Another trip to Stuttgart

I hadn't realized snarfing was a crime. Snarfing and cracking someone's computer - that's different, but plain vanilla snarfing? Someone just got arrested for it!

When I went to Aspen last year for the E&O Workshop with the Smiths, we didnt know where to go exactly once we got to the town, so we moved around the houses till we got a wireless signal on my laptop and then found the website for the Physics Institute where we wanted to go. Snarfing saved us that time.
Joined a couple of friends, and a couple of their friends, in Stuttgart today. We initially planned to go to the BrazilFest but when we heard it was 40 euros, went to the free jazz concert in the main park instead. The picture to the right is from an interesting ad for Camel cigarettes. If you don't see why it's interesting, keep looking.

Hmmm... catching up on my MyDD reading. There's an interesting - and scary - post about rabid anti-muslim comments on right wing blogs. Also check out the comments on that post. Ich mochte ein beer. (Actually, I'd like something much stronger, but don't yet know how to say that in Deutsch.)

While sitting in the central park in the shadow of the building shown here (we couldn't figure out why there were people walking around in it) listening to jazz/rock/stuff, Lutzi and Sathya tell me about their very cool group trip to Kiruna in Sweden.

There's an ice palace or something like that in Kiruna (home of Sweden's iron mines, and above the Arctic Circle). Its bar is sponsored by Absolut Vodka - which I had no idea was a Swedish company!- where you could get as many vodka refills as you can drink before your glass melts - it's made of ice too. Apparently it is highly recommended (skin detoxicating, etc) to go diving into snow in -26 degrees after 20 minutes of a steaming sauna. And it doesnt hurt. Even if you do it in bikinis and shorts. Though it might cause people from other group trips just returning from dogsledding and all wrapped up in parkas to get a shock.

This is the first time in my life that I've ever bought more than a single newspaper at a time. Desperate for dead-tree news in English to read during the week while in my internetless room, I picked up the weekend editions of the Guardian, USA Today, IHT, and a couple of British newspapers I hadn't got before.