GUNTHER!!!

Thanks to my mentioning him in letters, there are a few of you out there who may already be aware of the wonder that is GUNTHER. Well, that is assuming that his musical masterpieces have not made it into the rotation on MTV back home. But considering that the place where they draw the "too naughty for tv" line on Russian MTV is pretty, well....okay, it doesn't exist. So hopefully I'm right in assuming I'm privy to something special here.

Now let me warn you, these videos -- in addition to featuring Gunther making kissy faces at the camera, writhing around in all his skinny-mustached glory, and singing lyrics like "ooh, you touched my tra la la, aah, my ding ding dong" -- are a little saucy, so it might not be the best thing to look at on your work computer. But that said, I command you to check out: http://www.gunternet.com/

Okay, moving on...well, my idea was to make this entry a sort of "things I like" list, talking about the various weird stuff that has come to grow on me while living here like a sort of cultural fungus. In addition to the delights of the aforementioned Russian MTV -- I become transfixed whenever "nyeh vunovataya ya" by Fabrika (Фабрика «Не виноватая я») comes on, as well as this so-bad-it's-good video "Sexual Freak" by none other than George Michael -- I also get to hear Russkaya Radio www.rusradio.ru every day on the bus ride to work. I love the song "chyorney glazah" as well as this new (well, new to me anyway) track by "Hung Up" by Madonna, and "The World is Mine" by David Guetta. Ooh, and we mustn't forget Arash.

I wonder if half the stuff I mention on here arrived back in PDX like 4 months ago, or if I'm actually ahead of the times? You'll have to let me know.

What else...ah yes, adventures in coaching an Odyssey of the Mind team. I signed up for this little post about 2 months ago, dreaming of drawing out the creativity of a group of Moldovan teenagers and hopefully exposing them to a new experience or way of working. Of course, this wasn't my only motivation. I wish I were on an Odyssey team, and being about a decade too old for it, I figured this would be the next best thing. For those of you not familiar with the program, its been around for maybe 30 years or more now, and each year the program's creator releases several problems from which groups of 5-7 young people choose a problem to solve. http://www.odysseyofthemind.com/learn_more.php The main principles behind OM are that 1) the students do everything by themselves, without me or parents helping them, and 2) that everything is as original and creative as possible. My group decided to work on the Ancient Egypt problem, making a play that gives a fictitious and funny explanation for the creation of an ancient structure and includes characters that really lived during a designated time period.

During the course of this little "experience", I have been going insane over what until recently seemed to be a total lack of motivation on the part of the team. (Come on guys, what's the problem! I have TONS of ideas!!! Oh wait, not a team member. Right.) Perhaps I can't hold this against them -- I mean, they're not behaving so differently from a certain person I know who waits till 4 days before a term paper is due to begin writing it -- but enough about that. In any case, in the past three weeks I've seen some great ideas and really original thinking, and I have gone from contemplating calling the whole thing off to thinking, Holy crap, we might just win this thing. Planning for competition tomorrow, tonight we met for a last minute practice session, and...the horror! Nic (co-coach) and I sat there watching as the students crashed into the set, bickered over music selections (there's a pop track to accompany each scene, something we're quite opposed to but were voted down on) and giggled incessantly through each scene. "What's that saying?" I asked Nic during one particularly awful moment when our shouts of 'hey, you guys, hey, hey, listen up, hey' were going totally unheeded. "Oh yeah. 'Like herding cats.' "

Then we learned that due to today's snowfall, the competition has been postponed from tomorrow to two weeks from now. Gaah!