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Read recently:
All the Colours of Darkness by Peter Robinson, 2008, 403 pages.
Brave New World by Aldous Huxley, 1932, 237 pages.
The First Century after Beatrice by Amin Maalouf, 1992, 192 pages.
( reviews under the cut ) |
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Photo © r0uzi, cc-by-sa.
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Hi there :)
I have recently started teaching an extremely smart 12 year old girl in one on one lessons. I REALLY need some games that you can play with just one student seeing as I have exhausted the usual Hangman, Who am I and 20 Questions.
It should be nothing too long or time consuming - I just need it for our 10 mins breaks since she's the only kid around so she spends her breaks with me as well (and I don't want to be boring ;)
The games can be a little more challenging because she's really smart and loves a challenge :)
Any help would be greatly appreciated! |
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When I first moved to the northern tip of Neukolln in 2006 there was a funky little record store (it also sold comics, jagged grungy silkscreens, books of pervy photos of wounded Japanese girls by Romaine Slocombe, and copies of FRUiTS magazine) on my street called Le Petit Mignon, run by a frenchman called Guillaume Siffert.
In March 2007 Le Petit Mignon closed its Neukolln shop, moved up to the Torstrasse in Mitte, and merged with Staalplaat, a Dutch record shop and label which started as a cassette distribution operation in 1982. At the time, it looked like Le Petit Mignon was getting "upwardly mobile", moving from a marginal area to hipster central in Mitte. But in early 2009 rumours started to reach our ears that Le Prodigal Mignon was seeking to return to Neukolln, bringing Staalplaat with it. Guillaume spent a couple of months scouting locations, and finally settled on Flughafenstrasse, a busy commercial, working class street that slopes down from Tempelhof Airport to the Neukolln town hall.
The new Neukolln Staalplaat -- called Staalplaat Working Space -- opened in late April. I made my first visit last night, to see a Midori Hirano show in their concert space at the back. I actually missed Midori's set because of a fireworks display at Tempelhof, catching instead the sensuously placid guitar sounds of Rac-ka, a duo from Osaka.
It felt good being in there, even if there was something a bit cautious about the way Guillaume had to unlock the door to let us in. On the Staalplaat blog page Rinus details not just the new venue's problems with noise-obsessed neighbours, but their view that "the neighbourhood is turning into a red-light district, with illegal prostitution, women-, drugs-, and arms trafficking, bribery, violence and noise disturbances."
I personally felt a big hippy-alternative vibe of calm. Staalplaat's concert room has sofas. It's very quiet in there (and not just because of the neighbour with the decibel meter) and the only lighting is a couple of candles and some ghostly ambient seep from the backyard. When experimental music is playing, you're instantly in a Wire magazine article, and when the show is over and the audience mills out into the shop area you feel something of the vibe of the old Rough Trade shop in Covent Garden, the one under Slam City Skates.
The move back into Neukolln -- deeper into Neukolln, in the developing area around Boddinstrasse -- seems to have given Staalplaat a rush of relevance, a new mission and energy. Whereas, up in Mitte, Staalplaat pretty much blended in, sensibility-wise, with neighbours like Bongout Gallery and Neurotitan, down here in "deep Neukolln" it seems to be back on the cutting edge, joining semi-squat cultural guerilla operations like Loophole (from which I did a livecast back in February at the invitation of the ubiquitous Rinus Van Alebeek). The gamble seems to have paid off; foot traffic into Staalplaat during the day is apparently rather higher down here "in the middle of nowhere" (actually close to happening spots like Weserstrasse) than it was up on tacky Torstrasse, the Oxford Street of Berlin hip.
Neukolln may not have Mitte's buy-yourself-hip clothes boutiques (oh shit, did Best Shop close down already? Maybe Mitte doesn't have them either!) but it does offer less conventional clothing possibilities. I'd recommend a trip to the gigantic Bauhaus store on Hasenheide, directly across the road from Viet-café Hamy, our cut-price version of Mitte's Monsieur Vuong. At Bauhaus you can marvel at gorgeously utilitarian gas cannisters, chipboard slabs, orange-painted trolleys and red nested toolboxes.
Copying Jan Lindenberg -- my personal style guru, who uses them to soften his recycled MDF chairs -- I bought a €4.60 recycled Bauhaus packing blanket yesterday and modeled it for Hisae's camera right there in the store, to the amusement of Saturday shoppers. I run the pictures here so that Twit Opera and the Anons can mock me as if I weren't already mocking myself, and because ![[info]](http://l-stat.livejournal.com/img/userinfo.gif) milky_eyes was complaining yesterday about the absence of photos of me. Packing blankets -- like deep Neukolln -- are where it's at, man. You read it here first. |
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Man.
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Jul. 11th, 2009 @ 09:58 pm
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Jul. 11th, 2009 @ 11:48 pm
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Join us for the fastest growing wrestling podcast!!
