europe in black and white

i finally got back my black and white film of europe, and i've added my favorites to the europe set on flickr.

a friend of mine told me last week something that really blew my mind: i always seem to take pictures of things from odd angles, she said, which gave her a new perspective on things she's seen before.

i never realized that, but yeah, i guess if you look at these pictures, not one was taken from what you'd assume is a normal, straight-on view. i guess that's my calling card ...

anyway. these black and whites are some of my favorite pictures i've ever taken. i hope you enjoy them.

clock, musee d'orsay, originally uploaded by pr9000.

tour eiffel, originally uploaded by pr9000.

, originally uploaded by pr9000.

some guy without an ear, originally uploaded by pr9000.

jeanne d'arc, originally uploaded by pr9000.

purple monkey dishwater

most of those horror stories from katrina? total fiction.

yeah. george bush is the worst mayor new orleans ever had, too. (as for the title: search for the phrase here)

my wife

i just wanted to make a public declaration of my absolute love and adoration for my wife.

i really don't deserve someone as good as her.

sometimes, i feel like the luckiest man alive. my heart is so swollen with love, i just had to share this with you all.

why the stillers lost to the patriots ... again

as i'm sitting there, watching new england beat pittsburgh, i can point to one thing, and one thing only, that told me the game was over before viniateri kicked the field goal to win it:

the steelers gave the patriots too much time remaining after scoring their touchdown.

i can't have been the only person in steeler nation to be screaming "but there's too much time left!" at the TV after ward caught that touchdown pass. and i can't be the only person in steeler nation to be a bit confused as to why the steelers -- a power-running team if ever there was one -- didn't try a few rushes during that 50 yard drive. you know, to kind of take some precious tick-tick-tick-ticks off the clock.

mind you, they did rush once -- a gutsy quarterback draw on 2nd and 1 from inside the new england 20. and it got good yardage. but not one, but two linesmen were called for holding, and that led to the improbable 4th and 11 pass -- again, a great call -- that should have been caught. i mean, it sure looked like quincy morgan had the ball ...

wait. what am i thinking? quincy morgan is the go-to guy in this circumstance? i'm guessing that russ grimm spilled some primanti bros. sammich toppings all over cowher's little laminated playbook. bill looked at the sheet, saw that "4th down +10" was covered in mayo, and decided to call morgan's number.

but they scored. great. game tied with about a minute and change left. we all knew that brady would get huge chunks of yardage on pass plays -- 14 and 17 on the first two snaps -- but then the patriots ran the ball, got nothing, and cowher calls a time out, to preserve the clock.

what i'm also wondering is this: why did cowher call time out on that down, but never again? why did he let the clock run down to nothing leading up to viniateri's kick? what kind of half-assed clock management is that?

the steelers deserved to lose this game, from what i saw. the better team won -- again.

farking out loud

the premise: a guy named bodhi oser prints out stickers with the word "fuck" on them -- all sorts of different sizes of stickers. then he goes around, finds signs, and uses the stickers to modify the sign. then he takes a picture, puts all those pictures together, and sells a book.

some of the sample images on the site are pretty funny ...



to see them, click "this way" or "that way" and enjoy ... this is one coffee table book i just might buy.

hey mister congenial-looking black man, record a show for me

i don't understand what the congenial-looking black man (mr. CLBM for short) means when he outlines what i'll "love about directv dvr" ...

see, mr. CLBM, we just got our directv with dvr -- which is just tivo -- activated yesterday. and it's pretty; it's shiny and silver and looks very, shall we say, powerbook-ish behind the glass in our entertainment console.

the only problem: it seems to fucking record random programs. programs i did not ask it to record, and unless frijolita mixed a few spoonfuls of Cremora brand Creamer with Crack in my morning coffee, programs i would never in a million years record.

such as cooley high. and some eric stoltz movie that i've never heard of before. why, mr. CLBM, would i love some sort of ipod shuffle action with all one billion channels you offer me.

some days, it's as if technology is giving me the finger.

***

other days, though, it's the entire home improvement industry that flips me off.

take, for example, what happened at the homestead while f and i were galavanting across western europe. we had a little flood in our back yard, as lake eponymous decided that it couldn't deal with a five-inch deluge one sunday night. water came up to our back porch, about 200 feet away from its banks.

there also was a lightning strike at or near our house, as it blew up the outlets in our basement and garage, killed all devices plugged into phone lines (and damaged one of our two lines itself), totally fried my cable modem and wireless router, blew up our sprinkler system and the electric eyes on the garage door, and ruined my old powerbook G3, which was plugged directly into the wall.

well.

