Drunk History, Vol. 3 — The Story of Oney Judge (5:34pm)

Drunk History is one of my absolute favorite things on the internet. Episodes pop up infrequently, and the delight I experience when I see there's a new one is indescribable. I just ran across the latest volume last night, Drunk History, Vol. 3 — The Story of Oney Judge, and it's a masterpiece. (Note: contains swear words.)

Do yourself a favor and check out the previous episodes of Drunk History as well. You'll be very glad you did.

• Drunk History, Vol. 1 — The Alexander Hamilton/Aaron Burr Duel
• Drunk History, Vol. 2 — Discovering Electricity
• Drunk History, Vol. 2.5 — A Ribald Anecdote

Philly pictures (5:55pm)

I'm back in France! Hello!

I had to head into Philadelphia the other day for a short meeting at my old job (now one of my freelance clients), and otherwise I had no reason to be in town that day, so I decided to take a bunch of pictures of Philly stuff to show my friends back home. I grew up just across the river from Philly in New Jersey, started working in the city in 2000, and moved there around 2002, so it still feels like home to me in a lot of ways. It was neat and weird to wander around and take pictures of things like a tourist.

This is City Hall. You apparently cannot fight it.

( Lots more... )

Cartwheel video! (12:58pm)

Good-bye, America. I'm getting on a plane in a couple hours.

I leave you with this here video of me doing my first cartwheel (right-click and "Save Target As..." if you're interested), courtesy of the lovely Trish and her lovely cellphone. It's some sort of weird file (.3g2? whaaa?) that can be played in Quicktime. It's tiny; just 29k. It's totally not a great cartwheel; I did some much more gooder ones later, but I think this one isn't too bad for a first try, no? Please forgive me for wearing baggy black shorts; I borrowed them from Steve. Whilst we were cartwheeling, Steve did an impression of me doing a cartwheel in my regular (tight, restrictive) clothes, which was basically him falling down like he was in a straightjacket and then writhing around a little bit. I imagine that's exactly how it would go. Okay, I'm off to cartwheel through airport security...

Cartwheel (8:42am)

One of the recent times I was in town, maybe January of this year or possibly last November, I was working on a freelance project at my old office but didn't have a desk assigned to me for several days, so I set myself up in the reception area and worked from there. One afternoon from this unusual spot I spied a woman I'd met once but didn't really know, walking down an otherwise empty hallway in between some offices and conference rooms. She was fiftyish, professional but friendly and funny, and thinking no one was looking, she did a perfect cartwheel and continued on her way.

Apparently I told my hosts Steve and Trish about this after work and lamented that I've never been able to do a cartwheel. I also evidently told them about the time, maybe four years ago when I was living with Ben in Philly, when he and I went out to Starr Garden park across the street from our apartment in the middle of the night so I could try doing cartwheels on the rubber floor of the playground. I probably tried twenty or thirty times and never got it. I finally gave up when I got tired and the parts of me I kept falling on started to hurt.

I don't remember telling Steve and Trish any of this stuff. But the night I arrived in the States for this current trip, about three weeks ago now, Steve jokingly told me he was scheduling activities for me during this visit that would entice me to stay in America. And then, not joking at all, he told me he'd arranged for us to go to Steve and Trish's friend Rita's dance studio one night so she could teach me how to do a cartwheel. Man, awesome.

Last night was the night. I admitted to Steve and Trish on our way there that I'd been worrying like hell about the cartwheel thing since my first night in town, so I was happy to finally get it over with, and also sort of irrationally nervous about the whole thing. I'm in pretty good shape and I've got good balance and coordination, and I had no idea why I'd never been able to do a cartwheel and I worried that there must be something wrong with me, and that Rita would try helping me for an hour or so and I'm embarrass myself over and over again in front of my friends and we'd all feel very uncomfortable, and then after a while we'd all have to arrive at the sad conclusion that it was time to simply give up, and we'd all feel awful about the whole thing and wish it'd never happened. No one would speak on the ride home, and then I'd cancel all upcoming trips to America and change my name and grow a beard and move to a tiny French village where no one would ever find me or know that I let my friends down, or, worse yet, that I couldn't do a cartwheel.

