You've probably seen it all on the Instagram, but here is a classic blog post for you old school folks who choose to conscientiously (or otherwise) eschew the modern world of social media.
Pemulis's Birthday Weekend Extravaganza (TM) started Friday evening with a well-attended mystery wine party. 10 bottles of the finest wines from around the world, shrouded in the secrecy of torn-out pieces of draft graph paper. Taste them all, predict their origin, and win phenomenal prizes. Even Brad Pitt and Angelina Jolie's vineyard Miraval made an appearance in the grand competition.
Following a night of partying, Helga couldn't start the day until she'd had her morning cappuccino. If you even try talking to her before she's gone through this important breakfast ritual, you're in big trouble.
Being Pemulis's Actual Birthday (TM), he had to start the day with the famous Bauer Frühstück.
Then it was off to the Erstings Familie store for Helga to play with the giant bead toy thing.
Finally, the big night arrived: the Pemulis's Birthday BBQ Dinner (TM). Helga's best friend Anonymous Child came over and they did the actions for The Wheels on the Bus for about 3.5 hours. Pemulis BBQed while he and his friend Anonymous Adult drank Starkbiers in the back yard putting on their own private Starkbierfest.
Sunday morning the party continued as the heroes headed out on the town to the St. Patrick's Day Parade (only 6 days prior to the actual St. Patrick's Day).
Following an intense and tiring bout of Irish Flag Waving, we all settled down for some much-needed Kimchi and other assorted Korean food.
The End.
Not that I would ever say it's the solution to some of our current problems, but one might see a relation between the years of relative peace, prosperity, and "not having to care", and the incompetent useless leaders, the rise of populism, and the seeming dumbing-down of the electorate (all reflected in the political apathy shown by low participation in the democratic process, etc.). Let me be clear again that I don't believe war is the solution. One of the effects of burning down your house is that you'll have less stuff to move to your new place, but it's not exactly the greatest of solutions. It does have the effect of cutting down your number of possessions, though. If people were living in the constant fear of having to be sent to die in a battlefield or of their house being destroyed by a ballistic nuclear missile, would they really have voted for a guy who says things like this:
"We should have a new force called the Space Force. It’s like the Army and the Navy, but for space, because we’re spending a lot of money on space."
Ten guesses (only the first one counts) on which brainiac is quoted above. If people had to actually believe in something rather than having access to 500 TV channels with unlimited streaming Netflix content (a recent estimate is that Netflix has over 250,000 hours of available content to stream; if you watched 8 hours per day, every day, that would take you (250,000 / 24) / 365 = 85 years = an entire life time to watch) would they be shaken out of a life of complacency and learn something? Probably not...
Another failure at the game 2048 was recorded in the small black ledger. The result, failure. Time spent on the game, 17 minutes and 33 seconds. Other mundane details were filled in like date, time of day, mental state of the subject (one of 30 categories in a model designed by the most trusted psychiatrists available). The alien beings in charge of running things were losing their patience with Pemulis. His win column in the Karmic Life Ledger was growing sparser by the day while the loss column was growing comparatively crowded with thick black ink [you would think that an ultra-intelligent alien species sent to monitor, influence, and in many cases full-on control life on Earth would have systems less primitive than small leather-bound notebooks indexed by a vast library-like Dewey-Decimal system that are filled using cheap black ink pens but there you have it; some say that the aliens were worried about Russian hackers, though those might have just been rumors]. The alien flipped backwards through the pages in the small book he held in his small grey hands. While humans were vastly less advanced than his species and caring for -- or even understanding at any level -- them and their actions would be akin to a human rooting for a flea to, go on! Find a new host! Drink that host's blood! You can do it!, the alien felt sad for Pemulis. He had shown such early promise. Notebooks from years past showed rows full of wins. But lately, something had clearly changed. Some of the alien's colleagues believed the downturn was directly related to the dark days when Pemulis began fairly frequently reading the New Yorker. While this was obviously a serious new objective flaw in his character, the alien knew there was something more profound happening. Could it be his fascination with absurdly expensive clown bicycles built by British mechanics and sold to hipsters who don't understand either bicycles or economics? Sure, that was also disappointing for anyone gunning for Pemulis's ascendancy, but it still wasn't the, let's say, core impetus for his hamartia.
