The movies, ten years ago

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Time really does fly; and for me, nothing demonstrates this more clearly than looking at movies that were released ten years ago. You know: movies that you can vividly remember going to see at the cinema, and still consider to be “recent”.

While pondering this recently, I realised that 1999 was one hell of a movie year:

These days, I’d be happy if each year included just a single blockbuster movie that lived up to these (warning: depressing word ahead) classics.

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Spare change we can believe in

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For years, I had been waiting for this opportunity.

When standing in line at the supermarket checkout, I tend to quickly dig out my spare change and count it, so I can react quickly when the time comes to cough up - can I pay with coins, or do I have to get out some paper cash?

Yesterday, at the back of a particularly long queue, I counted exactly €4.78 in change before returning it to my pocket. When it was finally my turn to pay, the cashier mumbled “That’ll be €4.78″ in that exceedingly unfriendly manner that must be a mandatory part of the training they receive here (”Lesson One: Why the customer is annoying scum”).

Making a big show of it, I jingled the change in my pocket, and finally pulled out a seemingly random handful of coins that I thrust at the cashier before wordlessly walking away.

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McService

Filed Under Annoyances, Journal

Recently, a mate and I sought out a McDonald’s drive-through, as we both had a bit of a hankering for overpriced grease. We ordered two limited-time-only-and-therefore-the-same-price-as-a-small-car Clogger Burgers and a variety of smaller bits and pieces. As we checked the bag to make sure everything we had ordered was actually in there, we noticed that we had only been given one Clogger.

“Excuse me, there only seems to be one Clogger in here, but we ordered (and paid for) two”, I politely said to the lady behind the window. She said nothing for a moment, regarding me with the kind of contempt normally reserved for people who have been caught in a compromising situation with a chicken. “Yeah, there was only one Clogger left in the heat tray” was her gum-chewing response.

After politely insisting on being given our second burger and then waiting a geologically significant length of time, we were wordlessly handed the second burger without so much as a humble “Sorry, here you go”.

But seriously, “There was only one left in the tray”? What kind of mental process precipitates that kind of remark?! Surely only an aggressive brain disease can cause anyone to believe that kind of reasoning is acceptable?

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Tour de Farce

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Today, I bought myself a new bicycle. Actually, I’m using the word “new” quite wrongly: (a) the bike itself is a second-hand model, and (b) it isn’t actually replacing any other bike, as I haven’t owned anything with pedals since I passed my driving exam in 1996.

As I attempted to climb on for the first time in well over ten years, my right calf - unaccustomed to such exertion thanks to years of living behind a desk - immediately cramped up. My mind raced how I could nonchalantly explain away my sudden grimacing and grunting to the perplexed bike salesman, but in the end the best I could come up with was “Cramp!”

Eventually, I managed to clamber aboard. As I took the bike for a test spin around the block, I realised the old saying “You never forget how to ride a bicycle” is quite accurate. I also discovered that there is a very good reason why the phrase doesn’t include the word “gracefully”: the first couple hundred metres were exceedingly wobbly.

It also didn’t help that I was too busy concentrating on not falling over to even consider trying to change gears, so for the first few minutes I laboured away in a gear evidently designed for conquering almost-vertical Alpine trails: for every three dozen pedal rotations, the wheels moved about an inch. The previous owner obviously took the “mountain” part of owning a mountain bike very seriously.

But eventually, I managed to ride around with something almost approaching aplomb, and figured out how to switch gears without having to stop and inspect the controls. At this pace, I’ll be in the Tour de France next year! After all, I’m twice the man Lance Armstrong is… literally.

Oh wait, did I say “Tour de France”? I meant… “pub”.

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I want to play a game

Filed Under Amusing, Journal

I’m not normally one to judge people by their appearance, but somehow, there is something deeply unsettling when you pull up to a mobile food stand to buy something for dinner and suddenly find yourself standing face-to-face with Jigsaw, the villain from Saw.

“I want to play a game”, he said matter-of-factly, with the slightest hint of a psychopathic grin. I recoiled, staring in terror at the man wielding a large Döner knife. “P-pardon?”, I stuttered. “I said… what can I get you?”

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Football patriotism

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Two posts on football in one day… we can expect hell to freeze over any moment now.

While I’m no fan of football (or any organised sport, really), the Euro 2008 championship has had one welcome side-effect: Germans are showing their true colours… literally. Everywhere you look, cars, windows and balconies are proudly adorned with German flags; this trend first surfaced during the World Cup in 2006, and has returned for Euro 2008.