I'd met Rita once before but didn't know she had her own dance studio. We arrived at the place, Rita showed me one or two simple moves building up to doing an actual cartwheel, and then boom, I did it. A real cartwheel, about five minutes after we walked into the place. I thought maybe I just got lucky the first time so I tried a bunch more times. No problem, it was easy. I was just doing something extremely wrong all those times before, I guess. I did a few dozen cartwheels, thanked Rita profusely, and then we all got sushi and went to Trish's sister's house to watch a few episodes of 30 Rock. I have no idea why I wanted to be able to do a cartwheel, but I'm sure as hell glad I can now. I feel ever so slightly more ninja-like as I write this first LJ entry on this first day of this new chapter of my slightly more acrobatic life. I'm going back to France on Monday, but my next trip to the States is already planned for October, and I'm going to get Rita to teach me how to do a back handspring or something.

Why I Love America, by Manning Leonard Krull, age 8 (7:54am)

I was souvenir shopping in Philly yesterday for my friends back home, and I found myself on a side street near my old part of town just off South Street. A ways down the street ahead of me, I saw a gang of five teenage black butch lesbians coming my way; polo shirts, baseball caps, baggy jeans, boobs bound, trying real hard to look tough and not doing half bad. I was wearing a skinny white button-down shirt, super skinny black pants, and ridiculous white faux alligator shoes, and of course my usual stupid hair and piercings and sunglasses. I can always see it a mile away when someone's going to either give me a hard time about my style or compliment me on it (this happens almost daily when I'm in America; earlier in the afternoon an old lady in Macy's told me she liked my hair, and the night before I was followed down the street by a guy singing Billy Idol songs at me), and I knew one or the other was definitely coming. As soon as they saw me they started yelling.

First one: Day-amn!
The rest, in unison: Day-ammmmmn!
Dude is out! Dude is OUT!
Can I hang witchu, pops?

I smiled the tiniest smile at them and continued on my way.

Pops?

Wildwood photos (4:07pm)

Okay, Here are a bunch of pictures from my week in Wildwood! I tried to document a bit of the Jersey shore experience in an effort to explain the trash and glory of it all to my perplexed French friends back home.

I sort of almost died in Zombie World! For real! Zombie World is a stupid haunted house ride/game where you ride in a car that runs sideways along a track, and you're armed with a laser gun and you shoot at just-barely-animatronic zombies that are basically lined up along the wall you're facing, standing there waiting to get shot. I went in a car with Steve and Trish, and Jenn and Russell were in the car behind us. About ten seconds into the ride, the track turns ninety degrees and your car is supposed to turn with it, and the turn is supposed to be kind of fast and violent, because this is a haunted house ride and it's supposed to surprise and scare you. However, our car made the turn extremely violently and I smashed my head really hard against the metal back wall of the car. I spent the next half a second wondering how they could have a ride that does that to people and not get sued, and then I realized our car was facing a black wall for a pretty long time... At first I thought it was just a dark part of the ride and the zombies would jump out in a second and scare us, and then a beat later, one of us, I think it was Trish, said what we were all thinking: "We're turned backward!" The turn that should have been ninety degrees happened so violently that our car got turned all the way around, and we spent the rest of the ride looking at a black wall and just hearing the zombies behind us. I couldn't wait to see how the employees would react when our car finally came through the black curtain at the end. There was a small window in the back of the car and Steve happened to glance back over his shoulder right as the old guy who ran the ride saw us. Steve said the guy's eyes popped out and he silently mouthed OH MY GOD, which made Steve wonder if we were either in way more peril than we thought, or maybe there was a dead employee smeared along the backside of our car, just out of our sight. The guy shut down the whole ride and ran out onto the track and let us out of that deathtrap, and then we walked along the track toward the exit and told the guy, "yeah, that happened as soon as the thing started, and we were stuck like that the whole time." Amazingly (and also not so amazingly, because it's Wildwood!), the guy didn't apologize, didn't offer our money back, didn't offer us another ride, didn't really say a single word to us at all, he just walked away, probably to look into the problem. I should mention that we didn't ask for anything, because we honestly didn't want anything, except maybe an apology, or even a "Are you okay?" So we just walked away, kind of laughing at how stupid and awful that experience was. On our way out, we passed a group of guys heading it, and Steve exclaimed to them, mostly jokingly, "That ride is unsafe!" They didn't care. I mean, it says Zombie World right on the sign; nobody said it was gonna be a dance around the maypole, you know what I mean? I think it was Jenn who quipped, "Forget it, Manning, it's Zombie World." My head felt fine a few hours later but I've still got a lump on it, so fuck you, Zombie World.

