The Columnist Manifesto

On the flight from Zurich into Berlin, B chatted up a German guy sitting at the end of our row. Her immediate goal was to see if he knew the price of a taxi from the airport, but the guy had lived in Chicago and the conversation was fairly wide-ranging in the time that it took from touching down to the seatbelt sign winking off. One of his comments was that temperatures in Berlin at this time of year (which he thoughtfully translated for us into Farenheit) "can be anywhere between 50 and 100."

He wasn't kidding. Daily temperatures have ranged 25 degrees between morning and night, and from day to day we've gotten low 50s with high 80s expected tomorrow. You really have to layer for this weather.

For the past couple of days, the weather seems to come in 1-hour units, beginning with brooding overcast skies, then wind, then a 10-15 minute rainshower, then clearing to sunny and warm. Next hour, the cycle repeats.

I find this kind of weather uplifting. For one thing, it makes me feel so smart for toting my packable Marmot Mountain waterproof rain jacket. For another, I find continuous sunshine to be so overrated -- this weather is much more entertaining.

But lets indulge in the overused metaphor of storm clouds for brooding bad moods. Which brings me to blogging. It turns out that my photo problem was not the card reader, but rather the photo memory card itself -- my film as it were. I learned this only after spending an engaging half day dragging B from one photoshop to another in a vain hunt for a new card reader, which ended successfully in an outdoor shopping arcade in the Charlottenburg district at the German Equivalent of Best Buy (to quote Voxwoman's comment to the previous post).

All the photos from the start of the trip until yesterday afternoon are inaccessible -- either gone forever, or else recoverable only with some clever techno-fix that will not be attempted here in Europe.

This is too bad. I now realize that the photos for me are a journal, containing not only a visual record of what I do, but also of my mental impressions of what I see. They're pictoral notes for my blog posts. I have post ideas written around them. I mean, I could verbally describe for you the smoking lounge in the Zurich airport, with its glass facade bearing the Camel Cigarette decal with the label -- in English -- "Cigarettes harm your health." But it would be so much better to actually show you the picture before riffing on the irony of that.

Some of the photos are things that I'll re-photograph. But some are just gone, like faded memory.