ritas kleine welt

youtube is a great thing. it's a treasure trove for rare interviews, such as lita grey talking about her life and her marriage to charles chaplin. their relationship always fascinated me. they were such a completely different pair that their marriage always appeared as doomed from the start. especially, since she was twenty years younger and just short of 16 years old when she got pregnant for the first time. a shotgun wedding and two children later, the pair were throwing muck at each other and the world was left to wonder whatever they had seen in each other. whatever it was, there must have been love, too.

in honour of today's storm, i composed an ode upon a brave pigeon digging its little claws into a trusty birch twig and swaying with the whole tree against the stiff breeze.

ode (in german), moving pigeon and music behind the cut.

birgit and i went for a walk through berlin on friday afternoon in order to secure some tickets for the world premiere of the restored metropolis. (we were short of ten people in front of us when the box office closed. dang!) on our way to the friedrichstadtpalast, we crossed one of the many bridges across the river spree. this is what we saw...

birgit and major. what have you done to me? this starsky and hutch fandom is lethal -- a complete wackjob. i tell ya!!! though, i have to admit, i was already into the show some 17 years ago when it was still aired on german telly. proud member of team starsky then. proud member of team starsky now! hey, i gotta stick to my beuteschema... (and, no!, that's not dubya on the right, but roland totheroh!!!)

browsing the web today, i found an insane trivia page listing all the strangest occurances on the show. like 'starsky touches hutch', 'hutch touches starsky', 'they touch each other' and 'other body contact'. not to speak of the categories 'body count', 'what time is it?' or 'booze', 'drugs' and 'literacy'. honestly! and i thought i had too much spare time in my spare time. see for yourselves.

edit: now complete with major's torino.

every winter, the crows are gathering in this city in order to survive the cold season. the colder it gets, the bigger the swarms. one of the great side effects of this phenomenon are the dancing swarms every evening. single flocks gather together every evening to create one big swarm before they settle down for the night in the trees around. but see for yourselfves below.

instead of just counting off the different stations of my life in the past 365 days, let me just show you, what i did on the occassion. spanning from one new year's eve to another, it seems like most of my activities have been taped either by night or underground with an equal lack of proper light.

in the 1910s, the chaplin-mania took off like a rocket. firmly and steadily, his fame soared to the sky. and strongly ignoring all sorts of copy-right and cashing in on the phenomenon, there were numerous songs composed in honour of the little fellow with the baggy pants. so, here are some examples of period adoration of a global phenomenon. harry potter had nothing on the tramp!

s. and i went exploring the city on foot yesterday. why? because it was sunny and because it was open house/construction site/tunnel day. at the future tube stop 'bayrischer bahnhof', the construction site opened their gates to the public so that people could get a first look. s. and i climbed down a couple of steep steps into the deep bowels of leipzig (cue: inevitable comment about the föhrer-bonker) and walk back out in what will eventually become the tracks. naturally, all above and below ground was documented by my trusty camera.

edit: now complete with video

it is a bit strange: all those four times i have been to the island so afr, the weather was pretty much constantly splendid. in and out of season. hardly any rain -- and nearly 30°C last week. i even got a slight tan which is something that happens only once every decade. and because we were so extremely lucky, the pictures came out especially well. so, here's the first round of pictures from an extremely sunny london. including pictures from an extremely nocturlan london.

apparently the song 'smile' is currently experiencing a comeback. the tune was composed by chaplin in 1936 for his last silent film, modern times. it was a silent film in the sense of missing dialogue. as in theprevious feature, city lights, however, chaplin had included  sound on the filmstrips themselves. so in the end, technically speaking, the film was far from silent. there were a few words, such as human dialogue filtered through machines (telescreens, radio and a grammophone) and chaplin's tramp sung nonsensical lyrics to the smash-hit 'titine'. (the original lyrics were just as silly, though!) in 1936 'smile' was not yet the song, though, that now everybody has become wild about in the past three or four days, simply for the reason that it still lacked words. the lyrics were added somewhat later and ever since then, people have been messing up the line, 'light up your face with gladness / hide every trace of sadness'.

Jeff Goldblum will be missed!

our team just won the pub quiz again. this time we came in second place due to incredibly stiff competition. it does pay off to study english, after all. and to watch silly videos on youtube that hold the clue to winning the "who am i ?"-round. thanks to the line, 'i was born in montreal,' we scored five points. YEAH, baby!

wales. land of the hills and mountains and farmers -- and sheep with LED blankets.

this is what made this nation great!

take that have a brand new and kicking single out -- and somehow it reminded me of the goooooooorgous john simm tearing it up in dr who.