the world has turned and left me here

if you like potatos, say ho!

"If you like potatos, say ho! If you like grapes, lemme here you say hhhhhhhhhhhoooooo!"

"We like quiet. Quiet please."

Alrighty-then. It is a Munich morning and I have just pulled an all-nighter, for no good reason other than that my brain would not stop. Every once and a while it seems like I need to do this to clean out the old brainpan. Guess I kind of let work follow me home a bit (my first mistake) and then I got to thinking about XML and XSLT (my second mistake). And the rest is history.

So I grabbed my trusty frisbee and went to toss it around on the soccer field at about 5:45 am, just to cap the night off. I wonder if the sight of an American throwing around a frisbee by himself at 5:45 in the morning freaked out some German brainpans as they drove past. I certainly hope so, because there's nothing as lonely as an incommunicable disease.

On that note, my German is finally starting to come along, ever since Norman told all my colleagues at work to speak German to me rather than English. And he's right, I should be speaking German, not relying on others to know English.

A word or two about Norman. We share the same room with 3 or 4 other interns, and he's been really cool to me, kindly imparting his knowledge of German obscenties and so forth. Holger calls him my "teacher" and he kind of is. He seems older than me, maybe 25 or thereabouts, wears loud mis-matched shirts and shorts and is a total riot to talk to. But then once we had a really good serious conversation--he and the French intern Florent and I--about Europeans flipping out over genetically engineered food and mad-cow disease etc.

This led to the common agreement that things would not change unless people started demanding quality over quantity. Although I'm still skeptical of all this food paranoia, the Europeans do seem to be a little ahead of the game by beginning to demand quality. That's a first step. If we're content to eat Big Macs, to eat food because it's fast, and refuse to pay a little extra in order to get quality food that comes from a known origin like the farmer next door, favoring the feedlots and a forest of supply-chain middlemen, we as consumers are sending an economic message to producers that says "I don't care what I shove down my gullet." Producers hear this, and know they can safely ignore how good it is and instead concentrate only on how much. Quantity. Mass-production, friends.

So, to reiterate, if you like potatos from the guy next door, say ho!