The rush towards war with Iraq is a horrifying thing to watch via the German newspapers — it’s the top story in all of the papers here, even though a national election will be held in two days. I sit in restaurants here in Munich, and I can hear that people are talking about Bush and the U.S. Regarding war and the politicians, I bring you a selection from Mark Twain:

The loud little handful – as usual – will shout for the war. The pulpit will – warily and cautiously – object… at first. The great, big, dull bulk of the nation will rub its sleepy eyes and try to make out why there should be a war, and will say, earnestly and indignantly, “It is unjust and dishonorable, and there is no necessity for it.”</p>

Then the handful will shout louder. A few fair men on the other side will argue and reason against the war with speech and pen, and at first will have a hearing and be applauded, but it will not last long; those others will outshout them, and presently the antiwar audiences will thin out and lose popularity.

Before long, you will see this curious thing: the speakers stoned from the platform, and free speech strangled by hordes of furious men…

Next the statesmen will invent cheap lies, putting the blame upon the nation that is attacked, and every man will be glad of those conscience-soothing falsities, and will diligently study them, and refuse to examine any refutations of them; and thus he will by and by convince himself that the war is just, and will thank God for the better sleep he enjoys after this process of grotesque self-deception.

Mark Twain, “The Mysterious Stranger” (1910) </blockquote>

An office building near our hotel has a cool neon sculpture on the ground floor. Photo courtesy of James.

I was harsher than I had to be, and some would say shallow, in my previous post about the appearance of my fellow geeks. I guess it’s not that bad, but part of my overreaction is that I find smart people (men and women) sexy. An average-looking person with a good mind is HOT, in a way that a well-toned body housing an incurious mind is not. The other problem is the astounding lack of social skills in a lot of geeks. I realize that’s not exactly breaking news, but the reason I’ve found myself in the technical world over the last decade is precisely because one can now find interesting people in the tech world who are interested in something other than science fiction and Monty Python.

One of the weird things I see here is people keeping their computers on during a presentation — writing email, reading slashdot, even writing code. I’m sure they believe that they’re multi-tasking, but at times even people sitting in the front row do it, and then ask questions that show they haven’t been paying attention. They even did it during the talk by Larry Wall, the inventor of Perl.

I’m trying to write a little bit before I fall asleep. My geek conference started yesterday. Except for a few fabulous exceptions, such as this Dutch guy:

this group makes all of the financial conventions I’ve attended look like a supermodel gathering. Loads of pasty, out of shape guys with long hair and beards — not as a fashion statement, but for low maintenance. Not that I have much of an excuse on the beard-while-traveling front right now.

The exceptions are generally from Europe. The guys from Copenhagen are in a class all their own, as are a few of the German ones.

For the Mac fans — Macs make up a majority of the computers here at the conference.

I was pleased to see my fellow Americans making fun of Bush. I feel like wearing a big “I’m not one of those bad Americans” button while I’m here. It’s horrifying to see the U.S. and Iraq on the front page of every paper here each morning.

Today was a phenomenal day on the food front. We had lunch at Pfistermuehle (Pfisterstrasse 4). Wow! It was incredible. I had a trio of soups for my appetizer: venison broth with a pistachio dumpling, foamed cream of chestnet mushrooms, and a creamed fennel and celery root soup. That was followed by homemade ravioli filled with freshwater crayfish — yes they have those here — on a bed of Savoy cabbage. It was accompanied by a bottle of Austrian Gruener Veltliner.

We went to the Alte Pinakothek for three hours tonight — it’s open until 10pm on Thursdays. I always knew they had an amazing collection, but I saw so many paintings tonight that I have loved for years, but only knew from books. They have a huge number of Breughels (8 rooms!), Duerers, Cranachs, Rembrandts, Titians, etc. I finally got to see the Rembrandt self-portrait I’ve always loved:

The museum building was damaged by bombing in WW II, and it’s interesting to see that they’ve chosen to make it obvious in places that they’ve only partially restored the building. There are areas that were once more decorative that have been left plain.

