Finally, then!

No, I am not dead.

No, Larry isn't either.

Then why haven't I updated you ask? Well...Browser crashings, little to tell, and much time spent with a certain very cute American boy, probably. Also, I'm just a lazy bastard.

As I don't even remember what happened exactly each day, so I'll just go by theme. The first thing, of course, being classes. Yes, school has started again, it's almost the end of week two even (time flies), so, what about those classes?

My only true physics class this quarter is "Cosmology and Particle Astrophysics". Yes, that is scary. The professors themselves confess to playing it "good, cop, bad cop". The good cop is my professor from last quarter, Katsushi (yes, this makes me laugh), a little excited japanese man who mostly likes showing us nice pictures on overheads at top speed. The bad cop is a very young russian theorist called Alexander Kusenko, who writes frightening equations on the board but then explains them really well. Also, today he wore a glow in the dark T-shirt about dark matter. My kind of geek.

I also have a kinda physics course. By which I mean a Biophysics course. It's nice and quaint, getting back to Newton's laws and formula's like "in equilibrium the net torque = 0". The teacher is Dutch, coincidentally, so even 6000 miles from home I can't get away from Dutch accents, I mean it, they're pursuing me: yesterday on Discovery Channel, after Mythbusters (aka. the show that makes me want to be one of those bearded, bespectabled, big-bellied nerds), there was an "extreme engineering" show about Holland's battle against water, filled to the brim with Dutch-accented English.

And then...enough of the science courses, on to film courses. Well...one of them is actually a little bit of a social science course. See, when I subscribed for "French Cinema", I thought it would be about Truffaut, Godard, Chabrol etc. What I found out during the first class was that it was actually "Francophone Cinema", and that the main topic was colonialism and (mostly) the immigration problematic in France and Great Britain. So far, we've watched "The Battle of Algiers" and "Inch-Allah Dimanche". I've decided to stick with the course even if it isn't about the great french directors, the topic is very relevant and gripping, and it's nice being taught in French again, even if it is overly slow and articulated French.

My last course is "History of the American Motion Picture". And you wanna know the coolest thing about it? It's taught in an actual movie theatre. Well, there is an even cooler thing about it: after seeing Casablanca so often on DVD that I can say most of the lines before the characters, I'm finally going to see it on a big screen. So far, we've watched "Singing in the Rain" (which was pretty much just filler for the first class, and I'd watched it with my film class last semester as well, but who cares), various short films by Thomas Edison and the Lumière brothers (my favorite was an Edison short called "cat boxing". The title was meant to be taken literally), some famous somewhat longer, edited shorts, notably Meliès' "a trip to the moon" and Edwin S. Porter's "The great train robbery", a D.W.Griffith film and three comedies, one of them Charlie Chaplin's "the Kid" (and boy was that kid cute) and also Buster Keaton's "Sherlock Jr."

So much for courses. Next update, hopefully to be up soon, what have I been doing outside of class?

Until then,

Hedwig

P.S. All Dutch speakers should check out my dear friends' yearbook entry here. I miss them.