Ramblings
Wacky wacky world
I love it. Jessica Simpson declines to meet the President and attend the Republican fund raiser because she says she doesn’t want to politicize her favorite charity: Operation Smile. And what does Operation Smile do you might ask? They provide plastic surgery for kids in foreign countries who are disfigured. Read more
Ramblings
Sony Delays PlayStation3
I don’t know why this stuff interests me so much, but it does. Anyway, they are cracking open the champagne at Microsoft. Not only does Sony have to delay the revenues/profits it is going to get from PlayStation until pretty much 2007, but they are losing something even more valuable: Read more
Europe
TOC at the Nationals
xcnl > en xcnl > en So the Table of Contents ()is among the top 17.5% of pub quiz teams in the Netherlands. We deduce this from the fact that today we finished 35th out of 199 total participating teams. It was a fun time, even if the place was Read more
Europe
Rome – The Forum and Palatine Hill
xcnl > en xcnl > en xcnl > en xcnl > en xcnl > en A few months before I went to Rome I had just finished watching the HBO miniseries and finished reading a great book about the ancient Roman Republic. I had never given much credit to the Read more
General
Rome – St Peter’s Basilica
I think it’s the biggest church I’ve ever been in. It’s sheer grandeur dwarfs every cathedral I’ve seen in the rest of Europe. A huge covered space, with vaulted ceilings () so high they remain in constant semi-darkness. Already from the outside you get an idea of the scale of Read more
General
Rome – Strangers in Line
We’re standing in line to get into St. Peter’s basilica. It’s our first day in Rome and it’s mid-afternoon. Sadly, the day is grey and overcast. I take the camera and snap a few shots of the square and the front of the basilica. I get a nice one of Read more
General
Rome – First Impressions
Ann keeps telling me that no one reads my posts because they are too long, so I am going to chop them up into little digests as an experiment, and I’m going to start with our arrival in Rome. Fiumicino airport is average, as airports go. It isn’t an architectural Read more
General
Free Speech, Cartoons, and the Holocaust
xcnl > en I recently had an exchange with my good friend Ian that I think is worth mentioning. It had to do with the fact that recently a court in Austria put a guy in jail for three years for denying the Holocaust. This seemed at first glance to Read more
Brian
Flying Airships of 2010
xcnl > en xcnl > en Man, I love stuff like this. An update to the Hindenburg. A luxury dirigible ferrying people at 175 mph and a relatively low 8,000 feet in the air. It just sounds cool. I want one. Of course, I’d prefer if mine didn’t explode.