I’m not yet in the physical condition to write long blog-posts, mainly due to what some of you might refer to as a cold, others as a reason to make people feel sorry for me. Any which way, I still want to update this very blog, only to prove that Twitter has not yet turned every blog into a wasteland of old musings longer than 140 characters.

So there, I’ll just post one of the numerous pictures I took, so you can admire my ability of using nice filters for my cell-phone camera while also wondering where that unlimited source of cockiness lies of which I make so ample use. Enjoy!

But here’s the thing. Horst, mastermind of that last project, has just released a new book. It’s called “Dinge, die ich vom Nachtfernsehen gelernt habe: Things I learned from watching TV after midnight” and features an assortment of images taken off of after-midnight TV, accompanied by texts. And apart from the fact that the images are quite captivating, there’s also a text of mine written especially for this volume. It features my ability to fall asleep during TV and is great fun to read. And it’s in German, proving that my German is almost as much fun to read as my English.

So please, do check it out and don’t hesitate to buy and spread the word to whomever you might know. I assure you, the more people have this book at home, the better this wretched world we live in will turn out to be.

I’m a lucky bastard. I really am. I do, for example, have friends who think of me when they have spare tickets to events. Like a couple of weeks ago when I was treated to a concert of Them Crooked Vultures. Or, well, yesterday, when a good friend of mine had a spare ticket for the Vienna Lifeball. And not just a simple ticket (which still goes for 150€) but a VIP ticket with free food, drink and an actual table to sit at and watch people.

In case you’re not familiar with the Lifeball, it’s a charity event that started out as a small AIDS awareness party and today is probably the one party in Vienna, or Austria really, that most people who are into parties would love to attend. Well, here’s the official website, they do a much better job explaining what it’s all about.

Anyway, I got that ticket and I must admit, I’m probably the least deserving person to do so. First of all, lots of people dress up for this event. And I don’t mean dress up by wearing a suit. I mean dress up by thinking up a bizarre, fantastically outrageous costume, working on it for weeks and then spending hours to get it to sit perfectly. Me? I don’t like dress-up.

Second, I’m not one for huge parties. I like sitting down, sipping on my beer, smoking a cigarette and being my misanthropic self.

The good thing is, I’m also a fantastic freeloader. If it’s free, I’ll take it. You should see all the crap I got at home, only because someone told me it’s free. Ok, so that’s not entirely true. Most of the crap I own I actually bought. But that’s for another time.

Well, so I went there, and yes, it was actually quite fun. Unfortunately, the opening ceremony, which is always quite impressive, had to be discontinued due to a massive rainstorm. Fortunately, there was still time enough for me to get exceptionally wet.

The rest of the evening and night was filled with delicious food, loads and loads of crazily creative costumes, even more photographers taking pictures of said costumes and the feeling that this was the party of a lifetime. Well, not really. But there was music and there were people gyrating to that, so I guess it was quite alright.

All in all, it was a memorable night, not least because I’ve never seen so many virtually naked people in Vienna’s city hall.

By the way, there are always people lamenting how the Lifeball has deteriorated to a mere large-scale party, isn’t about the fight against AIDS anymore and is selling out by having ads all over the place, yadda, yadda, yadda. Well, if you’re one of those, fuck off. I’m pretty sure AIDS won’t be cured by your bitching either.

For all the others, here’s a link to the slideshow of the rest of the pictures I took.

And for fuck’s sake, use rubbers.

For everyone who isn't Austrian, or Viennese for that matter, the Plachutta restaurants won't be that well known. For all the others, the name evokes images of traditional Austrian cuisine coupled with loads of celebrities - A to Z - who love being seen there. And if you're lucky, you'll even end up on the walls of their restaurants or on their website.

Anyway, even though I've spent the better part of ten years in Vienna now, I never managed to visit one of their restaurants. I guess one of the reasons was that they're madly expensive. But recently I had the chance to visit Plachutta Hietzing with the prospect of not having to actually pay for it myself, and well, so I did.

Since I had published a review of a Zwiebelrostbraten at a less fancy place just a couple of days before, I decided to opt for another Zwiebelrostbraten, simply so I could compare and see whether all the talk about best Austrian cuisine and stuff was actually true.

And I must say, yes, it is quite true. First of all, when you're at Plachutta, you don't have one server. You've got two, three or four. I had shredded roast potatoes with my Zwiebelrostbraten and they weren't served on my plate. No, they were served in a tiny pan. Or pot. A tiny pot-pan. Anyway, they were served in that and a server came and put half of it on my plate, then the rest was put on a heating device in that tiny pot-pan thing. To keep it warm, of course.

