Sicily

The long winding story of Sicily stretches all the way back through time immemorial to pre-history. Evidence of human occupation exists going at least as far back as 7-8000 BC in caves around present-day Palermo. More "recently" the 4th century BC (the neolithic Bronze Age) saw Proto-Celtic peoples settling the island. Sicily has gone through the most diverse set of conquerers and rulers that one could imagine over the years and each culture has left its imprint on and subtly (and sometimes not so) shifted the dynamic of this exotic land. From the Greeks (8th century BC) to the Romans (who turned the island into a massive grain-producing "factory" for the empire destroying the agricultural paradise of Sicily's fertile soil for literally hundreds of years), going into the early Middle Ages as the Germanic Vandals [side note: did the iconic punk rock band The Vandals name themselves after these barbarous people or after the more modern definition of someone who simply defaces property in their spare time? Enquiring minds want to know...] took over the island, the Muslim conquest of Sicily, the Vikings, the Normans, the Aragonese, the Spaniards, the Bourbons, and finally the long-sought-after unification of Italy, it starts to become clear that there are reasons why Sicilians have a worldview that is different -- and in Canada it might be seen as a "distinct society" of some sort -- from that of mainland Italy. Sicily's tumultuous history and in particular the long line of rulers who more often than not saw the island as one (or all) of either a trophy, a token to be traded, or a place to be exploited -- not to mention large swaths of the islands' complete destruction (on more than one occasion) at the hands of the mighty Etna -- has hardened the land and its people. In short, the Jewel of the Mediterranean has been through a lot over the years. And then, just when it seemed like things were finally starting to calm down a little, along came Hurricane Hannah, like a... well, like a hurricane...

We touched down on Sicily's East coast at the Catania Airport on a warm afternoon on the last day of March. After a very productive meeting with some friendly representatives from the International Air Transport Association, the European Aviation Safety Agency, and the Italian Federal Police (the Carabinieri), who fell just short of banning Hurricane Hannah and the rest of her family from commercial flights passing anywhere over or near EU airspace after a particularly sympathetic EASA agent felt pity when Sandi explained that much of Hurricane Hannah's embarrassingly un-German behaviour stemmed from her finding out that while we had been talking up the excitement of all of us wearing matching new shoes on holiday, when they arrived -- a set of handsome TOMS espadrilles -- Hurricane Hannah's were much too big for her and we therefore didn't pack them (which was the catalyst for much pandemonium to come) we were ultimately let off with nothing more than a warning, we made our way to the airport car rental queue.

While Sicily is very clearly a distinct society from the rest of Italy, there are of course many overlapping traits that remain. In Italy, on average, you can get a great coffee at most bars. Same thing in Sicily. In Italy, on average, anything official takes about ten times as long as it should. Same thing in Sicily. So, while we were happy to find ourselves second in line, minutes in the queue turned into hours which ultimately became days and then weeks [could be slightly exaggerated] and Sandi soon had to take Hurricane Hannah on a "cooling down" walk around the airport. As I heard distant gasps and other assorted exhortations from shocked holiday makers from far off in the airport terminal who were suffering from Hurricane Hannah's wrath, I finally made it to the front of the line where the young man asked me what number I had. "Number?" I asked politely but incredulously as though I had passed a beaten-up red "take a number please" machine on my way to the line, I obviously hadn't stopped to try to use it as it had the appearance of not having been in use since some time in the early 1930's and then hadn't fared well during the war years. Luckily, however, I went back to take a number (somehow one actually came out) after the man's assistant brought it back to life by giving the machine a thorough swat, and when he called out the next number it matched the one I had just been given. I signed seventy-three different official-looking papers, initialed about fifteen, and recited some weird latin verses with my hand on a bible, and just before sunset we were given the keys to a pretty cool, pretty giant SUV that would prove to be too wide for roughly 85% of the roads in Sicily.