( Boardwalk, beach, monsters from the deep, and more... )

I miss Wildwood already! I wish I could take it back to Paris with me. But I suspect they would both be destroyed in a nuclear explosion if they came into contact with one another.

Wildwood (9:28am)

I'm back from a week in Wildwood NJ with a dozen of my best friends. jenniferrodgers and gainsclockwork and I accidentally got an old timey photo taken. Hey, it could happen to anybody.

More Wildwood stories and pictures soon.

The coolest phonecall I've ever received (1:28pm)

I was out having a drink with my friend Megan the other night when I got a call from Steve (of Steve and Trish, the folks I'm staying with while I'm in town)...

Me: "Hey Steve, what's up?"

Steve: "Hey. Where are you?"

Me: "I'm at Vintage with Megan."

Steve: "Okay, cool. I just declined a collect call from Camden Country Correctional Facility, and then I realized I should make sure it wasn't you."

Me: "Oh man, awesome. This is going in the LiveJournal."

And so it did.

एअर इंडिया (7:57am)

"A thousand pardons for my lack of Star Wars trivia skillz."

For this trip to the States I ended up taking Air India, as I do about half the time. Air India is usually the absolute cheapest flight to Paris from any point in the States; you've gotta fly outta Newark but you can sometimes get a round-trip ticket for as little as $400 in the off-season. Anyway, Air India is basically the hilarious-est airline in the world, because they have a bowing, turban-wearing mascot, the planes are decorated with snazzy Indian motifs around the windows, and they show Bollywood music videos and wacky Indian sitcoms (the one I've seen most often is called Office Office, which is not the Indian version of The Office, but I pretend it is). The airline is also wonderful for a few reasons other than the fact they're so cheap, including the best airline food I've ever had (all Indian food, of course), the coolest flight attendant uniforms I've ever seen (modified saris), probably the classiest, politest staff I've ever dealt with, etc.

This time the plane had screens on the back of every seat, so you could theoretically watch whatever you wanted. However, unsurprisingly, most of the features were broken; all but one of the advertised movies weren't working, the flight info feature was broken, most of the advertised radio stations weren't available, etc. One thing that was available was the games section, which basically consisted of lots of rip-offs of classic 1980s arcade games that were redesigned and reprogrammed very poorly. The controls were so unresponsive that any game involving any timing or action was basically completely unplayable. So I ended up trying some of the slower-paced games, mostly involving words and puzzles, including a trivia game. Now, seeing as how these games were developed for Air India, presumably in India and for mostly-Indian audiences, I was prepared for the trivia questions to be a little bit strangely-worded, and a few of them were, but really that was barely noticeable; the thing that jumped out at me most was that lots of the world travel and history questions were somewhat India-centric, but the syntax of the questions themselves didn't read as extremely strange or foreign or anything. 99% of the trivia questions were perfectly reasonable and accurate and made sense. Then there was this question...

In Star Wars, the character of Chewbacca was a:

A. Robot
B. Monkey
C. Mutant
D. Monster

Of course my eyes were scanning for Wookiee, but since that wasn't there, I shrugged and went with Monster. You can imagine my surprise when the response I received, without explanation, was:

Wrong. The correct answer is C. Mutant.

Wow! Was Chewbacca ever in the X-Men? Maybe I've been away from America for longer than I thought.

The second most hilarious question, just because of its somewhat indelicate wording, was:

What black part of New York is North of Manhattan?

