Spark

Rice with ketchup because that's the only thing that comes with a halfway interesting story.

A long time I was in Prague and the cheapest thing in a fairly cheap restaurant had on offer was rice. Just cooked rice with nothing. Since I was hungry and broke (or maybe just cheap when it came to food, I know I spend actually money on an illustrated copy of the Heptameron (if you judged by those illustrations (scantily-glad women all the time) you would never guess that the author was 16th Century queen)) I ordered the rice. They had ketchup on the table, some weird Czech ketchup I had never heard of before.

It was delicious. But then I was hungry and the ketchup was really, really delicious all by itself. I took home a bottle I bought in a supermarket (no joke.) It was still delicious at home but it's been a long time and the deliciousness that used to be rice with ketchup has lost its appeal. These days when I make rice I made actual sauces where I thrown in a boatload of spices, some vegetables and sweet soy sauce and call it day.

(Day 6 was a free for all, which I decided it was an opportunity to not post.)



Florence: the view from the Ponte Vecchio


I took this picture and I know 1000 percent that it did not look like that in reality.

The picture seems really calm, devoid of people when in reality left and right and behind me were tons of people taking pictures, talking, swarming around. It's very saturated, very colorful which it obviously wasn't quite like that either.

Now it was a beautiful view, even reality, but the Florence that it shows does not exist.

Except, and this is perhaps why it makes me so happy, it is very much like I remember places. I have a fabulous memory for locations. And I remember places I loved much more vividly and romanticize them quite heavily insofar as I remove things that don't quite fit into the postcard-ness of it all.

This photograph makes me so happy because it takes me back to a memory rather than a reality.

I don't have one. I had one when I was seventeen but I haven't read it in a decade, the English translation is less than enjoyable and I have my doubts on how well it would hold up if I read it now.

( But I do have something else. )

This meme is totally stolen from iridescentglow but it does look like a lot of fun.


Day 1 - Favorite Song

My favorite song is The Chemical Brothers feat. Richard Ashcroft - The Test

It's an incredibly layered song. Kind of like Death in Vegas' Dirge but a lot less gradually and noticably layered. Dirge is the song where the addition and integration of new sounds drown out the older sounds until you have this huge noisy thing with hardly any individually distinguishable sounds.

The Test is similarly layered and new sounds are added and integrated all the time to drown out old sounds and to disappear. Ashcroft's voice is always distinguishable. Can't say the same about the lyrics. The internet consensus says that he sings "I'm seeing waves breaking form to my horizon" that one time and it sounds like it but that doesn't even make sense.

But I love the lyrics. I know it's about an LSD trip but the part about "my heart and soul are free" make me still kind of emotional. If it was a shorter song it would be the most listened-to-song on my ipod. It is certainly the one song I've never grown tired of and I've been listening it since it came out. Incidentally it was the first DVD single I ever bought.

But then this was the time when music videos in general still had budgets and production values, so the video has abstract dream-like landscapes, underwater sequences and houses falling down. And a whale. Nowadays production value extends to hiring Swedish cable actors and dancing in a leotard in front of a white wallpaper. And that is deemed THE BEST VIDEO OF ALL TIME. I think I'm growing bitter so I better stop.