The Daily Procrastinator

Yeah, none of us have posted anything in a couple of months.  So sue us.  We’ve been living up to our theme.

Regardless, Merry Christmas to any of you who happen across this blog.  I’m hoping to step up my entries this year, but you all know how resolutions are.  Hopefully the “real” writers will do the same (I’m looking at you, FC, Tallgirl, and BRP).

Hope you all got what you wanted this year, or at least the necessary gift cards to do so.  Merry Christmas, everyone!

Greetings, procrastinators! I write to you from a cozy little apartment in central Munich, my first contact with the Internet since leaving the US. I can assure you that, as promised, I’ve been working hard on my quest to consume and review a variety of authentic German brews.

My trip began in Baden-Baden, a charming and well-preserved resort town in a cozy little corner of Germany, near the French border. I’m told that the town managed to avoid destruction in WWII because the French had plans for annexation and wanted to keep it intact. I was visiting some friends in the area and was exposed to two local brews: Rothaus Tannenzaepfle and Rothaus Radler Zaepfle. Rothaus is the brewery of the Baden region, cranking out beers since the late 1700s.

Tannenzaepfle translates to "pine cone."

The Tannenzaepfle – the name reflecting the pine cone on the label – is a classic pilsener brewed according to the Reinheitsgebot, or German Purity Law. While I tend to not be a big fan of pilseners because of their hoppy bitterness, the Tannenzaepfle was clear and refreshing, with a clean finish.

The Radler Zaepfle is one of the more bizarre finds. In a country that obsesses over beer purity, this one is a mix of beer and lemonade. I’m told that it’s fairly new to the Rothaus lineup, creating a pre-bottled product for something that people were already doing themselves at their table. I can’t say that I’m a big fan. Oh, I can appreciate the reasoning behind it, but as a girl who doesn’t even like to add lime to her Corona, lemonade and beer is just too much of a leap for me.

I also experienced the Lowenbrau Premium Pils. Now, let’s be straight up here: this isn’t the crap that was brewed by Miller and marketed under the same name. This is real German beer. It’s served with a two-inch head and has a distinct aroma of both citrus and hops. It’s a pilsener, so it’s not going to be my favorite of all time, but it had a crisp, refreshing taste that offset the pilsener bitterness, and made it a good complement to a meal of sausage and kraut.

Stay tuned for Part 2, my adventures in Berlin!

Our name says it all.  We are committed to procrastination.  And, in the spirit of procrastination, we will be taking the month of July off.  Some would call it a vacation.  We call it summer procrastination.

Wish you were here.

We’ll be back on August 1 with the “What’s TallGirl Drinking?” tour of the beers of Germany.  I’ll be taking detailed notes and will do my best to arrange for daily updates, internet connection permitting.

Until then, enjoy your Fourth of July celebrations, stay cool and please, follow our lead and don’t work too hard.

Don't call her TallGirl . . . Call her BEER GIRL!

Dear Internet, I am hereby preparing you for a future event.  In six weeks I’ll be departing for Germany for two weeks of sightseeing and, of course, beer.

It is my heartfelt desire that you can share in this experience with me.  How?  I, TallGirl, will take it upon myself to sample as many German beers as I possibly can and report these results back to you, our loyal readers.

I’ve found a list to get me started, but let’s be honest: these beers were probably reviewed by beer aficionados.  These are the kind of people, like wine people, who can detect notes of clove or banana or the mint plant on a neighboring farm.  I am not one of these people.  My reviews will be much simpler, highlighting drinkability and enjoyment.

So keep your eyes open starting August 1 for this valuable public service, only from The Daily Procrastinator.

We here at TDP just installed the Backtype Connect wordpress plug-in. Let’s see how it works. It’s supposed to pull in comments on our articles from all over the web, including Twitter and Friendfeed.

