random picture & I'm going to Madrid.

just as it seemed like my life had deteriorated to flying back and forth between Frankfurt and Zürich, increasingly revolving around trainings, partying with colleagues, and indiscriminate money spending, suddenly the holiday spirit set it and I found myself re-catapulted into family life around the Christmas tree. However, just as things were getting too cozy, I realized one of the grand truths of my new life: that suddenly, I had lots of money and little time, instead of lots of time and little money (if you're looking for deeper truths, check my other blog). Thus was born the idea to go to Madrid for new year's, to give birth to a few new entries on my impressions of the Iberian peninsula. Iberian peninsula, here I come...

My Blogging Helps You Cope.

au lecteur - to the reader.

as you arrived in my blog's belly
an extra hit did my counter tally
my dear, you err inside a thread
where wise men truly fear to tread!

but I console you with a fact,
that your mind (till now) truly lack'd:
that though Peer Gynt an onion peels
as man himself for the core reels

There is no core of this entry!
no truth- but jest, there is plenty!

However, as long as there is still more time,
there will always be a rhyme
and another lay'r to peel away
and another stupid thing to say!!
[otherwise, try peeling something with
more of a core, like an avocado, or visit www.nietzsche.de]

evocation of my Muse.

Oh, somewhat be-muddled muse of all things blogged
haunting the molten plastic perfum'd blogosphere!
You, passionate one, who kisses our eyes, CRT-flogged
to us, bastard sons of an electronic Narciss, be near!

...as we yet again luggage our Facebook profiles,
with the sweet URL siren-call of our irrelevant blogs,
in the vain hope of catching, what out there lies:
another key-bor'd-potato, whose soul already sogs,

be-moist'nd by the wish
for another "easy" dish:
the Saran wrapp'd TV-dinner
of the internet age: the "blog".

Oh you vixen Muse, hear my call!
Make many, many ... for me fall!

don't be ashamed: being deep inside my blog is just as obscure a place as visiting www.wired.com

An Ode to the blogger.

Oh! You bloggers, who your secrets
from your parents keep,
with the fanatic determination of viperous Cerberus;
but are unashamed to exhibit them openly
to 2.5 billion other people!
To you goes out this ode, and to all
the under categories of you, whose tendencies
Google is so happy to index
to the detriment of those just trying
to find niche internet porn.

Let me start with, you, sweet girl bloggers,
who adorn your sites
with such star-trailing cursor magic
& perfuming pink style templates
that the visiting man
cannot but faint from its overbearing insense!

Then to you, oh bards, you sharers of deep experience
Tell me, which shops you visit, and musics you listen to,
which sounds play from your electric harp-proxies.
Are you currently listening to an underground group
called Monkey Idol? Rest assured, I care,
though alas, today I've forgotten my pen...

And you, bricoleurs, you hobby reviewers of digital trinkets!
Tell me, how you cleaned the CCD on your Sony DSC-P200!
Tell me, how you can boost the range of Bluetooth mice!
May God grant you the Odysseuses you seek
who crave precisely that knowledge
in the wild nihil of the internet, which your site doeth graciously, (with pictures), provide!
[And please, review the iPhone!]

Then, oh , you desperate souls, you melancholically inclined,
Tell me, like a Polar bear surrounded by global-warm'd melting ice,
how your lives have no more meaning,
but please, spray your entries with the misty insence of self-loving eloquence
Maybe then, on the next party, that you and I attend
Between the small talk, to your necrophile tendencies I can attend!

Oh, and you, baby bloggers, wrapped in delicate swaddling clothes,
who put the glint back in our eyes with their first and only entries:
"Welcome to my new blog, where I will from now on post random thoughts
and impressions on my life. Yeah, so this is my first post"
dated 2006 february.
please, write another entry, so we know that blogging is alive and well!

Oh bloggers, bloggers of the world unite!
Let us show where people need to search
the pulse of eternal life
in this internet age!

"This is Barbecue"

It is an open secret that my other blog has been more active recently. However, because I also want to entertain those for whom finding my other blog remains too daunting a challenge, I will now proceed to sharing a completely random anecdote.

