Florida Accidentally Banned All Computers In The State Through Internet Cafe Ban

[garbon]

Not cold enough yet for tomato bisque.

Their tomato soup is lovely, particularly when paired with grilled cheese. Up in my cubicle it always feels like winter.

[CountDeMoney]

I like to watch the chicks at Panara Bread. 

You'd love the one near me.  Not a girl working there over the age of 20.

Yup, it's like Chik-fil-A, only without the evangelicalism and with Sunday hours.

[Syt]

The proper Vienna Kaffeehaus experience demands that the waiters will generally ignore you for a while before taking your order, and after they've served you will ignore you again until you lasso them in for more coffee or some cake or the bill (in which case it's their duty to look properly indignated).

The idea is that you can spend hours there, reading the international papers or (in modern days) work on your laptop.

Starbucks won't stand for this, of course.

[Darth Wagtaros]

I should go to Panera today.

I'm tempted now. Could use some sesame semolina bread.

[Malthus]

The proper Vienna Kaffeehaus experience demands that the waiters will generally ignore you for a while before taking your order, and after they've served you will ignore you again until you lasso them in for more coffee or some cake or the bill (in which case it's their duty to look properly indignated).

The idea is that you can spend hours there, reading the international papers or (in modern days) work on your laptop.

Starbucks won't stand for this, of course.

Heh, thinking about Vienna today, as I was reading Musil's The Man Without Qualities. Struck me that his characters would have enjoyed Languish. 

Hardly anyone still reads nowadays. People make use of the writer only in order to work off their own excess energy on him in a perverse manner, in the form of agreement or disagreement.

We could have designed a pretty good Parallel Campaign. It would, no doubt, have involved Dreadnoughts.

[Syt]

Man Without Qualities is one of the essentials of Austrian literature; alas, I haven't read it yet.

[Malthus]

Man Without Qualities is one of the essentials of Austrian literature; alas, I haven't read it yet.

It's an odd one.

The cover on my edition compared it to Proust and Joyce, which was not encouraging.  However, unlike those two worthy heavyweights of literature, Musil's work is readable, even in translation, and indeed in places it is very funny.

However, there is not much of a plot. It is purely a novel of ideas. It can be enjoyed in snippets and quotes.

The basic idea is that a bunch of Viennese characters, including the protagonist, the 'man without qualities', are drawn together to plan a gigantic celebration of the Austo-Hungarian Empire in the years before WW1. The trigger for this was a similar celebration being held by the Prussian Germans, whom the Austrians wish to outdo - hence the "Parallel Campaign". Needless to say, nothing is actually planned; this is merely an excuse to have the characters ruminate on anything and everything. Indeed, even if anything was planned, nothing would have happened, because the target date for this big celebration of Austrian-ness was ... 1918.