…it seems to be a billing problem of some kind. I’ll be getting in touch with Infopop as soon as they open for business today (they host the domain) to get it sorted out. Sorry for the inconvenience.
Blogging turns out to have been even scarcer than originally anticipated over the last few days, due to a combination of (a) Ryoh-ohki’s Bluetooth card throwing some kind of obscure fit— he card’s lights show it’s getting power, but the computer doesn’t seem able to see it: (b) my forgetting the password I need to post to Blogger via e-mail from the Clie: and (c) the hotels I’ve been staying in all being more or less computer-unfriendly—nowhere to plug in the wires, or the phone systems have been digital rather than analog, or variants on the theme. Oh well. Tomorrow I go wireless again—the hotel where Peter and I will be staying for our meetings is 802.11-friendly, and so is Munich Airport.
Weather has been iffy. The night I hit Munich it was surprisingly cold, and the guy at the hotel told me they’d just had a rather unseasonable snowstorm. Sure enough, the next mornings “panoramabilder” program on cable showed livecams from ski area after ski area, all boasting new snowfall up in the mountains—in some cases up to a foot of it. Nights have been uniformly cold, with temperatures hovering around freezing, even though days have been growing warmer than usual—upper 60s to low 70s. I’m presently sitting in a “country” beer hall in Aying, a suburb of Munich, and it’s about 70 out. Not quite warm enough for me; I’m inside. (Ryoh-ohki’s screen isn’t much good outside when the sky’s too bright.)
It’s been a frustrating few days in terms of hardware failures of one kind or another. Just when I could really use the Bluetooth to go online, I can’t do it: even the Clie is suffering because its charger seems to have gone belly-up, and the “trickle” charge from the USB-to-Clie hard link is too slow to do much good. The Clie’s implementation of the iPass local-dialing software is also acting up for reasons I don’t understand. I take all this as a subtle message from the Universe that I shouldn’t get too hung up on the hardware, and should kick back and enjoy the scenery. Nonetheless, I have my excerpt from Wizard’s Holiday ready to post, and it’s frustrating not to be able to do it today, since I know people have been waiting for it. Oh well: tomorrow is going to have to be soon enough.
Meanwhile, two nice hotels to add to the collection: the little Hotel Kaiser in Bregenz—very good value for money, a snug and luxurious kind of place—and the Brauereigasthof Aying, run by the Aying brewery. More luxurious yet, though a little more expensive than the Kaiser (which was not terribly expensive at all). Bregenz is a nice little town by the Bodensee: in some ways it reminds me of Chur, in Switzerland a compact “old town” full of intent shoppers and good small restaurants and pubs. They were setting up the Saturday market in the marketplace when my cab arrived this morning: I was sorry I couldn’t stay, but my train schedule was more or less set in stone if I wanted to be in Aying by early afternoon. Aying is more of a village: very small, quite rural, about half an hour out of Munich on the S-bahn. A nice place for a summer day out, in slightly better weather.
The Liebhard “beer hall” across from the hotel has a surprisingly adventurous menu for such a place. One offering was medallions of venison in a juniper and oyster-mushroom sauce. Another was geschnezeltes of springbok with wild mushrooms and buttered spaezli (teeny little dumplings, often panfried when they don’t come in a sauce). I wasn’t up for anything quite so heavy, and settled on Nurnberger sausages (they’re small, and always come in sixes) with some sauerkraut, brown bread and horseradish, and a couple of glasses of the Aying brewery’s “Celebrator” dopplebock. A rich beer: you wouldn’t drink more than a couple of these.
There’s only one problem with these wonderful foreign beers. They introduce you to wonderful foreign yeasts, and the result is what Peter tends to characterize as “the horns of Elfland faintly blowing.” Or not so faintly. I think tomorrow I go back to wine, and wait for the wind to die down, as it were.
The guy who came out of the crowd holding an old Iraqi flag — the one which Hussein had not had “Allahu akbar” added to, so that tearing it down would be an act of sacrilege — how long had he had that under his bed (possibly endangering his life thereby), waiting for this moment? I keep wondering about that…
Meanwhile, business calls. Blogging may be sporadic for the next five days.
