live pod blogging

we're in a pod

360deg podcam

which certainly beats being anywhere else in heathrow airport

for dougie, and for sally

genius

music and cholesterol

We haven't posted any food pictures in a while, so here you go. This little concoction has many recorded names - our favorite is probably the "one-eyed egyptian sandwich." That said, around these parts (ie, our apartment) it is known exclusively as a "pirate in the hold." The ship on the right is armed with sausage cannons.

the only real events of note, aside from it being Lebkuchen season, is the ridiculous abundance of concerts at the moment. Berlin has a fairly good music scene, although it tends to come in spurts. We are now mid-spurt. Last week was Grizzly Bear, who were awesome. Not much more to say, other than we also got to learn about the autoharp over the course of their set, which was cool. More interesting, at least from a blogging perspective, was the opening act St. Vincent, who in addition to rawking, inspired a number of hilarious comparisons: "the artist formerly known as the female prince," "indie-rock björk," "mary timony with a perm," and something else involving mark knopfler. Monday was Do Make Say Think, who had moments of brilliance, and got bonus points for having four trumpets on stage at once. However they sounded a bit muddled at times, perhaps because there were 9 people crammed onto a very small stage. Next up: Yo La Tengo on Monday, followed by Great Lakes Swimmers on Tuesday.

I'm off to watch Liverpool try and repair an absolutely dismal run of football. Will they beat Man. City? Will they?

belated halloween spirit

Kate was recently away in Chicago for a week-long neurobiology conference (which she'll tell you all about). I tried to make the most of her absence by spreading out 15 years of photos across our living room, making a massive mess in the process. The master plan being to organize, scan, and back-up everything.

It was an audacious plan. And while some level of organization was achieved (instead of one big box, there are now 8 piles), the scanning and backing-up remains a bit of a pipe-dream. But hey, in the process I found this gem from a Halloween long ago.
I'm particularly fond of the rope belt/shoe combo that I'm sporting.

Me! All about me!

Kate has been working very hard the last few months - a serious nose-grindstone situation. Which explains why it's fallen primarily on me to update this wee corner of the internet.

In keeping with the current state of things, I present you a completely self-absorbed post. First up, the link for the Nokia commercial I was in.

http://vids.myspace.com/index.cfm?fuseaction=vids.individual&VideoID=53997861

For those of you who haven't heard the story, I fell in with a very nice Finnish director who thought I had the right "look" for a commercial he was directing. See above. We got on like a house on fire, and proceeded to hatch a diabolical scheme involving him shooting a documentary following my travels across the U.S.A. en route to the Beard and Moustache and Championships in Anchorage. It didn't pan out for a number of reasons involving work, broken elbows, and global financial crises - which is a real shame because that would have been awesome. Way better than some Freddie Mercury look-a-like at the planetarium.

And here are some pictures of me and my new glasses...

The ball on the stick in the background is what I like to call local flava.

Pupster Down!

Hi blog friends!

A brief, but sad update.

Maggie, the Stear family "hound" for the last 14 years, took a one-way trip to the big doghoue in the sky last week.

Here are some pictures of her in happier times.


(that first picture has the added bonus of being one of the first digital photos I ever collected)

She copped a lot of flack for being, in essence, a fluffy white football who yapped a lot. Which is fair. But I'm still going to miss that little pooch.

dum dee dum

It's a lazy sunday here in Berlin; so in lieu of writing anything real, here's a picture of me eating a hot dog in Copenhagen.

UPDATE: Warning! Bad and/or scary things will happen if you enlarge this photo. So don't click on it!

The danes do enjoy their hot dogs - perhaps explaining this:


In other news, the Premier League started up yesterday, and the Stools have made their first ever foray into the world of fantasy sports. My team is called "the chops," while kate's is "now that's mediocre." As you can see, expectations are low.

Is anyone else surprised that the Indians have begun playing reasonable baseball again? It just befuddles the mind.

Hellooooooooooooo...

Is anyone still out there? Are ya'll sick of staring at the French flag? We'll be back in action soon. Maybe even within the day. We don't even have a proper excuse for our two-month absence. Not that we need one of course.

Until we do a proper post, here's a quick tribute to the current state of the Cleveland Indians:

I suspect that Indian's games would be much more entertaining if everyone had to play with a cup of beer in one hand.

Update: oh, and what the hell is up with the Chicago Cubs? I think I owe someone some cake!!

Important question update:

Dear blog friends,

What would you say to a Queen laser light show at your local planetarium? Yay or nay?
And yes, I mean this Queen...

Freedom Fries Are a Go!

The Stools would like to welcome Pierre, everyone's favorite frenchmen, back to the comments.

Oui oui.

Testimonials sought

Dear blog people,

My good friend Sally - who does comment here, and with whom I attended a Grateful Dead show in 1995 - is considering spending some of her summer vacation in Berlin. Maybe you readers who have previously basked in the Stool hospitality (I'm looking at you Alex and Douglas) would care to share your thoughts on what we can provide potential guests. Huevos rancheros have been mentioned. The usefulness of the magic stove lamp as a sobriety test has been debated. But I'm sure that there's more.

the elbow!

the only positive to have come out of my two recent encounters with bone fractures are the crazy-ass images. the surgery went well on monday - no screws were required, and they just
jammed the fragment back into place with a large needle. here's the picture:


wacky.

please note the surgeon's hand gently cradling my arm as i lie in an anesthetized stupor.

i was only in hospital for two days, which wasn't so bad. particularly since i acquired several seasons of crap american tv shows. now i'm at home, eating bowls of thai green curry (the official comfort food of the pooles - thanks kate!) and swaddling my arm in frozen peas. oh, and no cast!

