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2004-06-29
See me zoooooom!
I'm finally on DSL! Yay!
Let me tell you that DSL and 54MBit WLAN make a very nice combination indeed. Once the morons of Deutsche Telekom (called Telekomedians around here, although it's mostly black humour you need to deal with them) got their asses into gear and realized that yes, the phone is registered on my wife and yes, the DSL line was ordered on my name, things went soothly, larger downloads are now bearable again, and online banking is running much more smoothly, too. Also, using WLAN for the house network seems to have been a good idea so far: far less cables lying around, and when we move the computers into a different room, no need to worry about running cables through walls. If only the network cards were a bit cheaper...
Of course, the WLAN is only running with WEP encryption and I still need to get WPA going after finally having acquired updated, WPA-capable drivers for my DLink card from DLink Taiwan (available there for more than half a year) because DLink Germany are obviously sitting around with their heads up their collective asses and seem to think that no-one really wants to have a secure WLAN anyway, so why bother. That observation seems to be mostly correct when you look at statistics about WLAN security, but I want my wireless home network to be secure, and it's not like providing a link to download those drivers from the mindbogglingly borken German DLink support site would have been a whole lot of work.
Anyway, the war driver density around here is probably rather low, and I think I'll get WPA going next weekend, so all is well for now.
On a different note, we watched Woman on Top last weekend in a desperate attempt to get away from all the European Soccer Championship footage. If you read the comments on IMDB, you get the idea that a lot of the people there approached that movie as if it were a rendition of "War and Peace", starring equivalents of Audrey Hepburn and Spencer Tracy and then were severely disappointed to find out that this was not the case.
Well, duh! I mean, it's a US-made romantic comedy and fairy tale, so of course it's predictable, flat, and kitchy, has no script to write home about, with acting roughly on par with the rest of the performance. And expecting the first class enactment of the role of a northern Brazilian cook in a fishing village from Spanish actress (and I use the word loosely) Penelope Cruz starring in a US movie is just tempting fate to be disappointed, in my book.
All that aside, it's fun to watch. Mindless, chick flick fun, but fun nonetheless. Penelope Cruz does what she does best, i.e. look hot. The latin music is easy on the ears and eminently forgettable, John deLancie's excellent acting fails to rescue the movie, and the movie was short with some of the plot holes feeling as if they were due to cuts instead of just a generally weak script. How that movie acquired its R rating for strong sexuality in the US is rather beyond me, though. OK, I can see how the US won't rate it "6 years and up" as it is in Germany, but PG-13 would have been playing it plenty safe, in my opinion.
Except, if someone thought that presenting some poor redneck with a transvestite or male-to-female-transexual in one of the most important supporting roles would have caused a brain stem overload from too much sexual confusion in the poor beleagered guy's mind or something. I, of course, found it to be one of the few redeeming features of the movie, together with the ending that of course was happy but saw the female lead character retain her strength and her transgression of macho ideas, in that she continues to be on top during sex (hence the title) and to be the one behind the weel in cars and on motor bikes.
Just think about it: a comedy, with a transvestite or even a transexual, because (s)he basically lived as a woman. This alone would normally be enough to make me shudder from all the bad, tasteless, cringe-inducing jokes about "trannies" and effeminate men that almost inevitably follow from such a setup. "Woman on Top" has some of those, too, but they are few, and most of the jokes derived from this particular setup were less cheap, garish, and slap-your-thigh, and rather more low-key and smile-inducing than I had feared. Plus, said transvestite/transexual actually scores a male partner in the happy end, which probably sent the homophobes spinning and may account for that otherwise not quite understandable R rating.
If you want some cheap entertainment and mindless fun, or another excuse to ogle Penelope Cruz, you could probably do worse than watching this movie together with you significant other(s). Just don't expect high art were there isn't any.
2004-06-24
Truth, Fiction, Stranger
Read this. Pay attention to the fifth paragraph. Weep. Or Laugh.
You just can't make this shit up.
2004-06-23
Babyvision
I have been spending a lot of time and energy on getting the Plain Layne Archive into a reasonably presentable shape, so I don't feel much of an inclination to blog at the moment. But Monday evening sure deserves to be treated to a few paragraphs.
Standard operating procedure for pregnant women in Germany is to have three ultrasounds, one after the pregnancy is detected, but no earlier than week 6, another around week 20, and a third somewhere around week 35. The week 20 ultrasound is special in that lots of diagnostics are run which require a better ultrasound device than most ob/gyns in Germany have, so our ob/gyn referred us to a another colleague for our 20 week ultrasound this Monday.
