Here is the second installment in my interpretation of the songs from The Office. This probably isn’t as popular as the Freelove one, but the scene in which he plays this song is possibly my favorite in the whole series. David meets with Dawn in his office and starts to talk about how he wouldn’t be the boss "or the man" that he is if he didn’t try to console her in her times of need (she had a fight with her boyfriend). As he is talking, the camera pans to Dawn. When it pans back he is holding his guitar and he breaks into this song. It ends up being about the car accident that killed Princess Diana. The look he has when he goes into the “rushing through the Paris night” part is classic. Gareth in the background is perfect. If you still haven’t seen it, you are missing out.
Performance Disclaimer:
Any music you might find here is solely for the entertainment of me and my friends. I don’t pretend to be a musician and obviously don't have a voice made for singing. I have a much more polished version of this song with drums locked in the belly of ProTools but the program is completely worthless and has corrupted something in the file so it won’t let me format it to WAV or MP3. So this is just me and the acoustic.
Princess Diana (550KB MP3)
J sent me this sweet picture of Zurich he screen-captured while playing around with Google Earth. It's pretty much the coolest map I have ever seen. One thing I hadn't seen before was the ability to rotate and change line of sight. You'll see what I mean if you first get a broadband connection and download this bad boy. One thing you'll probably want to do is to turn on the 3D Buildings layer from the checkbox list. This will combine the whole thing with satellite images of the location so you can see the buildings and streets and all the other good stuff.
Our apartment location is identified on this map too. It's pretty sweet but I'll bet I could get a more scenic one from the Queen Anne house where we lived. I'll post that if I get around to it.
The bulletin board forum is up and rocking courtesy of Mr. Piro. If you were a fan of the old chizzyandbryan site, you will enjoy this even more. Even if politics isn’t your bag, you can chime in on sports, celebrity gossip, or any topic you feel like talking about. Let the good times roll.
Has anyone else been following this obscene public display of 'romance?' I'm not denying they actually love each other, but I can't help but think it's too sappy to be real. If you watched the MTV Movie Awards, you would have raised your eyebrows too when an unbelievable Katie presented an award to her new man. I didn't see the show that TC put on in his Oprah interview, but I can only imagine she was returning the favor when she did this arms in the air, 'I'm a champ' pose. It was just weird. I like Miss Holmes, but I'm a little surprised by her public composure these days. Maybe she's just giddy over this new relationship, which reminds me of the JLO/Ben pairing. Can you believe she went and got Tom tattooed to her chest?
I'm sorry I took that last thread down. You know I never edited or removed anybody's comments on the old site. I do like having content that people enjoy reading and commenting on, but those conversations just didn't seem to fit here and certainly the flat comment mechanism is not a good tool to host that type of forum.
Don't be sad though, because Piro has verbally committed to actually doing something useful with his domain and get a bulletin board going for these very discussions. He said my site is better because people read it, but I think the three of us will be able to find his site. I’m posting this here essentially to call him out and get him going on it. Steve can help you if you want, Piro. Thanks for volunteering, Stever.
I look forward to pointing all my readers to his site when he gets it going.
Except for yet another holiday on Thursday (Ascension), I completed my first week of German class. All hopes of a possible side benefit of meeting some new people to hang out with went out the window pretty quickly. There are five others in the class and three of them are about 12 years old. The other two are women who are probably in their mid 20's. Nobody speaks English at all, including our instructor. Two of the kids are from Macedonia and the other is from Honduras. One of the women is from Moroco and the other is from Lebanon. The class is taught only in German and it is working pretty well so far but I am very interested to see how some of the more complicated grammer will be taught. The woman from Lebanon is a bit slower than the rest of us but I'm pretty sure it is because she is learning the alphabet from scratch which wasn't part of the class for some reason. The teacher just walked in the first day, points to herself, and says "my name is..." in German and we are off and running. In general she just pulls out some pictures and says what things are and pretty soon we are going around asking each other questions with our new verbs and nouns and reading from a workbook. I am one of the star pupils and when I get praise from the teacher, I yell, "USA, USA, USA" and I give the number 1 sign. That's a joke for Nick. The teacher is actually a real stickler for not talking in class (a few of the students share other common languages), not rocking in chairs, being on time, not yawning, and doing homework correctly. It's like she is German or something. Oh, I'm on a roll this morning. Speaking of which, I now wake up at 7 am since I have somewhere to go. It's good.
Sure was mean of me to talk about the tiny apartment and then not show you. Well, I'm returning to my friendly ways. Enjoy.
This is where I slave away all day cooking.
We've bumped our heads a few times getting out of the bath. Note the dishes in the bathroom sink. Sanitary.
Do not let the mirror fool you. I think the TV reflection gives the best perspective on the size of the master bedroom/living room/study. Directly behind Chiz is the kitchen.
