Valkyrie

Every once in a while, you stumble on a rare undiscovered talent. Ralf Meyer, known as “ralfonzo83”, is one such talent.

Here he parodies Tom Cruise. If you’ve seen the infamous Scientology video that was leaked a little while back, you’ll appreciate this spoof trailer of Cruise’s latest movie, Valkyrie.

Meyer isn’t a professional, but consistently gets professional-looking results with a camcorder, a normal home computer, a green screen and a few costumes. Of course, he plays all the parts himself, except the voiceover. His Hitler is hilariously reminiscient of Charlie Chaplin’s The Great Dictator.

The Starbucks Principle

Starbucks, as everyone knows, is that chain of coffee shops that sells a bewildering array of coffee flavours and sizes. For some reason, instead of offering the sizes small, medium and large, they insist on tall, grande and venti, and then pretend not to understand if you order sensibly. If you want a medium, you have to remember to order a grande, or go without.

The big Starbucks fans, the ones who have got ordering down to a fine art, complain when lesser mortals get confused and hold up the line because the staff are trained not to meet the clients halfway. What, they want to know, is so difficult about reading from the menu?

Good point; and I think it would be just great if we could extend the Starbucks Principle to other areas of life. For example:

vache slice

steak

costume au James Bond

tuxedo

automobile energizer

petrol

goop pomodoro

tomato ketchup

timepiece moderne

digital clock

timepiece tradicionada

analogue clock

timepiece miniscule

wristwatch

payment-optimized

cheap

I think this would improve the quality of our lives no end, and foster creativity and imagination. I’d be all for it.

Yet another conspiracy theory

Now that Macca has forked out over £24 million for the privilege of divorcing Heather Mills, the Daily Telegraph reports that fans have discovered hidden references in his latest album. Chief among them is the title of one of the tracks, Mister Bellamy, which is an anagram of “Mills betray me”. Aha, say the conspiracy theorists, that must have been deliberate.

This works, of course, if you write the title like that, but in fact everywhere else (meaning, everywhere except the fevered imaginings of people who don’t believe in coincidences) it’s written “Mr Bellamy”.

The Telegraph does point out that there are 18000 other English phrase “Mister Bellamy” is an anagram of, which sort of puts the conspiracy theories into perspective.

A couple of questions come to mind:

1. Who first decided to sit down and make anagrams of all the titles of McCartney’s latest album tracks? And why?
2. How does the Telegraph know there are 18000 other anagrams of the same phrase? Do they have staff employed to do this kind of research?

Easter eggs Sorbian style

I found this report quite by chance, from NTDTV.

The Sorbs are an ethnic minority group living in parts of eastern Germany, more closely related to the Poles and Serbians than to Germans. In this report, a Sorbian woman demonstrates the traditional method of painting Easter eggs. It’s a painstaking process, but the result is worth it.

I’m dreaming of a white Easter

This is just bizarre. Having gone without snow for practically the whole of the winter, this happens.

In truth, we haven’t had quite as much snow as other parts of Germany have this last week. Just a few miles away, on the Spessart hills and in the Odenwald, they’ve been having quite a bit of difficulty. It’s not the amount of snow that’s been the problem, but rather the fact that it’s very wet, and thus very heavy. It’s brought down a few trees and power lines.