First of all, I need to stress how crazy awesome last night’s episode of House was. I mean, every episode of House ends with me throwing my arms into the air and crying out “Oh my fucking god!” but last night just went above-and-beyond.
If you don’t watch House, you are a sucky doo-doo head.
Secondly, I wanted to a little jig of celebration, for I have not failed my physics midterm! After writing it, I was sure it had gone abysmally. Yesterday, when Professor Jones put up a slide of the marks distribution, I was sure I was one of the unlucky three people who made up the lowest bar. I braced myself – and then found out I was only three points (6%) below the class average!
I was completely overjoyed, and it made my day. In other midterm news, the MAT401 test went ok, though I haven’t gotten it back yet, and the MAT246 that I wrote yesterday was great.
I really feel grateful for my friend Jerod, who, in addition to helping me with problem sets and studying, is great at boosting my confidence and not letting me start thinking that I’m the worst in the class. It really helps having his support.
And just now, I got back from kicking ass on my German presentation. I played a song, tried to get some class-participation going, and, most importantly, spoke without a script.
It’s been a good week so far.
And now for some ranting:
While doing research for my presentation (which was on the current German music scene) I can across an article by Claire Berlinski, which you can read here. I was first confused, then, after thinking about it, angry.
Ms. Berlinski doesn’t seem to like Rammstein very much. After picking out the dumbest people out of a crowd of Rammstein fans to quote, and making Till seem like a jerk, she goes out of her way to insist that the band are violent Fascists. She compares their logo to a swastika (you can see that logo here – looks like a Greek cross to me, but what do I know). She uses their use of a Leni Riefenstahl clip in one of their music videos to prove they are Nazis.
But the thing that confused me was this: Berlinski says that “The crowd shouted "Hi!" in unison, which sounded just different enough from "Heil" that the resemblance could be denied.” Now of course she means that “Hi!” sounds just like “Heil” and so Rammstein fans are Nazis. But… when would the crowd have cause to yell “Hi?” That made no sense to me.
Until I realized that what they were yelling was “Ahoi!” during the performance of Reise Reise. This made me angry all over again.
She ended my saying: “I emerged from the concert profoundly relieved that the members of Rammstein declare themselves to be against war: If this is their pacifism, the mind boggles at what their aggression might look like.”
I want to say more, but I’m late for tea.