Rattlebrained

Seems like Dominik, Swamp Trains bassist, has been out hustling to find gigs because we have a few lined up now which is cool. The next one being a trip back to Bellwald to inaugurate the Bellagio Lounge & Bar on December 18th, a new place for the local fauna and a good one if you consider their choice for the band! ;-)

He asked me to translate the bands bio into English for the flier he’s sending around which I did this morning. However I must admit here that I had found what had originally been posted on our MySpace page a bit dull so I decided to spice it up, hopefully this one is better:

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Nothing like a cheap cell phone camera to make delicious pizza look totally unappetizing! Oh well, too late now…

I make a mean pizza, a claim many have doubted until they tasted it, but would add that good pizza isn’t that hard to make so it’s not like it’s that big a claim to make. As with many things the secret is balancing the ingredients and giving yourself time to do it properly. And there you have it, time, the one thing you usually don’t have enough of. With pizza the most important factor is making a good crust, doesn’t take much: water, flour, olive oil, salt and yeast, plus eventually a small pinch of sugar to help start the yeast. And then the hard part: let it raise an hour or so, punch it down, let it raise again; all in all a three hours is a good reference..

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It’s has been a while since I’ve made it back to the states, unfortunately, especially since there have been a number of events past and future that I’m really sad to miss. A recent one was a niece’s wedding over in the dark lands of far away Vermont, where the sun rarely shines and the trees are thick with eery creeping plants (shudder) and although this blog usually avoids subjects like family going ons I couldn’t help but want to share the fantastic vampire couple wedding cake adornment that her sister Ava made for this special occasion!

A ride through my favorite city, filmed by one of my best friends, this one’s for me! :-)

About a year ago Dave bought a cheap Chinese resonator guitar and decided that it needed a better cone. So he ordered one but it was a bit too big for the guitar’s hole. Having taken a look at it I told him that I could make the hole bigger and so he brought it over to my workshop and we (I) ended up adding two sound holes, since he received two with the cone, remaking the bridge and sticking in a pickup between the cone and the neck.

After all that the guitar sounded definitely better, which was nice, but unfortunately has an annoying hum when amplified.

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When it comes to cell phones I’m pretty cheep, nothing smart around here plus I prefer a netbook for traveling, especially considering the cost of a phone internet connection in this country. Nevertheless, since my three year old one is showing signs of use and my contract was up for prolongation I stopped by the company’s local outlet to check out their offers.

Sure enough, for the symbolic sum of 1 swiss franc an all new fancy 6303 was passed over the counter. Which is satisfactory I hope, we’ll see when I get the next bill since there are a couple of irremovable links to the web that are there to push if you don’t watch out, plus the fact that depending on the application, you don’t know if you’ll end up there or not… Isn’t society’s drive to consume fun! Forget to lock the keyboard and there goes your next vacation…

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About a year and a half ago I stumbled on the Hero Rat website and was very impressed, but as one often does I put it aside for later and forgot all about it. Until last January (‘09) that is, when it popped into my mind that even I could afford the 5 Euro (just over $7) monthly fee of adopting a rat. So I did.

Kim is one of the 5 “symbolic” rats that you can adopt, actually from what Ive gathered looking through their info there are at least 300 rats being trained or doing what they’ve been trained for. In Kim’s case this means detecting tuberculosis, which she does well! Last September in Tanzania where they work for instance these rats found 70 patients with active TB that were missed by microscopy!…

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