Our first destination was the Agriturismo that we had booked approximately two months prior. I remember those days in early January quite well. Booking.com urgently reminded me every few minutes that Sicily is very popular during our requested dates, so we had better book something soon. Time is running out. Do not delay. Why haven't you booked yet? It seems like you don't really want to stay at a very nice place. Bad husband and father. Or at least one who doesn't.. OK! Under immense pressure that our dream farm B&B would soon be fully booked, we finally at what felt like the last possible moment made a reservation for what looked like a beautiful, relaxing quiet destination. And when we arrived and parked in the empty guest parking lot, it was! At least the first part... Our (first) Agriturismo sat close to the foot of the south-east side of Mount Etna, right in the middle of a large orange orchard. The buildings were old stone and really it was quite a nice looking place. The problem was that it wasn't all that quiet. At all. No, this particular Agriturismo (which I suppose I could have plainly seen if I'd paid closer attention to the Google Maps) sits right directly beside the one and only trans-Sicily highway. In our room with the windows and doors closed tight, if you had the air conditioner on high, Hannah's white noise machine was cranked up to 11, and you were hiding under the covers, it didn't seem THAT loud. But if you wanted to sit out in the orchard and spend the afternoon lazily picking, peeling, slicing (OK, so you can't lazily eat an orange) and finally eating fresh oranges in the mid-day sun, it was actually pretty difficult because all you could hear was the sound of Italian transport trucks flying by at 130+ km/h and I couldn't really get my heart rate down to anything below a 150. It's sad really. The place was just beautiful. They didn't lie or anything in any of the pictures, the food was delicious, the people were nice, but man was it ever loud.

We had a really nice dinner there on the first night, and then a 4+ hour Easter "lunch" the next day which involved unlimited wine and what seemed like never-ending courses of pretty delicious Sicilian food. But since I'm old now, becoming more curmudgeonly by the day, and steadily turning into a combination of the worst traits of each of my forebears, I just couldn't stand the noise. I felt a bit embarrassed telling them that we wanted to leave (and even blamed Hurricane Hannah to help save face) but I couldn't relax with all the noise. Luckily, Booking.com had been lying their faces off and when I called up another place that we had considered the guy said "yes, we have room" and when we got there and stayed with them for about a week, we were the only ones there for our entire visit. But we're getting ahead of ourselves. Let's get back on track now to Monday morning when we ate another delicious Sicilian breakfast (a special Easter edition) and then checked-out and headed towards our new abode...

The new and improved Agriturismo was about a 30 minute drive south down the coast. This one also specialized in growing fruit on trees, but instead of oranges (actually it had a few blood orange trees and man those were delicious) it specialized in... LEMONS! First: obviously we were pretty worried that this place would be just as loud as the last one or some other thing would bother us and we'd just keep leaving places never finding that unattainable mythical perfection that is just over the horizon and realize that we've become those awful people who can never be happy anywhere and just as I was looking up the coordinates of the Al-Bustin Hotel as our potential next destination and considering changing my name to G.G, ... it was great! Quiet, close to the sea and a nice small town with a great bar for morning cappuccinos, and even a place to have a BBQ. We dropped off our things and headed towards Catania proper to meet up with a friend whom I hadn't seen in years.

In the heady days of 2003 I was a student activist on the campus of the University of Leeds fighting for the rights of the down-trodden and doing all in my power to bring down the capitalist oligarchy and disrupt its evil roots of power in all their forms. We traveled to London and shouted to the warmongers that you will not drop those bombs in our name! Rosalinda was a fellow socialist freedom fighter and we bonded over our hatred of what seemed back then like a bad US president (hahahaha oh the days of the early 2000's). Rosa was strong-willed and had the heart and mind of a person whose people had been colonized and bandied about amongst essentially all of the different conquerors that are known to history for the last 3000 years. Which makes sense because she's Sicilian. We met up with Rosalinda on the rough-and-tumble backstreets of Catania where she graciously offered to help keep us alive that little big longer by chauffeuring us around for the rest of the day. We started at a local eatery where we consumed 6 or 7 kilos of pasta each with a light Sicilian red wine to help down the pasta. Then it was time for dessert. After strolling through the Duomo Square -- home to the well-known 18th-century Elephant Fountain -- and (something for our Schmitter readers) spending a few moments awing at the grand Norman Cathedral dedicated to the patron saint and protector of the city, St. Agatha (!!!), we were led to a dessert bar where we were to try some Sicilian post-main-meal specialties. We ate frutta martorana, Pignolata of Messina, buccellato, cannoli, granita, cassata siciliana, and probably five or six other desserts that I either don't remember the names of or which I literally have no recollection of eating because my brain had turned off the memory-creating portion in an all-out rally-the-troops effort to produce enough insulin to keep me alive after consuming more sugar in a single sitting than I ever had before. Despite the near-death-experience, however, the sugar rush and tastiness was well worth the very brief trip to the emergency room.