When I was in Regensburg, there was an intern from Belgium, (let's just call him Mr. G...) who loved to smoke good pot. As much as he liked to indulge himself in aforementioned (in-)activity, Geoffrey had admittedly a more difficult time in actually getting the pot:

In Prague, at four-thirty in the morning, a dealer had cut him in on four centimetres of supposed premium hash compressed in a saran-wrap tube; for twenty euros, each five euro'd centimetre would actually have seemed somewhat a bargain, at least when high at five-thirty in the hostel; alas, fate would have it that the there-puffing Geoffrey went quite fast from the declaration, "mmm good shit" to "strange shit" to "this is not shit!" as the first one-millimeter layer of shit wore through to the tobacco filling.

Alas for Geoffrey, this would not be his last close call with Mary Jane; an even closer one indeed is what motivated this entry and its clou, which has since become a kind of redewendung for me. (It was no doubt partly this final adventure that sent Geoffrey packing back to Belgium, somewhat closer to the centre of European weedendom):

I also had a friend called P... (this time omitted because I actually have forgotten his name) who was considerably more successful at finding sources than poor old Geoffrey. My adventures with P... also form the butt (or shall we say, blunt) of several anecdotes, but alas, these cannot be the topic of today's post. It suffices to say that on one evening, when Geoffrey and I were again forced to face the quality (or lack thereof) of our navigation skills by not finding a certain party, which is a complicated way of saying 'one evening when we were lost in Regensburg', we randomly met P... . Now, not only did this radically increase our chances of actually getting to the club before the party was over; it also put tender, teary hope in Geoffrey's eyes of finally, as he put it, "connecting to the Galileo satellite" (evidently, besides being a fan of substance, Geoffrey was also a great fan of the European Union). Indeed, no sooner did I share with P... Geoffrey's preferences, than P... nodded understandingly and pulled out a small satchel and some papes, and proceeded to roll one. Though Geoffrey's vision was obscured by joyous, expectant tears, I saw clearly that what P... was rolling looked more like dried carrots, onion and ginger root than some of that real "sticky-icky". When confronted by my nagging doubts , P... shot back: "ja, es handelt sich hierbei um die beste Imitation, aus Indien. Fast so gut wie echt, und zehnmal so billig." "Fuer deinen Kolleg ist das eh gesunder", he added with a smirk, while handing the roll to Geoffrey. (Oh! And shall we mention, that as fitting of a tragic hero, Geoffrey had skipped most German classes that he had been offered by the university). Poor Geoffrey was thus left with his tears of joy and a hand greedily patting down his coat for a lighter. Soon, it was lit and the first expectant tokes were taken; we all eyed him questioningly, foreboding the final, tragic fall of our hero. Mouth agape, we were not dissappointed.

Said Geoffrey:

"This is not shit!... This is barbecue!"

So I leave you with this post tonight, which was not really brilliant, but also, I hope, not completely barbecue.

I read your blog entry...

The more I read other people's blogs, the more I freak out. I'm freaking about the kinds of friends I have:

suddenly, a tough-guy I know for his confidence and "bring it on" style reveals himself a gentle poet slash crybaby; a girl with a world-renowned smile reveals a heart more tormented than a fat man doing bodyPump(TM); and a colleague known for a clear head and analytic standpoints churns out blog entries slaloming between obscure new-age music discoveries and contemplating suicide. Guys, let me just ask you: why don't you tell us these things up front, so we can help? Is it because of the conviction that no-one reads your blogs anyways, so you might as well, or because you somehow feel these things so embarrassing that you'd rather give it to us in writing, and then shut your eyes and hide behind a pile of coats? The thing is, if you write it in your blogs, it's kind of public. So from now on, beware. I might just throw in a question about your foot fetish, just *bam* in the middle of the small talk you seem to prefer when you're not around your computers.

In Zürich.

