did little to mollify him. I had some more beer.
First of all: it’s official. We three are the Voodoo Tenants, a trio of accursed real estate customers who bring naught but misfortune and entropy to wherever we lodge. Last weekend I was reading on a sofa in the living room when I began to hear a pang, pang, pang dripping noise coming from the kitchen. I walked over and looked in the sink, but the tap was solidly off. Suddenly, a milky water droplet whistled by my left eye. I looked up, to see water dripping down from the ceiling, streaking the molding along the top of the wall and pattering down around me. Soon, the wall began to bulge and bubble, and then to split at seams in the wallpaper and sluice out great splashing waves of black water. It was some real Exorcist shit. Turns out the people who rent the flat above ours were replacing their washing machine. Unfortunately, the water shutoff valve in the wall didn’t actually turn the water off, so when they took the hose off the wall, the plumbing started pumping water through a three-quarter in pipe onto their bathroom floor at a gallon a minute. Also, this was the hot water line, meaning it came out at a healthy 180 degrees F, and the family couldn’t try to plug the leak without scalding themselves. Then the Hausmeister, or building manager, was drunk and didn’t quite remember where the main shutoff for the building’s plumbing was, so we wound up repeatedly mopping up the floor and dumping the results out the window for around an hour. We’re not liable for damages (duh), but it’s still scary to see the walls start bleeding on you.
I have found places in Germany to buy books in English, so now I’m putting my commutes to good work and burning through paperbacks like a German Shepard through bratwursts. I read The Blank Slate by Steven Pinker, who told me a lot of things I already knew about human nature, but also told me what research had been done to prove it. I read Atlas Shrugged, where Ayn Rand says that everyone who’s not a libertarian lassiez-faire capitalist is a nihilistic death cultist. I read this clever little book told first-person by an autistic kid in England. I read Cryptonomicon, which was so good I went out and bought other stuff by Neal Stevenson, Snow Crash and Quicksilver. Snow Crash is great fun and would make a really badass movie – it’s sci-fi not in a ‘this is how the world will be in 20 years’ way but in a “let’s dream up a crazy cartoon future, because that will be more fun” kind of way. The main character is named Hiro Protagonist, a hacker/concert promoter/pizza delivery boy for the Mafia whose business card announces him as the “Greatest Swordfighter in the World.” Yesterday afternoon, I read Fight Club, which is just like the movie, but with a creepier ending.
Speaking of Fight Club, I went out to a party at somebody’s apartment on Friday and got into this huge, sprawling argument with this smirky German guy (no, I did not kick his ass. The Fight Club connection comes later). We started off friendly; he sat down at an empty seat across the table in the kitchen where I was hanging out, and I introduced myself and we shook hands and he asked me if I had any cigarette papers. We talked a bit about what we were doing and I talked about my job and how it would be really interesting if I still was interested in natural language processing, but that instead I’d recently decided to go to law school. Ah, he smirked, then you will be miserable your whole life. I started to explain how perhaps many people would, but that I actually enjoy he process of working though subtle logical arguments, and that I don’t love money enough to kill myself working 60+ hours a week, but by then he was already off and running, trying to explain to me how the American legal system is irreparably unjust, corrupt, and just generally bad.
Europeans are always doing this: trying to tell you things you don’t know about your own country, because you live there and haven’t had a chance to read this really insightful book by this one guy whose name they can’t remember and whose references never even existed. At first I did the little bit I always do at this point, sweeping my arms wide to encompass the whole room and all the space beyond, putting on a warm smile and telling him, “Welcome to planet Earth. We are the species Homo Sapiens, or humans for short, and this is what we do.” But he persisted, calling the American legal system one of the worst in the world, nay, one of the worst ever. Top twenty. Some perspective was needed here. I tried explaining how the United States, though far from perfect, could be a whole lot worse before it even began to approach the level of the vast majority of most systems of law in world history, which tend to go something like, “we’re the biggest guys around, and we’ve got swords, so just give us what we want and maybe we won’t hurt everybody.” But no. Because in Fight Club, the character played by Edward Norton makes cynical calculations about automotive recalls without considering the cost of human life. And because people could sue McDonalds for millions of dollars for spilling hot coffee on themselves. And because there really was no social mobility in America, because descendants of indentured servants from the seventeenth century were still poor today, and did you know that indentured servitude was actually worse than slavery, according to this book I read by this guy whose name I don’t remember… and so on. All of the previous examples are real, and not hyperboles I’ve dreamed up for comic effect.
Actually, one major difference here was that I was familiar with nearly all of the relevant data. I kept saying things like, “actually, according to the 2000 census, fully half of the Americans in the lowest quintile of income earners in 1990 had left it” “no, the firebombing of Tokyo was in fact a far more deadly attack,” and “Well, according to the National Institutes of Health..” and so on. He held that genetics research that did long-term studies of twins was both immoral in inaccurate, because the Nazis were also interested in twins, and that statistics were just clever ways to disguise the truth, could never convey real information about the world. I pointed out that the Nazis were also interested in cars and airplanes, and that these seemed to work fine, and that the Oakland A’s general manager had made clever use of statistics to take a small-market team deep into the playoffs for years, but he was of a Platonic bent, and appeals to reality did little to mollify him. I had some more beer.
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