Post Titled: Beat Down dat Ausländerbehörde, worrrd.

After 25+ hours of waiting in various German govnerment buildings, and 10+ months of waiting I got my friggin Aufenthaltserlaubnis which is good until April 10, not that that matters any longer since I am married, but I just wanted to get those sweat-and-bloodstained stickers stuck permanently in my passport. Yao.
I was a half-hour late to my appointment because I decided to ride a bike- and mapquest the directions before hand (I#ll blame product placement in a recent re-re-watching of BROKEN FLOWERS on this one), problems being:

A. Mapquest directions were designed for CARS, not bikes.
B. Mapquest directions did not know about the massive "Umleitung" (construction detour) in the middle of the trip, thus null-and-voiding the last half of the directions. grr.

Nevertheless... After a 2 hour wait and another €50 I eventually got everything I needed. Finally. Like a fight to the finish, (or just simply point of exhaustion) as if the German bureaucracy (huffing gruffly) respected my perserverance, and was exhausted of its own reasons and ways to say "no" or "not possible" we came to a settlement... (nod, return nod.)

Anyhow, finds of interest this morning:

a report called "PUBLIC RAdio'sSOCIAL MEDIA EXPIRAMENTS" by Abbey Blake Levenshus (sponsored by the Ford Foundation-? WHy?)
and a fun little Doonesbury Survey from SLATE.COM.
and a blog entry (err- piece) called Virtual Virtues, By Sean Lennon found in a MySpace Blog that is quite interesting...

ooof. that's all I got.