Pemulis steals a glance outside his large office window to the sun-soaked cobbled street below. The wind softly blows and old leaves from last Autumn shuffle slowly by on their way to an eventual gutter. The sky is blue today but the leafless trees give the scenery both a feeling and subtle appearance of greyness. It's Old Europe with frozen American grocery products and a whole lot of shiny new BMWs. Ever since his mid-life crisis hit circa three or four years prior, Spring has been a complicated time for Pemulis. Another calendar year rolls by, and then one day you find ten years have got behind you. No one told you when to run, you missed the starting gun. So you run and you run to catch up with the sun but it's sinking, racing around to come up behind you again. The sun is the same in a relative way but you're older. Shorter of breath and one day closer to death! Pemulis's brain whirs back to life as the Pink Floyd lyrics circling his head dissipate and then disappear. In an alternate universe, Pemulis was doing something. He spoke Greek at parties on rooftop patios in European capitals while discussing his latest book and how winning that Gold Medal wasn't so impressive because the Russian who was his chief rival had been banned from competition prior to the event for the usual reasons. In this particular universe, however, Pemulis really kind of just steals glances. The sun has set now for another day and out the window that subtle appearance of grey has become an unmistakable objective literal grey.
The aliens have a sophisticated system for running simulations that, while far more advanced than the capabilities held by the humans on which they experiment and simulate, holds a sort of Steampunkesque quaintness and almost old world charm. Rather than calculating actuarial tables and building prediction systems and inputting probabilities computed with Bayesian generative models, the aliens build miniature biological replicas of the human world that have been manipulated both to (obviously) be much smaller but (necessarily) run much more quickly than reality. The alien assigned to Pemulis and his downward trajectory has been busy for months tuning parameters of his simulation, trying to find a correction or adjustment or anything that could be done to reverse his subject's decline. For a brief period in the previous year there was a widely held consensus that correcting Pemulis's hip problem might prove to be the silver bullet that the aliens had been searching for. None of the simulations -- once they were finally built and run -- came close to supporting the theory, however. It was one of the biggest disasters in theoretical applied anthromanipulology. Many of the aliens who had been on the project compared it to the laughable human attempts to unify the fundamental forces in physics into a Grand Unified Theory with a hilarious branch of theoretical physics called String Theory. As the winter leading up to Pemulis's 40th birthday dragged on, just as the aliens were ready to just kill Pemulis off for the greater good (the aliens really disliked failure) one "hail mary" simulation finally showed some promise.
Pemulis decides that though he didn't arrive in the office until shortly before the lunch hour, leaving at 5 pm is probably socially acceptable. He walks to the tram, steps inside, and finds a seat near the back. Following his usual pattern of behavior, he pulls his iPhone 12 out, and starts playing the game 2048. He swipes up, down, right, right, down, up, right, down, and so on. The tram lumbers through the traffic-filled streets and as it approaches his stop in the far eastern reaches of the city, something happens: Pemulis gets the 8192 tile! This is a serious breakthrough in his life and finally he feels that there might be some meaning out there after all. The 8192 tile is a coveted tile, of course, and to reach that level of the game is unprecedented. Pemulis's elation turns to exuberance as he metaphorically climbs out of a dark deep hole where his soul has been captured for as far back as he can now remember. The light at the periphery of the earthen dungeon is blinding. Pemulis remembers that today is his 40th birthday and he decides that to celebrate, he will drink a Starkbier.
Thursday, 5:00 PM, Central European Time. The snow falls outside and the tempers flare within. Pemulis is now an unbelievable six hours into his Deutsche Sprache, schwere Sprache course and the Earth's elliptical journey back to the right side of the 23.5 degree tilt seems to have noticeably slowed down here in early February. It really does keep snowing day-in and day-out and the weather forecast seems to be stalled in a Groundhog Day cycle of cold and wet predictions ad infinitum. But good news is on the horizon.
Pemulis will spend an entire week next month in the land that time and his family forgot: Grenoble, France. Hey wait! That's even he name of the blog. Yes, it only seems right that as we celebrate fifty years since the 1968 Grenoble Winter Olympics that he should touch down in the city with a mountain at the end of every road. Pemulis plans to visit all his old haunts: the Shannon Irish Pub, Family's Irish Pub, Druid's Irish Pub, O'Callaghan Irish Pub, the Albion Irish Pub, and Maison Floran (some breaking horrible news: apparently Maison Floran has closed down and I can't help but think that it's either because Pemulis is no longer there putting their kids through college or that maybe they misunderstood the demographics of Grenoble and didn't adhere closely enough to the Irish Pub loving crowd).
But for now back to Germany. It's cold, it's dark, it's grey, and we seem to be stuck in the month of February without all that much forward momentum. The good news is that if you're inside, you turn the heat way up, close your eyes, and eat an ice cream cone, you can pretend that you're somewhere else. Like Australia. Or Sicily. Or an Irish Pub.
A Guest Blog submitted by (probable) loyal reader Helga:
It’s me, Helga! I want to tell you about my holiday in Kanada. It’s really different from the place-where-I-usually-live-with-Pemulis-and-Joelle (my parents).