And this actually happened with every meal. The minced meat got peas in a tiny pot-pan. The fish got potatoes in a tiny pot-pan. The fried chicken was actually served in a basket. And pieces of the chicken lifted from the basket onto a plate. By the server.

Now, I found that most peculiar. And even though it's a total waste of manpower, I still found it quite cute. I might have to get someone to do this for me at home.

But on to the important stuff. How was the Zwiebelrostbraten? Well, it was delicious. Very tender beef, neither too salty nor too bland, with very crisp onions on top and a good amount of broth for the whole thing to soak in. The shredded roast potatoes were equally well prepared, and came, of course, with their own server.

So yes, it is worth going to Plachutta, if only for the experience of having three people serving your meal instead of, you know, one. Finally, here's an image of above described Zwiebelrostbraten. I must admit, you can't really see the beef and it looks a bit, well, not that great, but that's mainly attributed to a lack of photographic skills.

Plachutta Hietzing

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Watching this clip, I wonder how Lux Interior made it even to 62 before dying of aortic dissection. I’m glad he managed to have a singing role on Sponge Bob before he died, though. Which I present to you now. Enjoy:

I had some sort of late lunch, early dinner with my girlfriend at a place called "Zum Wirt" a couple of days ago. I opted, as I do most of the time, for an Altwiener Zwiebelrostbraten with roast potatoes. Zwiebelrostbraten is beef, simmered in some sort of broth, then adorned with loads of, ideally, crisp onions.

It wasn't the best Zwiebelrostbraten ever, because the meat was rather far from tender, and quite fatty. But the potatoes were absolutely delicious, and soaking the crispy onions in the jus they provided was great fun too.

Oh, and another nice thing about the place: all tables are covered in white paper, colour felt pens are provided on each table as well. So while you're waiting for your food to arrive, you can doodle ahead at your heart's content! I took photos of our drawings, but there's a time and place for everything, and this here isn't the one. So you'll have to make do with the picture of my food. Enjoy!

Restaurant Zum Wirt

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Daneben gibt es dann Journalismus, der sich hauptsächlich so nennt, weil die Ergebnisse in einem periodisch erscheinenden Druckwerk publiziert werden. Was für Geschichten dieser Art nötig ist, ist in erster Linie eine Anekdote, um die der oder die zuständige JournalistIn dann passende Informationen sucht, die diese Anekdote in einen größeren Zusammenhang stellen sollen.

Die KRONE ist, nicht sonderlich überraschend, eher Anhängerin der letzteren Variante. Damit wären wir auch schon bei der Geschichte die sie heute in ihre Printausgabe gesteckt hat.

Ausriss: KRONENZEITUNG

Es gibt also einen neuen Trend, “Eyeballing” nennt das die KRONE. Übernommen hat sie diese Geschichte von der britischen DAILY MAIL, die ja, gelinde gesagt, nicht unbedingt als das seriöseste Blatt Großbritanniens gilt.

Die KRONE, immer dankbar für Geschichten über die verderbte Jugend, hat sich auch nicht die Mühe gemacht zu recherchieren, inwieweit dieser Trend wirklich Trend ist, oder ob die ganze Geschichte vielleicht nur auf der Erzählung einer ehemaligen Studentin und einigen selbstgedrehten Videos besteht.

Was den “Alarm” angeht, den heimische Ärzte angeblich schlagen, so hat sich die KRONE allerdings die Mühe gemacht, auf der gleichen Seite ein Mini-Interview mit einem Augenarzt zu drucken. Darin wird, nicht sonderlich überraschend, davor gewarnt, sich hochprozentigen Alkohol in die Augen zu gießen. Von einem Alarm, den heimische Ärzte schlagen, ist das aber meilenweit entfernt.

Das Einzige, das die KRONE mit dieser Aufregergeschichte erreicht hat, ist die Bekanntmachung dieser absurden Technik nun auch in österreichischen Haushalten. Nur für den Fall, dass die heimische Jugend noch nicht weiß, welchen Alarm sie nun schon wieder auszulösen hat.