The next day we packed up for a hiking excursion to Mount Etna. This day saw Hurricane Hannah at her most-deserving-of-the-name-Hurricane-Hannah. Mount Etna is the tallest active volcano in Europe and one of the most active volcanoes in the world. It is a UNESCO World Heritage Site (since 2013) and a Hurricane Hannah Greatest Hits site since 2018. What do I say about this? It was awful. It was really quite a terrible experience and possibly constituted the worst few hours of our entire vacation (with possible exception from Sandi's perspective of those hours when she was non-stop vomiting from her food poisoning attack -- discussed infra). Of course part of Hurricane Hannah's hurricaneness probably came from the fact that she didn't get a nap and we didn't have much food with us up there on the volcano but that doesn't really take away any of the sting.

Let's see... we had some nice dinners, some great pizza, we drank Camparis with about-as-fresh-as-you-can-get lemons since just as we needed one for the drink we would step outside and pull it off the tree, we ate ice cream, we walked along the sea, we ate brioche and ice cream for breakfast as Sicilians really do, and a bunch of other cool stuff. But let's get to that food-borne illness part now!

Amongst many other things, Sicily is well-known for having a fine seafood cuisine. The area around Catania in particular is known for a grilled swordfish which we tasted a little of earlier in the week but we wanted a full-blown Sicilian seafood experience. We looked up some places that were nearby (side note: never trust Booking.com -- ever. I've already alluded to the fact that things were not "almost full" at all and even though it was Easter time, we were far from "high season". In fact, most of the restaurants were still closed for the winter break which was a little disappointing but there you have it) and found a place right on the water fairly close by that had some good ratings. The place was pretty empty (cf. side note just above) but we had planned to go all out and gosh darnit we'd come this far so we ordered the "catch of the day". Whatever those fishermen brought back on the boat during today's outing, we were going to down. First, however, we were offered a pretty substantial appetizer. And by pretty substantial I mean almost every type of seafood you can think of: octopus (cold octopus salad which amazingly Hurricane Hannah loved), shrimp, mussels, clams, and ... oysters! I decided not to eat my oyster. Why, you ask?

Since nothing has really happened until it's been blogged about, you might not actually know about one of my many brushes with food-borne-illness and/or death that coincided with trips and air travel. Perhaps you're familiar with my trip to China (minimally catalogued on this particular blog) where I began suffering from the onset of FBI just as we were making our way to the massive Shanghai airport. But what about our nearly decade-ago trip to Canada's shining West coast capital and the bacteria that we brought with us back East? This happened, of course, before the advent of GWMD blogging and so there's no way that anyone could know about it (right?). It was March 2011 (Ok, I just checked that date and I guess that's only like seven years ago) and Sandi and I were newly-weds eager to discover the vast country that claimed us as its intrepid children. To set the mood and to understand how staggeringly long ago that truly was (even if it wasn't quite a decade), let's examine a visual representation to begin with.

Depending on your powers of observation, you will notice a couple of important things that have changed over the years that are clearly reflected in the above images. First, I had a lot more hair nearly ten years ago, and second, I would add a lot more whisky to my morning coffee nowadays. I also have a much cooler winter jacket now.

But back to the matter at hand. We had visited some quote-cool-unquote oyster bar in some hip neighbourhood in Vancouver and eaten a bunch of oysters (naturally). The menu warned us that it was their legal duty to inform all customers that it's possible that eating uncooked food introduces an increased chance of developing symptoms and/or sickness due to FBI-causing bacteria. We scoffed at such a warning that was clearly aimed at those less experienced in exotic food consumption than we and spent the afternoon and early evening helping to do our part in causing the latest oceanic dead zone in our quickly dying planet. Sure enough, 48 hours later on our way back East we both started feeling a little queasy. I remember thinking "weird... I didn't think that I suffered from air sickness..." but then everything came together as I sprinted out of the airplane to the nearest airport bathroom to vomit (btw, have I written about this before? It really feels like déjà vu is happening... hmm...). Anyways, long story short: I got terrible food poisoning and haven't eaten an oyster since.

