Better than Eurovision

We were driving around Skania, looking at churches and castles and stuff and hit Dalby just after 3 pm. There were lots of young people rushing into the church, we thought there might be a wedding or something. But it was a choir, rehearsing for an evening recital.

About 25 young people, men and women, were practicing a gospel-sounding song that I had never heard before. They were so enthusiastic and the director, a very young man, was so energetically pulling sound from them and weaving an amazing song that we sat, fascinated. After a short deliberation over coffee we decided to skip attending the church service in Lund and instead go listen to this choir.

We got there early, but there was already a line. We managed to get seats rather far in the front, I was actually able to see the score, as I was just behind the elbow of the conductor. The choir, called Mixtum, presented a very varied program: Entire choir, women's choir, men's choir, solos, duetts, quartet, accompanied at various times by organ, piano, flute, guitar, djemba, tambourine - or just a capella.

They started with some standard Bach and a bit of Mozart and Purcell, then they sang a song that one of the conductors, Henrik Dahlgren, had composed. He arranged much of the gospel songs they sang later on in the program. My absolute favorite was the one we had heard during their practice: Days of Elijah, by Robin Mark. They were singing without a score, focused completely on Dahlgren, who was playing them like an instrument: louder, softer, repeat, modulate up, modulate back down. He had the whole church clapping along to the very catchy rhythm.

They closed with Ernst Toch's Geographical Fuge which was just hilarious! Time had just flown by, they had presented for over an hour and a half - and as the other conductor said: Hey, we could sing for 2 more hours if you would sit still for it. I believe her, they were so enjoying singing.

Much better than the songs of the Eurovision, and I'm so glad to see young people making music instead of just pushing buttons on a machine.

The Deep

The small movie theater across from the Cathedral in Lund had decided to extend the Icelandic film Djúpið (The Deep) for another week, so we were able to see it in original with Swedish subtitles. It is a film by Baltasar Kormákur, the Icelandic filmmaker who made the cult film 101 Reykjavik, among others.

It is a simple story - and a true one, apparently. Kormákur uses the first 3.5 minutes to check off all of the things that an Icelandic film must have: drunks; vomiting; pissing; gorgeous landscape of the Vestmannaeyjar (Westmann Islands); fighting over a girl. With that out of the way we see the hungover crew of a fishing boat take to the seas. They catch some fish, and have one bout of the nets getting caught on a jagged stone. They manage to free it, but soon the nets again get caught and the boat is threatening to sink. One of the sailors insists on cutting the net - the captain won't hear of it, as it is a brand-new net.

And so, the ship sinks.

Three of the crew die right away, two soon after. One guy, Gulli, solidly portrayed by Ólafur Darri Ólafsson, decides to swim to shore - a distance of about three sea miles or 6 kilometers. He starts swimming, and a sea gull decides to accompany him. He keeps swimming, and eventually reaches a rocky shore. But the cliffs are so steep - there is nothing else to do but to go back into the water and swim around the tip of the island to a place where he can draw himself up.

He walks over sharp lava in the freezing air back to town and collapses at the door of the first house. He is treated in the hospital, and then subjected to tests - how could anyone have survived this? It remains a mystery. He returns to his island, takes care of the things he had promised God he would attend to if he lived as he was swimming, and he returns to fishing.

A deeply moving movie, exposing many aspects of a people who live - and die - by the sea.

P!nk in Berlin

Ooooh, I had tickets to Alicia Beth Moore's concert in Berlin last Friday. That is the artist known as P!nk. It was in the large sports arena on the other side of town, I was not sure that it would be that cosy, as 14.000 people fit into the arena.

We went early to get some dinner, but the choice was extremely limited, so it ended up being fish & chips. We had good seats in the upper deck, on the aisle, except that people kept getting up to go get more food and drink. The band Churchill led off at the dot of eight. Kind of ho-hum, but it was something to listen to. They played for 30 minutes, and then they started getting everything ready for P!nk. We could see the technicians clearly, and they had a big problem: two computer screens were pitch black. The technicians were flipping switches, checking cords, restarting computers, all to no avail. There were no chickens sacrificed, but they fussed around for 45 minutes while the crowd grew a tad restless. We wanted music!

But oh, the wait was worth it! It was like a three-ring circus, you didn't know were to look next. And P!nk is quite the acrobat, pulling all sorts of fantastic stunts AND singing attached to some guy wires. In the finale she flies out over the crowd standing in the inner field, and came quite close to us even.

She sang the songs from "The Truth About Love", and played one round of drums and one song at the piano. She was skimpily dressed - as were many of the dancers - and there were lots of snide remarks of a scatological sort. But the music was great and the show fascinating. I'm glad we went!

Robbed again

Sigh. You just can't win. I suppose that I am now an old lady who makes a good mark. I spent the night in Zürich on my way to St. Gallen. I stayed in a lovely hotel in Glattbrugg that picked me up at the airport and really offered a lovely stay (Airport Best Western), much cheaper than the hotel directly at the airport. It is only a seven minute bus trip back to the airport, so I thought I would just do that instead of calling a cab. I waited at the bus stop, only to have the driver tell me that I needed to have bought a ticket on the other side of the street (no mention of this at the stop!), so I got back out, went over, and began to study the system. Soon an older woman, round and about my size came up and stood beside me, crowding me. I should have told her to get back, but instead I decided to quickly end my search for the cheapest fare and just pushed the button for the airport.

My bellypack was under my buttoned cape (it was raining). I had checked it - as I do about every 2 minutes while traveling - and thought it was well protected, because it was hidden, I felt. I dug out my change purse and put four coins into the machine, one after the other, lifting up my arm each time to do so.

