Stuff from Germany

The trouble with having updated so often in the last couple of weeks is that I feel compelled to make one entry a day to keep the calendar filled, and this means that I'm visibly struggling to think of things to write about (see the last couple of days). In fact, quite a lot of the recent ones have been from my backlog of pre-written entries that hadn't gone up yet, and that's now exhausted. I will replenish it with an entry vaguely inspired by the_twilighted's recent post, so that'll keep me going.

My family got back from Germany last week, bringing back imported goods with them - the most significant being the DVD of Black Books 3. We did have a recorded tape of it, but it seems to have vanished and no one knows if anyone's borrowed it or not. I'm still undecided as to whether the series is as good as series 1 and 2, but really, a bad Black Books episode is still far better than most of the rest of British TV's entire output anyway. There are a number of deleted scenes that should have been left in, including the inspired line "I wouldn't hire you again if we were the last two people in the world, the world was on fire, I was starving, and you had a fire extinguisher and sleeves that shot out crisps."

Two albums bought in Germany have also found their way on to my shelf, and those are Hammerfall's first album, "Glory to the Brave", and... well, actually, System of a Down's new album. My youngest brother and sister got strangely in to the music on my hard drive about a week before leaving for Germany, and I happened to have about an albumful of their MP3s. I don't particularly enjoy a lot of their music, but some of it is hilarious.

The album is tolerable, but only two songs really stand out to me - Bring Your Own Bombs and Sad Statue, which are both about the war in Iraq. The band are famous for having lyrics that mean very little on the surface, and also for being very secretive about the meanings behind them, but these ones are pretty clear. I think in some way, System of a Down are very much like South Park - crude and violent on the surface, but disguising quite intelligent social and political commentary underneath.

I haven't actually listened to Glory to the Brave much yet. The first track is decent enough, but it really is crying out for choirvocals in the background of the chorus (I've seen the European term for these so much that I've forgotten what the English phrase is). They seem very much like what you might call "Warhammer: The Band", and therefore more of my brothers' thing than mine.

The schools went back today, meaning that traffic in to Aberdeen was the worst ever. The summer holiday is now six weeks rather than seven, which seems an incredibly short amount of time whenever I think about it.