First, in Kanada my parents own 2 houses, one with Gosig and one with Aero. These are dogs. I was very disappointed with dogs. Normally, I can get attention by smacking-in-the-face. But when I smacked-in-the-face Gosig, he went back to sleep. The nerve! And when I smacked-in-the-face Aero, he just turned his head away and never said a word. So my first piece of advice if you are going to Kanada is this: smack-in-the-face does not work with dogs. It does work with Grandmas. That brings me to my second point.
Pemulis and Joelle have installed a Grandma in each of their houses. These Grandmas make food for us and even diaper-change us. Well, diaper-change me at any rate. I did not see the Grandmas diaper-change my parents, so perhaps they do this when I am asleep. Also, the Grandmas are different in each house, but they have the same name. What a coincidence! Each Grandma is provided with a Grandpa, who does not do the diaper-change, even when I ask politely. And the Grandpas do not make food for us, so what good are they? Well, they get rid of the Schnee. That’s one thing they do. If they do anything else, I can’t say what it is.
That brings me to my third point. You can build a Schneemann in Kanada and it will stay put and not disappear. In the place-where-I-usually-live-with-Pemulis-and-Joelle, the Schneemann will go away without even saying good-bye.
Fourth, In Kanada trees grow inside the house and presents grow under the trees and I get to keep most of them! The presents, that is, not the trees. The trees stay there. I asked politely if a tree could be brought home with us, but I was ignored.
Fifth, there are other people in the houses besides the Grandmas and the Grandpas. Big people, little people, all sizes. Most of them will play with me for a while but they get tired easily and stop playing. One of these people is called “Aunt Kit” and she has a baby inside her! She must have swallowed the baby because otherwise how did it get in there? I don’t know how she will get the baby out, but if she does, I can teach it “Dinosaur” and “Smack-in-the-face.” These are fun things to do. Also, I can teach it “Dancing-with-a-backpack,” which is a useful skill.
Finally, in Kanada I am well but Pemulis (my Dad) is sick. This is the opposite of the place where I am sick but Pemulis is well. I do not like the being sick, but Pemulis really doesn’t like the being sick and complains all the time! Such moaning and groaning you have never heard. I want to say, “Suck it up, Dad,” but I don’t know how to say that yet. Someday I will say that in 3 languages.
If you go to Kanada, remember that your Dad will get sick. It’s required, I think. Your Mom will not get sick, which is a really good thing. You don’t want your Mom to ever be sick because you will not get the diaper-change nearly as much if your Mom is sick.
Here is my list of the Top-10-most-important things-to-know-about-Kanada:
- Grandmas are always nice.
- Dads get sick all the time.
- Dogs don’t listen to you.
- Schneemann don’t run away.
- No-one speaks Krippe-talk.
- Parents own two houses.
- There is lots of room to play “Dinosaur.”
- Babies may be swallowed.
- Trees grow inside.
- Presents grow under the indoor trees.
It's been a little over two weeks since our touch-down back in the "Southern Europe of Germany" and it's been kind of nice getting to experience all four seasons of the year during that time. We had lots of snow, lots of rain, lots of wind, and even -- yesterday and today -- some warm sunshine! It's always hard to believe such a claim when it's being made about the "Southern Europe of Germany" (especially any time between about mid-October and early April) but just check Pemulis's alter ego's Instagram's feed and you'll experience photographic proof of blue sky and sun (and also some snow highlights) of GPS-tagged photos documenting said events.
Helga is back at the very cleverly named "ThinkWith" daycare and has quickly reacquainted herself with the German language. I found myself at a particularly difficult passage in Goethe's Faust II the other day (in the Vierter Akt when Faust comes forward and states Der Einsamkeiten tiefste schauend unter meinem Fuss, Betret'ich wohlbedaechtig dieser Gipfel Saum, Entlassen meinder Wolke Tragewerk, die mich sanft anklaren Tagen ueber Land und Meer gefuehrt.) and I couldn't quite grasp whether Faust was saying that the solitude was the most deep under his foot and what that could possibly mean and Helga kind of rolled her eyes and explained to me that he was basically saying "Gazing at those deep solitudes beneath my feet"... Boy did I ever feel dumb.