Strangely, did woman didn't start to buy a ticket, but I didn't think anything of it. I went back across the street and did my luggage check routing - and my wallet was gone. I went back to the hotel to see if I had by mistake left it on the counter. No. I called the police (117 in Switzerland), they said: go to the police in Zürich Airport and inform them. Yeah, that helps.

I went back to the bus stop, and realized that the local cops were in a building near the bus stop, so I went in. They were very nice, gave me water and let me call Germany to stop my cards (the piece of paper with the telephone numbers is in my wallet. Need to re-think that). The cop didn't really want to take down anything, but I decided it was better - at least get it into the statistics. While working, he noted that just yesterday a lady had her wallet stolen and there was 3000 Franks taken out of her account before she could call up. Okay, she had her number written on the card.

The amount of personal information you have to give is immense. Name, birth name (Ledigenname, a wonderful non-sexist word, used to be Mädchenname), birthdate, birthplace, address, name of father and mother, profession.

I described what was in the wallet and was thankful that I had taken out all of the library cards. I also cursed my lazyness, should have put the Euros in a box in my bag instead of keeping them handy. And then I realized it was that lady who stole my wallet. I described her to the police as well as I could, but I didn't look at her face. So we filled out pages and pages of information, and I went on my way.

I find this quite disturbing to have been robbed twice within a year. I don't like to have to plan exactly what cards I am going to need in a day, I like to be spontaneous. And I really have been trying to pay cash for stuff. I suppose I need to more widely distribute my cash (I still have 30 € in various pockets, and my ID and one credit card were in an additional wallet in another pocket). And my next wallet will have a chain on it.

I wish my thief the worst of indigestion and various aches and pains, particularly in the place where her heart should be.

The Hunt

Berlin is a wonderful town for film-lovers! I mean, where can you go see a foreign film in the original language the same week it opens in German in the normal theaters? In the Hackische Höfe there is a theater (up about 4 flights of stairs and no elevator) that was showing Jagten, The Hunt, in Danish with subtitles. So when the decision was between Kon-Tiki and The Hunt, we chose the Hunt, on the theory that Kon-Tiki will still be playing in a few weeks.

We are probably right. Even though the film is on a very serious subject - a male kindergarten teacher is suspected of "doing something" to one of the children, and the whole thing escalates to the entire village being violent against the teacher (who loses his job), even though he didn't do anything. It shows the very fine line that one walks as a male who enjoys playing with children in this hyperreactive world.

The twisted ending after the village quickly forgives him when the girl makes it clear that she was just making everything up is not believable. It rather has the feel of having been cobbled together to get the film over with somehow. It is unsettling to see how whispers and believing the worst of someone can quickly serve to do them grave injustice.

And in a way, as one review has put it, quite an anti-feminism film, as it is the women who are all behaving so irrationally, blaming the man. This is far too black&white, although there are certainly women who would behave exactly as some of the women in the movie.

Not a movie for a fun evening, and not enough food for thought on this quite grave subject. Nice Danish, though, although much of the scenery seems to be more Swedish than Danish.

Python rules!

My students chose to have a lecture on Python as the last lecture of the semester this winter, so I had to spend a few days on the language. I'd never programmed in Python before, but since I've programmed in heaven knows how many languages* I was able to grasp the basic idea of the language and run some simple stuff I found on the web. It seemed interesting, although it uses whitespace as a block delimiter. Ah, that was one of my traumas, writing the paper "When Whitespace Conveys Meaning" that got itself rejected from a number of conferences. Horrible languages that use this.

Anyway, one of my takeaways was that this is a great language for throwaway programming, even better than awk. A friend finally convinced me that I really needed a large file of random garbage interspersed with plagiarized sentences for testing the software systems. So I decided to give it a try this afternoon.

Together with my student researcher (who is studying computing but had also never programmed with Python before) we sat down at 11.50 am and started googling. I fired up the environment, and we started to play. We had spoken through the algorithm at lunch yesterday. At about 12.25 my other student researcher showed up (a doctoral student in philosophy) and tried to understand what we were doing. At 12.35 we had a working Python program to generate a paragraph of garbage from the on-board dictionary.

After lunch we spent about 15 minutes getting the rest to work, but made an error way back in one method. I had exam proctoring, so I started the exam and then spent an hour rewriting the program (including comments, like I bitch at my students to do), using good variable names, and finding the error. The end result is highly parametrized (far too high for a throwaway program), easy to read program. In about 3 person hours. Done and delivered, and we can carry on. And: it was fun, even with the stupid indentations.

So yeah, I now understand all the excitement with Python. It rules! But still, I rather don't want it used in safety critical or vital systems ...


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* Basic, Fortran IV, COBOL, APL, awk, Perl, Pascal (various dialects), Occam, Ada, Java plus smatterings of report languages and database languages and compiler-compiler syntax and .....

Chocolates from the Deutsche Bahn?

There was a big package came in the mail today. From the Deutsche Bahn. Inside was a tin of hand-made chocolates and a letter apologizing for the train delay I experienced the middle of February when the trains were stopped/rerouted because of a supposed bomb threat.

Now, I already filled out the forms and got my 5,75 € refund. I asked for the refund as a certificate to be used on my next trip, except that it wouldn't accept the certificate for payment on my next trip. I cursed the DB, why can't they get it right like that bookseller from the States that I used to use? But I didn't write a bitching letter (or I have started writing them in my sleep). So do they have my laptop bugged, or did my Prof. Dr. dazzle them?

Whatever. Good chocolates.