For some reason, maintaining this blog is something I love putting off. I guess it's just hard to make time to sit back and reflect on things. That's probably a bad thing. A little reflection gives you a lot more clarity of mind at the end of the day. Writing more was actually my new year's resolution, as Suneet kindly reminded me about the other day. Anyway, a couple things I wanted to write about.
Language. I was talking with my buddy Marlon the other day about learning a language and how he first started learning French because he met a beautiful girl from Madagascar... who only spoke French. Got me thinking about maybe my favorite commercial of all time. Got a couple of good things going for it. First - the song is by Air. Second, the actor is Gael Garcia Bernal, of Motorcycle Diaries and Science of Sleep fame. Third, it's just really well done. Here's the video from youtube.
Hitchhiking. I've been reading alot of Hunter S. Thompson lately... and for anyone familiar with the Fear and Loathing books, HST loves picking up hitchhikers. Typically it's the source of great amusement for him... largely because the odds are that he's alot more whacked out than the passenger. Anyway, it just so happens that Ash and I had our own little experience with hitchhiking the other day. So... we were in Geneva until midnight. There looked like there'd be a bus back home... but it turned out the bus only went about halfway to where we needed to go. We tried to wait for a connecting bus to get us the rest of the way, but it never came. So, we're standing next to the road at 1:30 in the morning, coming to terms with the fact that we've got a five-mile hike in pretty cold weather... and Ashley's wearing extremely uncomfortable shoes. We get less than a minute into the walk, and this beat-up red hatchback passes us, stops, and then backs up. The window rolls down and a voice asks us if we need a ride. Typically, Ashley would have never accepted the invitations, but it was late and it was exactly what we needed. So, we got in. Anyway, it turned out the guy was a Pakastani Physicist who was just finishing up his doctorate at the research institute - CERN - that we had just passed. He thought we looked cold, so he wanted to help. Not only did he end up giving us a ride to the next town; he took us all the way home.More Cowbell. Just took the dogs outside around midnight, and it's sort of cool. It's perfectly quiet except for hundreds of cowbells ringing faintly in the distance. For some reason or another, all the cows have big Will-Ferrell-style cowbells around their necks that clang whenever the cows move. I'd imagine that could get annoying after awhile - both for the farmer and the cow.Butter. Speaking of cows and farmers, there's a really funny campaign going on right now in Switzerland. It's all about butter, and how people need to be eating more of it. Here's the butter link . I guess it's alot like the Got Milk commercials, except that I've gathered butter is pretty much bad for you. Isn't that why there are all those spreads like Promise? Butter leads to heart disease, etc.? Anyway, it amuses me... in large part because Americans are supposedly so health conscious... and here are the Swiss... eating chocolate, smoking cigarettes, drinking lots of wine and eating lots of butter... and they still live longer than we do!
