In München
Posted on October 21, 2011 Posted by John Scalzi 36 Comments
München, of course, being what the Germans call Munich, and when in Germany, etc.
It occurs to me that during my entire trip here in Germany I have not done one of my customary “view from the hotel window” pictures, so let me rectify that right now, lest I incurr the Wrath of the Internets at a time when I am least able to point and laugh at the Internets for being all wrathified. The view is of the back of some building, but as building backs go, it’s really not that bad. My hotel room is charming, and in roughly an hour I pile myself into a taxi to visit my German publisher’s offices, where I’ll meet the fine folks who put my books out into the German bookstores, and then it’s off to the Amerika Haus, where I have my last public appearance. And then, yes, we’re going to a Hofbrauhaus. Because when in Bavaria, etc.
Your plans for the day? Share with the crowd.
For now, work. Tonight, family dinner out for the wife. Looking forward to that.
Hoping to get a wetsuit and then maybe do some surfing…
Though I think I’ve just been inspired to visit one of the local beer gardens before it gets too cold.
Cause, you know, when with alcoholics…
For her birthday, that is. Maybe I should just go home already…
Go to Paulaner on Marienplatz. You won’t get anything out of the beer (I sure did, though) but the food was pretty good. My visit there in 2000 was the first time German potato salad made sense to me.
I believe I was in the same hotel when I was in Munich/en.
Lovely, lovely city… and the (delicious) beer is cheaper than bottled water.
Have a wonderful time, not that you need my instruction on the matter.
Cheers
Headed to the beach for an office team-building weekend. It should be fun.
Getting ready for the movers to arrive and pack my life into their truck. Then I do a walk-through with the landlord, a yard sale, and, on Sunday, begin a 2,100-mile drive to a new home, which I’ve never visited before (wife went out and picked it; I just signed the paperwork). So not very busy.
(Also: I was in Munich in February — did a reading in the basement shooting range of a police station there. Police made sure to shoot a bunch of rounds a couple hours earlier so that the place smelled of cordite. Germans seem to really know how to make a reading an event.)
My apologies, it wasn’t Paulaner, it was Bayrischer Donisl.
I quite liked Munich, where I was years ago after convincing a SciFi Film Festival and an Aerospace Conference that they could both have me as a keynote speaker if they pooled their money. They did, and I was in a VIP entourage which included MIR Cosmonauts.
Today? Well, every day since 6 July 2010 I have my fiction writing quota of 2,000 words. That was 10 novels and 915,050 words ago. So first I’ll fix the typos I saw in the Nth pass, yesterday, and fix them in the two concurrent novels. Then I’ll write Ch.29 of Pirates & Dinosaurs; and Ch.232 of Alzheimer’s War.
Here are the titles of the 3 novels I’ve written, and posted chapter by chapter on Facebook, since the start of September 2011. All the while continuing to write and post chapters of the epic trilogy Alzheimer’s War.
(1) WaterMusic (Paradena), started 4 Sep 2011, completed 17 Sep 2011, 188 pp., 48,400 words;
(2) Lonelyheart Locusts, started 20 Sep 2011, completed 26 Sep 2011, 190 pp., 52,550 words;
(3) Pirates & Dinosaurs, started 3 Oct 2011, as of today: 181 pp. = 48,050 words of story, of 250 pp. total (because there are endnotes on, well, Pirates, Dinosaurs, desert islands, naval architecture and strategy).
So here’s a one sentence summary of each:
(1) WaterMusic: one of my Paradena = Axiomatic Magic novels, in an alternate Earth where both Science and magic Work; this one centering on the Observatory of Prester John, in Mongolia, fighting an incursion of evil from yet another alternate Earth.,
(2) Lonelyheart Locusts, what if the historical Nathanael West, author of “Miss Lonelyheart” and “The Day of the Locust” did not die in the 1940 car crash, but became a maverick Hollywood studio boss, mixed up with Marilyn Monroe, Albert Einstein, and Charlie Chaplin.
(3) Pirates & Dinosaurs: Time Machine and crew from the mid 21st Century bring a Cretaceous dinosaur to a desert island at 1 January 1800, and soon run into a contemporary 1800 pirate ship, and an out-of-time 12th century Crusader pirate ship. Not done yet, see my Facebook Wall every day, as some of my roughly 3,000 “friends” do!
