Holyrood Park

When making my preparations to go to Edinburgh, I knew that, given the diet of fried foods that defined my trip, I would need to spend all the time that I was not eating being active enough to turn my body into a big, albeit slightly flabby, calorie furnace. Fortunately, Edinburgh is a city hilly enough to rival San Francisco, with the added benefit of a royal park full of giant hills smack dab in the middle of town.

This gigantic hill is now my bitch.

Hiking is not exactly my deal. It’s actually pretty far from my deal. God bless the hikers of the world, but I’ve seen trees and rocks before. I enjoy trees and rocks, and I like seeing them. However, I don’t feel the need to spend several hours clambering over uneven terrain in order to see more trees and rocks. I know it’s a matter of personal preference, but whenever I hear my friends raving about how much they love hiking, I can’t help but think that maybe I’m not enjoying it because I’m doing something wrong. It’s like I’m playing Modern Warfare 2 without knowing that you’re allowed to shoot people. This fundamental lack of enthusiasm for hiking was the catalyst for my breakup with The Ex Girlfriend (along with the fact that as a general rule I don’t like being scolded and otherwise slandered at every available opportunity).

However, after two days in which I consumed a haggis burrito, a deep fried cheeseburger, and a deep fried pizza, I knew that the only way I could make it out of Scotland without heart failure as a souvenir was to hike my nuts off, and the place to do that was at Edinburgh’s Holyrood Park, home to Arthur’s Seat and the Salisbury Crags. The fact that I did this on a day so hot that a runner in the Edinburgh Marathon died of heat exhaustion should also be noted.

Sides of my heart were blowing out like old tires.

Right away, I realized that this hike probably couldn’t be classified as a hike – not because it wasn’t difficult, because it definitely was, but because I was actually enjoying it. You see, while I don’t like hiking, I do enjoy panoramic views of major cities, and the advantage to these hills being in the center of a major city is… Well, really, do I need to explain?

The hike where The Ex Girlfriend learned that I was not a hiking enthusiast and thus could never be a good boyfriend was a muddy slog through dense forests, affording no real views of the surrounding landscape and, more importantly, no way to look back at how far you’d come and think, “Well, I’m covered in mud and sweat and there isn’t a bathroom for miles, but look what I’ve done!” For all I knew, we could’ve been going in circles. Furthermore, there was no tangible goal to what we were doing, save for “Get to the end of the trail so we can hike the entire trail backwards and then go home.”

Climbing the steep, uneven path up to the top of Arthur’s Seat, 823 feet above the city, was an awe inspiring experience. No, like, literally. I would stop and turn around and see the tiny brown path I’d taken snaking up the sheer edge of the hill with the entire city of Edinburgh laid out in the distance all the way to the North Sea, glimmering in the afternoon light, and awe was actually inspired within me. And along with that awe was ambition to keep climbing up to the top, which was also within sight, because the view only got better the higher I went. Refreshing cold winds off the North Sea also helped.

How many Scottish teenagers come up here to bone, I wonder?

Maybe 50 feet from the summit, the hill leveled out into a wide, grassy plateau where several other hikers were sitting with books or lying on their backs for a high-altitude nap. From here, you could turn 360 degrees and see everything for miles in every direction. I could see from the docks at one side of town all the way to where houses and deep fried pizza shops gave way to lush green fields and farmland. A city the size of Portland laid out underneath me, like I was some sort of sweaty alien riding on a floating grass disk.

Edinburgh is probably the second most beautiful city I’ve ever seen (after Portland, which, if it were a woman, would be Christina Hendricks). I don’t think I’d ever want to live outside the United States, for reasons I’ll elaborate on in a later update, but if I had to flee the country after pulling a massive casino heist, Edinburgh would be the place I’d go to start my new life.*

*Not that I’m planning a casino heist.

And what’s more, I’d use my newfound wealth to bribe city council members to let me build a modest house up on that grassy plateau, that little disk in the sky. Every morning, I’d be able to walk out my front door and see everything in the city I called my home, and at the same time, if the police tried to catch up with me, they’d be forced to run single file up a narrow path, which gives me a clear advantage, tactically speaking.

Truman Capps celebrated his day of exercise with a bacon cheeseburger for lunch.

Kentucky Fried Update

Between the round trip train tickets and three nights in a hostel, my trip to Edinburgh cost me roughly 130 pounds, which comes out to nearly $200. I consider myself to be a slightly cultured person, but the simple fact is that no art museum or guided history tour alone will encourage me to drop $200 on a weekend trip.

An international reputation for deep fried food, on the other hand, is exactly what it takes.

Deep Fried Cheeseburger

I am a tried and true burger lover. I’d say that it’s probably one of my favorite foods – juvenile a choice as it may be, there’s nothing quite like a big, high quality cheeseburger when you’ve had a long day and all you want is to clog your arteries in the most efficient way possible.

So when I saw the deep fried cheeseburger on the menu at Café Piccante, a chip shop near my hostel, I knew I had to go for it.

Deep frying is a tricky proposition – you’ve got to drop the whole business into a vat of boiling oil, which makes frying small things (M&Ms) or multi-layered things (burgers with their buns) difficult, as it’s very easy for everything to come apart and sink to the bottom of the fryer. That’s why I was interested to see how they handled a deep fried cheeseburger – a layer of cheese on top of the patty would all too quickly separate and disappear into the fat. It’s for this same reason that you can’t deep fry a pizza with any toppings that are liable to come off when submerged.

As it turned out, the Swiss cheese was inside the patty, an ingenious and effective delivery method that I would’ve taken a photograph of had it not been so delicious that I devoured the whole burger before I could think. The act of forming the raw patty around the cheese and then cooking it put me in mind of the South Minneapolis ‘Jucy Lucy’ burger.

Deep Fried Pizza

When I mentioned it a second ago, maybe you said, “What? Deep fried pizza!? He’s joking, right?”

The deep fried pizza was something I’d been itching to try ever since seeing it on a Food Network special about deep fried foods, and my trip to Castle Rock Chip Shop in the Grass Market was the culmination of many months’ planning and fantasizing.