According to this morning’s Irish Times, some early Irish tomb-builders had it in a big way. (Here’s the link to the article, though it may be inaccessible if it’s been classified as “premium access”.) Details from the UK National Astronomy Meeting (being held for the first time at Dublin Castle):
“Dr Frank Prendergast of the Dublin Institute of Technology will talk about his discoveries at Loughcrew, Co Meath. The site, about 70 kilometres from Dublin, includes a number of passage graves and stone monuments that date from the Middle Neolithic Age, about 3,600-3,100 BC.
“…the Loughcrew monuments are unusual because of their alignments…. While Newgrange accurately marks the dawn of the winter solstice, the two largest Loughcrew tombs pick out the vernal and autumnal equinoxes,….
“On these days in March and September at dawn and for a period of some 20 minutes afterwards, the interiors of the tombs are illuminated by a shaft of sunlight, exposing the elaborate engravings on some of the stones inside.
“Equinoctial orientations are uncommon and their interpretation is controversial… Their alignments are also a challenge to pinpoint, as an observer must track the total annual range of the sun’s rising direction and then divide it in half to provide the tomb’s alignment.
“In contrast, the monument builders at Beaghmore, Co Tyrone, and similar sites in Fermanagh, Derry and Donegal seemed to have had a fascination with the moon, according to Prof Clive Ruggles of the University of Leicester. This cluster of Bronze Age monuments consists of interrelated stone circles, rows and cairns with apparent lunar alignments.”
One of those great dawns — cloudless, peach-colored, pellucid. (See the Geoclock image over on the right for how dawn looked from above Ireland today. The one underneath it is the same view close to the winter solstice.) Absolutely silent outside: it’s still a little too early for the rooks and other birds in the area (robins, blackbirds, wrens) to start up the usual racket.
No, I tell a lie. The resident ravens have just started commenting quietly on something, from up on Castle Hill to the east. 
(There’s no castle there, by the way; as far as we can tell, there never was one. It’s just what that hill is called, locally.) Peter and I grinned at each other when the ravens moved in up there a month and a half ago: for ravens featured prominently in The Ring when we wrote the last draft. (They’re used as cellphones, sort of.) It was just after the ravens arrived that we got the call from our production partners in Münich to tell us that things were moving forward — that a major US studio was on board, and that a director with good TV-movie experience was finally in the process of being attached. Next week we go in to see our partners, meet the director, and hammer out what needs to be done for the rewrite.
In the meantime, when I’m not writing, I’m doing laundry for the trip. The shirts I hung out on the clothesline yesterday afternoon and left there overnight are presently stiff with frost; as soon as they thaw out a little, I’ll bring them in and start ironing. At the moment, though, I have an hour or so to have a little breakfast, catch up on the e-mail, and kill some more spam.
— A thought in that regard: I’m having good results with a program called MailWasher. Our most public address now gets about 200 spams a day from every corner of the planet. I’ve been using SpamCop on it for a long time, but for whatever reasons, I seem to be getting better results with MailWasher. The program looks at your mail server, identifies whatever mail is sitting on it as spam, possibly spam, probably spam, virus-contaminated, or normal. You can then check the mail (without downloading it) to see what it is, and use a series of check boxes to determine what to do with it: clear it, nuke it, bounce it back to sender. I really believe I’m seeing a little less spam than I was previously. We’ll see.
Right now, though, I want some tea…
Peter is one of a number of administrators over on NetSword, a site and discussion forum dedicated to, you guessed it, swords. Every now and then I hear him howling with laughter as he deals with something or other in the forums. Today this was the cause:
“any body got a good report on medieval weapons? it would help. thanks”
It’s fairly obvious what this is about: some kid somewhere wants the experts to do his homework for him. However, the locals on NetSword are used to this kind of thing. One of them quotes an earlier response to such a request for information. (Scroll down a little bit to see it.)