Also need to water & pick cherry tomatoes, walk the dog, clear out of the room the Tax Year 2010 documents now that the joint return for me, wife, and 3 businesses were filed by 15 Oct 2011. Make a math submission intended to be my 2,980th contribution to The Online Encyclopedia of Integer Sequences. Then there’s final rewrite on “Sumeria to the Stars” already compressed from the 16,000 words submitted to under 10,000 words, per request of the anthology editor. And a final rewrite of the paper accepted by the journal Cosmology, on consciousness in the cosmos, edited by the #1 astrobiologist Chandra Wickramasighe, who used to be a co-author with Fred Hoyle. Cosmology and Science Fiction, I’ve got to keep doing both.
Munchen is my second favorite city in Germany. Heidelberg is the first.
My plans for the day are work, work, workity work, then beer, beer, beerity beer. At some point I have to make a grocery list.
Well, I’ll go see this author at the Amerikahaus, and later apparently Hofbräuhaus for some Scalzi-stalking MUHAHHAHA
Been busy around the house this morning. Planning our 2012 trip to London right now, and later will dig into Rin Tin Tin Susan Orlean.
My plans for the day? Watch my shows, and while doing so, complete a plastic canvas tissue box I started working on yesterday. I’m a disabled crafter, and anyone who’s interested can see some of my work here:
http://www.craftedelegance.org/index.php?page=shop.browse&manufacturer_id=12&vmcchk=1&option=com_virtuemart&Itemid=93
I’m also waiting to hear from my local craft store whether or not they can find me enough yarn so I can finish a sweater I promised to make for a friend. I started it last year, and when it got too warm here (Houston) to work on it, I put it away until this year, and didn’t realize until I was almost finished with it that I’m probably not going to have enough yarn to finish it. And now I can’t find the same yarn locally anymore.
Sounds like you’ve had a great trip, Scalzi! Enjoy your evening!
Clean, shop, look for work, have friends over – a typical Friday.
Going shopping for ingredients for black bean and sweet potato chili (recipe: http://www.care2.com/greenliving/black-bean-sweet-potato-chili.html) which I will not cook until tomorrow because I’m using dried black beans, which must soak overnight.
Finishing up a small editing job.
EMPHATICALLY NOT doing any more of my day job until Monday morning. TIRED.
Today’s task list is:
1) Write a podcast review for my podcast review blog (http://viddyviddy.blogspot.com if you’re interested).
2) Tidy at least one room in the house.
3) Purchase massive amounts of garlic, roast it and then devour it messily.
4) Purchase cinnamon marshmallows, make rice krispy treats (these are AMAZING, highly suggest trying them).
Beautiful – some day I will have to make it over to visit the motherland.
Today’s agenda involves recovering from last night’s Michael Monroe show at the Whiskey and the after-show at the Rainbow, where the Songwriter reliably informs me I made many new friends and sang the Finnish national anthem, before pounding the table and demanding we go to Denmark for the summer. The evening is somewhat fuzzy after that…
But aside from recovery, it’s work: Writing for a client and writing my episode of a webseries I’m doing with my writers’ group peeps.
Has anyone asked about the exotic animal release and “Ohio, wtf?!?!”. ?
work work work – 5:04pm get on the train, 6:01pm get to Schnitzel Platz in “beautiful downtown” Glendale Heights, Illinois (taxi?) – the beer by the Litre (Weihenstephaner Hefeweissbier Dunkel
is on tap!) “oompah” music by Hank and Dave – merriment will be enjoyed by all….then (taxi?) home to sleep it off
Kay:
Your cinnamon-marshmallow-rice krispie treats sound extremely relevant to my interests. Please, tell me more!
Mixed bag today. On line job hunting while watching season 1 of Wearhouse 13 on Netflix. Updating the inventory for my Etsy shop. Eventually I’ll move the cat off my lap & take several bills to the Post Office.
Or Warehouse, as the case may be. Getting more caffeine may also be in order.
Okay, now I’m not a Münchner, but as far as I know there is only one Hofbräuhaus, (the one from this song) so no need for “a”.
Which makes me ask the USians here: do you have lots of Hofbräuhäuser in the US? I remember seeing various Oktoberfests in Wisconsin when I was there on exchange in the 80s, but no mentioning of a chain or franchise of Hofbräuhäuser.
Giving math tests all day (on the last one now). Bridge tonight with my neighborhood bridge group. Then blissful sleep.
Workworkworkworkworkbeerfootballsleep.
Follow-up to my plans for today.
(1) wrote, emailed friends and neirology experts, posted first half on facebook: Ch. 232: “General Intelligence” of the novel/trilogy Alzheimer’s War [draft of 8:50-10:20, Friday 21 Oct 2011, 26 pages double-spaced; 7,000 words];
(2) My my 2,980th contribution to The Online Encyclopedia of Integer Sequences was made, and an editor already published it: my comment The subsequence of primes begins: 79, 211, 269, 571, 1511, 1979, 3761, 4481, 5821, 6709, 7019. [Jonathan Vos Post, Oct 21 2011] to A198017 n*(7*n+11)/2 + 1.
https://oeis.org/A198017
Today’s a break from the World Series. Baseball’s World Series, the 107th of which had Game #3 yesterday, and will have Game #3 Saturday, is embedded in a mysterious probability-distortion field.