COMING UP NEXT:
July 12th, 2009 - LIVE -6c/7e
The Impact Players: Wrestling Podcast, this week:Dan is back from Las Vegas, and his cannon is locked, cocked, and fully stocked.We look forward to giving you 120 minutes of wrestling bliss as only T.I.P. can. Between the 15 man draft, Ted DiBiase as the general manager, a new TNA knockouts champion, Mark Henry's Babyface push, the new talent initiative on ECW, and the forever evolving storyline between CM punk and Jeff Hardy it's needless to say we have our plates full and are looking forward to digging in face first.We are looking forward to seeing you in the chat room, and remember that if you listen live make sure you download the show for an extra 15 minutes of bonus material!As always if you have any comments, questions, problems, solutions, or answers feel free to contact us at theimpactplayers@live.com
The Impact Players: Wrestling Podcast, comes to you LIVE as always with the latest news on the wrestling industry. Also we will give you the fallout of TNA Slammiversary, RAW, ECW, and, SmackDown. And of course Travis-2-Times will present his weekly 60 Second Storyline, and Dan's weekly segment, "Dan the Cannon Has a Problem". The past couple of weeks, we have had record breaking numbers and we continue to spread the S.T.D.
PODCAST:
Every Sunday night at 4:00P/7:00E 'The Impact Players' go LIVE on the air, uncut and uncensored On BlogTalkRadio.com. Visit our chatroom live or call at 1-646-716-9232. You may click here to view past, present, and previews for future shows.
ABOUT US:
'The Impact Players' together is 'Shaun from Oklahoma', 'Travis-2-Times', and of course 'Dan the Cannon'. These three gentlemen are truely some of the smartest 'Smarks' in the wrestling industry. You may know this trio from ImpactWrestling.com's 'Week In Review' podcast, and have come together as one to put on one of the most amazing podcasts in internet history. They supply you the listeners with news, round table discussion, great wrestling ideas, facts, and your phone calls and e-mails.
Check it out guys!
http://www.blogtalkradio.com/theimpactplayers
Also join our website, for this week in wrestling updates, forums, and chat rooms...
http://theimpactplayers.webs.com/ |
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Does anyone have worthwhile resources on the decline of coastal shipping?
Bonus points if it covers labour history. Cheers. |
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I was just a smidge bit curious. It's too bad I don't feel comfy making public my friends only stuff. Feel free to skip over the youtube entries and entries that don't have much to do with anything. Perhaps that's more than the few I'm thinking of in my head. Happy Saturday. |
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 Scarlet (2009)
Written by: Jordan Summers
Genre: Paranormal Romance
Pages: 292 (Mass Market Paperback)
The premise: after the events of Red, Gina Santiago has settled in the town of Nuria with her werewolf boyfriend, Morgan. She's trying to control her own abilities, but can't, which makes her an outcast in the town of Others. It makes her job of forming a Nurian tactical team even more difficult, but everything goes to hell when Morgan is called away on an important but personal mission he won't tell anyone about but Gina. Now, Gina has to run a town of people that resent her, and what's worse, someone REALLY has it in for her: dead bodies start piling up, and all the evidence points to her. She's got to find a way to clear her name and get Morgan back before something far worse happens.
Waste of Time & Money: yes, it was that bad. What I loved about the first book, Red, wasn't even remotely present in this book, and so much about the plot and character motivations seemed contrived, not an organic part of character, setting, or story. The romance was obnoxiously labeled as love when it was obviously lust, and Gina is not the same character from before, which is frustrating as hell, because I don't want to read about a moping heroine trying to cope with her missing boyfriend (wait, isn't that what New Moon is about?). Too many POVs litter the landscape of 292 pages, and the story is nothing if not predictable. Certainly, it's a transition to the third and final book in the trilogy, Crimson, but I have no interest in reading forward, this book bothered me so much. I would've stopped reading if it hadn't been such a FAST read, and frankly, I wish I had. There's a scene towards the end that reminds me of what I've heard my romance-reading friends complain about: you know the trope where the "hero" rapes the heroine, and until the rape scene, she hates him but suddenly loves him because the "rape" is so good? No, that specific scene is NOT in this book, but there's a scene that very much reminds me of that trope. Consider that a warning to those readers who are fed up with rape or anything alluding to it in genre fiction.
At any rate, if you enjoyed the first book for its gritty horror elements and solid, tough-as-nails heroine, don't bother with this one, because neither element is present. Don't get me wrong, there are points in the book where it TRIES to bring those elements back, but not enough and far too late. Save yourself and skip this one, or if you must read it, I'd try borrowing it from somewhere.
Review style: stream of conscious, with spoilers. It's taken me six days to actually sit down and review this book, and yet I still feel the need to rant. So if you're up to it, click the link below to my journal for the full review. As always, comments and discussion are most welcome.