The closer I got, though, the more apprehensive I felt – was I actually going to go through with this? I already felt bad enough for my body after the previous day’s deep fried cheeseburger – a battered and fried pizza would surely be adding insult to injury. I paced outside the chip shop for a minute before forcing myself to go inside, having already come this far.

“I-I’d like a d-deep fried pizza, please.” I murmured to the woman behind the counter as though I were asking for a volume of deep fried hardcore pornography.

She cheerily went to work, pulling a cheap frozen pizza out of the freezer and covering it in batter before dropping it into the fryer. Just like top quality steak never goes into a steak sandwich, you’re going to have to look far and wide to find a brick oven deep fried pizza. To my knowledge, virtually every chip shop in Scotland buys the bottom rung school cafeteria-style cheese pizzas to throw into the fryer. Buy a pizza at WinCo and you’ll know what I mean.

Thing is, you’re not paying for the pizza – you’re paying for the fact that it’s deep fried, and I can tell you that when you’re experiencing the novelty of eating something cheesy and tomatoey that’s also been beer battered, you really don’t care that much. The deep frying process covers for a lot of ills.

The experience was not that enjoyable for me, however. They dropped the whole deep fried pizza into a box and shoveled in a liberal amount of fries along with it, and then sent me on my way. Yes, as this was a take-away establishment, I was going to have to find a park bench and eat this embarrassingly unhealthy meal in public, bearing my shame for all to see.

It was good enough, I suppose, but I felt so bad – psychologically, I mean – about what I was eating that I only finished about three quarters of it and maybe half of the fries before dumping the remains in a garbage can and fleeing the scene, promising that my next meal would involve bean sprouts in some way.

(Also, I washed this meal down with a can of Irn-Bru soda, the Scottish soft drink so popular that in Scotland it outsells Coke and Pepsi combined. It tastes like a combination of orange and cream soda and has so much sugar and so many additives that it is allegedly illegal in Sweden. I have never in my life tasted a soda so steadfastly committed to being gross.)

Deep Fried Mars Bar

After my PTSD-inducing experience with deep fried pizza, I promised myself I would abstain from trying a deep fried Mars Bar. However, on my last night in town I caved and slipped out of the hostel under the cover of darkness, making my way to the Clam Shell chip shop on the Royal Mile with the dark and insane drive of Martin Sheen going to kill Kurtz at the end of Apocalypse Now.

I could practically hear Jim Morrison echoing in my head when I approached the Indian guy at the counter and said, “One deep fried Mars Bar, please.”

Verdict?

Don’t do it.

The Mars Bar is what we in America know as the Milky Way bar, which is actually one of my preferred brands of candy bar. But something about coating it in batter and throwing it in the fryer turns it into a sugar-charged orgy of molten chocolate and nougat coated in enough grease to render multiple sheets of paper clear as a car’s windshield.

It was a dark but delicious three days. Also, in case you were wondering, I was able to make it through the weekend without turning into 1970s Elvis by doing uncharacteristically athletic stuff, like climbing these volcanic rock formations:

Of course, I guess I’ll only really know if I ducked the consequences when I die of natural causes at a very old age, instead of succumbing to a heart attack before I finish writing thi

Truman Capps realizes that a lot of the humor is lost when he recovers from his heart attack to write this stinger.

Imageless, Short Road Update

Did you ever notice how people go off to college and instantly become huge fans of the Food Network? I never got it until it happened to me – you’re eating a bowl of $1 Safeway Penne covered in $2 Safeway Select Four Cheese pasta sauce, and all you want to do is turn on the TV and watch other people getting paid to fly to exotic places and eat totally delicious food. It makes your $3 dinner taste all the more bitter, but it gives you hope for the future.

“The food I’m eating right now is not very good.” You think. “But I’ll make up for it by one day going to the place in Minneapolis where the burger patties are all filled with cheese.”

My weekend trip to Scotland, which, as you read this, I am smack in the middle of, is the direct implementation of this fantasy. You see, it had never been a particular dream of mine to travel to Scotland (save for perhaps in elementary school when I went by my middle name, Scott, but those days are over – call me when they establish the Democratic Republic of Trumania), until I learned, several months ago, of the Scottish affinity for deep frying things. Deep fried Mars Bars, deep fried doner kebab, deep fried pineapple rings, and, last but not least, deep fried pizza.

This penchant for deep frying anything edible has made Scotland late night talk show joke fodder in recent years, which I think is wholly unfair. Firstly, up until this deep frying craze began, Scotland’s best known food was haggis, which is made of sheep’s lungs, heart, and liver minced with onion and oatmeal, heavily seasoned, and then simmered inside a sheep's stomach. When your jumping off point is inedible bits of animal jammed inside another inedible bit of animal, anything is an improvement.

Furthermore, we shouldn’t be laughing at the Scottish for pioneering new and innovative things to deep fry. We should be laughing at ourselves for not thinking of it first. I mean, come on, America! We used to be pioneers in the fields and industry until we outsourced all of that to Japan and India – don’t tell me we’re going to let go of first place in the field of finding ways to become morbidly obese too!

Deep fried Coke was a good first step and the KFC Double Down was a stroke of genius, but until we emulate Scotland’s willingness to grab the first thing within reach and throw it into the fryer, we’re not going to win this thing. Sure, sometimes they swing for the fences and it doesn’t work out, but Thomas Edison failed one hell of a lot of times before he invented the lightbulb (which, incidentally, the Scottish have tried to deep fry).

Hey, wait, has anybody tried deep fried whiskey yet? America! Get on it!

For the health conscious among you, I plan to keep my fried food consumption in check the same way I managed to lose weight while working at Mike’s Drive In two summers ago – moderation, portion control, and being a 19 year old male (the last one might be a little bit hard now, but I’m up to the challenge). Edinburgh is a remarkably hilly city built on a lot of big mounds of volcanic rock, and I intend to earn my ludicrous meals by walking absolutely everyfuckingwhere.

So I guess what I’m trying to say is this: If you don’t hear back from me on Wednesday, either my healthy eating plans failed and I had a coronary, or I decided I never wanted to leave. Take your pick.

Truman Capps would deep fry this blog if he could.