Joelle is also back to her daily rhythms and is happy not only because her Brompton Folding Bicycle (TM) was finally taken in for the voluntary recall where it was also tuned-up and cleaned, but it turns out that she will after all get her Christmas gift of seeing the ballet performance of Anna Karenina put on by the Bavarian State Ballet Company at the National Theater since Pemulis managed to come up big in the follow-up ticket lottery a few days ago. The only bad news in all of this is that she was secretly (highly) relieved that now she wouldn't have to read the re-gifted 7,000 page Tolstoy paperback that she had unfortunately lugged back to the "Southern Europe of Germany". But because we're all Christians here we know that a bad thing happening only means that good has to be around the corner and indeed, Joelle is thrilled that the family will get away from Ramersdorf for 8 days this coming Easter on a magical trip to the real Southern Europe where she and Helga will frolic in the vineyards of Sicily's Catania coast while Pemulis argues with the car rental people about alleged scratches to the Peugeot's hubcaps that aren't really there.
But yes, you read that correctly: Sicily in April. Men here of the secret they pass in upholstered silence they only exist in crisis they only exist in silence past territorial. Wait, that might be Springtime in Vienna, but Sicily in April probably has some connections. I think we'll stay at an Agriturismo (basically a B&B at a farm where they grow grapes) because that's what one does nowadays in Italy and we just loved doing that in Piemonte last summer so let's hope this can compare! This weekend the family plans to roll out our bicycles and glide down the hill from Perlach into the city-proper where we'll sip coffee (probably not Helga) from paper cups in the "Reading Room" at Globetrotter and be inspired by one of the nine hundred books that they presumably have about Sicily. Only then will we try to book one of these places so hopefully they're not all booked up by then.
And what about Pemulis? I mean, he's essentially the star of the blog after all. Since Helga became both the de facto and de jure star and principal protagonist of Instagram (let's face it you can't even call anyone else a supporting role at this point) Pemulis still needs some room in the limelight and so let's not take that away from him. After a rough and painful battle with some pretty mean pathogens to commence his Christmas season, he's in no shape or mood for doing too much more intercontinental travel and so has "paused" his previously planned trip to the far West to visit the "Mother Ship" as some have called it. He will, however, be spending his time fruitfully. February will feature a much-awaited visit from Mrs. Joelle (aka Grandma) and he will use parts of this time to participate in a German course of which he is in extreme need of. He will also finally visit the world-famous hip surgeon Dr. Acetabulofemoral to hopefully arrange some kind of upgrade since his system went down during recent "routine maintenance" and upon rebooting there were some bad sectors or something in the hip. Further! Pemulis also plans to return to his much-loved Rhône Valley in late April where the culinary masterpiece of a city Lyon claims to be holding some computer-y conference that I should be able to argue is worth my while to attend.
What else can I tell you? Tonight I will put on full display my die-hard support for the all but unbeatable Munich Redbulls as they defend their glory in the Deutsche Eishockey Liga. They are on pace to three-peat as the league champions so they had better not let me or my fellow fans down tonight.
Stay warm, friends!
Life is a seemingly never-ending (until it abruptly does) process where complications pile up higher and higher on top of each other with each step. Like Sisyphus or perhaps a cosmic game of Whack-a-Mole, one must forever chase after these complications putting out fires that each complication inevitably starts, to prevent the fires from spreading to other complications that they sit upon, and when one fire is extinguished race to the next one and deal with the stresses that it has introduced. The less time you spend dealing with complications and the complications that your existing complications cause, ad infinitum, the better one can live. But since the complications grow larger and continue materializing throughout life, by definition it is impossible to catch up and the time you spend dealing with them inevitably goes up.
One of the primary purposes of life, therefore, is obviously to keep your rate of complication materialization as low as possible and keep your fire fighting efficiency as high as possible. For example, to succeed with the first goal, it would be best to stay out of any industry that is advancing quickly (e.g. would require you to continually update your "skill set") or that involves anything that has a tendency to break for inexplicable reasons. For example, if you perform action A on day N and it results in output O, and then you again perform action A on day N+1 though now it results in output O' where O != O', then you are doing a bad job at keeping your rate of complication materialization low. The most obvious example of this mistake is having anything to do with computers. Bad, bad, bad idea (unfortunately it's harder and harder to avoid this kind of job nowadays -- that is, one where you work with computers -- but no one said living the good life would be easy).
To succeed with the second goal -- keeping your fire fighting efficiency with respect to your life's complications high -- it suffices to learn the details of these complications (taxes, contracts, strange rules, insurances, regulations, etc.) and make sure that you avoid activities that would complicate them further. For example, if understanding contracts for borrowing large amounts of money is already complicated (it is), then under no circumstances should you do so in a foreign language or sign said contracts while intoxicated. Don't do things like buy property, have children, or get a job. If you have to do any of those things for some reason (e.g. you don't want to live the good life), then definitely don't do any of them somewhere where you don't understand the language, or where the culture is such that the people enjoy an inordinate number of dense, complex, multi-self-referential sets of indecipherable rules to regulate their days.
That would just be silly.
