Over at Teekay’s

It may be Sunday but AP managed a brilliant hed nonetheless:

Stone-throwing Swiss celebrate bicentenary of cultural festival

Source: International Herald Tribune, 9/3

The piece itself is worth reading, too — we Swiss are very much in touch with our inner beast.

Following our own success, Cyprus offers to solve Lebanese crisis

Source: Cyprus Mail

Okay, the hed was tongue in cheek, but the offer is for real, apparently.

It’s unlikely many folks come to my blog to get news on the World Cup — though the Swiss rock! — but in case any of you out there are sick and tired of it (or as an unfortunate BCS interpreter recently put it on live TV, “bolestan i umoran”), here’s an article to cheer you up — especially if you agree that Europeans are just a bunch of nihilistic posers. Money quote:

Mostly soccer is just guys in shorts running around aimlessly, a metaphor for the meaninglessness of life. Whole blocks of game time transpire during which absolutely nothing happens. Fortunately, this permits fans to slip out for a bratwurst and a beer without missing anything important. It’s little wonder fans at times resort to brawling amongst themselves in the grandstands, as there is so little transpiring on the field of play to occupy their wandering attention. Watching men in shorts scampering around has its limitations. It’s like gazing too long at a painting by de Kooning or Jackson Pollock. The more you look, the less there is to see.

That’s what I tell people when I’m having them over for dinner. It’s usually fairly inexpensive, fairly decent stuff. But would you bring along 12-dollar bottles when visiting the President of the United States, as a certain dignitary from the Caucasus has done, according to a listing in the Federal Register?

Sarajevo, model city

Originally uploaded by teekay.

You know those miniature models of towns or landscapes? It’s very easy to achieve the same effect on photographs of real landscapes using a technique outlined here.
That’s the only way to turn Sarajevo into a model city.

…which means even lighter posting than during Tuscan hilltop town alert #14, Rolling Umbrian hills alert #4, or Dramatic Amalfi coast sight ahead alert #2. Expect something approaching “normal” posting to resume around April 18, jetlag permitting.

Positano (Amalfi coast)

Originally uploaded by teekay.

I uploaded a few pics from last weekend’s trip to Napoli and Positano to Flickr. Head over there to check them out.

It’s been a while, hasn’t it? We’ve been traveling in lovely Italy, mostly Tuscany, with a brief trip to Rome, where we found this restaurant osteria pizzeria birreria trattoria::

I guess they wanted to make sure to offer something for each and every passer-by…

My favorite newspaper (whose website, incidentally, stinks) ran this headline today on its English-language section:

Skeleton earns Swiss first gold

The explanation for the oddness is that skeleton, apparently, is some sort of Olympic sport while the mangled syntax is due to “Swiss” being an indirect object rather than an adjective. Whoever wrote this headline last night must have had a lot of fun — as much fun as one can have at this serious, highbrow paper.

The Danish government may have been slow on the uptake, but it’s getting there re: the cartoon controversy. The Prime Minister’s analysis unit has now submitted its findings, and here they are:

Denmark’s Rasmussen Says Cartoons Prompted Crisis
Bloomberg.com Europe

…or is it just me?

Moshe Katsav:

Source

Milan Milutinovic:

Source

Richard Perle:

Source

French would-be visitors to the US are in trouble because they can’t get biometric passports, which means they need a US visa. The union of government printers has blocked the government’s plans to have the new documents printed by private firm.

France is the only one of 27 countries with visa-free travel to the US that has not managed to produce biometric passports in time.

The Trib reports on the fallout, featuring some great quotes.

In the meantime, the union’s secretary, Jacques Floris, tips his hat to his French comrades standing in the cold, waiting their turn for a visa. But the government, he said, has to respect the union’s rights.

That’s small comfort for Xavier Leclerc, who joined the line for visas and passports at 7:30 a.m. and later abandoned his place to get to work on time. In January, he missed a training conference in the United States with his new employer, Google, because he couldn’t obtain a visa. So did another colleague in sales.

“I know that this is happening because of the strike-related problems here,” he said. “But to be honest, French people are a bit proud and it makes me feel a little like I’m coming from a third world country to get a visa. And now I will have to wait again in line in the cold.”

Perhaps he could try the French embassy in Sarajevo to get the genuine experience of coming from a third-world country and being humiliated by arrogant, corrupt staff because you had the absurd idea of visiting their country, or better still any Western embassy in Africa?

Read:

Pope warns about loveless sex
Seattle Post Intelligencer

Thought:
What does he know about it?

Use ropey old plonk to accompany cheese, experts suggest
The Guardian, 19 January 2006

This happens very rarely indeed.

I’m sitting here at my kitchen table, innocently writing some stuff and listening to an internet radio station playing the first Brahms concerto — music I know inside out. All of a sudden it hits me how extraordinary this particular rendering is — and I’m listening just through my PowerBook’s speakers.