Lest you thought there really was more.
Yes, it really is $2000 a month.
Yes, indeed. Our favorite pub so far is the Oliver Twist and it serves the dual purpose of being the main English speaking bar in Zurich and also as the hub of everything soccer. It is only a 10 minute walk from our place. On most weeknights it is just a casual pub where you can get a pint of Guiness and have a good time talking to Welsh dudes who hate Zurich. On nights when English soccer is being played it is a room filled with nothing but British dudes screaming at the top of their lungs. Awesome. I check soccernet.com on a regular basis now to see what big matches are coming up.
Tonight I chose to head down there for a Champions League match between Chelsea and Barcelona. If you don’t know, the Champions League is THE league for bragging rights in Europe. All of the teams involved in the league play for their respective countries, but this is the tournament to crown the best team in all of Europe. I think every UK soccer fan in Zurich was down there for the important game against the Spanish based Barcelona club. I don’t know if the Brits generally outnumber the Spanish in Zurich or if the lopsided cheering was simply because of the pub itself. What would a Spanish bar be anyway? I was silently pulling for Barca because I don’t have any geographic loyalties and the team I played for in Seattle was named after them (Barcaloungers was our historical name). It was a great game and London based Chelsea pulled out the 4-2 victory after a wild opening 20 minutes where they went up 3-0. They needed a two point victory to advance to the quarter finals so it was a nail biter to the end.
Ironically, the one guy I decided to strike up a conversation with was actually an American football fan who once played tackle for the London Monarchs in the World League. He was more interested in talking about the Super Bowl than of soccer. Small world.
I realized we didn't have a nice catch-all category to post those random bloggy things you need to write once in a while to keep the updates coming. So, sit back and enjoy this first entry to the Random category dealing with the minuta of our weekend.
Getting lost on a drive a while back we came across the city center of the town we actually live in, Montesson. It was a nice little area with the requisite cobblestone, small roads and smaller shops and looked like it might be a cool place to grab a drink another evening. That evening turned out to be Saturday and the idea turned out to be a bad one. The city center wasn’t that nice upon closer inspection and we ended up walking into a bar at the end of town because it was the only place we saw that might be serving drinks at all. It was a total dive and Chizzy felt very uncomfortable being the only woman in a tiny smoky room filled with what appeared to be hooligans. (Dante's foosball crew: I did make one amazing observation watching the hooligans play on some really old tables with what looked like rubber balls. The dominate shot of all the players turned out to be the aptly named Frenchy Pullback. I am not kidding.) After making quick work of our beer while standing at the bar we grabbed Chizzy’s coworker Mike and went out to the more inviting town of St. Germain En Laye. We went to a cool Irish pub and got to speak a bit of English to the barkeep and put back a couple Guinesses. They only had little sandwiches for food though so we moved down the road to a pizza place. We arrived at 6:45 which we knew was early for dinner but not so early that they wouldn’t even be open yet. They weren’t however, so we had a while to kill so went to the English pub next door. The British tabloid The Sun was sitting on our table and I introduced Mike and Chizzy to the famous Page 3 Girl. Finished off our beers there and headed back to the pizza place. I wanted to make sure I got a little local flavor to my meal so I ordered the ‘special’ which came with a fresh raw egg cracked right over the top immediately before serving. I had heard about the raw egg phenomenon from many people before I got here but was still a bit surprised to learn there are no rules on what qualifies to be topped with one. After dinner we moved across the street to the French bar where we met up with Bill, another coworker. If you are a long time reader of this site you might be familiar with a post I did several months back about how silly I thought asking where restrooms where in bars and restaurants. I have been regretting that post for quite a while but I still like to venture out to find them without asking. I thought I had these French bathroom locations nailed because they never seem to be on the dinning level. You are either going upstairs or downstairs if you want to use the restroom. So I made a beeline to the nearest staircase and was half way up by the time I heard the waitress yelling at me. Turned out to pretty much be the door right across from where we were sitting. I will always remember this bar, however, as my first introduction to the infamous smoking in Europe. I’d been telling people for a couple weeks now that I hadn’t noticed the smoke here at all. I guess it was just a matter of time before I found it. It was pretty much unbearable to me after a while and it was at my suggestion that we call it a night. In classic fashion the machine ate our parking ticket and I needed to use the call box to find a dude to come and help. Normally a trivial matter but the language barrier makes even those adventurous.
Nicely done. The Taylor is sounding great. You sing better then you think BK. I enjoyed it.
J, July 21, 2005 06:09 PM:Nice work. Do I hear birds in the background at the end?
Bryan, July 21, 2005 06:42 PM:Yeah, I took my laptop and guitar out into the forest to find inspiration and play amongst the birds. That's a lie. I'm not exactly sitting in a studio or anything though. I guess I didn't even close the windows that day.