the sane part of my brain said "get several highly-paid experts in here to fix all this," while the insane part said "dood -- you can totally fix all this shit." i think f was listening to the insane part, because each time the sane part decided to speak its mind out loud, she had this "who farted?" look on her face that told me her true thoughts about her husband's piss-poor home improvement skills.

long story short, we got an electrician neighbor to fix the basement outlets, and he's still poking around the garage to find out what's wrong out there ... we canned the tivo and got directv ... we upgraded the router and modem, but decided to get DSL about a week later ... and i fixed the electric eyes on the garage door.

that was a major triumph. that day, i put up shelves in f's office, then fixed the electric eye, then mowed the grass around the house where the flood had deposited all our expensive mulch, and decided that, because i was on a roll, i would tackle the largest project to date:

putting our storm door back on the front of the house.

see, it had blown off a few times, because when my father in law and i put it up, we were high on that Cremora Crack stuff and did a horrible job -- so horrible, in fact, that we decided that one of the most important parts of the door (the plunger thingee that makes it automatically close) would cause us to totally deplete what little home improvement skills we had left.

well, of course, the wind blew the door totally open so many times that it pulled the wood jamb completely off the door frame and, voila, one day i come home and the f tells me the freaking door fell off.

i let it sit for a few weeks, contemplating what to do. the sane part of my brain said "call a qualified professional TODAY" but the insane part, in cahoots with my lovely wife, made me feel like a (insert word for female genitalia) for not being able to hang up a simple little door.

***

so i decided to do it. i went to the local ACE hardware and the friendly hardware man said "son, use gorilla glue to make sure the wood never ever leaves the door frame again." i bought me some glue, waited more than a week for someone to come to their senses and call in the Bob Vila House Fixer-Upper Squad, and, since nobody thought that was a good idea, i decided to cap off my incredibly fruitful sunday with hanging a door.

long story short: i applied liberal amounts of glue to the wood, put the wood to the frame, pounded it in, waited for it to dry ...

and then realized i put the wood up crooked.

rule number 1 in home improvement: do not glue your mistakes to the frame of the house.

funniest joke i heard all week

thanks to mr. duffy ...

When Mr. Wonderful, Lil' Tommy Brady died, he got to heaven and God was showing him around.

They came to a modest little house with a faded Patriots flag in the window. "This house is yours for eternity, Lil' Tommy," said God. "This is very special; not everyone gets a house up here." Lil' Tommy felt special, indeed, and walked up to his house.

On his way up the porch, he noticed another house just around the corner. It was a 3-story mansion with a Black and Gold sidewalk, a 50 foot tall flagpole with an enormous Steeler logo flag, and in every window, a Terrible towel.

Mr Wonderful, Lil' Tommy Brady looked at God and said "God, I'm not trying to be ungrateful, but I have a question. I was an all-pro QB, I won 3 Super Bowls, and I even went to the Hall of Fame."

God said "So what's your point Lil Tommy?"

"Well, why does Ben Roethlisberger get a better house than me?"

God chuckled, and said "Oh no Lil' Tommy, that's not Ben's house, it's mine."

take that, abe frohman

fark.com takes on the death of marshall field's ...

"Well, at least this story will get Chicagoans talking about something besides "that one time we won the super bowl."

good news, and bad

first, the good:

President Bush on Friday ruled out raising taxes to pay for Gulf Coast reconstruction, saying other government spending must be cut. "You bet it will cost money, but I'm confident we can handle it," he said.

"It's going to cost whatever it's going to cost, and we're going to be wise about the money we spend," Bush said a day after laying out an expensive plan for rebuilding New Orleans and the Gulf Coast without spelling out how he would pay for it.

great! this is the first time in my memory that the bush administration is proposing cutting spending to pay for something. this is encouraging. in fact, i'd love it if they could find $200 billion in the budget to pay for new orleans' reconstruction. that's how, you know, a normal family would do it.

but then, the bad:

Bush also said he wants Congress to consider changing the law to allow the military to step in immediately if a catastrophic disaster occurs again. "It's important for us to learn from the storm what could have been done better," he said. Under fire, the White House has accused state and city officials of not authorizing federal involvement quickly enough, although critics say the administration didn't need approval to act.

and more bad:

(Couldn't agree more. I haven't been that disappointed with a new channel since the Yes Network launched and I found out it was an all-Yankee channel instead of an all-porn channel. Devastating day.)

i'm reading -- and laughing with -- the sports guy again. i feel like i just fell off the wagon.

europe roundup

notre dame, originally uploaded by pr9000.

i've added a few more europe pictures in the flickr set ... more thoughts later.

