Game of Thrones Season Three.

So I watched the first proper trailer for the new season of Game of Thrones a few days ago and it would seem dwarves, dragons, and incest will be returning to our television/laptop screens soon. March 31st to be precise. I’m not going to lie, like most people who grew up playing Gauntlet, reading Lord of the Rings, and listening to too much Led Zeppelin I have a soft spot for absurd fantasy so I’m rather excited by the prospect of ten new episodes.

Despite its hype, the trailer itself doesn’t really show anything that we weren’t already promised at the end of Season Two; people will die, family members will have sex with each other, and a homicidal teenager will torture others for fun. In terms of the larger narrative, clearly there is some sort of zombified horde trudging down from the North who are about to eat the brains of Jon Snow and the Night’s Watch before moving on into the rest of Westeros. On the other side, Daenerys “Khaleesi” Targaryen’s dragons look rather large and capable of incinerating more than just that creepy bald warlock. Hopefully now she will stop having those “I want my dragons!” tantrums that she regularly indulged in throughout the last season.

I haven’t read a single line of any of the novels, but now that she has her Qarthian army I assume Khaleesi is going to going to invade Westeros and tussle with the armies of teenage maniac Joffrey Baratheon. Unfortunately for him, as far as I know he doesn’t have any dragons, and will rely on his grandfather, an unwashed man called The Hound, and his dwarf-uncle who he treats rather badly. I predict an easy win for the ones who breathe fire. Speaking of fire, since the books are called A Song of Fire and Ice I’ll also assume that it’s all going to come down to an ice-zombies versus fire-dragons battle for supremacy. Sign me up.

BERLIN MAY DAY

Summer starts here. Politics aside, that’s the message of May Day in Berlin. This year the city certainly delivered. From Tempelhof to Prenzlauer Berg there was something going on. I think we can safely say sun + music + barbecue is a winning combination.

This guy I found on Tempelhofer Feld basically epitomised the day. Posing with his homemade barbecue/sound system, food and beverage in hand, he was everything that is right about Berlin May Day. The fact that he was blasting out Lionel Richie made me that much more impressed.

Grilling time. Tempelhofer Feld

Sound system. Görlitzerstr

 Midnight haircut. Görlitzer Bahnhof

Though the party stretched across the city, Görlitzer Park always seems to be where I end up. With good reason. Lively any day of the week, the park was once again packed with people and ringed by a collection of systems all contributing to the kaleidoscope of sound. My personal highlight? Todd Terje’s Inspector Norse outside Kleine Reise on Spreewaldplatz. In a strange scene, helmeted police in riot gear were cheered/jeered as they made their way through a dancing crowd of about 5,000.

Nice one, Berlin. Next up, Karneval der Kulturen in three weeks.

SERIOUS POLITICAL DISCUSSION.

GIFS!!!

GRAPHICS INTERCHANGE FORMAT!!

Holy crap I love animated gifs. One of the lasting contributions CompuServe made to the internet. Comedy boiled down to its purest form and put on a cycle of endless repetition. No introduction, no epilogue, no inane youtube commentary, just moments of life and LOLOLOLOLS(!). Nothing makes a blog/website look more professional than an abundance of GIFS.

Let’s do this. Apologies if you have slow internets.

 

The Ophiram Foundation

This is the kind of website I like. One that’s appealing to the eye and makes use of a diverse colour palate. One that subjects you to Christian rock ballads and explains governance systems using farm animals. One that argues that Obama’s 2008 election was satantic because he only won 580,000 square miles of land compared to McCain’s 2,427,000. One whose mascot is a glowing rainbow zebra. One that offers THE MOST SPECTACULAR SOLUTION TO GLOBAL POVERTY IN THE ENTIRE HISTORY OF MANKIND TO THIS PRESENT TIME.

