At the end of 2007, I was fortunate enough to spend three days wandering around Berlin... and with some tips from friends who have spent some quality time there, I had a fantastic time. I found it to be a very comfortable city, particularly when contrasted with Paris a few days later. Regrettably, I don't have any pictures from the various Christmas markets we visited along Unter den Linden, but here are a few mementos:

Remains of Berlin Wall, Mauerpark		Insane Climbing Apparatus, Mauerpark
The Unreal White and Gold Tree at Kaufhaus des Westens		View from KaDeWe Wintergarten down Tauentzienstraße

This extremely scary poster is being displayed on many bus shelters in my neighborhood recently ... yet another movie that screams out "what ever happened to the fine arts of animation and illustration?" or something along those lines.  More importantly, am I crazy or is there some unholy crossover leading to the leering visage above?

	+		=   WTF?
Horton Hears a Who		Joe Camel

Add Jim Carrey as the voice of our proud protagonist, and now I have all these uncomfortable thoughts about how purveyors of "adult entertainment" might parodize / satirize this one.  While an interest in both sides of that fence is not completely out of character for the dear departed Mr. Geisel, Dr. Seuss managed to maintain a firewall between the prurient and child-oriented that we would do well to respect today.  Ick.

My personal cognitive dissonance has been amplified, however, by going back 15+ years in the memory banks for a real screamer of a tune.  I had filed this one away under the title "Horton Hearts A Who" ... can't really explain it but for the Dr. Seuss sideways reference. My memory was wrong, but there's just as much confusion sown between the liner notes (putative lyrics never recorded) vs. the live performance (inspired in part by Pussy Galore's "HC Rebellion," a/k/a "the one where Julia Cafritz reads letters out of Maximum Rock'n'Roll" [Last.FM sample, review of the Groovy Hate F*ck EP]). Bottom line -- this one remains one of my favorite riot grrl-related songs.

Bikini Kill -- "Thurston Hearts The Who" (Self-titled EP, Kill Rock Stars, 1991 [eMusic])

Marking the passing of yet another crazed session of clock adjustment, the empirical research is starting to stack up against the institution of daylight saving time.  The New York Times has a nice resource page on the institution (frankly preferable to the Wikipedia version), while the naysayers started last spring in analyzing the 2007 extension  of DST in the United States (Ars Technica) and have picked up steam in the days leading up to today's "spring forward" (TreeHugger, Gizmodo).

Here's a more radical approach, born of my once-upon-a-time engineer's heart: why not abolish time zones entirely and switch to a single world clock?  The British established Greenwich Mean Time as a de facto world standard back when the sun never set on the British Empire, while today we've got UTC (Universal Time, Coordinated) which conveniently bolts atomic standards onto the Greenwich system.  The time zone I've inhabited most of my life, in the eastern United States, is variously UTC-5 (during standard time) or UTC-4 (during daylight savings).  As the world becomes flatter and more interconnected, it seems far easier to schedule and plan in UTC, rather than playing the whole "how many hours ahead/behind are you" game. 

Maybe I'm just reacting to the pain of scheduling cross-country conference calls in my day job, but I'm not all that attached to the "9 to 5" work-a-day convention.  Would it really be that difficult to switch gears to just designate all scheduled actions in UTC?  Or am I imagining some Star Trek dreamworld where time is even more arbitrary than it seems today?

Here's a brief musical interlude while I contemplate "ticking away the moments that make up a dull day" ...

Scrawl -- "Clock Song" (from Bloodsucker, Feel Good All Over, 1991 / Simple Machines, 1993)

Presaging a return to some longer-form content...

• Stuff White People Like -- Cringe in self-recognition after laughing your tail off.  I particularly like #48, #13, and (of course) #41 and #23.
• The Scuppie -- similar to Stuff White People Like, but suspiciously close to being earnest instead of snarky... (Hat tip to Treehugger)
• A Carlsberg beer advertisement that pokes fun at both mandatory Irish language classes and the "attractiveness of the unusual" ...
  
  Per An Spailpin Fanach, the concluding bit translates as "quiet road girl milk" -- which probably isn't too far from some of the gibberish I spat out trying to communicate in Paris...
• Television Without Pity was once the unquestioned prime-time purveyor of snark.  I can now admit that I was a total junkie for the Alias recaps -- it was really the only way to make any sense of what was happening.  Anyway, they got bought out by Bravo a year ago and are now headed for reinvention with the three creators all making their way to the exits.
• And finally, a bar in New York City has the good sense to ban "Danny Boy" for the month of March.  I'm all for live Irish music, but I have always despised that particular tune (even before learning the back-story) ... it epitomizes everything thats wrong with the "Irish Tenors" movement.

Yes, there's more content on the way shortly... but please don't hold your breath.