My buddy from Sweden is back with another song:

Otherwise, I recently found this feature of gmail quite powerful:
http://blog.wired.com/business/2008/10/googles-mail-go.html

I met a Swedish songwriter last weekend and we shot the breeze and played some tunes and drank some beers, a great Saturday.

Here’s his first entry, just in time to garner resonance before the most important u.s.-election in a long time. More to come…..

Americans (and perhaps other English-speakers) have the saying,

“There are only two certainties in life: taxes and death.”

This is quite appropriate, but for most of us, paying rent or a mortgage, and thus employment are further chapters in this long saga of necessary evils.  Unfortunately, full-time gainful employment robs us of a quarter of our life, or half of our waking hours.

That all aside, some employment-associated baggage can be eliminated by choosing our residence wisely.  Many people in my home town of Washington actually live an hour outside in the suburbs and commute daily two hours roundtrip, ten hours weekly.  They choose to do this because they own a house somewhere in the boondocks, and in classical American logic, house-ownership is godliship.

I too commuted 2 hours a day for 4 months this year after changing employer from a company near Zurich to one near Basel.  During these four months, my ten-hourly trainriding cost me about $250 a month, which is soft compared to the costs I would have accumulated driving a car.  However, I rode those ten hours only to go to work, so in essence, they were unpaid work hours. 

If the employer doesn’t pay for the travel to and from work (and some employers DO!) then it is up to the employee to live as close as possible to the source of his/her rent-payments.  Otherwise this workplace-associated clutter (commute, fitness center due to ten seated-hours a day) will eat at the employee’s physical and mental health.  Think: During the winter you will not seeing daylight in your abode except on weekends.

My new residence is a half-hour’s walk from my employer.  I could have lived 5-10 minutes away, but the current constellation permits me to do my (daily) grocery-shopping and recycling disposal on the ways to and from work, as well as gives me an hour’s walk a day to remind my body that there exists more to life than sitting in front of the machine.  The money I am saving per month from the commute is a better one-time investment for rain-clothing (walking rain or shine), which is a useful for the weekends and vacations. 

Commuting to work over long distances and times in transportation that can breakdown or be otherwise unavailable is a certain road to depression.  I’ve noticed that colleagues of mine have needed to take vacation-hours to bring their car to the mechanic!  What a tragic waste!  I will always be able to walk, barring broken-legs and tornados, which are circumstances that would either warrant sick-leave or would close my employer’s facilities.  Home-ownership is fine and dandy but my mental health and physical well-being are dearer to me.  Living on small rental properties permits me to save money for alternative investments.  Never live further than a half-hour’s walk from work, unless the employer will pay the commute time and ticket (a scenario one can find, at least among employers in Switzerland)….or if the employer’s compensation package is large enough for you to want to make such large sacrifices.

Does anyone else think that the US presidential elections are taking too damned long? The more time the democrats have, the more time they’ll have to mess up their campaign. Here’s some thing good from the good folks at onion indirectly about the protracted campaign:

A botellon is an informal gathering of teenagers to drink in public. The concept comes from Spain, where the kids wanted to rebel against bar-prices by organizing massive drinkathons in parks. The largest botellon was held in Madrid with 10,000 participants.

These parties are organizable by word of mouth, and most recently, via social websites such as facebook. The possibility to call up thousands of fellow kids at once is a power only recently in the hands of the kids themselves. A botellon requires no organization: just declare a day and a place. The momentum builds amongst the kids who have no more money left for vacations and openair concerts. The fright and angst among the parents also builds.

Slowly but surely this phenomenon is arriving in Switzerland. First in Geneva, geographically Switzerland’s closest corner to Spain. Then in Lausanne and now in Zurich.

The German-speaking authorities are scrambling to legislate this currently unlegislatable phenomena. The police in Zurich and Basel are even scanning facebook for evidence of Botellon formation in their precious tax-mountains. Oh how I love the thought of my tax-francs paying 25-year-old police officers to cruise facebook! However, drinking in public is not illegal in Europe (illegal public-intoxication would shut Europe down for a few years). Undeterred, the German-speaking (AND certain French-speaking!) authorities still have questions:

1. How are we going to make sure we can keep the place clean?
2. How are we going to keep the high-rent paying neighbours happy?
3. How are we going to tax these thankless drunk fuckers?

Furthermore, the German-language police have stepped in, the “academy”, the “Duden” from Germany, and have launched a task-force to incorporate the word “Botellon” into the German language. Wow. Can’t let any word organically slip past the glaring eyes of the high-paid professors standing guard over their German language!

Its a further beautiful example of the clash of the titans that remains Europe! A few kids way down south of the olive-oil/butter border rebel against the bar-owner mafia by organizing a few drink-ups in the park. They name the fests after the spanish word for “big bottle”. This idea is then accelerated and distributed via high-speed social-networking, which bleeds the phenomenon firstly into France and then into Switzerland! Now the country with problems-light has a “real problem” deserving dire measures such as task-forces (CSI Facebook).

That’s why Switzerland so exciting: its situated exactly on Europe’s olive-oil/butter border. The southern Europeans keep conjuring up new ways to rebel, and the hapless teutonic authorities are constantly having to reinvent themselves to counterract problems which, in any other country, wouldn’t be considered problems.