My reference record for this has always been Pollini and Abbado. But I was blown away by this one: it made me realize how inadequate Pollini is, not at any technical level but in his interpretation. The soundfile doesn’t give me much info beyond “Gilels,” but a cursory glance at this page suggests that this is most likely the Gilels and Jochum record with the Berlin Philharmonic — two artists I never particularly cared about. (I always thought Gilels was too muscular, but perhaps that’s not bad for the Brahms warhorse.) This stuff is probably more than thirty years old and sounds better than any other recording I’ve heard.

Not being an espresso drinker myself — ever since moving to the Balkans in the last decade of the last century, I’ve been drinking Turkish (or Bosnian, or Serbian) coffee — I’ve always been a bit mystified by the cult surrounding the perfect espresso, and the derivative cult of the perfect espresso machine. Today’s Süddeutsche Zeitung does a good job shedding some light on the mattter.

It seems your typical aficionado is a guy (no surprise there), lives — if he’s German — in Bavaria or Baden-Württemberg (which together account for 41 percent of the espresso-maker market), has a nice income and is a bit weird. For example, there are websites that provide soundfiles of espresso machines. You read that right. Soundfiles — of the noise a machine makes as the water percolates through the coffee, or whatever the right term for that is. (The article doesn’t give any links.)

But one explanation I found very satisfying. Most of the time I get a funny taste in my mouth from espresso at restaurants around here (Switzerland, Germany, France). The article explains that the machines made by the market leaders in Germany — Jura, Saeco — are crap and consist of plastic parts inside, which means that the water pressure is simply not big enough. What you get is a “solution,” not an “emulsion,” and apparently that’s the whole difference — it’s not just my imagination, it’s actually chemical.

I’ll take my Turkish brew any time over any of these.

Malta suspends importation of poultry from Croatia
di-ve.com

I left my lovely hometown ten years ago this month and never looked back (or, indeed, went back for more than a few days at a time). And for good reason. Yesterday’s FAZ ran a mildly interesting piece (not available online AFAICT) on the absence of a vibrant scene of young writers in Switzerland, prompted by the fact that not a single Swiss writer made the shortlist of twenty candidates for a literary award. But one passage caught my attention — it sums up pretty well what I always found so stifling about the place.

Die Trägheit der politischen Prozesse, die Ereignislosigkeit des saturierten Alltags, die Absenz einer Debattenkultur und das Fehlen einer bedeutenden Gruppe streitbarer Intellektueller von Format scheinen auch die Literatur zu infizieren. Dispute werden hierzulande, wo jeder jeden kennt, entweder sofort unterdrückt oder vertraulich in Hinterzimmern durch eine föderalistische Lösung entschärft.

The inertia of political processes, the uneventfulness of a saturated everyday life, the absence of a culture of debate and the lack of a sizeable group of combative intellectuals of stature seem to be infecting literature as well. Here, where everyone knows everyone, conflicts get either immediately suppressed or defused behind closed doors through a federalist solution. (Translation courtesy of MMV and exposing, as translations tend to do, that many adjectives that make perfect sense to the casual reader — or writer — are not all that necessary once you take a closer look.)

My favorite newspaper has a piece in today’s literary supplement that talks about the difference between modernists and anti-modernists. Anti-modernists are not reactionaries: they accept the inevitability of modernity but don’t celebrate it. Their main value is liberty, not order; and indeed, the article suggests, the difference between modernists and anti-modernists is a better signpost for political tendencies than the traditional left/right divide. (Of course one could just continue the list: modernists believe in grand social and political projects while anti-modernists don’t — though artistic grand projects are another thing, just think of À la recherche du temps perdu or the Mémoires d’outre-tombe, by two quintessential anti-modernists).

The piece is a review of Antoine Compagnon, Les antimodernes. De Joseph de Maistre à Roland Barthes, Gallimard, 2005. Sounds like it should join my growing list of books I want to read but am pretty sure I won’t — not any time soon, that is.

These days even switching channels on the TV has become a hazardous activity. I was doing just that when I hesitated, for a split second too long, before moving on from Sky News — a channel I only watched during one occasion, the July bombings in London.

And guess who’s presenting the new flagship news show there?

James Rubin to anchor new international show on Sky News
Issued: September 12, 2005

But it seems that even Sky viewers are not so easily conned:

Viewers switch from Rubin’s new show
Oct 27, 2005 06:55 PM

In any case, this dude is baaaad. Awful. Horrible. So horrible in fact you should really check him out if you have satellite.

Update: To be fair, I just watched an interesting interview between Rubin and Robert Cooper, a foreign-affairs official at the Council of the EU. Rarely have a seen such sweeping coverage of some of the key issues confronting the EU — the Kosovo and Montenegro status; enlargement more generally; transatlantic relations; and above all, Turkey. (Though I’m always rather amused when Americans harangue the EU about admitting Turkey, something that — for better or worse — a clear majority of Europeans are deeply wary of doing.)