There is no mistaking the serious weirdness of Facebook.  I’m all for connecting with my current friends, and even friends from my past, however estranged we may have become as a result of time and distance.  Even exes.  I’m so totally, completely fine with exes.  And the people I met senior year of high school when I started hanging out with the theater crowd and working the ticket booth on performance nights.  And even my college roommate that I more or less haven’t spoken to since we had that blowup fight sophomore year.  I’m cool with that.  I had some sort of connection with all of these people.

But what I still can’t seem to get over are the people from high school — the popular, student council, homecoming court kids — who acted as though I was invisible for four years.  Why on earth are these people sending me friend requests?  How do they even remember my name?  And if you couldn’t manage a “hello” during the four years we sat next to each other in homeroom, why on earth are you so interested in finding out what I’m up to now?

And they’re not just friending me.  They’re tagging me in all sorts of lists to find out what books I’ve read, or 25 random things about me, or whether or not I’ve ever been to jail.  I just can’t understand it.  Are they sitting there with a yearbook, searching for everyone alphabetically, regardless of relationship?  Do they have any memories of me whatsoever?  Does that guy remember turning me down flat when I asked him to the sophomore dance, telling me that he had “someone else in mind”?

For as infrequently as I think about high school, I also seem to have pretty distinct memories of it, and I just wonder if everyone else does, too.  I have no illusions that we’re the same people that we were at 15 or 18.  I’m certainly not the same shy, insecure girl that I was, and I don’t expect that anyone else reflects what they were then, either.

Maybe that’s the point of Facebook.  Maybe it doesn’t matter where you’ve come from or if you’ve lived parallel yet completely separate lives.  Maybe it exists to remind you of how far you’ve come, and help you to appreciate the value of the true friends you’ve made along the way.

Ah, prom night: the source of many exes.

Ah, Facebook: the place where the past meets present, sometimes with jarring results.  Childhood friends, recent colleagues and family members mingle in a “worlds collide” sort of way.  It’s a fascinating social experiment.

I was chatting with a Facebook friend/colleague recently when he asked me, “What’s your xCount?”  This was his own personal term — one that I must admit that I love — for the exes that have crawled out of the woodwork and once again made themselves part of your life.  

I scanned my list of friends.  ”I’ve got two… and a half,” I told him.  He told me that you can’t count anyone as a half, but I think that a prom date who appeared in pictures but actually spent the night sitting in the lobby outside the hotel ballroom qualifies as something less than a full xCount point.  And believe me, after that fiasco at 17, I was thoroughly shocked to see that he wanted to connect with me.

He had four full-fledged exes on his list, not including one whose request he rejected outright.  ”Sometimes, the requests are just too creepy.”  Many of my friends agree.  There was the one who was contacted by the guy who stalked her after they broke up.  Another got a request from the girlfriend who had certain… uh… shall we call them “unique” sexual proclivities?  And what about that guy you hooked up with after the frat party sophomore year?  From first loves to major heartbreaks, they’re all out there, and they just might be looking for you.

Who's in my inbox? I can't bring myself to look.

What prompts exes to want to get in touch again, especially those that you haven’t spoken to in a decade or more?  As for mine, I still have a good relationship — albeit separated by time and distance — with one of them, and accepted the second just out of a ridiculous sense of curiosity.  You know the kind.  They’re the ones whose request is met with audible talking back to the computer.  ”Oh my god, John Doe?  How the hell did he find me?”  These requests are met with a connection, a few obligatory messages back and forth, and the obligatory Googling of their name to figure out what they’ve been doing since the 90s.

His story was slightly different.  He had one with fond memories who had sent the occasional Christmas card, one who had been a complete WTF entry, and two who were clearly taking Google stalking to the next level.  ”I don’t mind connecting with them,” he said, “but it’s a little weird that they have to respond to everything I post, as though they’re spending their days just waiting for me to update my status.”  Weird, indeed.