Hair Guy Love Europe, Part 4

Part 4: Socialist Paradise

I looked really hard at everyone I saw on the bustling streets of Copenhagen. These people live in a socialist country. I thought. Denmark is the big government catastrophe that drives Glenn Beck to tears every night. Just how miserable are these people?

Well, she doesn't look so happy.

I scrutinized the faces of the passing Danes very closely and found two things: 1) If the people of Denmark are miserable, they’re doing a great job of hiding it, and 2) People of seemingly every nationality turn away and walk faster when they see me staring intently at them.

Income tax rates in Denmark start at about 35% and go as high as around 65% for the top earners. Sales tax is 25%. If you want to buy a car, there’s a 200% tax on top of the car’s price. Danes are perfectly happy to discuss this sort of thing – they don’t appear to be embarrassed by the fact that they give the majority of their money to the government, nor are they enticed by the idea of a large country across the Atlantic where one can pay less than half that in taxes and buy a truck the size of space for pocket change.

The reason everyone seems so satisfied is that all that money goes to really good use. Naturally, Denmark has more healthcare than they know what to do with. The government also fully funds every student’s education from kindergarten up through as much college as he or she chooses to pursue, and apparently they even pay college students a living stipend so they don’t have to take a job while they study. If you’re having trouble making your rent payments, the government will cover the difference.

I stayed with my ex-roommate Josh, who was studying in Copenhagen. His host family consisted of a divorced host father, who had epilepsy, and his autistic son. The disaster potential for that combination is pretty high, so the Danish government pays for a live-in social worker to stay with the family 24/7.

This is what Josh's host family looks like. From outside their apartment. While they're inside it.

The government apparently also funds significant research into genetically engineering the creation of tall, superhot blonde haired blue eyed women who walk around and boost general morale, and maybe the birth rate too. I’ll be honest – while Denmark is nice, it didn’t really strike me as the sort of place I’d want to live, but if they bumped up the Aryan babe population by another few percent, I’d be applying for a visa before you could say, “terrible reason to move somewhere.” Hell, if the women in North Korea looked like that, I’d move there. I’d even go to El Paso.

Josh has been studying in Denmark for nine months, and I was staying with him for his last few days in the country before his program ended and he went home. Thus, I experienced a lot of Josh’s farewell parties and other general revelry. One of the most bizarre moments, though, came when Josh and I went to visit his friend Obi*, a Danish student finishing his degree at Copenhagen Business School who had been paired up with Josh as part of Josh’s study abroad program.

*Obi is a shortening of his real name, which as I recall is super long and has a ‘Bjorn’ somewhere in it. He adopted the shorter nickname when he was studying in the United States a few years ago, apparently not seeing the Star Wars connection. I can’t promise that I didn’t tell him he was my only hope.

Josh and I dropped by the Copenhagen Business School to say goodbye to Obi during a meeting for the student business club, of which he was vice president. When we entered the room, he and about 25 other students were in the process of electing a new board of directors. Everyone was dressed impeccably – guys in collared shirts and ties, girls in heels and skirts. Campaign speeches were made in both English and Danish.

And the whole time, everyone was drinking straight whiskey out of clear plastic cups. Keep in mind, this is an official extracurricular function on a college campus, and everybody was just having a few drinks to keep their minds limber as they worked. I felt like I’d walked onto the set of Mad Men.

University of Oregon Extracurricular Activities That Could Be Improved By Open Consumption

1) The Oregon Daily Emerald
2) Oregon Marching Band Council
3) Drunk Driver Shuttle

Josh also took me through a part of Copenhagen called Freetown Christania, an autonomous commune of squatters who took up residence on an abandoned military base near the middle of town in 1971, declared it a sovereign country, and have stayed there ever since with very little resistance from the Danish government, which apparently takes a pretty mellow position on seditious activities.

Due to the open sale of marijuana, they're pretty strict about photography any closer to the city center than this.

Christania is a quaint little town chock full of largely unwashed and perpetually stoned hippies who subsist off of the sale of handmade trinkets and marijuana. Naturally, it made me pretty homesick for Eugene – I halfway expected somebody to come and ask me if I wanted to buy the funniest jokebook the world has ever known (and even when I’m on vacation, the answer is still no).

Socialist hippie dwellings.

After a few days, the time came for me to leave Denmark and head back to England. The past seven weeks I’ve spent in England have been a nonstop onslaught of unfamiliar and bizarre stuff – cars with steering wheels where there ought not to be steering wheels, the letter U in places it didn’t belong, and potato chip flavors that may well have been invented by a mad scientist.* However, coming back to England from countries so bizarre that they make cars prohibitively expensive and don’t even speak English really gave me a newfound appreciation for the place.

*”Gentlemen, BEHOLD! Lobster tail flavored chips!”

Hair Guy Love Europe. But Hair Guy Love United Kingdom more.

Truman Capps brought this rodeo to a close just in time to go to Scotland this weekend.

Hair Guy Love Europe, Part 3

Part 3: Transparency

I’ve always enjoyed American history because it’s basically a super long, incredibly violent movie that was filmed in my own backyard. I recognize a lot of the big stars from their other appearances, namely on money. Before big disasters like the Great Depression, you can even chide America for being naïve and stupid, just like the half naked girl in any given horror movie.

“No! Don’t go in there! At least turn on the lights! Okay, you know what? You deserve 25% unemployment, you stupid bitch.”

European history, on the other hand, is like watching a Japanese horror movie – it’s way more violent and involves a fair amount of incest. For that reason, along with the fact that I opted to be a library aide senior year instead of taking AP European History, I’m largely ignorant of Europe’s past, save for the more recent bits where America has stepped in to save the day (or firebomb the shit out of a city full of innocent people).

This was why a lot of the castles and churches of Dresden held little interest for me beyond “That is a huge and pretty building.” I made a point of going to see them, because these sorts of things are the reason one travels in Europe, but they didn’t have as huge an emotional impact on me as they would on a homegrown German because these buildings were built for monarchs who I knew virtually nothing about. It’s like if I started watching Lost right at the end of the series – I’d be totally confused, but everyone who was really devoted and had watched all of it would know exactly what was going on.

Well, wait – maybe that’s the worst possible example.

