Holzofen-Pizza

With Holzofen-Pizza you can get any woman in Switzerland and Germany. And who ever had a real Holzofen-Pizza once will probably never forget the experience and the very distincitve taste of it. Holzofen means an oven that's heated with wood. All those frozen pizza you can buy in your grocery-shop in german-speaking countries are Holzofen-Pizza, it's like 'handmade'.

In this case the Holzofen actually is the only heating in my parent's house, and when the oven is hot enough you can make pizza or bread in it. And there's a lot of space in the oven. I think when we were kids we once had 15 pizzas in the oven.

So today we had a family-gathering. Normaly thes events include my parents, my younger brother and me. But this time even my youngest brother and my sister along with her partner and her dog joined us. Mom made the dow in the afternoon while dad made the fire in the oven, and in the evening we all made our own pizza. Have fun with the photos...

En Guete!

Vampires are alive!

No, that’s not my idea. Actually it’s René’s. But first things first...

Every year in May TV-viewers all over Europe gather together in front of their TV to watch the Eurovision Song Contest and rate the 12 finalists from different European countries. Back in the 80s Switzerland once won the contest with a Canadian artist – Celine Dion. But after that, whenever Switzerland had reached the final what we heard was something like ‘Switzerland – 0 points’. Most of the winners were slsciously dressed women and came from Eastern Europe. That’s tough for the proud Swiss soul. Actually we feared we’d lose our pride slowly...

So the word went out to find an artist who could be a worthy representative for our country and make the jury say ‘Switzerland – 12 points’ again. Of course most Swiss artist would rather go on playing in pubs and shabby gym halls than to embarrass themselves on TV all over Europe. But finally one man stood up and said: ‘I’ll do it’: It was René.

Well, most probably you’ll know René as DJ BoBo.

DJ BoBo wrote a song and a matching script for a TV-friendly show and finally presented the song ‘Vampires are alive’.

So finally we have a Swiss artist who’s willing to either lead us to glory or to instantly scuttle his glorious career – and of course you can already hear the prophecy of doom again. There is a line in the ‘Vampire’-lyrics that goes ‘Free you spirit (...) Sell your soul’ which lead some hardcore-Christians of the SEA (Christians with serious brain-damage...) to complain that the song might drive mentally unstable people into suicide. They wrote letters to several members oth the government to ban the song and asked the artist himself to change the lyrics. Here's the link to the story, in best German (sorry, ET ;-)): http://www.factum-magazin.ch/wFactum_de/aktuell/2007_03_13_DJ_BoBo_Vampire.php

Ok, first of all: The government has probably more important things to do than to decide whether a song should get international airplay or not, just because its lyrics are about fictional creatures. Our teenage-heroes were much worse - even Marilyn Manson is a tussy compared to what we used to listen to. And second: DJ BoBo is UN-ambassador against hunger, so he’d probably be the last one who wants people to follow these lyrics.

Now that the first rage has calmed a bit, let’s see what’s left: DJ BoBo is still singing his original lyrics, the Swiss government has not yet decided about the song – and probably never will – , the SEA has reached the desired popularity and we’re back in the 80’s where the P.M.R.C. tried to ban artists like Prince, Sheena Easton, WASP, Judas Priest and other bands with obscure lyrics: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parents_Music_Resource_Center

Thanks chaps, I really had an incredible laugh when I read about your proclamations! Can we get back to business now? ;-)))

Paint it black... - wait, let's get some colours!!!

As I said earlier on: Spring is coming. Even I feel it now. The flowers begin to bloom and I started painting with my computer...

After a few rather embarrassing attempts I tried repainting one of my favourite airplanes in flight simulator again. The plane is an old Saab 91 Saphir, built in Sweden shortly after WWII: http://www.sibwings.com/freeware/repaint/ebed.jpg

It's not as easy as it may sound, since you can't just copy one or two photos into the repaint template. Another tricky thing is the alpha-channel. A repaint template is basically a 24-bit bitmap, and attached to it is as 8-bit black&white picture that tells the model in flight simulator how shiny the airplane should be, where the windows are and other important stuff that I don't understand too well either. This is called the alpha-channel.

And exactly this alpha-channel trapped me. Of course the paint looks good, but it's way too shiny. Actually it looks like it's covered with gelatine... Since the Saphir's been built way back in the 40's and 50's it looks a bit out of place.

