Jesus built my hotrod

Thursday was Christi Himmelfahrt, a holiday over here. This day celebrates Jesus' ascension to heaven. A literal translation (which is where all the fun is) would be "the day Jesus drove to heaven." (Himmel = Heaven. Fahrt comes from fahren, which is the verb used for driving a car, as well as riding a bike or train or whatever.)For me, Christi Himmelfahrt became Chris Wienfahrt, since I went to Vienna for a long weekend with a friend of mine from work. In about three and a half days we hit most of the major places (two palaces and all that comes along with them, the major cathedral, various other large and/or impressive buildings, several parks, a classical music concert, various restaurants and cafes).It's a nice city, but my feelings about it mirror those I got from Paris quite a bit. Too crowded and too many tourists. I would live there before living in Paris, though.I also think that, not having traveled as a child, I never really learned the art of traveling, and therefore I'm not very good at it. Sure, I can do it, but it really wore me down to the point where I'll need another day or so to really recover. Pretty sad.

Amoklauf

I'm sure by now everyone knows of the shit that went down here in Germany a week and a half ago. Some kid (Jesus, I just called a 19 year-old a kid) went psycho and shot up his school. He was a well-trained marksman--a member of a gun club--and he specifically went after teachers, killing several of them execution style directly in front of their classes--classes with kids as young as ten. A terrible, shocking event.And almost immediately, it was revealed that the guy played games. Violent games. And he listened to violent music (Slipknot? Never heard of them...) where the band members wear masks, just like he did when he went on his killing spree. The guy also liked violent movies.You know where this is all going, of course. Many politicians immediately jumped on the idea of banning all this crap, since obviously it is a giant contributing factor to, if not the source of, this guy's psycho tendancies. A standard politician's reaction that I wouldn't really worry much about if this were the U.S. But it's not. It's Germany, where violence is looked at in the same way that sex is often looked at in the U.S. In the past, some games have had to change the color of blood from red to green and/or people into zombies, before the game could be released, and a lot of games are restricted to buyers over 18 (note: I actually have no problem with this, since parents can buy a kid a game if they feel it's okay for the kid).I guess my problem with all this is not the reactions so much as the fact that it shows that people are the same here as in other places. They want a quick solution for things that they don't understand, and they look for easy targets to effect such a solution. The German media has certainly been more subdued than its U.S. counterpart was after Columbine--it would be hard not to be--but there has still been plenty of talk about "Gewaltvideos" and their potentially terrible efffects on kids. It's just a little depressing. I don't have and have never had any magical notion that Germany is better than the U.S. Far from it, really. But in some social areas this country is in what I consider to be a better place, and I had hoped that this would be one of those areas.

Terrible, terrible Zelda flash animation

There was certainly some potential here. Alas, the author needs to work on his/her (okay, most likely his) pacing.Note: The link is to angelfire, who will complain that you can't link directly to things on their servers. I was able to hit the "Go Back" button on the complaint page to get to the animation.