Regardless, my inexperience with German history led me to one of Dresden’s tourist attractions that is straight up futuristic: Volkswagen’s Transparent Factory.

I read about this first in a guidebook and later on Wikipedia, and the gist of it is that Volkswagen wanted to show the world their commitment to eco friendly design and high quality craftsmanship, so they built a factory in the center of Dresden made mostly out of glass, so that people walking by could look in and see that everything was being made properly.

Suggestions to rebuild the US Capitol building out of glass for this same purpose were considered, but then shelved when everyone realized that they’d much rather just get their sex scandal news from Drudge Report instead of seeing it firsthand.

I rest my case.

The Transparent Factory is a downright beautiful building. It’s all open spaces and stainless steel and hardwood floors...

...and I’m pretty sure it’s the only car factory to have a full service bar only thirty feet away from an automobile assembly line.

When, in the course of my two Euro English language guided tour, they took us onto a catwalk overlooking the assembly area, everything was quiet, clean, and restrained. My impression had been that building a car required loud noises, industrial smells, and near constant profanity, as all of those (particularly the third) seem to be a constant in the process of repairing a car.

Then, the tour guide hit us with the truth bomb – none of the really gritty industrial work gets done at this plant. All the shitty jobs that people wouldn’t want to look at, like the construction of the engine and the welding of the frame, gets done at Volkswagen’s more conventional Nontransparent Factory outside of town, and the parts are then brought to the Transparent Factory by tram to be assembled where everyone can see them.

This begs the question of why Volkswagen doesn’t just build the entire car in one place, because hauling truckloads of car parts across town is not cheap or easy (trust me, I’d know). During the course of the tour, the reason that became pretty clear was that the Transparent Factory is less of a factory and more of a glorified showroom. They produce just 35 cars a day, and only Volkswagen Phaetons at that – Volkswagen’s most expensive luxury sedan.

The Transparent Factory is the automotive industry’s equivalent of a miniskirt – Volkswagen is just showing off their best qualities, so to speak. However, the miniskirt still hides the ugly mole on Volkswagen’s ass, that being the factory outside town that produces the more unsightly WORST METAPHOR EVER.

Before the tour, I had gone up to a set of windows looking in on the assembly line and was about to take a picture when one of the receptionists ran up and stopped me, explaining that photography of the assembly line was strictly forbidden.



I found this confusing, because I thought that Volkswagen had built a glass factory to show the world that they didn’t care if people saw how their cars were built. If I were a bigger asshole, I would’ve pointed out to the receptionist that American automakers have a similar photography policy, which is why they build concrete factories surrounded by barbed wire, and never in the center of a major metropolitan area.

People who build cars in glass factories shouldn’t throw stones at guys with cameras. Just like girls wearing miniskirts shouldn’t get pissed when guys try to take pictures of their STILL THE WORST METAPHOR EVER.

Truman Capps will be back tomorrow with tales of his harrowing trip to socialist Denmark, where car drives you, but you still have to pay the 200% tax on the car.

Hair Guy Love Europe, Part 2

Part 2: Gluttony and Sloth

My trip to Dresden was not motivated by any great interest in Saxony or the greater Germany area. By and large, the only country I have an overwhelming interest in over here is England, which, fortunately enough, happens to be where I’m living at the moment. No, all of my destinations during my week of European travel were chosen because of the fact that I had friends living in those places who offered to let me stay with them for free. Admittedly, something that costs 0 Euros still costs like $1.26 at the current exchange rate, but it was still a way better deal than anything else I could find.

My gracious host in Dresden was my friend Bri, who, like myself, was one of the truly committed Sprague High School nerds to be in both the band and the speech team. She’s a few years older than I am, and after graduating from the University of Portland a few years ago with an education degree, she was offered a job teaching elementary school at an international school in Dresden.

On Saturday, my first day in town, there was a combination concert/potlatch fundraiser at Bri’s school that she was required to attend, largely to work crowd control with the kids. I tagged along, enticed by the potlatch aspect, but was disappointed to find that, 1) The potlatch came after an hour of watching other peoples’ children sing and dance, and 2) The potlatch wasn’t free.*

*Admittedly, I probably could’ve figured that one out from the fact that this was a fundraiser, but Germany is kind of a socialist country, so I figured they had some voodoo economic workaround.

Before the show I took a seat near the back of the auditorium, hoping that with my wet hair no parent would mistake me for ein childmolestenschnitzel. As more and more people filed in, an Aryan looking woman sitting two rows ahead of me with her husband kept glancing back at me for several minutes before finally turning around in her seat and directing a brisk question to me in German.

“English?” I whimpered, wanting to curl up into a fetal position. To me, whatever she’d said sounded a lot like, “Ve vill take vaht ve vish, and zen decide vether or not to blow your ship from ze vater!”

“Ve vould like to change zie seats vith you.” She said curtly, already standing up.

“Of course!” I exclaimed, bowing to German intimidation with moist, Neville Chamberlain confidence as I scampered out of my seat.

After the children performed, I set forth into the potlatch to see what not-entirely-free food I could rustle up. As this was an international school, the potlatch thrown together by the students’ parents represented all of the school’s various nationalities. Japanese parents were making sushi while a German father was preparing sausage, and at the Canadian table a husband and wife stood watch over a tall boy of Miller Genuine Draft and a pack of smokes.

I had some sort of Turkish rice stew which I’d never heard of. When I asked the Turkish parent serving it what was in it, she helpfully told me all of the ingredients in German, so for all I know it could’ve been made out of communion wafers and dick. After that, I still felt a bit hungry, so I made the perhaps misguided decision to purchase a massive doner kebab from the Turkish booth next to the one I’d gotten the stew from. The result was a food-powered exhaustion so powerful that I bypassed any and all sightseeing for the day in favor of passing out on Bri’s futon.

In my defense, this doner booth had one of those big vertical spits of meat that they slice strips off of, and if I don’t try to eat all of it, who will?

Like you could resist.