We had to wait almost an hour until the doc had time for us, which upset both my wife due to her not feeling all that well and myself because I could easily have done some necessary shopping in that time. When it was finally our turn, the doctor was polite, apologetic, and friendly, though, and we quickly amid much banter proceeded to the ultrasound.
To be fair, the equipment he used was miles better than what our ob/gyn has at her disposal. The resolution was much better, and we had a good look at the little heart beating away at 135 bpm, the little kidneys filled with fluid, the tiny arms and legs, the head, the hands, the feet, and the crotch ("kiddie porn" the ob/gyn joked), and yes, it's definitely a girl! Using some kind of Doppler-effect he was even able to make the heartbeat audible and ascertain that the valves in her heart are working correctly.
The most amazing aspect of the evening to me, exceedingly visual creature that I am, was the ability of the ultrasound equipment to take the data and convert it into a 3-D picture of the little human being ( this is what we're talking about here). Seeing the electronic replica of your child's face months before the actual birth is certainly strange, but just as certainly it's another "grin" moment. Wow. Just wow. I'll see if I can be arsed to walk over to the in-laws and scan in a few of the pictures we got. I mean, we're five months into the pregnancy and there isn't a single belly or ultrasound picture on this site - we just can't have that! ;-)
One thing is sure now. Finding a name for the little girl will require some sort of compromise between us. Just weeks into the pregnancy we had settled on a name for a boy, but it had become clear that agreeing on a name for a girl woudn't be quite so easy. The current top candidate is Mara Helena, followed by Maja (pronounced Maya) Helena, and seeing as there are only letters S-Z left in that "8000 Names - Their History and Meaning" book, it looks like this is what we may end up calling our little girl. My wife somehow likes Mara, and no, the protagonist in Feist and Wurt's Empire Trilogy seems not to have been a factor in this. I like Maja better because it's softer, but then my favourite is Helena, which is my contribution to the name. My wife got to pick which of the two would go first, but I would have picked the same order, so all is well.
For more baby blogging goodness (not ours, but vastly more entertaining than what you can read here) hie thee to Trixie Update and Dooce. And yes, I know that Dooce is terribly borked and unreasonably hard to navigate around in as a result, which is why I normally wouldn't link the site here, but it's just too darn entertaining to ignore.
2004-06-15
May Contain Nuts
If you're coming here to find information about Plain Layne and her hiatus, I will just have to disappoint you. I don't know, now anymore than the last time, anything about why she scrapped her blog and replaced it with a faked Squid error page in Polish of all things, or if and when she may return. I contribute all I have to say on the matter on the dedicated Plain Layne comment thread over on Joshua's Strip Mining For Whimsy and possibly the Plain Layne Comment Box community on Orkut.
For what it's worth, I don't see my contribution to this debate in engaging in speculation, but in curbing the wildest excesses by correcting errors in the facts and assumptions other people post there, if and when I spot them and am reasonably certain of the facts myself.
I also disapprove of the way some people talk now, as if the non-existence of Layne were a foregone conclusion, and badmouthing, flaming or other disrespectful language were therefore absolutely OK. Yes, I understand that some people are convinced she isn't real, and they feel hurt, betrayed, embarassed, upset, and any number of other negative emotions towards whoever they think is behind all this. I would, too, if I were convinced she isn't real, which right now I am not. But please, do everyone involved a favor and watch your language, will you?
2004-06-10
The Human Touch
Female hormones just have to be some of the weirdest substances on the whole planet: they make women bleed semi-regularly, they occasionally turn a warm, friendly woman into a shrieking shrew just before she starts bleeding, and other strange effects. The hormones of pregnancy are weirder still: they make boobs grow while at the same time negating any possible positive result by making those nice round boobs too sensitive to even think about touching, they make the woman you love even more attractive, and the weirdest of all, they even seem to work on friends whom you haven't seen in half a decade and who live 200 kilometers away.
How else to explain the strange changes in our relatively small circle of friends? Our best friend, a perpetually single and intensely private woman with a calm warmth and compassion that makes her pure pleasure to be around despite the fact that she is hiding most of her inner life from us and quite possibly even from herself, seems to have withdrawn even further since she has learned about our new status as expecting parents. I can kinda sorta understand this (the whole friends turning into parents phenomenon), but we are trying, and I think so far succeeding, to be as low-key about the pregnancy as possible. Add to this the strange fact that my wife, who has so far been the far more communicative of us both, suddenly hates talking on the phone at least as much as I normally do, and we have the serious possibility of our friendship lapsing into silence on our hands. I sure hope I can phone her up over the coming weekend, but even that is far from certain as she works irregular shifts in a hospital. Damn.
