Beating

Before I left for Europe, I stopped by Target to stock up on over-the-counter cold medicine to deal with what I thought was a cold that was in its last stages. All Target had was the economy size box of Day Quil, which does a fairly good job of putting a damper on a cold while leaving you functional mentally. I didn't think I needed 80 gel caps of Day Quil. Now I've just about finished the box because this cold wants to hang around way past its welcome like outdoor Christmas lights in the ghetto. This sucks.

Sidewalk Cafe Marathon

In the center of Brussels, there are several narrow streets that have nothing on them but sidewalk cafes that go on for about 26.2 miles. I bet Will we could make our way down this street and eat a meal at every one of these cafes in under four hours. However we both hit the wall after eating our 40th chocolate covered Belgium waffle at mile 20 and had to stop.

Luxembored

For such a small and scenic country, there's not much to recommend about Luxembourg unless you're rich and like to shop. That's really all there is to do in this country. Oh, and I guess you can bank here too --- they left that out of the travel brouchure. But the flowers are pretty.

Coolest, Cheapest Hotel Room Imaginable

We had no hotel reservations anywhere during our trip --- everything was a roll of the dice. We came up on seven when we got into Maastricht, a town in Holland we knew next to nothing about. A few blocks from the train station we stumbled upon this super cool room above a cafe. It had a fireplace and a stained glass window that looked over a little town square, all for about $25 a person. Maastricht was unbelievable as everything we did in this town was golden. No other place we went matched the fun and the feel we got in this town.

PDA on Parade

We saw more people making out in public in Europe than could be counted. I'm not sure why this was, but it nearly made me want to give Will some tongue.

Unfortunately, when you try to take pictures of people making out, they have a 6th sense that a camera is being trained on them and they stop smooching. Then one of them will stare at you.

Close Encounters

In Holland, it's best to be on the look both ways before crossing the street or an alien space craft could land on your head.

Elevator Closet

This hotel we stayed in in Luxembourg was home to the smallest elevator I've ever been in. A sign on it said it could hold four people. It could barely hold two guys with backpacks. I doubt it could hold one solitary American who makes McDonald's a regular part of his meal plan.

Overwhelmed by T-shirts

Idiots Waiting on Trains

The day this photo was taken, Will and I were about to set a world record for train travel. We hit about six cities in two countries traveling a combined route of about 12 train trips. We didn't even know what country we were in when this photo was taken --- Belgium maybe?

Ultimately, we got nowhere because by the time we thought we'd reached our destination in Holland, there was no room at the Inn for us in four of the largest cities in The Netherlands. We ended sleeping for awhile in a train station before finding a hotel back in Amsterdam on Sunday morning.

Whoa

I cannot tell you how many times I nearly got nailed by chicks riding bikes in Holland.

That didn't come out the way it was supposed to.

Little Help?

If you look close enough at all of the canal buildings in Amsterdam, you can see real quick that all of them are leaning this way and that. That happens when you build a town 40-feet under sea level and the damp ground shifts every five minutes. These guys look like they're losing a battle against keeping this building from falling over.

Lunch Break

"Hans, how's about we wear our suits to a very important business lunch meeting?"

"Screw that Franz. Let's shop for flowers!"

Hollandday

Tomorrow, I'm getting on a plane to Holland. The anticipation of leaving for a week-long vacation is almost better than going. But there's always a minor hang up.

Right now, I'm just putting the finishing touches on a cold. So for the last four days, I've been downing decongestants and vitamin C like like a six-year-old eats ding dongs. And just as eagerly as I anticipate a vacation, I worry that something will screw it up --- like sickness.

Last February before I went to Europe, I got an emergency flu shot because I feared I would take the office virus with me to London. It didn't happen.

I think the mere act of getting off of the plane in Schiphol Airport in Amsterdam will cure me.

Chicks With Tattoos

Back in 1984, tattoos were not riding the wave of popularity that they are now. Sure, lots of guys had them back then. But rarely would you see them on a girl.

So I remember the first shockingly bad girl tattoo I ever saw. I was at Six Flags to see this stupid band called Zebra play. And standing right in front of me on the baking hot asphalt was a skinny metal chick with teased blonde hair, spandex pants and a pink leather halter top. On her right shoulder blade she had "Nikki 666" --- a devilish way to spell the name of Motley Crue's herion-lovin' guitar player --- burned into her skin with dark green ink. Assuming she was 19 years old at the time, Miss 666 would now be 41 years old.

Today, I can't remember anything about the music Zebra played --- I'm sure it was a whole lot of screaming guitars bolstering the lead singer's falsetto voice, which for some reason I thought made the band sound more "rockin' " But I still remember that 22 years ago, the Nikki 666 tattoo provoked this thought: "You know, when that girl in front of me is 41, her love of devil rock may have faded, but that tattoo won't. I'm betting little Justin is going to have some questions for mommy about that ink choice."

Travelin' Clothes

Next Tuesday, I will board a plane and meet Will for a week in Europe. Both of us plan to set a world record for light traveling --- one small backpack each. And I use the term backpack loosely. Neither of us will be sporting one of those monstrosities that run the entire length of a human backside. They'll both be a bit larger than a book backbag --- enough to carry a bunch of pairs of underwear, socks, a few shirts and a tooth brush. That's it.

My delimna is on outerwear. Last time we made this trip, it was February and I sported a heavy motorcycle jacket. Highs in February in The Netherlands are in the 30s and 40s. But in April, it gets up into the 50s, but dips down to freezing at night. I know I'll have to have a jacket, but should the motorcycle jacket make the trip for a second time? The pluses are are that it has lots of stupid pockets for Ipod, passport and wallet storage and is fairly warm. The down side is it's heavy to lug around if you're not wearing it.