That night, we went to a barbecue that one of her coworkers was throwing, and I spent seven hours gorging myself on chicken, fruit, crackers, and warm brie spread on fresh rolls from the bakery down the street, all tempered with very responsible alcohol consumption. Afterwards, stuffed full of free food and drink, I waddled home for my second food coma of the day. By the time I woke up the following afternoon I was hungry again, so we stopped at a kebab shop for a durum, something Bri recommended.

I ordered the durum and, expecting it to be small, a side of fries as well (with mayonnaise – because they offered, and in Germany I don’t have to be ashamed of the fact that I think mayonnaise is fucking delicious). Thus, I was quite shocked when the shop’s proprietor handed me a hunk of meat wrapped in pitabread so large that it could’ve probably eaten me. The side of fries, also, rivaled anything one could find at McDonald’s for hugeness, and the fact that everything was covered in mayonnaise didn’t do much to make me feel better about my eating habits.

This led me to yet another food coma, forcing me to postpone my sightseeing for another few hours. Gluttony and Sloth go hand in hand, it seems – and when they conspire to make you put off visiting a bunch of old churches, well, shit, man.

Truman Capps will return tomorrow with the tale of his last day in Dresden, which he spent watching Germans in white coats build cars. Efficiently.

Hair Guy Love Europe, Part 1

Hey guys, it’s Truman again. I just got my blog out of the impound yard – it looks like after Jack’s last update he ran it into a ditch someplace outside Spokane and just left it there when he realized he couldn’t get it out again. It’s going to take a while to get the old girl cleaned up and back in working order: The tape deck is full of CDs for bands I’ve never heard of and there’s a funky smelling stain in the shape of California on the back seat. What’s more, nobody’s made a solid Battlestar Galactica in-joke that 93% of the readers won’t understand for a full seven days, and we’re dangerously low on jokes that have been shamelessly ripped off from Conan ‘O Brien. So do please excuse the mess during the rest of the update as I try to fill those quotas again.

Also, while the police currently have no leads as to Jack’s whereabouts save for a trail of blood leading toward some outdoor music festival where people get their bone on in public and the headlining band is really popular in Greenland, let’s all remember him fondly as a man among men for taking up the reins of Hair Guy for a full update cycle – he truly is a Hair Guy, and I’m not just saying that because I’ve seen the drain in his shower. Jack’s updates not only taught us a lot about the world; they taught us a lot about ourselves. For example, I learned that despite what I may have said before, California is actually a pretty nice place.

...for me to POOP ON!

Yep. Hair Guy will be back on track in no time. And without any further ado, please enjoy part one of a multi-part, daily series…

HAIR GUY LOVE EUROPE

No, that’s not… Ah, fuck it.

Part 1: Dresden

A few weeks ago, I visited London’s Imperial War Museum, which is basically one giant monument to the fact that if you live in the world, England has tried to kill your ancestors (or maybe even you – holla back, Ireland!).

The Imperial War Museum wants to show you its guns. No, really.

In the basement of the museum was the Blitz exhibit, wherein groups of tourists were herded in small groups into a little faux World War II era bomb shelter which would vibrate slightly while recordings of explosions played, to simulate the experiences of Londoners taking shelter from Nazi bombs. Afterwards, a little door opened and we were ushered out into a replica of a bombed out London street, which would have been a very powerful moment had the whole thing not looked like it had been built out of cardboard boxes by someone who had never been to England.*

*So as rides go, I’d rate it below Disneyland’s Great Moments With Mr. Lincoln, but above everything at Great America.

What I found most interesting about the experience, though, was that a group of German tourists about my age were in the exhibit with us. As I watched them sitting in the fake shelter, listening to the fake bombs dropped by fake Germans, I thought, Yeah. How do you like them apples, bitches?

And when we stepped out onto the fake destroyed street, in spite of its crappiness I wanted to turn to the Germans and yell, “Look what you did! Look what you did! Go back to your weinerschnitzel and your disturbing pornography; your kind aren’t wanted here! I hope the in flight movie is Inglourious Basterds!” So even though the Blitz exhibit wasn’t great, it was sufficient to inspire me with blind, ignorant hatred of other nationalities, which is, I suppose, as good an English history lesson as you’re going to get.

This whole situation got turned on its head when I visited Dresden.

Dresden is a charming little city of about 500,000 along the Elbe in Germany, perhaps best known as the place that got the absolute shit bombed out of it by the Allies late in World War II. It was during this bombing that Kurt Vonnegut, at the time an American prisoner of war, took shelter in the basement of Slaughterhouse-Five, an event which inspired his book, Slaughterhouse-Five.*

*Or, as I like to call it, Not Cat’s Cradle.

Historians estimate that the bombing and resultant firestorm of Dresden, a cultural center that was of very little military significance, killed between 24,000 and 40,000 people, most of whom were civilians fleeing the war. To cap it all off, the railyards and factories on the outskirts of town, which were the only significant elements of the Nazi war machine in the area, weren’t targeted.

"There is nothing intelligent to say about a massacre." - Kurt Vonnegut

It was America’s first foray into wartime assholery; fruitful years in Vietnam, Afghanistan, and Iraq laid ahead.

While the basement of the Imperial War Museum is a record of the Blitz in London, virtually all of central Dresden is a living record of the city’s destruction at the hands of Americans. At the center of the city there’s a new cathedral that’s a replica of a cathedral destroyed in the war, partially constructed out of rubble of the first cathedral.

In a museum downtown there’s a lot of information to be had about just how many priceless works of art and architecture were lost in the bombing. On February 13th every year, the anniversary of the bombing, the people of the city come together to protest war.

Needless to say, Dresden was sort of an embarrassing place to visit as an American. Whenever I would sheepishly ask a waiter if he or she spoke English, I always thought I could catch a glimpse of a steely look in their eye that said, “Oh, well – an American, here to survey the damage. Bad news – if you drop incendiary bombs on your currywurst, we’re not bringing you another one.”

This could also just be my reaction to the German language. At one point during my stay, I tried to walk into a bar that was in the process of closing. The manager came around the bar and briskly explained to me, in German, that they were no longer open, which was a traumatic experience for me because no matter what you’re saying in German, it sounds like, “I WILL CRUSH YOU!”*

*He was no doubt thinking, “Man, this guy looks super shifty, just like Battlestar Galactica’s Gaius Baltar!”