Where were all the task-forces during the European Cup?

I’ve made my first tweet.  Aren’t we excited?

I’ve stopped smoking and am experiencing intense nicotine withdrawal: my stomach is wrecked, evening headaches, but, i’m sleeping VERY WELL. It is a terrible feeling being owned by tobacco companies.

Although, the way cigarettes worked for me, they helped me concentrate and gave me a reason to get away from the PC at work. Also, smoking helped facilitate informal conversations with coworkers, especially in our factory, because a smoke-break was always away from the production line.

The next installment in the Weezer saga has hit the stores (or did so a while ago).  I used to complain about CDs costing about thirty bucks in Switzerland but for this opus I consider that price a real deal.

Weezer have been mainstream now for fourteen years, half of my current lifetime and maybe a third of my personal lifespan. Ha!  This album appears to be at first glance a mid-life crisis work.  The band obviously has no creative direction from their management, only from themselves.  “Themselves”, because the entire band is now largely participating in the songwriting, with a rotating “lead-singer” role and several songs in which the drummer Patrick Wilson plays guitar.

The band-members find themselves keeping their musical and personal boredom at bay with a stick, and with a production budget of one million dollars.  I found myself quite ridiculously claiming to myself that, “this work harks back to the beatles and queen”, with respect to the lushious production. Again, one million dollars. With Cuomo now sporadically yielding the creative reins to his bandmates, his “own” tracks have reached large-scale maturity, as he now can sing much more exact and elastically than in the “blue” and “pinkerton” days. Was that a part of the production?

In Rivers Cuomo’s own songs, “Troublemaker”, “(I am) The Greatest Man who ever lived”, and including the song he wrote though which was sung by bassist Scott Shriner “King”, we hear his own haunting as a geek gone big. That the world doesn’t take him seriously as a ex-metal rock’n'roller is a problem we wish we all had.  Once a geek, forever a geek, haha.

This is a rare occasion when I encourage the purchase of a CD. The booklet’s notes include per track interviews by the band-members of the other band-members explaining aspects of the songs, and even musicial-oriented details are revealed. The forays into southern rap and R&B are not complete flops and invariably lead into the crystalline melodies which we expect from Cuomo and Crew. Maybe, though, the world would take Cuomo’s rock-n-roll credentials more seriously if he didn’t detour into other genres.

Nonetheless, this a hauntingly refreshing listen.   And I’m not a full-fledged weezer acolyte either, the previous album from these guys “Make Believe” is not worth the plastic its printed on.  But the colored albums, “Blue”, “Green”, and this one, “Red”, they really are worth the plastic they’re printed on.

Buy it here, via the clickable pic:

I get to read the free daily paper “Blick am Abend” during my hour-long commute. Yesterday on the cover was a picture of some singer (whose identity I won’t reveal, because she doesn’t need this type of news). The singer, sitting passed out in front of a club. Why does that news sell? The readers read that and say to themselves, “say what you want about my(son/daughter/partner/self), but at least he/she/I am/are not stooped in front of a nightclub in a near-life experience, getting photographed”. Schadenfreude is bad manners in private life, and terrible manners in public life. Terrible manners sell, but this daily newspaper was FREE?!

In order to cover your tail when requested or requesting to sing at a karaoke gathering, here are a few tips. I do recognize that watching people botch their performance is most of the entertainment of the entire act of kara-okaying. But to not be on the laughing-stock side of the fence when singing, I recommend the following selection criteria.

1. Avoid songs with long instrumental solos, because, hey, what are you going to do, hum clapton’s riffs during Layla?
2. Choral works with fifteen separate voices are not good karaoke material. The original recording included fifteen trained (or at least corrected) voices, and just because you’ve consumed fifteen smirnoffs that evening, most likely you won’t even nail one of those voices well enough to not look outright stew-pit. ABBA is out of the question.
3. Imagine how the song would sound while sung by William Shatner. If he can pull it off, you and your friend Smirnoff can as well:
4. Tone-deaf people only find out that they are tone-deaf through the help of concerned and well-wishing friends. “Friends don’t let tone-deaf Friends Karaoke”
5. Forays into music genres which don’t already appear in your home playlist should be avoided. Budding Garth Brooks protoges, steer clear of those Jay-Z songs, no matter how many Smirnoffs that budding Shania Twain at the bar has plied you with.
6. Bohemian Rhapsody can never be successfully karaokayed, okay? See points one and two.

It’s been a while. I wanted to write more often. I’ve however been travelling, in order to evade this football madness which has gripped Europe.

It’s a shame, how the European Cup warps friendships into pathetic superficial reports of goals, red-cards, and injuries. But how can I personally care about twenty-two millionaires chasing a leather ball around a field? These are real adults and they should get real jobs.

I’m also amazed at the behaviour of my female friends. At least when club football is on, they don’t flock to the pubs to get neck cramps watching TVs. But during this god-forsaken European Cup, even they feign being interested in this nothingness.

I’ll continue doing lots of overtime hours and travelling every weekend. To hell with football.