1.4 mm of pure suck

so it turns out that my elbow is broken. woo hoo! a very small fracture, 1.4 mm to be exact, but enough that the bones aren't lining up properly. if i'm lucky, they can push it back in through the skin with a needle. if i'm unlucky, i get opened up and everything gets reattached with screws. sound familiar? either way, it's hospital food for jeff come monday.

astrochimp stories will have to wait a bit.

here we go again...

we didn't forget we had a blog, we were just willfully negligent in taking care of it. and people still think we should have kids. so let's get this party started! baseball:


that about sums that up. both in terms of culturally insensitive logos and playing ability. all of the ex-cubs in the universe, could not pull this team out of their current depths.

in happier news we went to barcelona a while back, where people (wisely) choose to ignore the cleveland indians and focus instead on making delicious donuts - or buyons (not bunyons - ewww). behold:

anticipating the donut-consuming power of the stools, our hotel were kind enough to provide us with an exercise bike. i availed myself (at least long enough to take a photo),

while kate basked in a siesta wonderland:

whew. my blogging juices are spent. we'll be better. promise. particularly since i'm guaranteed at least one more day of state-required sick leave. i banged up my elbow (non-robot arm) falling off my bike on tuesday, and it's still all sorts of gimpy (typing with one hand = no caps). it's not broken- it just hurts and doesn't want to bend. i got a mri today (holy high-resolution imaging of my elbow batman!) and go back to the dr tomorrow. hmmm. if a 2nd piece of metal is required i'm going to be well-pissed. but i'd probably end up blogging more.

at any rate, upcoming topics include ham the astro-chimp, babies and brothers coming to visit, plus trevor 2: electric boogaloo.

jeff- now with 95% less hair

and a lab of his own



look at that scientist go!

it's cold out there...

we had a final burst of winter weather two weeks ago, which really pissed off one half of the stool family*. so much in fact, that Frau Doktor Stool stalked around the apartment for 1.5 days muttering "grumble, grumble," and refusing to go outside. Which is why I just about wet myself when I saw this cartoon today:


check out the rest of the site - it's absolutely brilliant, and a total labor of love. We have enough trouble spewing out bi-weekly posts containing photos of meat with dumb captions. I can't even comprehend having to sew beforehand.

Oh, and to beat the end-of-winter blahs, we're heading off to Barcelona for the weekend. 20 degrees! beach! seafood! Woohoo!

In other news, the chops are no more. They have been trimmed back to a very respectable, high-school history teacher level. Full story to follow.

*of course, the flip side here is that the other half of the stool family suffers immensely when confronted with 40+ degree days down under. All they can bring themselves to do is lie on the couch in an air-conditioned room, drink beer, and watch cricket. But there's no grumbling. Just burps.

Screw football!

I think that the bacon = hipster fleisch post has run it's course. Which can only be a good thing.

Next up: Baseball!

And let me tell you, after watching some very disappointing football/soccer matches the last couple of weeks, I am more than ready for baseball season to start up. How ready, one might ask.

This ready:
Looking at the second photo, I'm reminded that Kate's shoulder has not seen the light of day in many months. Which is just a very polite way of noting that the less cold-tolerant half of the Stool family is well over winter (Cue getaway weekend to Barcelona).

Did I mention that spring training games start tonight - woot! And, as if we needed any more sport-related excitement, the first Australia-South Africa test begins tomorrow. It's like a party with an over-abundance of small hard balls. And potentially a lot of blond-tips.

The only crappy thing is that a water main near the university broke this morning. Which means that I have no water in my lab, and all of the toilets are locked. Good thing that I didn't eat any burritos last night...

Yes, we love bacon

a lot even.

So far three people have sent us stories concerning the Bacon Explosion, and we're a little worried that we've been stereotyped as some sort of über-carnivore couple. What's the deal people?

Was it the boar carcasses? The meat-fest photos? Trev?

Seriously though, we haven't had the meat sweats in months!

I would make a fantastic addition to Obama's cabinet

"For the love of Crom, am I the only one here who wants to keep the U.S. technologically competitive?"

Because man, do I love Conan.

Sorry for the lack of photos, dear blog readers. I've been working in Dresden this past week, which means increased time spent surfing the internet tubes and posting dumb crap here. But minimal access to the Stool photo library.

A gazillion times worse than any boar carcass

ever.

i'm not a very squeamish person, but maggots are one of the few things that really gross me out.

Tales of Brave Trevor

This holiday season, the Stool family briefly included a third member - a 16 lb. bundle of joy named Trevor (or Trev. or Trev-o). Here he is taking his first (and last) bath.


Trevor liked having onions shoved up his butt.


Who doesn't love a good butter massage?


The requisite mid-roast butter application


In the end he looked so good that we just had to eat him. But he will always be in our hearts. And descending colon...

(But seriously folks, applying this much butter to a turkey should only be attempted by trained professionals.)

Meat!

I'm going to cut to the chase here so that I can get back to restoring my iTunes library. Harumph.

Before:

During:

After:
Boo-ya!