Säumnisgebühr

That funny word in the title would be the German word for a library fine. It literally means something like "Missed deadline Fine". I forgot to return a book and had to pay 3€. The book was "The Long, Dark Tea-Time of the Soul" by Douglas Adams, and I think he would have approved of my disorganisation. Certainly none of his characters would have gone to the terrible effort of returning a book to the library just because they'd finished reading it. I wonder what, normalised to the number of times it has been borrowed, the most overdue book of all time is.

VfL Linden 3 - Torpedo Entenhausen 3

One of the major benefits of being able to touch type is that you can pretend to be the Grandstand vidiprinter. Whenever I post a Torpedo Entenhausen result, I always type the name of the club as quick as I can, and then pause for a second before hitting the number. If you don't know what the Grandstand vidiprinter is, this video may help.



I scored two goals to help Entenhausen grab a point despite lying 2-0 and 3-1 behind. For the first I swung my leg at a mishit shot without looking where I was. The shot caught the goalkeeper wrong-footed and the ball rolled just inside the post. The second was a shot from a narrow angle following a short corner. I still don't quite know how it went in.

Anyway, back to the vidiprinter. Whenever I get bored, I like to type my favourite fantasy results in the vidiprinter style. If you're reading this, my fantasy results probably looks a bit static, so feel free to type your favourite results too. If you haven't learned to touch type yet, now may be the perfect time. Use the following simple format, and don't forget the pauses.

United [mini pause] X - Rovers [longer pause] Y

Forfar 5 - East Fife 4
VfL Linden 3 - Torpedo Entenhausen 4
Sheffield United 0 - Sheffield Wednesday 4

SAD

Some people get sad and depressed in the winter. I like to think that I am above such stereotypes, and last year got depressed in the summer. There were a few reasons for this. I'd been in Bochum for four months, and had realised that my job wasn't going anywhere. My incompetence in moving house was also catching up with me. My belongings were split between Bochum and Erlangen, my post was mostly being sent to the old address and I still couldn't remember my new postcode. I hadn't worked out why there wasn't a recycling skip for tin cans in Bochum and had collected four months of tin cans in my flat. These things were all related to being four months in a new city and not giving a shit about anything, but had nothing to do with summer.

Then came the summer. I played lots of football and drank some beer, but couldn't be bothered to prepare food. The food lay on my shelves and was eaten by fruit flies. I hoped that the spiders that populated the corners of the flat would eat the flies, but they didn't. My flat smelt, but I was too tired and too depressed to do anything about it. I'd look at the rubbish, look at the washing up in the sink, look at the pile of clothes on the floor, decide that it was all too much for me and juggle a bit. I learned some good 3-ball juggling tricks, because I could only ever find three of my balls under all the rubbish.

I was reminded of this last week when I looked into my bottle of white wine vinegar. I was trying to clean the cooking pot I used to burn my hat, and wondered whether vinegar would be any good. The bottle didn't have a top on, so I poured some vinegar out, and found that it was 25% fruit fly by volume.

I had cooked some food with the vinegar last summer, but hadn't put the top back on the bottle. I thought back to last summer and remembered looking at the bottle, looking at the top sat next to it, and thinking how screwing it on was too difficult. The fruit flies took advantage of my sloth, but to excess. They must have gorged on the vinegar, bathed in the vinegar and died in the vinegar, for the vinegar was full of literally hundreds of dead fruit flies. I'm sure that I put a tablespoonful of the fly-infested vinegar into a stir-fry last autumn, which probably wasn't very healthy.

Torpedo Entenhausen 2 - Team USA 2

This week we got to play on the grass pitch. This was a blue moon event, for in the grass pitch importance ranking nothing comes below the second division of the spare-time league. For Torpedo Entenhausen to get to play on grass, the following criteria must be fulfilled.

