Since I was young and we got the Internets at home, one believe has always been fostered in me: you can find anything on the ‘net, if you just look hard enough. Till yesterday.

I’m currently looking for new shoes because I very badly need them. Near my workplace (or rather intern-place) there’s a small Levi’s shop that has some shoes in their window that I thought might be good, but I wanted to show them my girlfriend first. That’s why I tried to find a picture of the Levi’s Almayer shoes with red and yellow stripes online. You can find a lot of images of Almayer shoes, but not with this particular color combination.

This deficiency cannot continue. Here’s my contribution to the Internet’s omniscience, for all those image search engines:

Levi's Almayer Red/Yellow Stripes

A few weeks ago, I read an essay by Paul Graham on messages that cities try to send their inhabitants. It’s called Cities and Ambition.

He talks about cities like New York and Cambridge and messages like “you should be smarter” and “you should be richer”. I’ve tried to listen to Hamburg’s message for some time now, but it still comes down to what I first thought of when reading the essay.

The prevalent message here seems to be: “Drink more beer”. Everyone does it anywhere and anytime. You’re almost an outsider if you’re not drinking your first beer at 10 am on the subway.

What does your city tell you?

Over the weekend I was on a short trip to Trento, Italy. The flight from Bremen to Verona came rather cheap because of Ryanair.

The adventure started with a Fanta I had never seen before. It’s called Fanta Chinotto and is supposed to have the taste of the chinotto fruit which seems to be quite famous in Italy. All I can say is: It tastes disgusting.

Mimose is German for sissy.

These pizzas actually hung over the plates onto the table.

I quote:

In Fall vor Gefahr
[...]
- 4. Einen Ausgang erreichen

So, in case before danger you are supposed to reach one exit – sounds like a video game.

The Italians seem to think those spaces in German aren’t really necessary.

Not just a fire, but a fire blaze threatens the Germans.

Enough fun, there was also some culture to be found. At the moment, the Manifesta 7 is going on in Trento. The manikins shown above probably were a part of this biennal. This street and some narrow streets were full of them.

Here in Germany, Pro7 currently airs all six Star Wars episodes. So far, I’ve seen the first three and there was one scene that really cracked me up. Because it was so funny, I guess it’s my favorite scene of the first three episodes. It’s from episode 3:

R2-D2 stands in front of a hostile droid and tries to shock it with his built-in electroshock weapon. The shock doesn’t do any harm and the enemy kicks R2-D2 so that he falls over.

Here it is at about 0:20:

It think it’s even funnier in German because the bad droid says something like “Du spinnst wohl.” If the above clip is correct the droid doesn’t say anything besides the “ouch” (which he also says in German).