Maybe Tuesdays will always be hard. By Tuesday, you're solidly in the work week with no end in sight. You're already tired but utterly focused on driving on through to the weekend.

Also, if I don't start taking or scanning pictures soon I'm going to run out of images before the end of the month. I'm burning through a backlog here.

I am trying to plan train travel in Germany in April. So many rail passes, which one is the right one?

Also, I am realizing that Germany is completely foreign to me. I don't know the language or the food or the culture. Luckily, some words are recognizable. Still, will we be capable of ordering anything besides wurst? If we do, will we be able to say it? We'll point I guess. I asked Kate about curry wurst and she said "Veerrst"? I'm like, Oh yeah, we're fucked. I might have to stop listening to music and the news and start cramming some kind of Berlitz podcast series.

Watch it once, nice. Watch it a hundred times, you're a fan. Here they are in chronological order.

dontstopbelievin (2000)
I don't know who showed this to me, but back in 2000 this pretty much represented the pinnacle of Flash technology: a song-length video drawn with an opto-mechanical mouse and low-res image scans. Nice! I wasted a lot of time at my imploding dot-com watching this thing. Streetlights, people. Heavens just a funky moose. WWJD? Don't stop believin' of course!

Dear Girl (2000ish)
I can blame Kate for digging up this one from the dredges of Web 1.0. I don't find this one as compelling as dontstopbelievin, but sometimes it's still fun to say, "Damn girl, how's your mama?"

I love how in the beginning of a thing the people who have access to it are often the least qualified to participate. I guess that's how you know you're looking at the bleeding edge.

Numa Numa (2004)
If you haven't seen this one, you've been living in a remote cabin in Idaho this past decade. And since I know that's not likely, I'll assume you've seen Numa Numa or the numerous homages to it a buncha times. Heck, about a year after its release my aunt sent it back to me in one of those endless e-mail forwards. Nothing signals world domination more than a once-fringe Internet phenomenon returning to you in e-mail from a family member still on dial-up. Anyway, this link lived on my desktop for months. I'd fire it up every so often just to LMAO. The way the camera shakes when he starts dancing still gets me! HAHAHA! Be sure to watch the original version to get the full 2004 experience, an interesting hybrid between the 2000-era vector-based Flash and the coming age of Flash video.

Tom Cruise is a Cock-Block (2007)
I'm sure there have been funnier videos between Numa Numa and Cock-Block, but all's a YouTube blur. It's like, YouTube wasn't there and then it was and suddenly I was losing whole nights to watching old Michael Jackson videos. Thanks to Jerry for this one. I still watch it and share it regularly. Every line is quotable! Sadly, Part 2 sucks. Down with sequels!

Immersion (2008)
Immersion Project Blog Archive
Flash video becomes mainstream information exchange: I found this in the NY Times Magazine alongside an article about the project. It's not just funny but complicated. It's strange, a little sad, and somehow disturbing—but not in the obvious anti-video-game way. It's more that the reactions seem a little sinister when disconnected from the action on the screen, which the observer can't see. Anyway, I find it utterly compelling. "Let me kill youuu."