1/ It has to be dry.
2/ It must have rained within the past 4 days.
3/ The womens hockey team must be on holiday.
4/ The groundsman must be in one of his better moods.
5/ Jupiter can't be in alignment with Saturn, unless it's a month ending in 'r' or it's a leap year.
6/ ...

Playing on grass is a chance for diving headers, sliding tackles, dives and overzealous goal celebrations without tearing holes in your knees. I slipped over once, and sent one of the opposition tumbling with a nicely timed sliding tackle. We went into a 2:1 lead with three minutes remaining, but still didn't win.

The Ashes part II

Pet funeral directors are much more fun than your standard undertaker. The one in Bochum has a window display of its products, so it felt like any other shop and I didn't feel like an idiot going in to buy an urn for the ashes of my PhD hat. Once we'd got past the initial misunderstandings (Hut and Hund, the german words for hat and dog, sound rather similar), the assistent was very helpful. He sold me a nice green urn for 40 Euros and stuck on some slightly tacky letters too.

Just as we were finished, the next customers came in holding their recently deceased dog, Maxi. I was quite surprised by this, and I think that the shopholder was too, but only for a second. There were three of them, and they brought in two living dogs too, maybe to show that they were serious dog people and going through tough times, and maybe to prove that Maxi was atypical and that they were quite capable of keeping most of their dogs alive.

I decided that my cheerfulness of having acquired an urn didn't really fit the scene, so I left, wondering whether anyone has ever walked into a funeral directors with his dead grandma draped over his shoulder.

A Theory of Everything

I had lunch in Cafe Konkret and had a theory of everything explained to me by another regular. Volkhard Radkte has spent the past years developing theories of the development of planets and stars. From what I can understand of his theory, things come into existence in pairs, and suns can be born from planets. He has also developed his own model of the atom.

He presented his ideas to a physics professor at the University, who told him "If your ideas are shown to be true, I will personally recommend you for a Nobel Prize". I think this is a fantastic way of telling someone that you're not entirely convinced of their work.

I tried to read some of his book and asked him if his theory made a prediction that differed from accepted physics, and could be tested in the future. He couldn't tell me one. His work also contained a bit of numerology and some Excel graphs, so I decided I probably wasn't talking to the next Copernicus and concentrated my efforts on the Guardian Crossword.

Anyway, here is his model of the Hydrogen atom. I asked him about it, as I did my PhD on something similar. The accepted model of the Hydrogen Atom includes a proton, which is composed of three quarks, orbited by an electron. He includes all these components, but his model has a rigid arrangement for the quarks and has the electron in a fixed position between the two up quarks.

The Ashes

On Tuesday I was on a 6-2 away win football high. I'd only slept for five hours and my legs were burning all day. I felt up to anything and started cleaning my flat. Lying in a corner were the remains of my PhD hat. I broke it when I first put it on; it was top heavy and fell off my head. Since then I broke the broken glass tube, and a miniature cricket bat and some charred remains representing The Ashes had also fallen off. I was faced with the choice: repair the hat to it's former glory, or burn it and put the ashes in an ornamental urn. I decided that I'd never make it as good as it once was, removed the electrical components and cremated the hat in a large cooking pot.

"It's alright, nobody's died." I tried to put the funeral director at ease and reassure him that I wasn't in grief. "I've cremated a hat and am looking for an urn. It's kind of symbolic." He showed me his collection of urns, but they were all so big that I could have put the whole hat in, which might have been kind of amusing, but I'd already burnt the hat and thought 80 Euros was a lot for a hat box. "They're all a bit big. It was quite a small hat, really," I explained.

I wondered whether the guy who bought the original Ashes urn felt such a pillock.

It's alright, nobody's died. I've cremated a cricket stump and am looking for an urn. It's kind of symolic.

The funeral director recommended that I buy an animal urn, and told me that a shop on the Hattinger Strasse sold them. Looking at the Ashes of my hat, which are being temporarily stored in a freezer bag, I guess a canary or rat sized urn might work.