Which is actually not true at all but seems like a fun first sentence when thinking it up. Reading it at the top of a blog post: not so much. However, I do want to tell you about my stay in London. Now, the ones who know my itineraries will be most nonplussed, considering that this stay I want to tell you about happened not a week, not four weeks but rather six weeks ago. That’s right, I went to London and only now I am going to tell you about it. Which would have been a rather cool opening sentence as well, come to think of it. But enough with the rambling. Let’s loosen this whole thing up with one of numerous potentially award-winning pictures I took:

Letting you figure out by yourself what this image depicts, I will go on with my jumbled narrative. I spent a long weekend at my sister’s in London in mid-March. Not only was she gracious enough to take me in, she even took a whole chunk of time out of her busy schedule to explore that fair city she calls home.

To top that off, she also managed to get me into a concert which took place in a chapel in Westminster Hall. Not only that, the whole thing was preceded by drinks with rich people, among them Ruth Rendell of crime-fiction fame, that were had in a hall which to my ears sounded something like “Chumley Hall”, but which upon closer scrutiny turned out to be named something else. Something very else. So very else that I was unable to remember, nor find the name online. But hey, we got a good laugh out of it and now that I’ve shared this with you, you did as well!

Anyway, I also got to have drinks and pizza with the musicians, who turned out to be a very fine lot and who you should be hitting up on their website. And with hitting up I mean having a look at their website and then visiting their concerts. No excuses!

I could go on now about the numerous rides on double-decker buses, the vast amounts of food we consumed, the movies we saw at splendid cinemas (actually, just the one), the countless episodes of “Flight of the Conchords” we watched late at night with my sister and me alternating as the one who would fall asleep first, the extreme number of little vintage shops on trendy brick lanes (where vintage actually means the results of people going through their parents’ 80s clothing and then deciding to sell them for ten times the amount they had cost initially, notwithstanding the fact that they still look exactly as silly as they did back then), the fish & chips we had looking over the river Thames, our stroll through a big park, our trying to spot celebrities at a place called Primrose Hill but failing miserably (even though I heard someone on the street mentioning Johnny Depp), the meeting up with a good friend from school who is now a famous producer for a computer game company, the dinners and lunches we had with the many splendid friends my sister is fortunate enough to call, well, friends, or last but not least my initial confusion with the various privately held train services that cost me an extra nine British Pound Sterling for a ticket which turned out to be useless, but I will instead stop here so as to not turn this posting into a gargantuan piece of sentence and letter mush that nobody reads anyway. And if you’ve made it till here, I will reward you with the rest of the above mentioned award winning pictures. Enjoy, and always remember to buy a ticket for public transportation in London. They’re kinda strict when it comes to that.

Lately though, I have felt the need to upgrade my mobile phone to something more full-featured. With me using an operating system (Linux) that Apple can’t or won’t support, an iPhone was out of the question (among other issues like Apple’s iron fist when it comes to what shall and what shall not be run on their devices). So instead, I opted for the HTC Desire, an Android powered phone. As luck would have it, I quickly found a carrier that sells it, ordered the beast and a week later my trembling hands were unboxing.

This is not the HTC Desire. This is just the box in which it came.

In case you think me calling that device a beast was just a playful way of trying to spruce up my writing, you were only half right. That thing really is a beast. With a 1GHz processor it’s way faster than any other smartphone on the market right now. Which reminds me that not so long ago (approximately 10 years) I was still using a computer that had a mere 300MHz. Yes, you read that right. Today? I’m using a mobile phone that has thrice the power. Hail to the processor gods!

Anyway, as I mentioned above, the Desire runs on Android, Google’s own mobile operating system. There’s a marketplace very similar to the Apple appstore which at the time of this writing holds roughly 40,000 applications. Which is about 39,950 more than I will ever need. But people like choices, and I guess that’s what Android is all about. If you want, you can replace every application on your phone with applications from the market and guess what? Neither Google nor HTC will care. And they won’t even revoke your warranty either.

There’s one problem I have with the Desire and that, of course, is its battery life. If you use all the stuff smartphones are famous for, you know, like surfing, taking pictures, sending emails, watching videos, listening to music and such, the HTC’s battery will crap out after approximately three hours. You can of course use the resources sensibly, in which case I’ve heard people mention battery times up to three days. Be that as it may, I am still wondering what the battery industry is doing all day long. I mean, it’s not as if they didn’t have time work on the durability of batteries for the last fucking century.

At last, you might be wondering what the headline is all about. Basically, I just wanted to lure you in. I don’t think there’ll ever be a smartphone to rule us all. Because there are more important things in life than gadgets. Like drinking, food and daytime television.

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