When I first came to Iceland in 2001 I did not like coffee. Then I discovered Swiss Mocca. Consisting of half hot chocolate, half coffee and topped with whipped cream it was my entry drug. In winter you can get a version with chili flakes from Te og Kaffi, the better Icelandic version of Starbucks.
No Swiss person I ever met had heard about this national drink of theirs. I did some investigations into European coffee drinks and think that the closest European drink is Vienna Coffee, a drink that outside of Vienna is often made by mixing espresso and chocolate, topping it with cream. I guess some Icelander who brought this drink to Iceland got their European mountain countries with strange German dialects mixed up. In Vienna itself, the only coffee you can get is a "Wiener Melange", an espresso topped with steamed milk AND milk foam (as a huge fan of milk foam, I loved this drink when I was in Vienna, it is 60% foam 40% coffee. I would have milk foam by itself).
So next time you order a coffee drink, good luck it really is the wild west out there....

So, I have been thinking about my online future for a bit and (after joining a year ago) will leave Facebook soon. Which means that the blog is going to be THE place for all my terrible opinions again. I will keep up the picture of the week, because I have a lot of pictures from travels left, and they closed my very short lived instagram (I think it got hacked). I am also going to make it a bit less REM centric and introduce a new regular series of cool German words (there are several). And of course there will be posts about politics and general snarkiness.

It is done! I recorded and mixed it myself. It has very bad lyrics (basically the first idea that came to mind and rhymed was good enough). The most basic of chord progressions is used (including only I, IV, V and iv) and a melody constructed around the base note of the chords, which is why the melody sounds like something you heard before. The bridge is fun though as are the key changes and I really like the background harmonies, even if it goes strangely "Sound of Music" in parts.

I recorded it with audacity, a program I never used before (it is really easy to use!) in my bedroom. Guitar and voice were recorded together, because I'm lazy and didn't want to deal with 5 tracks (I had three instead, main vocals and rhythm guitar, background vocals and finger picking and second background vocals). Because of this I couldn't use fancy effects on the guitar or voice, so I just cleaned up some background noise and added a reverb from the bridge onward. During the bridge you hear me tapping to count how long to wait for the background vocals to come in. This is the only attempt at keeping the tempo I made, so the whole thing is a bit wonky.

I'm not quitting my day job.

I had a discussion the other day with a friend, whether I am GenX or a Millennial. He was aghast that I would prefer GenX, even though he is fully aware I am still writing a blog, which these days is mainly about REM, so what does he expect?

Anyway, today I saw this on Facebook: Wearing masks may generate immunity against Covid-19 virus, according to leading macroeconomic influencers. Allow me please to have a "grumpy old man moment":

The article refers to an article in the Telegraph, which also does not refer to the original article in the New England Journal of Medicine. When I finally found the original article here, I immediately noticed that this is not a study, just an opinion piece. "may" is doing some heavy lifting there.

"Macroeconomic influencers" are just some random people on twitter with lots of followers, who retweet articles they like AND THIS IS HOW WE FORM OPINIONS ON PUBLIC HEALTH POLICY IN A PANDEMIC NOW. *sigh* Millennials....

Excuse me, I'm going to shout at some kids to get off my lawn now.

I took a lot of pictures in JianShui in the south of China, they all looked quite nice (composition, light, depth of field), but were a bit boring to me, just standard tourist pictures, so I played around with double exposure and the outcome was great!