Toothpaste, and Western Denmark

I just finished watching an online report on the A-rod steroids incident, and an interviewed man finished with, "once the toothpaste starts to come out, it's really tough to stop it." Terrible. There are so many problems with this. On the ground level, the fact that this analogy is wrong; once the toothpaste starts to come out, you can stop pressing and no more will come out. It's quite a viscous liquid, maybe even a solid (though admittedly probably a liquid.) Second of all, analogies like this that are used to end an interview in some sort of sly manner always hit me in places I don't want touched. Third of all, there is no way the guy made this comment up on the spot ==> he thought of this line, "once the toothpaste starts to come out, it's really tough to stop it," at a previous time, before the interview. You can see his face too, at first subtly stutter the first syllable, and then glide through it, clearly proud of himself. Terrible.

Last night I got back from a 3-day tour, with my Communications and Mass Media program, of Western Denmark, the second biggest cities, Aarhus and Odense (the birthplace and early stomping grounds of H.C. Andersen, Denmark's greatest contribution to the world.) We left early Thursday morning and saw "educational" sites such as The Danish School of Media and Journalism, a newspaper or two, and TV2, Denmark's largest TV station (where we saw a live news broadcast, which was pleasurable.) I got to see a Danish indie rock band who could play indie rock music better than me or you could (assuming my blog hasn't made it the screens of the Followill brothers/cousins yet (of Kings of Leon)), but they weren't good to listen to. We got relatively good sit-down food, I took way less pictures than I should have, and the highlight of the trip was definitely the basement floor of the ARoS Museum in Aarhus where we got a sneak peak tour of an interactive arts media show. A few of the pieces:

• A treadmill approximately 8 feet by 18 feet, on which you could ran as fast or slow as you want and it would keep you in the middle. In front of you was a cinema screen that showed you running through different scenarios based on how fast you were running. Depending on which sides of the treadmill you ran, the scene would change (spooky parking garage, forest, et cetera.)
• An old fashioned type writer, attached to a long sheet of paper and a projector, projecting onto the piece of paper. You could type anything, and then hit the create button, and the letters would be used as some sort of DNA to form a creature that would live on the piece of paper. Each sequence of letters produced a different creature, and you could create as many as you wanted. If you typed letters and did not hit the create button, your letters became food for the others. Evolution based.
• A handle, attached to a light bulb. It finds your pulse, puts it in the light bulb, and shows you where on the ceiling made of 300 lights of other people's pulses your pulse will be until 300 more people try it out.
• Two wheelchairs that spookily move around a blank room interacting with each other and you. They write you notes that drop on the floor. Spooky music also.
• A bed that interacts with you using human emotions with vibrations all over. When I went in, I felt as though the bed was telling me it was nervous.
• The homepage of the New York Times, from July 4th, 2009. It was good because it was humorous and well-written.

Last night Tiffany and I made a stir-fry that had so many levels of the food group and nutrition it would make mother Lipstein sleep soundly. Then a bunch of us stayed in, saving some money and some tolerance, and played bananagrams. I'm looking forward to the week.

Also, one of the only hard alcohols you can find in Denmark but not most other places is called something like Fisherman's Friend. It's dark red and tastes more like Robitussin than I remember Robitussin tasting like. It's really something terrible. Oh and it's only 20% so you can enjoy more of it.