Yeesh, I realize there's nothing really wrong or offensive at all about that, but Americans are so programmed to be PC all the time that it still made me wince a little bit. I'd been playing the trivia game for twenty minutes or so at this point, and upon reading that question I just about blushed and felt like I'd brought my friend Air India to a party to meet my friends for the first time and in making smalltalk with my gang Air India came out with something a little awkward like that, thinking it was totally okay, and everybody got uncomfortable and looked at me and I felt embarrassed for Air India and for myself and for my friends all at the same time and wished I could disappear, and then Air India sensed everyone's discomfort and looked at and said, "What? What?" and I just let it go because if someone doesn't know that it sounds a little insensitive to say that, there's no way you can explain it to them without sounding hypersensitive and weird. Like I said, Americans are obsessed with being PC and nobody else in the world is, and it's really no big deal. Oh yeah, but also, Harlem is in Manhattan, not North of it, but I get what they meant. I still had a great flight and I still love Air India.

Je suis un metalleux (9:29am)

When my pal Leonard (ludickid) was visting me in Paris a couple months ago, he was here working on an article for Metal Edge magazine about the heavy metal scene in France, and I helped him out a little by tracking down record stores with him and doing a tiny bit of translation when he was interviewing store owners. For kicks, Leonard let me pretend to be a guy shopping for heavy metal records in one of the pictures he took, which ended up being printed alongside the article, as Leonard mentioned today. I'm glad the issue came out when I happen to be visiting the States, as it shouldn't be too hard to track down over here. I'll see if I can find a copy in Philly this week and post a scan...

Yop (9:21am)

I forgot to post these pictures I took just before I left Paris the other day. I am very much disturbed by this ad for a popular yogurt drink...

( Closeup... )

I do not wish to drink any of these things.

Amerika (9:59am)

Hi gang. I am now in America, as advertised. It is exactly like this:

Within my first twenty four hours, I rode in big American cars, ate big American food, went to American work, hung out with American friends, drank lots of American beer, and got danced on by American strippers. Today I'm having American brunch with my American family. I've been super busy and I know I owe a lot of people a lot of e-mails and phonecalls! Please bear with me, I'll be in touch soon. I'm once again staying at Steve and Trish's lovely chateau in The New Jersey. It's great to be reunited with my friends and also with the toothbrush that has my name on it (made by Trish a while back), and the awesome hairspray I left here last time, and my awesome old hairdryer that I had to leave behind because of electrical differences in Europe. I love my old hairdryer because one of the settings is Cool, and I always use that one because I want my hair to look really cool. Then again, the High setting is pretty compelling to me for the same reason.

The New World (9:20am)

Today I'm going here:

I'm hoping to land somewhere between Terra florida and Francisca. Bags are packed and I'm off to find a taxi. See you soon, Americas.

Lada's KISS pictures (6:46pm)

Lada gave me two pictures from the KISS concert last night to share with my LJ pals...

( Not for the faint of heart... )

Pictures from my friend Frederick (3:58pm)

Last night while my roommates were being recruited by Kiss, I prepared for my trip to the States that's coming up way too fast (tomorrow). I always back up my computer before I fly, you know, so if Air India flight 191 crashes in the ocean and I'm eaten by sharks, at least my clients will still be able to track down their Photoshop files on my external drive in Paris. Anyway, whilst computering, I remembered I had a stack of poorly-labeled cds I'd been meaning to sort through and figure out, and I discovered that one of them was a huge collection of photos from my friend Frederick. Frederick is my colleague in Philly; we worked in the office together for about five years and nowadays I see him whenever I'm in town, since he still works at the same company and they're now my biggest freelance client. Frederick is one of those guys who always has his digital camera in hand and is always snapping photos of everything all the time. Since he and I went to lunch together most days, I ended up in hundreds of his pictures, and I'd asked him to burn me a cd of them one time when I was back in Philly recently, and I guess I forgot he actually did that and gave it to me; I never realized I had the thing 'til last night. So I went through all of the photos while my computer was backing (that ass) up, and some of them are great and some of them are hilarious.