The company who runs the site, the Zion Corporation, has a similarly excellent web presence and offers “25th century phones, furniture, and kitchen appliances.” Apparently these guys are constantly bringing new products to the market such as a TOP SECRET ZEBRA KEYBOARD or A SHOULDER TO CRY ON. Another product they have developed is an entirely new sport, STARZONE. The site explains, “the object of Starzone is to successfully throw a set of 42 Ninja Style Stars into 21 Revolving Rainbow Light Targets.” This makes perfect sense and I’m actually surprised no one I know is playing this, we are living in the third millennium after all.

To be honest, I have no idea what to make of this site. My first impression was that it was some kind of parody, but no one puts this much work into a joke page that has links to dozens of equally bizarre sites. It seems to be mostly the work of a man called Elijah Saatori, who invented a board game back in the 1980s called GALAXION, and then it seems, lost his mind and became a evangelist entrepreneur in Hong Kong. I have a weird feeling I have seen this game before. Namely, while being an inmate in Hamilton East Primary School’s after-school program which back in the late 80s was run by a highly Christian woman who always wore a wrist brace possibly due to an injury sustained through excessive prayer. Ohhhh, someone is selling a copy of Galaxion here in Germany. I think God would want me to have this game.

I would investigate further but my face hurts and I’m seeing rainbow zebras everywhere.

FEEL THE STEEL!

I’m pretty sick at the moment so my illness-addled brain is finding distraction in almost anything including infomercials for TOTALLY SWEET MEDIEVAL WEAPONRY!

I remember seeing these videos a while back and they remain pretty amazing. Some guy called Lynn Thompson seems to feature in almost all of them and he’s clearly a man on a mission for Cold Steel. In advertising their products Thompson and his colleagues chop, hack, stab, and bludgeon their way through a bizarre selection of objects such as the face of a pig, impudent watermelons, disrespectful buckets of Mountain Dew, potentially deadly barrels of water, and scary targets in either a plywood dungeon or sunny parking lot.  My favourite is undoubtedly the cowboy boots filled with meat. You just never know when those bastards will turn on you.

Basically, it’s comforting to know that if I was ever being terrorized by a balloon that there’s a way I could protect myself and my family.

Being the considerate warrior that he is, Thompson also offers a DVD set called NEVER UNARMED. For only 119US$ you can watch him defend his freedom by dispatching at close range a wide variety of dangerous items using an equally wide variety of firearms.

Bad tattoos are great.

I’m not really a fan of tattoos. Some look decent and others not so much. Saying that though I am a huge fan of bad tattoos. I find that nothing provides self-reassurance while simultaneously destroying faith in humanity like googling ‘ugly tattoos’. Seriously, what is wrong with these people? Is this what happens in prison or if your parents feed you a steady diet of playdough spaghetti? Here are some gems. I think the last one is my favourite.

It all went downhill with Elmo.

Recently on the Guardian site Hadley Freeman took two thousand words to say what I can in four, the Muppets are great. I say this despite still having memories of hiding behind the couch as The Count…counted. Though I’m no expert, most children’s television these days seems to be a thinly veiled infomercial for the associated merchandise. I don’t know what Hannah Montana does, but I doubt she’s referencing Samuel Beckett or Twin Peaks.

As Freeman notes, the amount of guest stars who drop by Sesame Street and the Muppet Show is one of best features. Here’s the legendary Buddy Rich drum-battling another legend and Stevie Wonder doing Superstition.

Not another web-log.

Blog stands for web and log. Web-log.

My enthusiasm for web-logging may not last but while it does I’ll be posting things that I either like or see as interesting and/or absurd. It might hopefully be entertaining for 10 seconds to 10 minutes. The following things may feature:

• music.
• sports.
• things I came across on reddit and elsewhere.
• stuff I have seen, places I have been.
• overuse of alliteration and commas,
• dogs.
• cats.
• dogs and cats in platonic relationships.
• lists.

Anyway, it’s a work in progress. For instance, I haven’t figured out how to make everything comic sans. It’ll all probably end up resembling something like this.