Events

Local Manchester, N.H., television station WMUR mentioned my weather application on the news last night: There was only one place in the world colder than Mount Washington this morning: the south pole. The weather website wx now.com says the summit's temperature of 35 degrees below zero early this morning was the second coldest reported temperature on the entire planet. I can't wait to see the Google analytics.

The Bode-Museum: Brandenburg Tor: And another view of the Reichstagsgebäude:

Oh, joy. Tomorrow night into next week, Chicago could set some cold-weather records for the month of February: Daytime highs Wednesday and Thursday are predicted to reach no higher than single digits [Fahrenheit] over much of the area–a rare development this late in a cold season. Just how rare?? There have been a grand total of 17 single digit daytime highs beyond Feb. 17 over the past 144 years which averages out to JUST ONE single digit high beyond Feb 17th per decade! The chill’s not going away...

I've finally pulled my photos off my real camera, but as I have actual work to do for my employer, it'll take a couple of days to publish some of them. This one, though, this one I'll publish today: This guy chased me around a park in Słubice. This may be a life-size image, too. Once I crouched down to take his photo, he got a little freaked out, and bounced around for a while before his owner called him back. That was the most hostile reaction I got from any living thing in Poland or Germany last week.

After nearly a week walking my ass off in reasonable early-spring weather, I arrived back in Chicago last night to -11°C, which dropped to -15°C for my commute this morning. It is strangely not comforting that it has been this cold this late on only 12 days since 1871. Or that it's going to be even colder Wednesday and Thursday. Will it warm up? Eventually. But the National Climate Prediction Center forecasts below-average temperatures for the next couple of weeks. It was really nice to be able to walk...

(Posted retrospectively on Feb. 17.) Roger Ebert once said that good movie reviews were good, but bad movie reviews were fun. Anthony Lane's review of the film adaptation of Fifty Shades of Grey falls into the latter category: Who could conceivably play Christian Grey, the awkward young billionaire with the extensive neckwear collection, let alone Anastasia Steele, the English-lit major who is also, as we gasp to learn, one of the leading virgins of Vancouver, Washington? Many combinations were...

Since last report, I've spent time at two bars known for their craft beer selection. Even though I've seriously reduced my beer intake for a variety of reasons (especially its effect on my Fitbit numbers), spending a couple of days away from home let me feel a certain license in my consumption. Friday night, therefore, I found Kaschk, a Swedish-owned pub on the fringes of the Mitte district in the former East Berlin. Within a few moments of entering I knew I'd come to the right place: Old Rasputin on...

Berlin's Tegel airport is supposed to close at some point, so I shouldn't be too surprised at some of the, ah, artifacts in the place. For example, in the A terminal, the security checkpoints only control pairs of gates, so once you're through you're totally stuck with whatever concessions are inside that gate pair. In my case this means €9,60 (about $12.50) for a ham sandwich and a latte. (Come to think of it, that's about what it would cost at Starbucks...) This is apparently a feature, not a bug...

Another big walking day in sunny weather took me up to Bernauerstraße and the Gedenkstätte Berliner Mauer (Berlin Wall Memorial): That's a mostly-preserved but partially-reconstructed section of the wall at the corner of Bernauerstraße and Ackerstraße, near the site where the first person trying to flee over the wall was killed. It's hard to imagine that the place I'm sitting now was once in East Berlin, just a few hundred meters from the place by the Wall where Reagan gave his famous speech in 1987. I...

Nobody, I think, visits Germany for the food (or the UK, for that matter), but when in Berlin, one does as...a tourist to Berlin. And that is why I got suckered in by this guy: And ordered this: That is (literally) a hot mess of grilled pork and chicken (though which bits no one can say) in a cream-of-mushroom sauce with some fried potato bits on the side. You think yesterday had surplus calories? I am actually shocked that Germany isn't as fat as the US, on average. Fortunately, I walked another 14.5...