First, interestingly, I ran across this photo (above) of me in Rittenhouse Square in the snow in 2004. It's the same photo that was later printed out and hung up at my going away party at the office in 2005, which is the photo I ran across on another colleague's Facebook gallery a few days ago.



Then I found this photo (above) that was taken a few months later in the same park; we worked literally across the street from the park and cut through there every day on our way to lunch. Those of you who knew me at the time will probably remember I came down chickenpox that spring, and this photo must have been taken right after I returned to work, because you can see one of my last remaining spots on my cheek there. I have a small, smooth white scar there now, one of about five left on my body by that terrible week of chickenpox. I swear I didn't scratch!

I bought those horrible women's sunglasses at a vintage shop in New Orleans and wore the heck out of 'em. I was devastated when they broke a couple years later.


( A bunch more riduculous photos, all out of order and stuff... )

Or maybe this is the "party every day" part (10:37am)

My roommates Alexis and Lada scored free tickets to see Kiss last night in Paris. I woke up this morning to discover that they didn't come home. I'm afraid they may have joined the Kiss Army.

Snoop Chienn (1:21pm)

Question: Should I cap off my unbelievable spring/summer of the best concerts ever (Nick Cave, Leonard Cohen, Tom Waits) with this?

Answer: Yes! (Actual answer: No!)

Why did Manning's cellphone get the works? (3:12pm)

The other night I had some time to kill while waiting for Marjorie, so on a lark I decided to change the language on my cellphone. When I arrived in France back in September of last year, I bought this phone and set it to English. About a month later I found the courage to set it to French, and it's been that way ever since. Checking out my other language options in the phone, there were Italian, German, Spanish, and Turkish. I decided to choose the only one of those languages in which I cannot speak (or even recognize) a single word, Turkish. Now, thanks to all those crazy Turkish special characters, every single time I go to make a call or receive a text message or check the time, for a second I think my phone is severely broken; I wonder when I dropped it, when I spilled a drink on it, et cetera. My brain has gone through this process several times each day for about three days now. Lesson learned: it turns out if you're stupid enough you can play practical jokes on yourself.

Le Cake-Walk Infernal (10:25am)

Man, I can't wait to go to Hell! If this video is any indication, it's going to be a blast.

(Uh, this post is entirely unrelated to my trip to New Jersey later this week.)

Un-Wanted Poster (3:41pm)

Facebook does a thing where you can tag your photos (and other people's photos) with the names of the people who appear in them. This sends a message to each person in the photo to tell them that a photo has been tagged with their name. I received a message like this recently that said that an old colleague of mine, whom I haven't seen in a couple years, had just tagged a photo with my name, and the photo itself belonged to a woman I had never heard of. So I clicked through and found this:

Why, I'm not in this photo at all! Or am I? The lady on the left is the one who tagged the photo with my name, and I don't know the other two. Did you spot me yet? (I'm not the guy's head on the far right.) I'm in the picture that's hanging on the top-right; that's me walking in the snow in Rittenhouse Square in Philadelphia around 2004 or so. My friend Frederick took the picture, and it's now hanging on a column in the cafe area of my old office in Philly (pictured here during an office party, hence: beer). This and several other photos of me got hung up around the office when my colleagues threw a going away party for me back in February of 2005, and some of them are still hanging there to this day (that is, the photos are hanging, not my colleagues). I still do a lot of freelance work for this company while I'm over here in Paris, and I end up working with new people there all the time who've never met me in person. Several times now I've had the experience where I work with a new person in the Philly office for several weeks (over the internet and telephone) and then one day they're suddenly super excited to tell me that they'd always wondered who that freaky guy is whose face is hanging up all over the office, and they finally just found out it's me! I get the same thing when I'm actually visiting the Philly office, as I do a couple times a year; someone I've never seen before will walk up to me and say, "Hey, you're that guy in those pictures around the office! I've always wondered who you are! Who are you?" And I say, "I'm Manning Krull," and they say, "YOU'RE Manning Krull?! I'm [person you've been working with over the phone for months]!" And then they faint. Mine is not the face one imagines when one talks to one's web design consultant in France, I suppose.