Hungry as Hell

You won't imagine what happened yesterday!

I was out traveling again, just a day trip to the south. I was up at 5:30 am to get on the morning plane, and came back home at 7 pm, tired and hungry as Hell. I hadn't eaten since noon.

But my old lady refused me to eat. She was preparing for a gathering with her friends, and had all kinds of obscure dishes spread all over the kitchen. She said I would just mess up everything if a made a couple of sandwiches. Crazy isn't it?

I just had to be patient, but it paid off in the end, when the salmon rolls were served ... and finally, the oyster >:)

Where were you on 9/11?

September 2001.

I was attending a geophysics conference in San Antonio. Monday 10. September I had an oral presentation, with approximately 50-100 people in the audience, and 3 or 4 questions from the floor after my twenty-minute presentation. The world was normal.

The day after, I had a poster presentation, at 8:30 in the morning. I was very disappointed that no one showed up. It was a somewhat special subject, something about non-linear waves (similar to the breaking waves on the beach), but it couldn't be that bad?

After my scheduled presentation time, I went out to the big exhibition hall were the geophysical contractors run their software demos. Big crowds were gathered around the computer screens, all of them displaying the CNN broadcast.

There was a big discussion about what to do with the conference; proceed or cancel? In the end, they decided to skip all the social events, and run the technical program as planned. All the participants from Europe, Asia and South America would be stuck in San Antonio anyway. And those who lived within driving distance could not get rental cars.

When the conference ended, it was impossible to get on a plane back to Europe. So we decided to take it easy and drive around in Texas for a while. We went down to Big Bend National Park, to Austin, and the strange "German" town Fredericksburg (where a friend of mine took the picture above, outside a mall).

In Del Rio, we crossed the bridge over Rio Grande, to look around and to buy some Cuban cigars on the Mexican side. The border police told us it was no problem to get back, with our Western Europe passports. After a couple of hours, we returned to USA, smoking happily on our cigars. But when the border police found that one of my friends had three visa to Iran and one to Libya in his passport, Hell broke loose ... we spent the night in the police station.

Where were you on 9/11? The day the world turned crazy ...

Burning the Koran

I read in the news about a minister who wants to burn the Koran. I think that's a very stupid and childish thing to do. There are Muslims around the world who burn stuff, like American and Israeli flags, Salman Rushdie's book and sometimes the Bible.

There are many things in Islamic theory and practice that should be, and need to be debated and criticized; womens rights, sharia laws, violent attacks as response to critique. But burning the Koran means that we step down to the same low level of primitive outrageous action. Burning books is just a stupid thing to do.

I bought the Koran some time ago (and wrote a blogpost about it). I'm not gonna burn my copy. I rather read it. How about you?

Rewriting the beginning

It's week end. Yeah!

Almost no work to be done the next two days. Finally, I've got some time to write. I'm working on my so-called novel. The plot is lined up, mostly, and finally I've got names for all the characters. I had a cool name for my protagonist, but it was damn difficult to invent good names for the rest. The San Antonio Rotary Club helped me solve the problem.

All the characters (except the protagonist and his family) have real names taken from the member list of the San Antonio Rotary Club (don't tell them if you know anyone in that club). About half of them even have the same occupation.

I've been reading a lot of great writer blogs, and think I start to get a grasp on the show vs tell issue. Now I'm rewriting the beginning, for the third time. I hope it's improving. I've even got a dead body on the first page, a bicycle accident, apparently ... >:Z

The manuscript has become a big mess. I decided to write in English, but swap to Winterlandic whenever I run out of vocabulary, to avoid loosing my line of thoughts. Right now I have about four chapters of a bilingual novel >:)))

Do you know any agents that deal with that kind of stuff?