"My name is Gaius Baltar, and I spent basically the whole first season masturbating in space."

Okay, see? It’s like I never left. See you here tomorrow – in case you forget, I mention it again in the stinger.

Truman Capps will be back tomorrow with another update that purposefully skirts any boring descriptions of any cultural or artistic stuff he did in Dresden.

The Dog Dies

R.I.P. Frank Frazetta, 1928-2010

Oh hello everyone! Welcome to the final installment of the groundbreaking three-part series "Jack Hijacks Truman's Blog And Runs It Into The Ground." This is my grand finale. My Mad Max: Beyond Thunderdome. My Look Who's Talking Now. My Terminator 3: Rise of the Machines. Actually, let's hope it's not like any of those.

In all honesty, it's been a lot harder writing this blog than previously anticipated. A lot of you could probably guess this, seeing as this is going up about 24 hours after Truman would normally post it. Don't worry, we'll have you back to your regularly scheduled programming in no time. Anyway, I was able to come up with the first two topics relatively quickly, while a third has thrown me for a loop. So, instead of actually creating vast spaces of text-based content, I'm going to post some pictures from the Internet* and comment on them hilariously. I'm just as excited as you are.

*Trans: Teh Internets

PICTURE #1

I think what's most remarkable about this picture is the source. This is supposedly a drawing of the Jersey Devil, a mythical creature that terrorizes people all over the great state of New Jersey. But it's not from some crazy kid's fever dream. This is from an episode of The X-Files, which prides itself in scientific accuracy when addressing the paranormal. Granted, this is supposed to have been drawn by a half-drunk homeless guy, but come on. It doesn't even look intimidating. It just looks like something you'd never let near children*. They do fine the Jersey Devil by the end of the episode, and the most disappointing thing is that it actually looks like this. Boo Chris Carter. Boo.

*Like Truman. Pow!

PICTURE #2

This little beauty is a screen capture of a Chinese bootleg copy of Star Wars Episode III: Revenge of the Sith. Not a great movie by any stretch of the imagination, and this is one of the worst scenes. Vader realizes the "love of his life" is dead, and he screams "Nooooo!" to the heavens like Kirk raging against Khan. But what really shines here is the firm grasp the Chinese people have on the American sense of humor. Their English translation takes a moment that would otherwise feel hammy and kicks it into Comedy Town, population us. I would much rather have wasted my time on a movie with this as the jumping-off point for the dialogue than any crap George Lucas could come up with*.

*"I don't like sand. It's coarse and rough and irritating and it gets everywhere. Not like here. Here everything is soft and smooth."

PICTURE #3

I defy you to figure out what's going on here. It really boils down to three possible situations, all of which have nothing to do with each other.

Possibility 1: This guy is a sewing machine salesman shooting a commercial where he takes his machine to some sort of prom, and the people operating the green screen behind him used the wrong background image.

Possibility 2: Using the powers of his possessed sewing machine, this young Satanist caused a truck to crash in the ravine. Local law enforcement, all good Christian men, have no idea what's in store for them, which causes our antagonist to chuckle maniacally.

Possibility 3: Purgatory.

PICTURE #4

In this day and age, I have to admire things like truth in advertising. It's really refreshing.

PICTURE #5

Okay, I admit this wasn't an internet discovery. This is actually from the OMB's trip to Sea World during the Holiday Bowl 2008 trip. This is also one of the only documented times where Truman can be seen looking cooler than at least one other person in a photograph. I'm the joyous fellow on the left.

Jack Brazil has thoroughly enjoyed this opportunity to fill your heads with ridiculous nonsense. He also fully acknowledges now that last Wednesday's Justin Bieber picture was completely uncalled for.

Go Ask Alice

Your New Hair Guy

Hello again! I’m not Truman. Let’s just get that out of the way at the top.

Truman, as you all may have noticed by last week’s blog entry, has gone native so to speak. He recently decided that he was sick of all the crap that America has saddled on him, and has declared that he will never return stateside. Unless the British decide to take back the land we stole from them. Then he’ll come back.

Until then, you’re stuck with me. Last week’s diatribe that nobody cares about regarded renting movies, and this week, I intend to discuss something only remotely more interesting. And that topic is hippies, of course.

As I vaguely alluded to in the last time I wrote for the Hair Guy, I returned to my hometown of Davis, CA for the first time since early March. It was great to get home, effectively breaking free of the shackles of school for a blessed three days. Instead of normal college life, I had my meals paid for, got to see Iron Man 2 on my parents’ dime and sleep in as late as I wanted. In short, heaven.

But I forgot one important aspect of Mother’s Day weekend in Davis. Every year, in a tradition that stretches back for eons*, a swarm of hippies descends on the sleepy little UC Davis campus to take part in the Whole Earth Festival. They bring with them their drum circles, tie-dye, pachouli oil, and pipes and cigarettes filled with a perfectly harmless blend of various herbs and spices**.

*Probably.
** Marijuana.

In Eugene, this is known as every day. We’re so accustomed to hippies at U of O that it would be weird to NOT be accosted by a drumming dread-head on your way to class. They pervade the very fiber of our campus, and it gives Eugene a unique vibe that is off-putting, mildly amusing or awesome, depending on how many pot brownies you ate.

Davis, while certainly not Stepford, has a far smaller hippie population for the majority of the year. It’s really a town where hippies go when they’re too tired to rage against the machine anymore and want to settle down and start a family. It is also a town where you move to if you’d like to build a tunnel for frogs to pass safely underneath a busy street.

But when the Whole Earth Festival rolls into town, it’s a whole other ball game. The overwhelming musk emanating from the UCD campus pervades the town for the entire three-day celebration of Mother Earth. And that’s fine. I don’t really have a problem with hippie culture, especially due to the inherent peacefulness they strive to achieve. No one has a Reefer Madness-esque freakout and runs around murdering innocents*, and they clean up pretty nicely.

*At least that we know of.

The problem comes from the junior high and high school kids who attend Whole Earth for the sake of seeming counterculture for a few hours*. These are the same kids who stress themselves out over school on a daily basis, the kids who overachieve beyond belief. They’re the children of doctors, lawyers, university professors and other folks who fit nicely into trust-fund territory. For them, Whole Earth is the safe, easy way to pretend that they’re totally cool while paying $30 for a henna tattoo that will wash off in two weeks.