Sometimes it goes a neck & neck 7 games, as with the Arizona Diamondback’s walk-off victory over Mariano Rivera and the Yankees in 2001, or the 1986 Boston Red Sox meltdown against the New York Mets.
So, assume the teams are evenly matched — both the purportedly the best of their league — and simulate a World Series by flipping a fair coin, where each team has a 50% chance of winning each game. The
winner is the first to achieve victory in 4 games total. What the simulations shows: about 31% of the time, the series goes 7 games. About 31% of the time, the series lasts exactly 6 games. 1/4 of the
time, it ends in 5 games. 12.5% of the time, it’s a 4-game sweep.
However, the so-called Real World refuses to conform to those odds.
20 actual World Series encounters since the best-of-7 format froze in (102 series total) were 4-game sweeps, seven more than pure chance predicts. 20 have gone exactly 6 games, nine fewer than the predicted
32 in coin flippage. 34% (35 of …them) went the full 7 games, most recently a decade ago with the Anaheim Angels over the San Francisco Giants. I was teaching Astronomy then, 2002, Cypress College, in
Orange County, and the students went nuts of the victory from their country. We’d have predicted 32 of the 102 World Series collisions would last 7 games.
Anyone know why? I don’t.
Plans for today? Fight crime!
Going to Tulsa’s Oktoberfest tonight!
Also fending off jealousy because I love Hofbrauhaus. They have the most awesome roast chicken, potato soup and my second favorite beer in the whole world.
what will I do tonight? the same thing I do everynight,. Plan to take over the World!
– Narf
My wife, an experimental physicist, when I trotted out the World Series reduced to coin flips, concluded (I paraphrase): so you have a low signal to noise measurement of imponderables about human beings in groups psyching each other out.”
I have not yet managed to write Ch.29 of Pirates & Dinosaurs. But Facebook friends gave good advice relating to some actions described in a specific book of the Aubrey–Maturin series, a splendid sequence of nautical historical novels—20 completed and one unfinished—by Patrick O’Brian, set during the Napoleonic Wars
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aubrey%E2%80%93Maturin_series
Instead, I complied with my attorney’s request, and filled in some gaps in what became a single-spaced 16 pages, 4930 words, Timeline cross-referenced to emailed and snailmailed documents, related to a deranged student of mine who severely injured me, and whose criminal trial-setting date is 25 October 2011, and against whom I am requested to testify by a deputy District Attorney. Until I fictionalize this, years from now, best to say little more.
Say, speaking of the Yankees, if the Libyan who “captured” Muammar Gaddafi was “A Man Wearing A Yankees Cap” — is that the greatest Yankees victory this season?
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2011/10/21/is-mohammed-al-bibi-libya_n_1023882.html
My day consisted of a 3 hour nap, and 3 hours of doing paperwork for my brand new job :)
Couldn’t have planned it better.
Here, a quiet day – a mix of the usual.
Jonathon: does the phrase ‘too much information’ ring a bell?
Walk my dog. Start writing my first academic journal submission. Clean the living room in preparation for a pre-Winter reconfigure, necessary to uncover my baseboard electric heaters. Make a pot roast.
Somebody buy Jonathan a TL;DR hat.
Wibble decryption: Literally, “Too long; didn’t read” Said whenever a nerd makes a post that is too long to bother reading.
Post is not my middle name; it’s my last name. And yes, I’m a nerd. And yes, I write more than most people read. As of this morning’s Chapter 29 “Hyperspace Convention” of the 3rd novel I’ve written since the start of September, I’ve written 923.050 words of fiction since 6 July 2011. Good luck with your first academic journal submission. I remember what that feels like. I’m somewhere past 3,900 such publications, presentations, and broadcasts. Which does not count my own 15-year-old 15,000,000 hit/year web domain, nor blogs. Including Mr. Scalzi’s great one.
Different paths to power and wealth.
“How come China can produce a Mao Tse-tung but not a Steve Jobs?” grumbled one iPad fan on the Sina tribute board, back in 2011.
“Steve Jobs biography: His thoughts on Android, cancer, Bill Gates”,
21 October 2011 | 12:25 pm, as downloaded 22 Oct 2011 from
http://latimesblogs.latimes.com/technology/2011/10/steve-jobs-biography-android-cancer.html
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