REVIEW: Jordan Summer's SCARLET |
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I am looking for a good biography on Thomas Paine... Any suggestions?
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Jul. 11th, 2009 @ 09:08 pm
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Hi! Could somebody help me with these translations? I bought a new book.
Ich habe eines neues Buch gekauft.
or,
I saw a nice red dress.
Ich habe eines nettes, rot(es) Kleid gesehen.
The endings confuse me.
Thank you!
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Jul. 11th, 2009 @ 08:47 pm
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What are your favorite ESL games for teenagers? |
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On Wednesday Yoshito, Naoko, Hisae and I took the train to Blankenfeld, a satellite suburb about 25 kilometers from central Berlin. Japanese friends had invited us to Workshop Japan, an afternoon presentation of the part-time work they'd been doing over the last three months, teaching German children about Japanese crafts, lifestyle, language and philosophy.
Coming from dense, Turkish Neukolln to Blankenfeld was like entering another world. After riding two trains and a bus we found ourselves skirting a poppy-dotted wheatfield in a thunderstorm. Boat-shaped suburban houses were surrounded by gnome-haunted gardens, many boasting ornamental fountains, statues of goats, and clumps of bamboo. Even in the heavy rain, we paused to marvel at flowers and plants we never see in the inner city.
At the school -- a clean, modern brick box -- ten-year-olds scurried about in Japanese headbands, guided by the friends who had invited us. Look, there's Ido-San, the performance artist! But today she's Ido-San, the judo instructor! Look, there's Saiko, the art student who works in the kitchen at Smart Deli! But today she's the kimono lady!
Like Superman, these friends of ours have secret powers. We thought they were artists, but after a quick change of clothes in a phone booth they become... ambassadors for Japan! Speculating idly as the slick Workshop Japan DVD played to the teeming assembly hall, I wondered if I too could earn money from the German government teaching "the Scottish Way" to kids? Is there even a Scottish Way worth learning? How do we arrange our gardens? How do we fight? How do we dress? Is it sufficiently different from the German way to warrant a three month course? Is it charismatic enough? Could this be what my Book of Scotlands leads to?
I suppose I was perceived as a parent at the Workshop Japan afternoon -- a parent nobody had ever seen before, not attached to any particular child. Like all the other "parents" I raised my Japanese digital camera and snapped dutifully during the kimono fashion show, as young German girls paraded past in unlikely kimonos featuring what looked like the double-headed eagle of the Hapsburg Empire.
In fact, if I was the "father" of anyone, it was the Japanese instructors themselves. It was with some kind of paternal pride that I told Saiko-San that the arrangement of hair at the back of her neck had achieved the pinnacle of iki beauty.
What I noticed, out at Blankenfeld, was that we all became different people there. In central Berlin the culture allows us to be somewhat ageless and cultureless. Out at Blankenfeld, we suddenly had ages and cultures. I was "old", the girls (in their mid to late 20s) were "responsible adults", and the kids were "kids". Your perceived age slotted you into this syntagmatic hierarchy, did away with equality, made you act a certain way. We also had more noticeable ethnicities. All the kids were white, and German. All the instructors were Japanese, and did stereotypically Japanese things, like paper-folding and flower-arranging. I passed, I guess, for a German.
Despite the emphasis on culture, there was less cultural mixing going on out at Blankenfeld than happens in central Berlin. Last week Ido-San did one of her multimedia performances in Neukolln -- an act that mixed Japanese and Western idioms. But out at Blankenfeld she was being 100% Japanese.
It was a relief to get back to dense, dirty Neukolln, where people are as various as flowers are in Blankenfeld. It seems to me that central Berlin is the exception and Blankenfeld the norm, in the sense that rather few places allow you to escape your age, your class, your race and your culture -- should you wish to! -- in the way that urban Berlin does. Here nobody ever says "Act your age!" or "Scots don't do that!" or "Be a man!"
But if it's a sort of freedom to escape your age, your gender, and your culture, it's also a sort of freedom to embody them gorgeously, generously, even stereotypically. Perhaps, out in blank Blankenfeld, my Japanese friends were suddenly free to express a repressed part of "themselves" -- the part, paradoxically, that we're not at liberty to change. |
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Jul. 10th, 2009 @ 11:54 pm
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Apparently the_silent_army has gone to get a life.
Sorry, didn't think it was mean enough for a deletion. Otherwise, be sure to check out his/her journal for several captivating text walls about anime video games that AREN'T VIDEO GAMES ABOUT ANIME BECAUSE THEY ARE SO TRANSCENDENT AS TO HAVE ACTUALLY BECOME ANIME OMG
Also, what does the_silent_army mean, "look harder"? Like a Magic Eye poster? Magic Text Wall? |
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Episode 067 of The Bugcast is now ready for you to download or subscribe to.
Some cracking music, and a change in signature tune... again!
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