Bust out the kazoos

Tom DeLay got indicted.

whoohh.........whoooh whoooh whooh.whoooh-whooop whoo. wooooo.drink a beer for me someone.

.whoooh.whoooh. whooh.

Here's something I wrote earlier. Now's a good time for gloating, so I'll post it:
http://michaelmoore.com/words/latestnews/index.php?id=2173

just not drunk enough, and stockholm's finest brew (actually the worst beer in sweden)'s not working enough.
watch kinky friedman's commercial:
http://www.kinkyfriedman.com/kinkytoon/

Green Winter Now.

Boy I think I'm in trouble with this Swedish venture. The weather is like a typical January night in Texas already, and it's now September 12th. Descartes said of Uppsala "it has two seasons. Green Winter and White Winter. White winter is better because then at least the people light fires." He was once made Professor of Philosophy by Sweden's Queen Christina, but came to Uppsala and found the post was already filled-Christina had just wanted someone to talk to. So he was made to get up at 2:30 each morning, take a carriage across town, and wait outside the Queen's room as she dressed. And if she was particularly enamoured by his conversation, Descartes was rewarded by getting to watch her eat breakfast that morning. After 45 days he got tired of this and died of pneumonia.
Other than cold, things are really coming together. I'm successfully thwarting Sweden's expensive nature with a starving artist's budget, essentially living off of black beans and Euroshopper tuna or Euroshopper Ramen noodles, and except for the tuna I've mostly become a vegetarian without noticing it at first (it feels healthy and also Euroshopper is the best idea ever). The plan's paying off, as I should now be able to go see Bob Dylan in Stockholm next month and go to Russia and Finland the month after. But for tomorrow I'll be spending a week at a lake with my ecology class. The task: to see if ducks distribute themselves efficiently when having bread thrown at them, and if I get back in time I'll see Hans Blix.
When on the plane to Kenya a girl asked me "what do a guy in a boat and American beer have in common? They're both close to water." And looking back, that scene feels like a video game where at the beginning of the quest some wise wizard or scroll or maybe a talking pie gives you equipment or advice, saying in a very dignified way that "thiS... shall aid you on your quest," because in Kenya but mostly in Sweden the best conversation starter is a casual conversation about beer, and that joke provides the conduit between our just-exchanged nationalities and the topic of most comfort, and as a joke it's fairly lame but if you preface it as such you get credit for the humor that it does contain and sometimes for the kitsch factor too if you raise your eyebrows just to the right amount and tilt your held and shrug your shoulders only slightly.
And on alcohol-related matters, it seems popular in the US to make repeated jokes about college students spending more money on booze than on food, but in reality it takes some serious alcoholic tendencies to accomplish the feat. Here though, it takes no effort and is the assumed order of operation when budgeting and in practice, due to prices at the systemblögot(sp) that I've seen bring a Canadian shopper to the verge of tears (admittedly joke tears) but also 'cause Swedes drink like fish. It makes for some eventful weekends or sometimes mid-week checkpoints. Sweden's awesome too, and the buildings look like wedding cake.

Gosia and Elske.

DSC01472
Originally uploaded by gopherpl.

Anke took this picture with the "classy" setting. So it will be backdated to 1947.

Kakamega

DSC01473
Originally uploaded by gopherpl.

Kakamega monkey

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Originally uploaded by gopherpl.

Monkeys are like children except they have sex and throw more shit at each other.

And a Talking Pie!

Eh. Reading the past few posts I realize a sassy robot could write this blog.

Bargaining is often hard beacuse the peddler will tell me a price at three times two high so I need to get over my sense of audacity by saying something eight times too low with a straight face, maybe offering a few coins and some 7-11 coupons for an intricately carved something or other. With the sense of shame gone, I'm on equal footing.

I got out of Kenya unscathed, spending the last month doing some work, traveling, optimizint the amount of time I could waste in one day, and sometimes arguing with the matatu drivers in completely wrong Swahili (they'd just laugh and pat me on the head.)
A few times I gave science lessons to some 4th graders at the school across the street. The first was on living things and astronomy, and worked well 'cause 4th graders are still young enough to be innocent and sincere but old enough to receive information that's interesting to teach. I made the sun the central point around which to focus the survival of living things, which provided a nice transition for the astronomy lesson too. The discussion ended too early, which worried me until a little girl had a question, which when they realized it was ok to ask spurred the kids into a flurry of questions which desperatly clung to relevancy until they figured out they could ask aliens questions and get away with it. "How did dinosaurs die? How far are the stars? Are aliens real? How did aliens get to earth? Have aliens gotten here before? What would happen if they did? Are monsters real? Is it true if you put your arms like this on Mars (holds them horizontally) you can never put them down again? I've found the more basic the question the harder it is to answer. It takes a bit of deconstruction and seperating different concepts into different categories for them to answer questions about the reality of monsters.