Ok, so dead flies is dead. It wasn't "the people" who killed it, much the way it wasn't really "the people" who killed typewriters or good taste; they just got replaced by cooler things like computers and MTV, and left with their heads hanging.
Ok ok, so I admit it, the fact is dead flies died because I killed it. But I have an excuse, which is that recently, my life has been reduced to sitting at home with my shirt off, either working on my thesis paper, or watching TV while drinking liters of "high C" orange juice, only to use the empty cartons as projectiles to hit the channel change or volume adjust buttons. While engaged in such deliciously duotonous (as in, paradoxically, two times monotonous) activity, I would sometimes drift and slumber, and before I would wake myself with my own hideous first snore, I would dream of those times when my blog got tons of visitors, with enough third-party comments to actually bathe me in the illusion that people were actually, God knows why, taking their time to read my absolutely random rantings. So in this second before the snore, I made up my mind, however childish and insignificant it seemed, to strike a blow towards whatever my blog represents by again blogging something. And while this post seems to demonstrate that you actually CAN make something out of nothing much, it also demonstrates that that something then, due to the infinite justice at work in the world, actually ends up adding up to nothing much.

Rümlang Bodyflying

Paris... one more time

It breaks my heart to see the counter on my page creep up, while the number of weeks since I haven't posted just keeps increasing. It seems like a pyramid scheme doomed to fail in the long term. To keep all those dead flies fans alive, here a few commemorative "good-bye" snapshots of Paris, courtesy of Marc's telephoto lens.

Bretagne!

Continuing a dear dead flies tradition, the computer ate this post the first time I wrote it.
So I wrote it again, because I know that the computer likes seconds.

Ah yes, the little squares of Rennes, teeming with life, booming and echoing with thousands of chatting denizens who should actually have been hard at work in plastic-and-steel cubicles, improving France's disappointing first-quarter GDP figures.

After Rennes came the first true highlight of the trip: Le Mont St. Michel; the approach was designed for maximum effect, with the majestically towering fortress throning over the landscape from miles away... the parking lot gets flooded every high tide, so we kept our cars under surveillance from the many small windows of the monastery. Interesting note: the very top of the Church was finished in the 20th century and added via helicopter.

Inside, a surprisingly serene atmosphere...

the monastery hall..
...the visit effeting our entourage to the point that they reenacted the dead WWI soldier stance on a field nearby, shortly after leaving for Dinard...

On the way to another highlight, another highlight: the forest in Huelgoat, alias the devil's bowling alley. We climbed down into the caves below, where light is thrown in thin beams into the musky darkness.

Then, finally, the cliffs of Crozon, our final destination... the view below...
Tamas testing his life insurance.
Who knew France had these treasures, other than the Guide Michelin?
On the way back, we stopped in several picturesque towns, above the Roman/early Gothic Pleyben, home of the Pleyben cookies.

Menez Hom, supposedly the best panorama in the Bretagne, overvalued in our opinion (see picture)

the obligatory beach picture, keeping in tradition. Above: Tamas running from seaweedman. (Seaweedman not pictured) A flower, courtesy of Katrin, which sprang about at an evening BBQ session at a backpacker's hostel somewhere in Bretagne.

And then: just us, and the sea.


The adventurous eight. From 1' o clock: Paul (CAN), Celia (CAN), Tamas (H), Euripides (BRA), Mika (SWE), Kathrin (SWE), Gustavo (BRA) & Yours Truly.

Decadence

Decadence is a word that slips out of my mouth quite easily, in fact, I am the first to admit that I have been mis- and over-using the term throughout my blogger career. Some deadflies historians might actually point out my own special hypocritical relationship to the word.

But here at HEC campus, one doesn't just take this word for a walk once in a while to chastise fellow students for lacking that socialist-compassionate glazing so appreciated in hardcore business universities... no, one can't just spit out the word; one has to really reflect about it, before settling on using it as a sort of "I told you so" excuse for then guiltily indulging oneself to the core.

