Knights of the Round Radio

For Christmas, we got Aidan a set of knights and a big castle for them to rule/overthrow. I have to admit, they're pretty awesome. The castle did take a good part of the morning to set up, but we had a good time putting it together.

Today, Aidan had some of the knights out at the kitchen table during lunch. They were "fighting" each other, or at least squaring off for a fight. Just for kicks, I asked Aidan what the knight's names were, expecting something like "Aidan knight, Daddy knight, etc." Instead, he rattles off a slew of names for every knight and their dragon. We tried to write them down, but some of the names changed after he said them the first time. Here's the snapshot, with labels:



Just to re-iterate, that's Strongeo, Red Radio, Black Radio, Grey Radio, Blue Radio, and Frick Freyio (the dragon). I can't tell you where all the "radios" came from, but when we asked Aidan to clarify that he in fact meant radios, he held his hand up to his mouth to pantomime talking on a CB. Red Radio, it is.

Crazy Judges

I was wasting some time here at work, surfing the internet while I wait for the next asinine request to come down the pipe. I saw a story while I was browsing around about a “fog shower” that some kid in Brazil designed for a contest sponsored by Electrolux. Nothing too crazy; it’s a shower that makes a warm fog instead of a stream of water for you to wash off. It’s supposed to be “more environmentally friendly”, or some crap.

It was interesting enough for me to look at the Electrolux site http://www.videonewsmanager.com/electrolux/download.html to see what it was all about. Pretty blah for the most part… until I got to the section about the judges.



Holy crap. What a motley crew this lot is. They look like James Bond reject villains. Especially ol’ Matali Crasset. What’s with that haircut? Jason Bradbury isn’t too much better. Wasn’t he Le Chiffre in Casino Royal?



Oh, sorry Mads Mikkelsen. I’m sure people make that mistake all the time.

Have a good look at these folks. Can you imagine how exhausting it must be to be one of these people? To have to get up every morning and fix your hair that like? To have to find some haute couture fashion to wear everyday? To have to be stuck with a name like Henrik Otto for your whole life?

"Hello, this is Henrik. Are you available for our backgammon game this afternoon?"

Yech.

Even Celine Cousteau, arguably the most mainstream of the lot, has a crazy picture. Look at the lighting. She's not outside in front of a cloudy sky. That's a studio photo that they put that background behind. What's with that? In fact, she might be the wackiest of the bunch. A little bit "tries to hard" perhaps?

Anyway, moral of the story: designers are bizarre. Especially European designers.

Tiny Chess Game

In Bulgaria, there's a whole sub-culture of tiny old men that gather in the parks and place chess on normal sized boards with normal sized pieces.

I didn't believe it when I first saw it, but you can't deny this photographic evidence:





Yet another bizarre part of Bulgarian culture.

War-stache

I don't know what it is about being deployed in Iraq, but it makes soldiers want to grow their mustaches out. Plenty of guys do it. When I was deployed in 2003, I sported one for a couple of months. I kept it until it got thick and collected so much Iraqi sand and dust that anything I ate tasted like dirt. To be honest, the food wasn't that delectable to begin with, but you've got to have standards.

So I wasn't too surprised when my brother Justin sent me this picture of his Iraqi war-stache.



Nice, right? For comparison, here's my profile pic with a artificial mustache. Notice the family resemblance? Uncanny, I know. Although I think I do look a little more sophisticated in my picture. Look at that sublime eyebrow raise. Goosebumps!

A funny thing happened last night...

Well, what do you know?

After a night out on the town, I wake up to find myself married to a Bulgarian girl. Who knew it could be so easy? Jessica's not going to be thrilled about this.



And if she's going to be pissed about that, she's going to be furious about this. Due to a huge misunderstanding, which I will admit was partially my fault, I didn't wed one but two Bulgarian girls last night.



Good grief.

At least the priest was nice enough to only charge me for his services once, since he only technically performed one ceremony. Here's a shot of me and him hanging out afterward.



On a serious note, these pictures were taken at my hotel last night. I came back from dinner to find that there were not one, but two different weddings being hosted by my hotel. Must be a popular place. Anyway, by the time that I came back from dinner, the booze had been flowing and everyone was my new best friend. After learning how to say congratulations in Bulgarian, I wished the wedding party the best and asked for pictures with the brides. Ideally, I wanted to get them both in the same shot, but the timing didn't work out. When I saw the priest hanging out, I went for the trifecta. I'm the Bulgarian "Wedding Crasher".

The priest was an interesting guy. After getting the hotel night manager to ask him in Bulgarian (the manager and the priest were acquaintances), he came over and gave me an uncomfortably long handshake while he asked me questions in Bulgarian and I waited for translation. After I got the picture, I asked my Bulgarian friend what that was all about. Apparently, the priest is hesitant to get his picture taken with people because there are semi-religious cults in Bulgaria that would try to get a picture with a priest to give credibility to their sect. So he was feeling me out with the questions to make sure I wasn't one of these cult wackos. Yet another bizarre glimpse into the world of Bulgaria.

Buried Alive

I was relaying a story to a Bulgarian about safety coffins. For those of you not in the know, people in Victorian England and Europe would get these coffins that had bells attached to strings that the departed could pull in the event that they "wake up" from an accidental burial. Sounds crazy, but I guess it happened on more than one occasion back then. Check out this passage from deathonline.net:

Fear of premature burial was widespread in 18th and 19th century Europe, leading to the invention of the safety coffin. Over thirty different designs were patented in Germany in the second half of the 19th century. The common element was a mechanism for allowing the 'dead' to communicate with people above ground. Many designs included ropes which, when pulled, would ring the church bell, or a purpose-mounted bell. Others replaced the bell with a raiseable flag, a powerful fire cracker or a pyrotechnic rocket. Some included a shovel, a ladder and a supply of food and water. An essential element, which was overlooked in some designs, was a breathing tube to provide air and occasionally even sustenance.

Weird, right? So after reading this, my first question was, "How did people get mis-diagnosed as dead?" Any suggestions, Wikipedia?

At least one report of accidental burial goes back to the 13th Century. Hundreds of instances of accidental burials were documented in the 1600s during epidemics of plague, cholera, and smallpox. Revivals have been triggered by dropped coffins, grave robbers, embalming, and attempted dissections. Fearing premature burial, George Washington, on his deathbed, made his servants promise not to bury him until three days after his death. Patients in the 1990s have been documented as accidentally being bagged, trapped in a steel box, or sent to the morgue.

Sucks to be the doctor that mistakenly pronounced someone dead when they weren't. That's got to be the ultimate "D'oh!"

I also came across this super creepy painting by Antoine Wiertz called The Premature Burial. What kind of a wacked out painter do you have to be to paint this?



Oh wait, he's Belgian. No further explanation needed.