In most countries this would be considered normal, especially in the United States where you can’t go anywhere without bumping into the Stars and Stripes. Due to their history, however, Germans are worried (read: paranoid) that any display of patriotism will be misinterpreted as nationalism, and that openly carrying a German flag is just one small step away from goose-stepping into neighbouring countries.

I’m pleased to see that sixty years and three generations after the end of World War II, Germans are finally daring to openly show they are proud to be German.

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Don’t mention the score!

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I find it strange how people can identify so strongly with a bunch of overpaid yobs kicking a ball around a field. I refer, of course, to the currently on-going 2008 UEFA European Football Championship. (That’s “soccer” for those on the other side of the pond.)

Sometimes, the enthusiasm and optimism of fans and the media borders on the psychotic. When Germany lost a first-round game against Croatia, the news reports consistently stated that “For the first time in this championship, Germany has lost a game.” They made it sound as if they had previously won dozens of games, when in fact this was just their second game. It doesn’t get much more glass-is-half-full-er than that. Luckily, they subsequently beat the Austrians, and so everything was once again fine in football world.

Incidentally, England didn’t even get through the qualifying round this time, so I can accurately brag that we have not lost a single game yet in this championship.

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Castle Neuschwanstein

Filed Under Journal, Photos

Recently, Aisha and Ross - two mates from Holland - dropped in for a long weekend to get away from their respective stressy student and software developer lives.

Intent on giving them the full German experience, I dragged them around Neuschwanstein Castle, this ludicrously large and ornate palace built in a picturesque alpine setting by Ludwig II of Bavaria.

Sadly for him, Ludwig never had a chance to live in the place, as he died before it was completed. He actually died under what I will diplomatically call “ununsual circumstances”: having been declared legally insane and deposed by the Bavarian government the previous day, Ludwig drowned while going for a swim with his accountant in a nearby lake.

Despite never being completed, the castle did in fact leave two important footprints in history: it inspired Disney’s Cinderella Castle, and it was used in the movie Spaceballs as Castle Druidia.

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Stupid questions

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There are a lot of really stupid questions out there. “Are you sitting here?” is one such question, as is “Where exactly did you lose your keys?” Normally I make a conscious effort to avoid asking dumb things, but recently I discovered that - in unfamiliar and unnerving situations - the brain shuts down the quality control department.

As I was driving home from my weekend shopping route, I noticed someone lying face down in a field, next to a toppled bicycle. I brought my Mondeo to a shuddering halt, jumped out of the car and ran over to the limp and motionless ex-cyclist. And that’s when it happened; during a bizarre, out-of-body type experience, I witnessed myself kneel down next to this person and heard myself ask: “Are you okay?”

If I’m ever in the position of the person on the ground, I pray I can find the energy to calmly reply “Yes, thank you. It’s nice down here.”

Thankfully, other motorists soon stopped and joined our happy little field party, including a doctor who made sure the cyclist was in no danger of dying with all of us watching. As it turns out, she had been cycling home from a friend’s house when she was suddenly overcome by “fatigue”, which is apparently a code word for “all the beer I’ve been drinking today”, if her breath was anything to go by.

Eventually, the ambulance arrived - heroically summoned by me a few minutes earlier - followed closely by the police, who pointed at the bleeding, near-unconscious woman lying on the ground and asked “Is this the woman who fell off the bike?” What a stupid question.

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Blog Episode IV - A New Hope

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Every once in a while, I decide that it is time to change the layout of my website. New layout! New structure! And, hopefully: new content! For a brief few minutes, while sitting on the couch, this seems like an excellent idea. Then I remember that this actually entails a load of work, so nine times out of ten, I just put on a Simpsons DVD instead.

The main deterrent in the past has been the home-made content management system that powers my site. I went with something home-brewed since I enjoy planning and building software; also, thanks to my oh-so-slight control freak tendancies, I distrusted third-party components. However, as the projects I do at work have increased exponentially in size and complexity over the past years, I have been forced to use third-party components, as coding everything myself is simply no longer feasible. And, to my great surprise, if a component is carefully researched and selected, the things actually tend to… work. Shocking!

And so, when the urge recently surfaced to revamp my website, I jumped over my own shadow and installed WordPress. And hot diggity daffodil, I like it. Out of the box, it does almost everything I need; the few things that are missing such as photo albums are available as free plug-ins. The only real downside I can find is that my old content cannot be imported as-is, but it was time for a content reset anyhow.

I guess this means the snarky comments season has been opened, so here’s a pre-emptive one for copy/pasting: “It took you this long to discover ready-made blogging tools? Oh boy are you in for a pleasant surprise when you realise that there are also these things called ‘compilers’ that translate your source code into machine language, instead of doing it manually!” :P

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