But hey, we're living in the internet-age, and the producer of the sim-airplane has got a very good forum and I'm sure I'll find a proper solution for the problem.

Thoughts about cooking

Some say, 2 hours of cooking is too long when the meal’s eaten in only 15 minutes. I have a different opinion on that one. It really depends on the occasion, on the guests you have and on what you want to achieve.

Yes, there are times when I just put some frozen pre-prep-meal in the microwave oven. But this just happens when I had a long day and don’t want to cook and don’t want to eat bread, cheese and meat. Mostly when I cook for myself I do some Asian food in the wok or just the ordinary pasta with pre-prep gravy. Sometimes I put a steak in the oven together with rosemary and garlic. But these are rather rare exceptions. Since I’m living alone with my brother there’s not many opportunities for big cooking. Whom should I impress? Eating is basically providing the body with food. But still it’s very interesting what you can do with this oldest need of life in general.

So I prepared the Lemon Chicken with self-made roquette-pesto, and it did take 2 hours. But since it was a test for my mom’s birthday it really was worth it. I made some minor mistakes and miscounted the amounts of some ingredients, but in the end I took a very tasty meal out of the oven and was really happy with it.

Lemon Chicken

Yesterday was one of these days when you think that everything breaks when you touch it. I ended up taking four (4!) attempts for having dinner. Later on I went to bed loaded with frustration about such a bad day - and in fact a very frustrating week at work. Even better to wake up this morning to Shanya Twain's 'Up' - 'there's no other way but up from here'. And behold: A sunny morning and no rain in sight. As I went to bed yesterday night it was pouring...

I had to get myself a new pair of trousers since I ruined my last clean pair yesterday night with half a liter of french dressing - one of my dinner-attempts - and I couldn't do any laundry before today afternoon. So I took the train to Aarau and tried my luck at an outdoor-shop first, where I had ordered two pair of pants about 6 months ago - but they still keep me waiting. Next shop was Men's Globus and finally success: The saleswoman did her job so well that I walked out with actually two pair of new trousers.

Climax of the day will be my dinner: I'll try out some special Italian meal that I will cook for the whole family on my mom's birthday in April. The main dish will be Lemon Chicken filled with self-made roquette-pesto, and sage-butter pasta. The catch is: Since the paste is spiced with sage, normal pesto made with basil would taste too pale with the ckicken. So I take roquette which adds some 'roughness' to the ckicken as well. Yet I'm not sure about the starter. A creamy soup with the rest of the roquette would probably be the easiest to make. No idea about the desert though, guess I'll just wait and see what's in the stores by mid-April that kind of fitts the main dish and the desert. I'll definitely not go for some simple fruit salat, it'll have to be something a bit more sophisticated. ;-)

Hope you're hungry too now, I'll update you when I'm through with cleaning the kitchen.

Spring is coming!

Yes, finally spring is coming! Despite all prophicy of doom we didn't get any snow at the beginning of March - last year we got about 70cm at this time of year. Now we're looking at some 10° C (50° F for our American friends) and more or less dry weather. Even my Nepenthes has some spring fever: Three new, tiny weeny cans are growing, although Nepenthes are known to be rather demanding plants and not easy to handle.

In fact I did have some trouble with this plant: In the first 6 months all well-grown cans withered and died, so that i had doubts about my abilities of growing plants. But now I'm really satisfied with me and my 'baby'.

Here are two of the new cans. I couldn't take a picture of the third one, because it's hidden behind a ton of leafs.

Hi everybody who reads this! I'm PFlight2000, and I'll write about all the world and his brother - mainly about the himself actually.

What's up today? After a very tiring day I'm relaxing at home, surfing the internet and listening some radio broadcast about contemporary rock music. I just browsed the site of Switzerland's biggest ticket-seller, when I ran into the ad of a Deep Purple concert coming up in Zurich later this year.

Good Lord, Deep Purple? They do still exist? Yes they do actually, although the Lord isn't with them anymore, he's been replaced by Don Airey. But since I've seen DP on their last tour with Ritchie Blackmore - must have been back in the early 90's - I didn't buy a ticket. Plus I've just bought tickets for Faithless - Insomnia, God is a DJ - in Winterthur for me and a work-mate. So I guess that will do for this year. Unless of course Whitesnake would decide to play in Switzerland again.