Buzz The Bridge

Straight Bangin'

Problem

 So let's say you're a propane deliveryman here in the Gracia district of Barcelona. You've immigrated here from north Africa, and you just want to sell your high-quality propane so your family can eat. But unfortunately due to lack of education you have no ability to schedule delivery times. You also aren't sure how to call customers with a telephone. Newspapers, email, the internet? All mysteries to you.

But you must deliver your propane. And you need customers to know that you're there, that your propane is available! What do you do?!

Solution

 This one should be obvious.

1. Get you and your friends to circle the streets of Gracia every Saturday and Sunday morning from 10am-2pm, pushing your propane around on dollies
2. While carting your propane around, use an iron hammer to continuously bang on your steel tanks loud enough for everyone's dead Aunt Felicia to know you're there
3. Be sure to go up and down each street at least fifteen to twenty times
4. Take as few breaks as possible

Problem. Solved.

I want to attach a small explosive to the business end of this hammer and then just sit back and wait.

Plans To Get Stranded

Been trying for the past few weeks to figure out whether I can make it in terms of time and money to any of the shows on The National's current European tour. They're not coming to Spain and was thinking maybe Milan might make sense.

Belchica: kinda like a well-let basement but with really, really good beer

But last night at a Belgian bar downtown, Jared here convinced me we needed to just suck it up and do the weekend Rolling Stone Weekender festival in Weissenhäuser, Germany. Apparently there's a vacation area up on the Baltic Sea near Kiel (ah, Kiel...) where they have an annual event.

Tickets include:

• Two-day pass to all the shows
• Two nights' lodging
• Access to a huge "tropical" pool with waterslides

This weekend: get two more people to come so we can rent our own bungalow. Next three weekends: focus on Accounting, Marketing and Business Valuation so attendance can happen without remorse.

"It's no crime to steal from a thief" - Lao Tzu

Like most of you, my friend Tall Dan is not perfect. And of his many, many flaws, perhaps his greatest is a thievery fetish that comes on later in the night. Bikes, pumpkins, artwork... anything to be found in a yard is usually considered fair game. And for awhile he got away with it.

  A question asked of many of those living north of Davis Square

But in early 2009 TD finally began to get in over his head. You see, I'd purchased a very special green rake for yard maintenance, and for obvious reasons Dan began to covet it, taking it home with him every chance he found. He went even so far as to refer to it as his rake on occasion. At least a half dozen times I had to head over to his place to repossess it.

And as of the morning I left Boston to join an MBA program in Barcelona, the damn thing was yet again no longer to be found at my place. This situation resulted in the video below.

10/10/10 = 42

So it's already the second week of October and the weekend's almost done. Time is, as predicted, flying. Today's date's pretty auspicious, as not only is a moment of containing five tens possible (seven if you get into milliseconds), but the date is also 42 in binary, which I suppose might imply that today contains The Answer.

Poker Night II went well Friday night, later met up with the surviving women from Girl's Night. I need to remember that women kept from men for 4-5 hours become extremely sociable later on. Spent most of yesterday crisscrossing the city with Dima, who was extremely kind in offering up a good six hours of his day to help me with a little personal project I've got going.

Cantina Machito had some pretty sick carnitas tacos. Though their mojitos were 96% mint leaf.

Later had dinner at a great Mexican place here in Gracia with Ana, then worked until 5:30am on my presentation to be considered for the ESADE Marketing Club's governing board. Will find out Wednesday how that goes. Skydiving was called off due to the weather, so just gym today and misc crap getting done.

The first term's final exams wrapped up last week with Accounting on Thursday, which I'd been dreading yet seemed to go well. I think. Also had the first classes of the program's second term, which they refer to as "Term 1" in much the same way the second floors of European houses are called "Floor 1".

They do this for no discernable reason other than they're wacky and like to do nonsensical things. It's the same kind of endearing way that a defensive whale might wonder why anyone wouldn't eat only krill.

You could learn to be a little more accepting of other cultures, hombre.

Our first Marketing class was on Friday, which was pretty cool in that in eight years of marketing I'd never once seen any kind of real theory applied to the things which we do.

The visiting Marketing professor, who apparently flies in for the lectures from Chile a few times a semester, had us discuss an interesting case study in which a Chilean owner of peaceful, grassy cemeteries for upscale Chileans had decided to try to expand his target audience by offering similarly peaceful plots to the lower class.

Loved by rich, dead Chileans the world over

To which they rebelled, as apparently lower-class Chilean families like to honor their deceased with small huts, flowers, chotchkes, symbols of things they owned in life, etc. To them, "a cemetery plot is just another form of real estate", and needs to be decorated accordingly.

Not a rich Chilean? Then go with something a little livelier in your death.

And the cemetery company was perplexed as to what to do... until they just decided to go with it, stop spending on grass / grass maintenance, and instead begin selling flowers, plot adornments, small huts, etc.

Moral of the story: Aspirational sales aren't always the answer. Sometimes you gotta just sell people crap.

Also raises a rather interesting question. For the wealthy, their ideal final rest is solitude, peace and isolation. For the poor, their ideal final sleep is noise, bright color, family and their life's possessions. Is the heaven of the rich the hell for the poor, and vice versa?

Either way, love the coincidental timing of writing about death just now and having the grinding pipe organ of The Arcade Fire's "Intervention" come booming in midway through the last paragraph.