Back to Sicily now. I felt a bit stupid and maybe even kinda wimpy but the trade-off didn't seem worth it. Even if there was only a 0.001% chance of developing a bad reaction from consuming said oyster, in the end they just taste like salty water with some squishy something or other in there. I'd rather have a lolly pop. Sandi ate one though, and ultimately paid the price. Forty-eight hours later -- like clockwork -- she was in and out of the bathroom praying to the porcelain gods. I'll probably never eat an oyster ever again.

Saturday -- our last full day -- was BBQ day. Rosalinda obviously wasn't traumatized enough by her initial encounter with Hurricane Hannah and so made her way out to the countryside with an SUV full of Sicilian BBQ ingredients. Sandi was still a little under the weather (i.e. she stayed in bed for most of the BBQ) but Hurricane Hannah and I started the day with a trip to our favourite cappuccino bar and to the local grocery store to buy some charcoals and other essentials. Because taking Hurricane Hannah anywhere is -- to put it politely -- a wee bit of an ordeal, we arrived back to the lemon grove far later than we had initially planned and Rosa-Sicilia (actually no one has ever called her that but whatever) was already there waiting for us at the gate. But no hard feelings and all that and we headed down the excruciatingly narrow driveway to the agriturismo-proper and started setting up the BBQ. The first thing -- of course -- is to de-cork the Mount Etna wine and light the fire. You then lean back with your glass of wine and relax while you let the coals wa... and, Hurricane Hannah just fell off the bench that she was climbing on that I had told her ninety-six thousand times to stop climbing on cause she could fall off and there's literally blood everywhere. Hurricane Hannah's mouth and surrounding area are a crimson bloody mess. I am, as you might imagine, not as relaxed as I imagined I might be a few short moments ago and I ask her to spit so we can assess the damage. About a litre (conservative estimate) of blood comes out but thankfully it turns out that she just cut her lip open and there's nothing too serious (that will wait until a few days after we return home and she breaks half of her front tooth off in the backyard, but that's another story). After a fortnight of crying and wet cloth application things calm down a bit and we finally get to the cooking.

Rosalinda is a kind and generous Sicilian. Emphasis on the generous as she brought enough steak, polpetta, and sausage to feed a small Aragonese army. With Sandi sidelined by a bad oyster, this monumental feast/task was left to just three of us: Rosa, me, and Hurricane Hannah. I swear she cooked 10 steaks if it was one, and the polpetta -- cooked between lemon tree leaves -- were not only delicious but almost endless. The sausage was the product of some kind of generations-old secret Sicilian recipe, the only problem with said recipe being that apparently you can only create it for a "serves 50" set-up. Luckily I'm such a terrible host that all we supplied was a bottle of Campari and a zucchini and so instead of having enough food for 1000 we only had enough for about 999. Nevertheless, we were up for the challenge! On certain days (cf. Mount Etna hiking day) Hurricane Hannah decides that nothing is good enough for her particular palette (even things that she's devoured before), whereas on other days, when the wind is just right, and the stars have aligned, she just goes to town... this was one of those days. Let me just say that it's a small miracle that Hurricane Hannah is still alive because she consumed more meat on that fateful BBQ day than many mere mortals consume in an entire lifetime. She ate steaks (plural) and polpette (I guess that's the plural?) and sausagess (double-plural -- get it?) and even some of my measly grilled zucchini (no Campari though). In the end we finished it all and even the Sicilian BBQ Queen of the Island herself was impressed. "Bellissima!" Hurricane Hannah exclaimed at the tastiness and plentifulness of the food.

After a long afternoon and early evening, Rosa left us to our own devices and we began to prepare for our 8 AM flight the following morning. We had some hiccups along the way and Hurricane Hannah was going through a difficult period in her life, but Sicily truly was a magical place that I can't wait to return to. We experienced a lot but only -- to truly bring in a well-used but well-fitting cliché -- scratched the surface (ugh.. barf..) of the mystical experience of this blah blah blah really nice place.

tl;dr*: Sicily has a lot of history, it's different from mainland Italy, Hurricane Hannah was difficult, Sandi got sick, Rosalinda cooked us a lot of food, Hurricane Hannah ate most of it.

* tl;dr (for those who aren't of the Internet generation) means "too long; didn't read" and is a summary often used in forums for long responses for people who don't feel like reading such a long response.

** PSA (Public Service Announcement):

I had written another version of this blogpost (lost to the aether forever) before my computer crashed and I hadn't saved it (well, I had, but about 2 hours before) and so I lost almost this whole story completely. So what you read above is not the original but a poor imitation of something somewhat akin to the original. So sad... Oh ya, and so the PSA part of this message is: SESO (Save Early, Save Often). Ciao!