We had dinner afterward (at 10pm) at an Italian restaurant in a passage called Amalianpassage between our hotel’s street (Amalienstrasse) and Turkenstrasse. The restaurant, Il Baretto, was pretty authentically Italian. The older woman waiting on us said she had lived in Germany for 40 years, but she was still Italian. She was from Naples, my favorite city in Italy. We all three spoke in a mixture of German, Italian and English. I told her that my simple (and perfect) pasta dish couldn’t be made in NYC today, and she said that was because they were all American there now, instead of Italian.

When she found out we were from New York, she went, “Ooooh”, and frowned. I told her, “It’s OK”, and she said something like “the world just goes on”. We also told her we really hated Bush, that he was terrible. She responded, “like Berlusconi”.

Universities are much more cool these days. There is an open wireless network here at the site of the conference, so that I can use my notebook anywhere to connect.

At breakfast there was guy sitting at the other end of our table who I was convinced was an American geek headed for the same conference — he was wearing a Basics t-shirt after all. He turned out to be a French journalist here to cover a big motorcycle show. We apologized for thinking he might be American.

The Wittelsbachs weren’t prudes when it came to art. This is a picture of a satyr in one of the interior courtards of the Residenz — one of the royal palaces:

I like the uniforms worn by workmen doing street work here in Germany:

I got the high-speed wireless networking at my hotel here in Munich working. Yeah! No more ghastly earthlink international dialup at 28.8 kbps.

Today we went to the brand spanking new Pinakothek der Moderne on its opening day. It’s a new modern/contemporary art museum. How often do I get a chance to go to a new museum on its first day? The building itself doesn’t seem all that distinguished in terms of architecture, but it works for showing the work, and it’s designed to allow lots of ways to see the other people in the museum.

After I registered for my geek conference, we had a fabulous late lunch at Cafe Greco, a Greek/Mediterranean restaurant in the Neue Pinakothek, or more accurately, outside of it.

After walking around the gay area of Munich a bit, we had dinner at a beautiful restaurant called Faun at Hans-Sachs-Strasse 17. The staff was all gay, and the crowd was an amazing mix — elderly couples from the neighborhood, gay guys and the women who love them, a few cycling/hiker types, etc. They even had wild hare on the menu!

On the way to the University for my registration, we walked by St Markus Kirche. They had an exhibit by Beate Passow on the pillars of the inner sanctuary, in which she put images in light boxes of famous crucifixion paintings (Cranach, Rubens, Dali, etc.) where the Christ figure had been erased. The title of the exhibit came from a Raymond Pettibon quote: “As long as he suffers there is hope”. The bulletin board of the church, at the entrance, had the most amazing collection of items: a graph of apartment availability in Munich (it’s an expensive city with affordable housing problems), a map of Afghanistan accompanied by a photo from Schroeder’s visit there, and a map of the Nazi’s plan for transforming Munich.

On a happier note, we walked around the Englischer Garten and had lunch at the outside tables near the Chinese Pagoda. There was a film crew of young, cute Germans eating near us, including this fine specimen, with a Brownsville(!) t-shirt:

One of the things that amazes me about this part of the world is that they use glass everywhere. They don’t give you plastic when you have a beer at an outside area on picnic tables — you get sturdy china plates and glass beer or wine glasses. Even at an Esso (Exxon) gas station, you can drink coffee in a real cup and saucer.

We visited the Geschwister Scholl Platz today. They were a brother and sister who were killed by the Nazis for distributing anti-Nazi leaflets at the Ludwig Maximilian University. The memorial is very good — there are ceramic versions of the leaflets on the pavement near the windows from which they were thrown.

We arrived this afternoon after visiting the memorial chapel for Ludwig II on the Starnbergersee.

It was a nightmare getting to the hotel, because several of the main roads were closed for an ecological/pedestrian friendly thing called Street Life — yes, in English.

It was amazing to see this grand boulevard — Ludwigstrasse — free of cars:

OK, it’s not totally free of cars in the picture, but that’s people cleaning up and an ambulance.