On the other hand, there is the equally strange case of the Miserable Quartett, which was formed by my wife and three other female students who helped each other through the exams, sharing each other's highs and lows in the university years. After uni, the MQ dispersed, my wife going someplace south of Berlin, one staying in the city, and the remaining two moving into towns and cities a bit north of Berlin. Communication soon grew less and less, and it's been several years since we've seen anyone in the MQ in person. But somehow, news of our pregnancy must have worked itself through the grapevine in record time, and invitation for a barbeque evening in a small village smack dab in the middle of a decidedly rural area about two hours away soon followed, and Saturday saw us spending a pleasent evening with old friends and their kids, three quarters of the MQ joined again after all those years.
On our way back, my wife remarked upon something that I had noticed myself on occasion but hadn't yet put much thought into, but was reminded of again on Tuesday when browsing through the wonderful marriage photographs over at David Grenier's.
It seems that we are a couple for whom physical contact is of supreme importance, and that we are pretty much alone in this among the people we know: We hug and kiss frequently, even after having been an item for more than a dozen years. We can never just sit on the couch and watch a movie, we have to snuggle. She prefers falling asleep with her head on my chest or belly to any other possible position. When eating, we prefer sitting side by side to sitting opposite of each other because that way we can just lean over and let our shoulders touch, or sneak a hand under the table to give the other's thigh a stroke or two. When one of us stands somewhere, the other will fondle their butt and/or kiss their neck when passing by. When we take a walk in the woods or around the lake here, we walk hand in hand (or at least pinky in pinky, which is far more comfortable for us considering our difference in height) whenever the path is broad enough. And we will often stand arm in arm and joined at the hips, or me behind her with my hands around her hips and my head over one of her shoulders, her head lightly resting against my chest, when we are talking with somebody.
We have occasionally earned raised eyebrows or strange looks especially for that last one, but we wouldn't have it any other way, physical contact is that important for us as a means to communicate our feelings. This, of course, is not restricted to just us. My wife frequently hugs some of the people, mostly elderly or mentally retarded, she comes in contact with on a professional basis, she often touches people in her line of work to diagnose a problem or ascertain a previous diagnosis, which takes people by surprise because apparently most people working in the medical sector seem to have completely abandoned touch as a diagnostic tool, relying solely on sight and chemical analysis instead. And me, shy, private me, I have to take myself back occasionally lest I touch or hug people to communicate comfort, commiseration, joy, or any number of other feelings when we are not sufficiently close to make that socially acceptable.
Oh well, at least, we can hug each other freely, which I will go and do now, that my wife is coming home from work.
2004-06-01
First Contact
I had been just about to pour my first cup of breakfast tea this morning, when I heard my wife calling from the bedroom, a slight note of urgency in her voice. Having gotten used to the problems her extremely low blood pressure can occasionally cause, as well as beeing acutely aware of all the stretching and growing going on in her abdomen right now and the pain this is sometimes causing her, I carefully put the tea can down and rushed off to the bedroom...
... to find my wife, comfortably reclining under her blanket, ellbows propped up on a pillow, smiling at me.
"What's happened?" I asked, still a mild note of concern in my voice.
"It's moving." my wife answered, "come and feel it."
So I did. Well, almost. I came to the bed, sat down, put my hand on her softly rounding belly, and felt absolutely nothing.
The wee one had been pulling that particular trick a few times before. First, kick around in mom's belly to work up the excitement, then, when dad is finally there, keep your head down, lie still, and see how long you can hide from everyone. Repeat. Not that I blame anyone. After all, it must get damn boring when all you have for entertainment besides yourself are the ambient noise of a digestive tract occasionally augmented by mom's or dad's voice or the music box playing Brahm's Lullaby, and an umbilical cord.
But my wife would have none of that this time. So she put my hand which I had withdrawn back on her belly. She then proceeded to tenderly poke her own softly bulging roundness.
The answer was a kick/punch/head butt that was felt right through her skin on my hand and from there was apparently directly channelled into my pleasure center. I mean, how else to explain the grin distorting my facial features in such a way that (after passionately kissing my wife) I had to consciously wipe it off my face in order to be able to resume eating my breakfast?
But if the wee one is reacting to a gentle poke with such a hefty kick, what does it think about all the sex-induced jostling it was subjected to over the pentecost weekend? Or is it just getting high on mom's endorphines on such occasions? :-)
Questions, questions...
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