It seems that nearly everyone has an xCount greater than zero.  An informal survey of friends reveals xCount numbers between 3 and 9, each bringing varying levels of discomfort and baggage with them.  One, however, through the benefits of a new married surname and a move to a new continent has managed to avoid the xCount concept altogether, and was stunned to learn that I had an xCount.  

“I mean it’s lovely that they want to get in touch and it speaks volumes about your effect on their lives ….and yet: eeeeek.  I always wondered if I was crazy/unfriendly for not wanting contact or if the crazies were the ones who did.”

There’s no shortage of posts about this very topic.  This one talks about being the one that’s obsessed with the ex on Facebook.  This one talks about the shock of seeing the photo of the ex appear in the inbox.  Yet another talks about why your ex should never see your Facebook account.

Should you friend exes?  Only you know for sure.  Of course, you could always accept their invitation, learn everything you need to know about them, and then stealthily “unfriend” the person, leaving them to discover your passive-aggressive acceptance and rejection at their leisure.  But does that make you more or less creepy than the creepy ex that you’re trying to avoid?

In our continuing mission to provide you with something to do during the work day other than work, we at The Daily Procrastinator published a tantalizing batch of articles this week. This is your chance to make sure that you didn’t miss a thing.

FlashCap led off the week with A Man’s Guide To Mama Mia, in which he chronicles the pains (and, surprisingly, the joys) of the male experience of watching a musical which is primarily concerned with relationship foibles and ABBA. Later in the week, FlashCap confessed his love of comic books and defended comics as much more than tales for children.

TallGirl’s contributions for the week began with an Open Letter To The Woman At The Gym, celebrating the struggles and accomplishments of an anonymous stranger. TallGirl’s discerning eye also fell upon the relative costs and benefits of organic foods, the oddities and perils which await the frequent traveler, and the possible unforseen fallout from the birth of Nadya Suleman’s octuplets.

BigRedPoet weighed in this week with a suggestion that adults take a break from their “serious” reading and venture into the world of unexpectedly well-written young-adult novels. As ever, BigRedPoet also issued the weekly wrap-up.

Visit The Daily Procrastinator at any of the links above and sign up to receive daily email updates so you never miss an article!

The Daily Procrastinator: Contributing to the Dramatic Reduction of Your Personal Productivity

An actual scene from the movie.

Thor vs. Hulk is the latest animated offering from Marvel Comics (coupled with the simultaneous release Hulk vs. Wolverine). Unlike the previous “Ultimate Avengers” DVDs, Thor vs. Hulk focuses on the old-school Thor: red cape, winged helmet, and Mjolnir, his mystical uru hammer.

Full disclosure: I’m a Thor fan-boy. I wear a Mjolnir pendant on a necklace and my office is decorated with Marvel Legends Thor action figures. So while I’ve been looking forward to this movie since it was announced in mid-2008, my expectations were tempered by my typical pessimism that it could turn out to be a disappointment.

My pessimism was unfounded. Marvel has really come through in creating an epic Asgardian tale, wearing the influence of Walt Simonson proudly. Simonson is the writer of Thor’s most significant storyline in the 80’s, and many of the characters he defined make welcome cameos: Skurge, Malekith the Accursed, Surtur, and Balder, among others. The story opens in Asgard, in the midst of the Odin-sleep, when Asgard’s enemies launch their attacks while the kingdom is at its most vulnerable. Enter Loki, who is not content to merely repeat the same old cycle of events: he has kidnapped Bruce Banner and with the aid of Amora the Enchantress, plans to usurp the power of the Hulk to finally rule Asgard.

The production of the video is top-notch, from the artwork to the voice talent to the direction of the battles. One would expect the battles between the Hulk and the God of Thunder to be epic, but even I was impressed by the sheer power and brutality of the blows given and received as the two rage through the streets of Asgard. Thor Vs. Hulk is a return to form for Marvel’s animated series, particularly after the disappointment of Next Avengers, and should be an essential addition to any Marvel fan’s collection.