Category Archives: Digressions

In the conversation on what attire and behavior should be constitutionally accepted as religious expression, I think that Ali G has a good solution for the use of drugs. In this video, he suggests that it may be legal to use marijuana if you have a couple of Bob Marley records and a hat with dred locks.

It could all be one big misunderstanding, a case of mistaken identity. The other day at work, we were all discussing the whereabouts of Maddie, Europe’s latest all encompassing news story. One of my co-workers told me the real life story of some friends of friends of his on vacation in Amsterdam a few years back. What do a group of Spaniards in Amsterdam, seven dwarfs, and a missing kid have in common? Continue reading →

It was looking like start of a promising weekend, but then on Friday night, my computer shut itself down with a “fatal error” message. That meant that my +40G of music (now around 10,000 songs) was in limbo. I have a 100G external hard drive that I use as a backup, but when I got my computer up and running again and tried to update my backup with new music, my computer crashed again.

Then on Saturday morning, my landlord showed up early to install a new hot water heater. From the way he put it, it would only take a few hours and I would probably have to spend one day without hot water. I might not be much of a handy man, but I am smart enough to know my limits. Seventy-two hours later with gaping holes in my kitchen ceiling, I still don’t have hot water. At least, I got to share my weekend with my landlord. Continue reading →

This morning I woke to the sound of distant thunder. I was startled and couldn’t tell where I was. I was so disoriented that I couldn’t even figure out who I was. This was due in fact to two aggravating factors. First, it was the first time that I had really slept since Saturday evening (and this was Wednesday morning). I left from DC on Sunday night and arrived in Madrid on Monday morning, getting my sleepy ass to work. Needless to say, I was suffering from jet lag and wasn’t able to sleep more than two hours until last night (Tuesday) when I finally got a full night’s rest. It was wonderful. At least until I was confronted by a sound that I hadn’t heard in a long time. Continue reading →

I just caught myself singing the song “Time to Change” from the Brady Bunch episode when those fun loving Brady kids form a group and sing just as Peter’s voice is changing. I can’t believe that this song could pop in my head. The episode is from 1972, but I probably saw it only a handful of times in the latter part of the 70s. The song was probably never played on the radio, and I only heard it when watching the Brady Bunch re-runs. It’s funny how music can pop into your head at any time from such distant places and times — especially when that music was so very low in quality or importance in my life.

One of thing that I achieved while home was to clean my room. My room was filled with almost everything that I have ever owned and kept since I was born, including clothes, books, letters, and banks statements for all of the nineties.

In this video to Lyle Lovett’s “Step Inside This House” (from the album of the same name), I try to show the general mess and then the results of the cleaning. I threw out about five large American sized trash bags worth of papers and other garbage (including my 1990 30 pound Zenith laptop). I also found my baby blanket (or what’s left of it) and my first teddy bear (“Baby Bear”) that is probably as old as I am. I thought the process would be more nostalgic, but strangely it was not. Continue reading →

Well it looks like Americans aren’t the only ones with culturally challenged beauty competitions. This is from a Miss Spain competition when Miss Melilla was asked by the Ambassador of Russia to Spain what she knew about Russia. Miss Melilla replied that Russians are “maravillosos” and that they had some recent political changes (by the way, Putin has been in power since 1999), but she did acknowledge not knowing anything else. At least an American could have said something about commies eating mommies or vodka “as such”.