I ordered a copy of And One's BodyPop and Michael Ende's "die Unendlische Geschichte" (Neverending Story in the original German), and they both came in today. While I won't have a chance to start on the latter for awhile (the fact that there's a sticker saying the reading level is that of a 12-year old German is encouraging - reading Nietzsche in German is very challenging, and it'll be nice to have something easier), the former is excellent. The other And One album I have, Virgin Superstar, has a desperate, lonely feel to it (except for Panzer Mensch, which doesn't really fit the album, even though it's probably my favourite song the group has yet done). This one has more of a jaded, predatory feel to it. The CD came with some adverts for some cool industrial clubs in Berlin.

This morning, I woke up because Beefalo, being the nurturing female cat she is, decided that I must be hungry and so she dropped some cat food into my unsuspecting (and apparently open) mouth. She's so good to me... Pfui!

I'm starting to play with family tree software, largely because there are people in my family that spend time on these things but they do it with pen-and-paper. Hopefully, I can get them interested in something better. I found a free software project called Gramps that looks to be decent, crossplatform, and supportive of the GEDCOM format (which seems to be the standard for family tree stuff). I'm really irritated that people generally care so much about privacy that they won't give birthdates (or sometimes even real names) of living people. A lot of the time this is even public record in web-connected databases, and even if not it'd be nice to be able to contact living people and/or have a complete tree of information. I'm not going to put up the whole tree up until I get my grandparents and great-aunts on it, but some random info on my family tree, for the really bored (to be honest, I don't find this stuff that interesting):

• With the data I have right now, I can trace the Gunn line back to a William Gunn born in the late 1700s who married a Marriah Goddard.
• Right now I can trace the pure matrilineal line back to Ida Kraus, who was of Hungarian and German descent (but born in North Dakota - apparently a lot of my relatives on my mom's side still live there)
• There are two parts where it's clear that my family married into Judaism, with the Horn and Tobias families (both on my mother's side). Some of the older names in other parts of the family are suggestive of blood relatives, but it'd be hard to know for sure.
• My ancestors were mostly Western European, with a lot of Scots, Germans, and French, and a few English. They were apparently mixing national backgrounds long before leaving Europe.
• The birth names of my eight great-grandparents (two of which I met when I was younger) were "Albert Alexander Gunn", "Zula Covey", "Rupert H Phillips", "Amelia Menta Cooper" (who seems to be a mystery - the only record of her in any database I can find is the birth record for my Grandmother), "Kenneth Carver", "Leatha Pell", "John Harold Greene", and "Ida Kraus"
• The oldest well-documented ancestor I have information on right now seems to be a John Greene who lived from 1777 to 1837.
• A bit further back on the Kraus line (parts of the tree relatives have but I lack right now), some ancestor was part of the Bavarian military.

I'm off to visit my mom this weekend in Cleveland - hopefully I can get her set up with the program so I don't need to spend any more time on it.