*Also, free pot.

And it’s not entirely their fault. For every peacenik who rode their bike to Davis from San Francisco, there’s a shrewd businessman selling $40 tie-dye t-shirts. Whole Earth Festival, while embracing the great things our Earth has to offer, is simultaneously an excuse for a guy with slightly above-average smarts to make a quick buck.

But it doesn’t really matter. Whole Earth has achieved a certain balance that seems to serve it well. You could go there and spend no money, camping out, purifying your urine to create clean drinking water and rocking out in the greatest drum circle in your life. Or you can borrow $20 from your folks, put on your store bought tie-dye, buy a peace necklace and throw up on the way home because you forgot to listen to your mom and not take the brown acid.

Jack Brazil knows this is shorter than a normal entry, but his rage burns white-hot for only a brief period of time.

Guest Update, Jack Brazil

Due to a computer time crunch and an upcoming trip to Dresden and Copenhagen, I've temporarily left the blog in the hands of Jack Brazil. Let's see if he screws it up!

Well, well. It looks like Truman left the keys to the blog in the ignition, and now Big Daddy Brazil is going to take it for a joy ride. I’ve been reading Truman’s musings for quite some time now, and let me just get one thing out of the way: they’re good. They’re damn good. And you’d be a fool to expect this is going to be better. But there’s one thing I can promise you: I’ll use the word TARDIS* more than Truman ever has. TARDIS. There. 200% more.

* Hi Doctor Who fans!

But what I’d really like to talk about today (and who’s going to stop me?) is something that I discovered recently. Let it first be known that I absolutely love movies. I love movies more than the proverbial fat kid loves that mythical beast known as cake. And because I love movies, I end up renting them all the time.

You see, as a college student, I don’t have vast sums of money; otherwise I would just buy every movie I wanted to see. Or I’d just go see them all in theaters, but I don’t remember the last time Robert Altman’s Popeye was shown on a big screen. But I don’t have the big bucks, so it’s much cheaper to rent films both new and old, and watch them from the non-comfort of Bret’s lumpy, old futon. *

*Hi Bret!

“But Jack,” you say, “this is not making for a very interesting blog entry!” I completely agree, and if you’d stop interrupting, I’d get to my point. I’ve lived in Davis, CA for the bulk of my childhood, and near my house is an independent video rental store called 49er Video. This is an absolutely wonderful place, a veritable paradise in a sea of mediocre, corporate chains. My family goes in often enough that the staff recognizes us, and always engages in friendly banter. Not only this, but they are extremely helpful when you’re looking for a movie, or you need a suggestion. And, to top it all off, they still have some VHS tapes intermingled with the DVDs, something that has an awesome nostalgia factor, even if I never watch them.

But. There is no 49er Video in Eugene, OR, where I now spend the bulk of my year. This creates a dilemma: do I go without renting movies or do I sacrifice myself to a chain rental store? Do I sacrifice my support of small, independent businesses for my own personal pleasure? You could cut the tension with a knife!

For the first two years of college, I did without movie rentals, relying instead on what my friends owned, or watching a lot of TV. There’s not a whole lot of TV watching in the dorms, and last year my roommates were watching Blazers games more often than not, so movies were not all that frequent in our tiny little quad. This year, however, the game has changed.

Truman, as you probably have figured out if you read this blog with any frequency, is a freaky pop culture nerd much like myself. Because of this, and the exquisite TV he and Bret chose to purchase, movies have become a regular feature in this household. * The demand for watching movies suddenly increased more than I had anticipated, and my reasonable DVD collection was clearly not going to be enough to satiate our needs. So I broke down. I got a Blockbuster card. And for a while, this was enjoyable enough. They did charge more for movie rentals than I was used to, but I was so happy to be able to be only a few blocks away from a vast movie library. But then, as I should have expected, the Imperial Empire raised their costs for rentals to a point where it wasn’t financially viable anymore. And that was the day my life changed. FOREVER.

*Granted, he’s gone now, so Bret and I get to make ALL the movie choices! No more Battlestar Galactica** for anyone!

**I actually like BSG.

Rather than take their financial slap in the face, I decided to retaliate against Blockbuster and join the Rebel Alliance. I signed up for a Netflix account. And oh baby did I make the right choice. For a paltry $8.95 a month, I could rent as many DVDs as I want (one at a time), plus stream unlimited movies and TV shows on my computer. A match made in heaven, to say the least. Netflix has more than paid for itself if you’re basing it on Blockbuster rates, and their library of films is gigantic.

And yet I’m not entirely sure about this. On the one hand, Netflix has been one of the best choices I’ve ever made, making movies instantly available to me whenever I want to watch them. But I’m starting to miss going to the video store. I miss walking the aisles, looking at new releases and remembering movies I’d forgotten about. Netflix likes to provide suggestions, but there’s no real character to it, no employees to converse with. Of course, Netflix is a large corporation as well, so I’m still taking business away from my beloved 49er. I don’t know if they’re suffering without me (probably not) but I still feel bad.

A few days from now I’ll be returning home to celebrate my mother’s birthday. And I know, as part of the weekend, my family will go into 49er to rent some movies we all can enjoy. I haven’t been back in 49er since I started my Netflix account. To tell you the truth, I’ve never been quite this excited to walk back through those doors.

Jack Brazil hates that this sounded like an advertisement for Netflix at some points, but it’s probably worth it. They’ll probably decide to start paying him.

Murphis

Oh, you KNOW it's going to be a good update now.

So here’s the deal: After making the last update, wherein I said I was going to be really busy for a week working on a script, I went and wrote the entire 30 Rock script within about two days, which I’m now scrubbing and preparing for submission (I’m going to try and send it well in advance of the deadline, because who knows? Maybe it’s a race.) Tomorrow I’m shooting my video interview, and I’m too psyched up to sleep on a Sunday night.

And the thing is, last night I wound up going to a British karaoke bar with my housemate, my host sister, and her boyfriend in celebration of the completion of my script, and the whole night all I could think was, “Oh, man! I can’t wait to put this on my blog so everyone can read about this totally wacky experience!”