I'm leaning towards taking the biker thug look abroad again.

All The Young Punks

Sometimes a movie's lineage is more interesting to me than the movie itself. That was the case for a film I watched last night called 16 Years of Alcohol. It's subject material was a sure thing for me as it centered around a guy in mid 70's Edinburgh, Scotland who was a "boot boy" although he was never refered to as such. Boot boys were also called skinheads. And believe it or not, this lifestyle originally had nothing to do with racism. To show their cockney, working class solidarity, they all wore close cropped hair, Doctor Marten boots, rolled up jeans and buttoned up golf shirts. And they had three things in common --- a love of drinking, fighting, and ska music.

The movie's protagonist, or antagonist if you want to look at him that way, hung around with three other thugs. He walks into a record shop and he and his mates start acting like apes, bullying people and causing a scene. They confront the young pretty store clerk, demanding that she play some ska on the stores sound system. She tells them if they don't calm down, she'll play "Mott the Hoople" a glam rock band that was kryptonite to any boot boy. Then the romance begins between boot boy guy and the clerk. It was a nice touch. Then the movie gets a bit to arty for my taste with dream sequences and foreshadowing, but I stuck with it so I could watch the credits and sound track listings. That's where the movie held the most interest for me.

One of the bands on the soundtrack was The Skids, a wonderful Scottish punk band that put out a genius first album in the late 70's before they got a bit too arty, much like the movie, and broke up. The most famous member of The Skids was Stuart Adamson, who went on to form Big Country, a very underrated and important Scottish rock band (I you don't own The Crossing, you should.) Coincidently, the movie was written and directed by Richard Jobson, another member of The Skids. He's the guy responsible for making his punk band too arty, much like his movie.

A simple plea

She reads the news on a terrible morning show. And she's getting an obscene amount of money to read the news on a evening news show that nobody watches. She reads the freaking news! Please, stop caring about this.

Nut?

The police have a phrase for an unstable person who deliberately puts themselves in harms way by waving a gun around or charging an officer in an effort to provoke them into firing their weapon. They call it "suicide by cop."

Much the same is going on in Zacarias Moussaoui's federal trial. The prosecution had a weak terrorism conspiracy case against the guy, until Zac, who is way north of stable himself, takes the stand and fills in the blanks for them. The jury then decides he's eligible for the death penalty, which is exactly what the self professed Al Queda member and terrorist wannbe wants. Unfortunately, the best criminal justice system in the world isn't set up to deal with suicide by court.

Strugglas

Back in the late ninties, my buddy Rob took a weekend job at Bill's, the same Dallas music store he used to work at when he was in high school. I used to drop by and see him, just like I did when he worked in a music store in Austin during our college days. And just like in every record store Rob ever worked in, his favorite part of the job was making fun of the randomly bad albums the store had for sale.

Back then, Bill's stocked a lot of rap --- to make any money you had to, because the rap audience is always looking for the flavor of the month, so you'd never know what would sell. Lots of the albums were independantly produced gansta rap CDs. Gangsta rap was getting kind of stale, even then. But the CDs kept on coming even though nobody bought them. So Rob and his fellow employee Mark created a special section for the slow moving rap artists. They named the section "Strugglas."

One of the albums pictured a rapper, or Stuggla if you will, dressed up in a heavy winter parka standing in front of stack of orange tires in some sort of junk yard. "Look at this album," Rob would say. "I bet the hit single goes something like this: 'Orange tires. Stacks and stacks.' "

But my favorite Struggla, based purely on his album cover, was Tommy Wright III who released a CD intitled "On The Run." The amatuerish album cover was eye catching for several reasons. First of all, what gangsta rapper uses the name his mama gave him on the cover? Second, the album showed a montage of four different pictures of our boyish hero, Tommy, engaged in different criminal acts --- most of them misdemeanors offenses at best. In one, he appears to be shooting a B.B. gun while propping it up on a chain link fence. The another shows Tommy climbing over a chain link fence. The third and fourth photos show Tommy in various states of arrest by the police. While I'm sure Tommy has outstanding rap abilities, his on the run status seemed to be hindered by his petty choice of crimes, chain link fences and law enforcement. What else would you expect from a Struggla?

Attractive

Why is beauty so subjective? Why is it that women the rest of the universe holds up as the standard bearer for attractiveness I find absolutely foul? For example, most people go apeshit over Jessica Simpson. And I can't figure it out. She looks so much what every other woman strives for --- slim, blonde, sparkley --- that she's almost characterless to me (granted, being incredibly stupid will taint the whole deal for me, no matter what a woman looks like.)

So what do I find attractive in a woman from just a physical standpoint? I don't know. Fat, skinny, straight teeth, crooked teeth, short, tall, blonde, red head --- all can be attractive to me. I know it when I see it. Take this photo I've posted of Janet Weiss, the drummer for the super loud Washington punk band Sleater-Kinney. Janet will never make the cover of Cosmo. She's got a homemade haircut, her teeth aren't perfect and the laugh lines are starting to show. But I'd turn around to look at Janet twice were I to happen upon her on the street. She's distinctive looking and resembles no one else I know. And I guess that's what I find attractive.

My wife certainly qualifies --- nobody else I know looks like her, even though occasionally people say Susan Sarandon. But I think that's just an easy way to compliment her, because I think she's pretty in her own right. It doesn't hurt that she's smart as hell, but that's beside the point.

Love is . . . .

receiving your tax refund check in the mail, just in time to fund a historic, debauchery-fueled trip to Europe.

Telling Stories

"So, I left a McDonald's cup on a shelf in this chick's office over the weekend. And by Monday, the smell was unbelievable."

Scruffy

Is there any doubt that beards are sexy?