Blogging to you *live* from the city that started it all

[note: this isn't technically coming to you live from the city that started it all because while I did indeed start this post while I was in Grenoble, I didn't finish it until several days after I left. Oh well, good enough.]

Well it's great to be back. Grenoble is just such a great city, let me tell you. This old trope has been carted out here in front of you folks so many times but it needs to be said again: in Grenoble, as Stendhal (at least) once said, there is a mountain at the end of every street. It's really true. Well, not fully literally in every single sense. There are definitely some roads where you walk down and the road indeed ends but you're not at a mountain -- you're at a café or a shopping mall or one of those awful Nespresso super stores where even though they just sell miniature capsules with pre-ground coffee that are really pulling their weight in destroying our planet and livelihood with their tons and tons of needless trash piling up day after day they somehow need a gigantic store of probably 500 square meters or so. I presume it's for storing all those big George Clooney posters. But in general, no matter where you look, you can see mountains as far as the eye can see. It's awesome.

Right??? I'm here in "the Greno" as we once liked to call it for a few reasons (well I'm not sure about the reasons that we call/called it "the Greno" but I mean I'm here for some reasons of which I'm about to enumerate presently...). The main reason is because I love it and there was an excuse (actually a couple) to be here. The excuses are that I'm attending the 2018 European Conference on Information Retrieval (ECIR is the cool way to say it) and I will be giving a talk at my old workplace, the Xerox Research Center Europe (XRCE) -- which is now actually known as "Naver Labs Europe" after the Korean Internet company Naver purchased the lab last year. As an interesting side note, this is my second ECIR and the first one that I attended was also where I had my first conference paper accepted and which I presented at the conference in 2011 when it was in Dublin. How about that ("An Iterative Approach to Text Segmentation" available where all good papers are downloaded: here).

Note for the timeline-confused: the narrative picks up here now that a couple of weeks have passed and I'm no longer in Grenoble). The talk at Naver was good! It was a bit funny that there were so many of the same people still there, but it was also nice. And the place is just as easy on the eyes as it always was:

A beaut! Yes, that is the famous Chateau de Maupertuis where I once worked. My actual job. Cool beans yo. Here is an artist's rendition of the building where I currently work (more or less accurate):

So Grenoble was great, seeing friends was fun, giving the talk was nice, all good. Well, it wasn't all good; I had a cold most of the time and the trip was a bit short, but we can't have it all I suppose. Actually, the worst part was that I was there for 5 days and I didn't get to go cycling. THAT, my friends, is where Grenoble really shines. I would have loved to do the hour-long climb up to Lans-en-Vercors or headed down the highway to tackle the Alpe d'Huez or any other of the amazing cycling routes around here, but alas time was limited.

Another insane part of Grenoble that I realized this time but never would have even thought about when we lived there before is the housing prices. Good golly Grenoble is cheap! As is the norm (for some reason) in French cities, there are agences immobilières on essentially every street every few buildings. I'd conservatively estimate that 1 in 4 businesses are agences immobilières and they put up ads for houses and apartments and what not in the windows. This was just eye-opening to the extreme. You can buy a beautiful 3-bedroom house with a swimming pool on the side of the mountain for the cost of our crappy apartment and have enough left over to buy a Porsche each to race down said mountain. You could, if you preferred, buy essentially 3 city-centre luxury apartments in Grenoble for the same price as our non-city-centre non-luxury Munich abode. It seems basically that the prices there are a little cheaper than 1/3 of what you would get here. Insanity. Now, the salaries are a little lower in France. BUT, if your salary is 1/2 but your house costs 1/3, you still come out the other side a little better off, right? Let's see...

Instagram ruined blogging

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.

War, huh, what is it good for?

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...

Pemulis's 40th Birthday

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.

Andere Länder, andere Sitten

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.

Helga’s Kanadian Adventure

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:

1. Grandmas are always nice.
2. Dads get sick all the time.
3. Dogs don’t listen to you.
4. Schneemann don’t run away.
5. No-one speaks Krippe-talk.
6. Parents own two houses.
7. There is lots of room to play “Dinosaur.”
8. Babies may be swallowed.
9. Trees grow inside.
10. Presents grow under the indoor trees.