h2g2 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Earth Edition

...the wurst is yet to come.

Actually, that's not true. Glasgow's Winterfest is well and truly underway. But why spoil a good joke. Well...a joke.

As part of it, the kids took part in something as part of the biennial Radiance festival (light sculptures and installations all over town). They made some of the shadow puppets and were life action performers (you can't really see them) for this:

http://tinyurl.com/yoteq7

The building it's projected against is the oldest house in Glasgow.

>...the wurst is yet to come<



I'll look forward to checking out that video when I get home.

Haven't noticed any of our local Christmas markets or bazaars opened yet (though the stupid tree from hell went up Friday). The Swedish deli we patronize for our holiday lingonberries, cheese and limpa, however, was packed to the rafters with little old ladies placing orders yesterday.

Ours is next Sunday, 2nd December. For some reason i have that date firmly fixed in my head....

zdt

It's because you're looking forward to Feuerstangbohle. That's when they suspend a huge sugar lump over a vat of gluhwein, soak it in brandy and set light to it, so that it drips into the wine. They also have 'Lumumba' - hot chocolate and rum - the only known beverage named after a Congolese socialist revolutionary.

Feuerstangbohle...

Lumumba.

Eeek, wasn't he the guy who got arrested, then later released, in connection with a British girl getting murdered in Italy?

I could do with some Glühwein right now. They do a similar thing here at the actual market day, i reckon it's the only way to use up the vile Nouveau Beaujolais!

zdt

Sumptuous Ed

Some schoolfriends and I nicked some transparent red plastic sheets from art class and stuck them over the spotlights around an old church. It looked like Judgement Day

I love the shadow puppet show!!

Patrice Lumumba was the guy who was horribly murdered in the Congo back in the sixties, wasn't he? He was strung up by the Balubas.

That's the fella. Murdered with the compliance of Belgian security services, and under the direction of (of course) the CIA.

Am I right in thinking that his son's now president of one of the Congos?

More horror stories. I was twelve or thirteen at the time and the politics didn't impinge on me at all, but I remember the event, not just because of the despicable joke, but because an Irish politician, Conor Cruise O'Brien, was there in the Congo in some UN capacity, and he wrote a book about it which I gave to my dad ("To Katanga and Back"). Now my dad has passed on and the book has found its way into my house . . . I wonder will I ever read it?

I met Conor Cruise later, and he told us that he used to write home to his wife from the Congo in a mixture of Irish and Russian, on the assumption that, with the exception of the two of them, nobody who understood the one would be able to decipher the other.