Sept. 8

Sept. 8, originally uploaded by beths96.

enough of the europe pictures. here's one of my lovely niece, hailey elizabeth, who has many fun presents from europe awaiting her for her first birthday. :)

europe, days 4-9

so what explains the large gap in updates from last week to today?



jean-louis drove his citroen into our hotel and caused us to lose internet.

as the french say, "le kidding!"

since we last spoke, frijolita and i moved from paris to brussels to koln (cologne), and lost our free internet access. so i decided to wait a bit and do a huge update all at once. so ...

paris



f and i went to the eiffel tower -- in fact, we did the whole "we're just tourists in paris" thing that day, going from a museum to the eiffel to a seine river cruise.

the tower is ... well, i wasn't really excited about visiting it, though to avoid that while staying in paris would be like avoiding, say, the sears tower and the art institute while staying in chicago -- meaning, you should do it, but only once, to say that you did.

but having said that, i must say it was quite wonderful. overcast skies made me worry about getting drenched on top, but luckily the weather held out for us. and i had another mathematical breakthrough -- actually, f found an addition to my famous Odor Formula:

lim ([me + f in elevator to top of eiffel tower] + smelly frenchmen) = anger

but the tower was fantastic, the views were sublime, and i really got the true sense of paris -- how large, how dense, and how old the city is.



we also visited the musee d'orsay, which houses some of the more impressive ... er ... impressionist works. we saw all the big posters-taped-to-dorm-room-walls paintings, and also discovered that, for the ancient greeks (and even 19th century parisians), statues were the equivalent of the internet. i mean, where else could have seen things like this?



or even this bit of bizarro pedophilic water sports porn?



this actually is taken in brussels -- it's the most famous statue in the city that i saw, called the manneken pis, and ... well, it's a boy peeing. and the locals have about 300 different costumes they use to dress him up. the day we saw him he was a soldier.

and why, pray tell, is the little tyke's bladder so full?



these are just a few of the 260+ beers on tap at the belgian beer festival, which was just incredible.



the grand platz contained a very neat, very crowded (at times) rectangle area where the breweries set up shop. the prices couldn't be beat -- three tickets (in the form of specially designed, unused bottle caps) cost €2, meaning that the best beer in the world, all on tap, cost about US 2.50 ... you cannot beat that. and we didn't try, believe me.



we made a day trip to brugge, which is this charming little tourist-infected city north of brussels. everything in it dates from, like, 1300 or something, and believe it or not, it was very, very charming. we rented bikes at the train station and terrorized the city with our american-rules bike riding, and went from quaint little lace shop to ancient cobblestone street with nary a smashup. brugge at one time was, as the french might say, le king shit city of europe.



this, taken on a street that lines one of the many canals in brugge, might be the best picture taken on the trip. frijolita really did a great job on this one ...



finally, we leave this segment at the cologne cathedral, the first edifice i've seen in europe that has left me speechless when first seeing it. so speechless, in fact -- and because it's after midnight here -- i'm going to leave you with the image. for now.

as always, the europe pictures can be found here.

au revoir, vaarwel und Auf Wiedersehen.

europe, day 3

okay. we were hung over yesterday and didn't get started until 2 p.m., which will explain the short post.



we found a doorway.



we found the bastille, or at least the "place de bastille," which i think is french for "lanes? you expect us to have lanes on our roads? stupid americans" ...

we were floating around the place de voges, which is the oldest square in paris, we were told by our helpful concierge. but we were searching for a pizza place, because we'd been walking in some pretty severe heat for a few hours, nursing our thick heads, and we didn't care as much about history as we did about sustenance.



we found a nice cafe where only the assistant chef was smoking while he cooked -- a major upgrade from the norm ... i had quiche lorraine and a salad, while frijolita had the pizza. i felt kind of ill, mainly because my mind kept saying "no way in a million years that you would ever have these two different foods within the same eight hour period."



then we hit the louvre.

frankly, it was fricking jinormous. too jinormous, really, to enjoy properly. many japanese tourists taking pictures of everything, people scurrying like ants to a picnic basket to see ...



the mona lisa. f said to me as we left the room that, while the mona lisa is a great painting, we can't understand why everyone makes like mad to see it. of course, we did that very same thing, but there's no explanation as to why we did it. maybe because everyone says "oh, you've got to see the mona lisa" blah blah blah ...

i was more impressed with the palace itself, to be honest, the artworks seemed to me to be overshadowed by their gallery. to imagine that someone lived there, called that "home" ...



i mean, imagine shoveling those stairs in the winter!



we are in love with the metro, and used it last night to run for mussels near the st germain des pres. coming up from underground on the way home, we saw the eiffel tower all lit up and shit. it was ... beautiful. almost beyond beautiful.

but, of course, we've not gone to see it in person yet. maybe in tomorrow's post you'll see some up-close shots.