Month: February 2007

I just spoke the sentence “You have to download the jars to your ears before the ejbs will work.” A voice in my head is screaming that something has gone horribly wrong. It’s not supposed to be like this.

Night before last we went to yet another Indian restaurant. This particular one was chosen partly because it was close to Celine’s apartment, but mostly because its web site advertised BOWLING@#(%&, or Kegelbahn as the germans say in german. Apparently it’s called skittles in britain. Wankers.

skittle |ˈskitl| noun 1 (skittles) [treated as sing. ] a game played, chiefly in Britain, with wooden pins, typically nine in number, set up at the end of an alley to be bowled down with a wooden ball or disk.

1st good sign: From the outside it looks like a seedy 2nd-story Juarez bar where old men drink tequila and wait for Anthony Banderas to come shoot them. 2nd good sign: On the inside there is a floor-to-ceiling sculped banyan tree in the middle of the room and branches with leaves sticking out of walls. It is completely awesome: the craftsmanship and attention to detail impressive; the garishness blatant; the sheer ballsiness of putting a fucking tree in the middle of your restaurant admirable. There is also a carved canoe filled with gourds.

Food was very good and actually spicy which is unusual for Zürich. I’ll definitely be back to try the… Exotic Tandoori Ostrich. Wait, OSTRICH!?!

And then the bowling machine in the basement. The Kegelbahn machine is Swiss or German (i.e. HaRD-CoRE), has a pig on it, and is circa 1950s. The mechanism is amazing. Well-designed, yet ancient and mechanical unlike our modern whirleygigs. Rube Goldberg-esque; pullies and pins on ropes and conveyor belts and serious robot light buttons. I thought about how much more impressively designed and built the thing was than any of the enterprise software I’m forced to use for my job every day.

Crazy wooden balls with HUGE holes cut out of the sides to accomodate hands up to gorilla size. They “roll” lumpily and veer sharply if thrown without sufficient force. The atmosphere completed by the tiny your-grandpas-basement-if-your-grandpa-was-indian, 6’2″ ceilings, cheap boom box, and two cds each containing 1/2 of the soundtrack that they use for all Bollywood movies. It even has the smell down.

Celine posted pictures: http://flickr.com/photos/c-space.

PS Celine has done an excellent job of photodocumenting Swiss interestingness lately.

My mp3 player randomly picked the superb Carcass song Arbeit Macht Fleisch, and I realized that I kind of knew what it means now: Work Makes Meat. Apparently this is a parody of a common german phrase:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arbeit_macht_frei