It is hard to quantify the exact magnitude of crazyness that the elections of the local BDE (student government) draws with it here; 300,000 carefully raised Euros need to be spent in 3 days on completely furtuitious activities, ranging from completely pointless, gargantuan-sized advertisements of the various warring apolitical parties:
To the provision of random fun-tools around campus (Segway not pictured):
To the provision of only somewhat rickety amusement rides that, with only somewhat faulty security bracers and restraint mechanisms, are only somwehat dangerous to the soewhat jaded, indigenous student population:
let me not mention the free food service for one week, with room delivery, the poker tournament with the plasma screen as prize (grabbed, of course, from the French by our Xchange man Paul aka Pokerman aka Shinny), or the parties with just about free everything.
Those of you who think young students here might be getting the wrong impression about the meaning of life, go figure. Yeah, go figure, while I take my thirteenth intoxicated bumper car ride...

Some serious catching up.

Ok, I have to admit that I've been neglecting things. In fact, last time I logged into blogger, I could hardly even remember the password. I have been feeling guilty about not posting, tho, so guilty that I chose to drown the guilt in not posting even more. In fact, dead flies was not only dead in the last few months, but some of you might have gained the impression that it was actually even more than dead, perhaps undead, having reverted to some sort of electrodecaying afterlife as a zealously frozen-in-time mummy, or mummified zombie. Well, there is one thing that all mummies have in common, other than being wrapped-in-cloth carcasses, which is that they come back to life; this is also the reason why dead flies is back from the dead, albeit in a perhaps more deeply boring form.

Chartres

With Chartres checked off and another trip to the Bretagne already in the pipeline, who am I to complain? Well, I'm not sure, but I think Ill do it anyway...

first of all, I still haven't nailed the topic for my Master's thesis, tho I know it should be something on new economic geography and that I should choose at least two cities to analyse from an urban dynamic perspective. I was trying to surf the net for some good material, but the best thing I found was Rem Koolhaas' treatsy on Junkspace, an amusing yet unsettling piece from the Harvard Guide to Shopping. There are some great quotes, like: "Although its individual parts [i.e. parts of a shopping center] are the outcome of brilliant inventions, lucidly planned by human intelligence, boosted by infinite computation, their sum spells the end of Enlightenment, its resurrection as farce, a low-grade purgatory... [junkspace]" ; "junkspace is like being condemned to a perpetual Jacuzzi with millions of your best friends...". Anyway, read this rich form of scathing social critique if you have time; I certainly did, which wasted [at least relative to what I was supposed to be doing] even more of my time. I know I want to expand on the holistic approach I had in my last thesis, but Im not yet sure how I want to integrate such elements....

secondly, Ill have to spend this whole week on house-arrest studying for the theory of finance test I have next wednesday. This kinda snuck up on me... I was understanding every session until a few classes ago when I suddenly found myself copying endless processions of incomprehensible greek characters chained together with logical operators in what can only be described as a rococo math nightmare. Speaking of styles, check out this picture I shot of the stone work surrounding the altar at Chartres Cathedral.

thirdly, guess who I found hyping MEcon on the HSG website?

Our Campus

l'ouest side part deux

Ah yes. What bogus road trip would be complete without the obligatory escape-from the world, final destination, road-ends here beach picture? None of course; and so, neither was ours, until we went to the beach near Bordeaux.

And to prove to you that Im not lying about this being symptomatic, here a random picture of Sandfoort on our Amsterdam road trip 3 years ago;

followed by one from our time in Oostende early last year (notice the apocalyptic name for added effect on this last one). So obviously, I'm not just riding clichés here. Facts prove time and time again: final destination beaches are part of every well-staged decadent road trip these days.

Ok, anyway, back to the main plot. Unlike the Bordeaux wine from the vineyard, we didnt really let the city unfold its bouquet all too much, arriving deep in the evening and leaving early in the morning the next day; instead, we got to see Nantes in quite vivid detail, including this spooky night shot of the back gate of Nantes castle... now how useful was that while you were trying to free that imprisoned princess?
Actually, we ourselves chose all too often to leave the princes to the knights, preferring to leave our nights to the obligatory pizza-and-juice hostel sessions. Pictured: Richard, Luis, Mary-Louise, Juice, assorted bevarages, pizza. We then chose to move to more elegant surroundings, were dinner was served:
(no actually, this picture is from the Louvre I visited the week afterwards, but having accidentally made it into this post, it's such a beauty, I dont have the heart to take it out again...)