I’d have loved to see what grade the earlier kid got on his report…
Or so I believe. Sorry for the confusion. And thanks to Anita for the heads-up.
Normally I would consider the words “McDonalds” and “upmarket” in the same phrase to constitute the most basic kind of oxymoron. Oh well…maybe I just don’t have enough caffeine in me yet.
“[McDonalds] says staff will be better trained, would smile and apologise.”
As Peter’s Mum would say: “Oh, well that’s all right then.” (wry look) And are they going to start paying their staff more than the minimum wage? That would be nice too.
…Meanwhile, in local news, Beemer seems to be less interested in the fish out in the pond. This may have to do with my having changed the spray head on the pond’s fountain, the other day. The new spray head throws the water around in a way that creates more turbulence on the surface, and makes it harder to see the fish clearly. (It also makes it harder for me to count the critters, but that’s my problem.)
I’ve republished the archives in “monthly” format. Still trying to figure out what to do about permalinks. Please bear with me…
Shame on me. Take a look at their take on media coverage of the war. I particularly like the article “U.S. Forms Its Own U.N.”
Meanwhile, something peculiar is going on with the archives. I’m going to try republishing them a little later and see if that straightens the problem out.
…and the honor they get in their home country after they’re safely dead, is here.
But there are some oddities. Among them: plainly the writer hasn’t been here for a while, as the Floozie in the Jacuzzi hasn’t been on O’Connell Street for — what? a year, or two? Or more? — since they removed her to make room for the Spire of Dublin. 
Other peculiarities: “Bloom’s Day?” Obviously this guy doesn’t even have the wee bit of Joyce-savvy necessary to know how the word (isn’t) punctuated. But probably most annoying to me is the way the article gives the impression that this celebration of writers is something Dublin’s just started doing, possibly as a cynical ploy for publicity….which is simply untrue. Where such commemoration happens, it’s meant with genuine affection. And probably as much to the point are all the places where it doesn’t, or didn’t happen.
Consider Jury’s Antique Bar in Dame Street, Dublin. In the ancient day, Joyce used to drink there. In the early 1970’s, Jury’s (then in the act of becoming a hotel chain as well as an owner of “licensed premises”) was preparing to gut the wood-paneled bar with its painted tiles and replace it with something more modern. The ornate paneling and brass fittings would have been sold for salvage: everything else would simply have been thrown away.
It took the James Joyce Foundation in Zurich — the place where Joyce fetched up for the longest, I believe, after leaving Ireland — to keep this from happening. Members of the Foundation raised enough money to buy the interior of the old bar, import it to Switzerland, and then prevailed on one of the Big Three Swiss banks (now UBS) to give the interior a new home in a bank building at Pelikanstrasse 8 in Zurich, where it could be recreated exactly as it had been.
There it stands now, as pleasant a place to have lunch or dinner as you could hope for…and with genuine Irish craic seeping out of the walls. When the crowd gets in there in the evening, it takes careful listening to the language to determine that you’re not in fact in Dublin. (The pub pulls a pretty good pint, too. — I know I have some pictures of the place around here. I should dig them up…)
EXT. FRONT YARD, MORNING -- THE FISHPONDTHE COUNT
One, two, three golden orfe! One, two, three shubunkin!
(SFX: SINISTER ORGAN STING)
THE COUNT (CONT'D) Bwahahahahahahaaaa!
DIANE One cat, one, watching them!
(SFX: SERENE TINKLING OF FOUNTAIN... BUT FOR HOW LONG?)
DIANE (CONT'D) (resigned) I was kind of hoping this was just a phase she was passing through....
…Peter has helped make the situation a little less nervewracking by moving a couple of larger stones onto the one Beemer’s been sitting on, thus forcing her to do her fishwatching from a slightly more remote situation and angle. At least she won’t be able to reach straight down into the water and hook one of the fish out.
I think.
I should put a daily status box over in one of the columns. (Oh, great, one more thing to do. A fish body count…)