And, of course, I could’ve just sent this out as an email to my parents and Trevor Jones and had the same effect as putting it here without going back on my promise to not update, but hey – I’ve got a reputation to keep up.

So anyway…

My host sister, Karen, has this boyfriend, Jonathan, who’s usually here a few nights a week and eats dinner with the family. Saturday night, my housemate Tom and I were getting ready to go to a pub and, bumping into Jonathan in the hallway, we invited him along. He wasn’t able to make it, but he did us one better and invited us to a surprise party he was throwing for Karen at a karaoke bar in central London called Murphis.

Now, of course, karaoke isn’t really my thing, but I certainly didn’t come to London to tell people that I wasn’t going to try things, so Tom and I both agreed to meet them at the bar at 9:00. We left Harrow at 7:00 on the Underground, taking three different trains to London, only to find out that the Underground station closest to Murphis, the one from which we had the directions to get there, was closed. However, an Underground employee told us that we could get off at the next closest stop and make the walk in 10 to 15 minutes.

At the time, I thought this information was helpful. Now, I would say it was probably harmful, unless the information was somehow meant to teach Tom and I a valuable lesson about ourselves by showing how much rainwater we could absorb, in which case it was highly valuable.

We spent an hour and 20 minutes parading up and down different winding streets in the pouring rain, receiving contradictory directions from bartenders and maitre’dis and genuinely wondering if Jonathan had given us the name of a fake bar in order to get us out of the house long enough to steal our computers. At some point, our trek became less about going to a party and more about proving that in fact a bar named Murphis did exist – because about half of the people we asked, sometimes within a few blocks of Murphis, vehemently denied that there was such a place. Others, though, would say, “Oh, yeah – it’s right down the block, on the corner!”, pointing us in the wrong direction down an alley toward a Laundromat that was definitely not a karaoke bar.

When we finally found Murphis, we entered to find two piss-drunk English guys onstage, screaming the words to ‘Easy Lover’ by Phil Collins into the microphone.* This, we knew, was going to be a good night – because while there were a couple of assholes loudly butchering a great song, they were both no older than 25, and neither one of them was grinding on me, which made it a real improvement over the last time we went out.

*Incidentally, the video for Easy Lover is a spot-on accurate depiction of my time in London so far.

We went downstairs and found Karen, Jonathan, and their friends, almost all of them prolifically drunk. Karen explained to me throughout a variety of enthusiastic hugs and cheek kisses that her college friends had thrown her this party because they’d more or less skipped her last two birthdays in college because they had always fallen during final exams. Then, she began introducing me to her friends.

I didn’t catch the name of the first girl Karen introduced me to because somebody was blaring the lyrics to ‘Brown Eyed Girl’ (the first of many that night), but we struck up a pretty interesting conversation about television when she heard that I liked the British version of The Office.

“I hear the American one is quite different.” She said.

“Yeah.” I replied. “The receptionist and the paper salesman are married with a baby now in ours.”

This shocked and impressed her, as though I had brought news of a victory in some foreign war. Then again, if somebody told me that in the Nigerian version of Battlestar Galactica the Colonial military forms a glee club and starts singing 80s pop tunes, I’d be shocked too. And angry.

Then Karen introduced me to her friend Vicki, who instantly dove into my hair with both hands, running them through it and yelling to her friends, “Look at this American’s hair!”

All I’m saying is, in my country, strangers ask before they start rubbing their hands all over your head. But I’m also not complaining.

At some point, I was passing by the bar when Karen grabbed me and dragged me over to another group of friends to have a jagerbomb with them.

I love England and English culture, but in this regard they are savages: The jagerbombs that Karen bought for us consisted of a short tumbler with a shot glass full of jager placed in the center, and then Red Bull poured in around it. They mix when you drink it.

This is not how you make a jagerbomb. In a jagerbomb you drop the shot of jager into a beer stein full of Red Bull, much as you would drop, I don’t know, a fucking bomb. Maybe England is still sensitive about dropping bombs after the Blitz. Regardless, what I had was not a jagerbomb. It was more of a jagerfart, if anything. It’s still a disgusting drink I don’t like, but the least they could do is make it the way God intended.

Jonathan’s friend James was a good conversation partner, mainly because he appreciated American football and was an Arrested Development fan. Hearing someone saying, “Illusions, Michael!” really makes you feel at home, even if they’re saying it with a British accent.

As it got later, more and more of their friends were eager to know if I was going to do karaoke. I suppose their reasoning was that many of them had never hung out with an American before, and they were trying to see what kind of cool tricks it could do. I suppose if I was having a few drinks with a chimpanzee I’d try to get it to fling its poop at something, so I can’t blame them.

I looked through the karaoke songbook for Pink Floyd’s ‘The Great Gig In The Sky’, because there’s no better ‘fuck you’ to the karaoke bar patrons than four minutes of melodic wailing, but it turned out that the British karaoke bar didn’t have any Pink Floyd songs, so I declined to do any singing. I suppose Pink Floyd isn’t really a good soundtrack for having a good time with your friends, what with the songs about mortality and insanity and all that.

In the taxi back to Harrow, while Karen, Jonathan, and Tom slept off their beers in the backseat, one of Karen’s more sober friends asked me if I missed America.

“Yeah,” I said. “There’s a lot of stuff I miss. Big cars and strip malls. I guess I miss the familiarity, y’know?”

“What do you mean, ‘strip malls’?” Karen’s friend asked.

“Oh,” I said. “Well, I mean, it’s not like I really like strip malls or anything, but I grew up around them, so…”

“No,” she interjected. “I mean, what is a strip mall?”

I was not aware that there were people in first-world countries who did not know the blight of strip malls. Explaining a strip mall to someone who’s never seen one is like explaining orange to a blind man. But, I gave it my best shot.

And so, from the left hand front seat of a British taxi driving through outer London at 3:00 AM, I explained to an Irish girl what a strip mall was, and I felt like I understood at that point what this study abroad business is really all about.

Truman Capps appreciated this brief opportunity to think about England, and will now return to constantly obsessing about his internship.<