I've been to Wonderbar at an event where Claire Huot and Robert Majzels (left) presented their very interesting poetry concept called 85 letters.

It is fantastic on multiple levels. The output as simple as haiku – you have 5x17 characters in grid but written without gaps between the words and from top to down, right to left. Because of this awkward way of reading the recitals are quite odd from traditional.

For the material dimension of the concept they've made delicate prints on Chinese ghost paper. Some examples (and videos) are to be seen on authors' blog 285 Bungalow Drive.

The background of this project digs deep into Jewish mysticism, sinology and the art of translation in which the authors are both experts. It was also their response to the problematics of Chinese-English translation and notions of otherness.

Quite mental, right? Any questions, and I'll get into the details as far as I can in the comments...

The other day I flexed some muscle with php scripting and comma separated values. Before you see the results I can safely confess that programming is quite nicht mein Bier, but definitely on the long-term self-development list.

The whole thing ricocheted from an observation, that we often have very little vocabulary about birds. Last month there was a bird nest on the balcony. A new batch of blackbirds, I learnt. In May I freehandedly spied on some woodpeckers. Even megapixel'd pigeons led to some nice discussion on Flickr.

With visual motif at hand it's smooth to communicate, but what happens when we single out a bit more difficult birds and we don't know their names in any language? Then we describe how they look like, sing or behave. It can get quite creative and funny.

After picking up a dictionary it doesn't take long to notice, that the bird names are works of art in themselves. Who came up with Bohemian Waxwing? Certainly no innovation-driven government agency. Nördlicher Raubwürger? That sounds like the worst thing to come since Götterdämmerung. Then again, no (Finn) would probably hurt a vuorihemppo.

This took on a bit of a life of its own, so I started compiling my own trilingual bird lexicon. Just for the sake of the nomenclature. It's simply a table of species names in Finnish, German and English accompanied by each one's binomial name for added scientific precision, if you may. Sensible additions are welcome...

Now playing: Michael Nyman - Bird List

Almost two years of (mostly) Germany now and the love/hate relationship with the language goes on. From a non-native speaker's perspective German is in its complexity a frightening instrument of power, but also an infinite source of linguistic pleasures. In my case, especially in its written form.

Frustrations mostly deal with the spoken word, especially on TV, on stage or such. To battle this, I had taken up a tradition to go see the latest transmission of Tatort with a friend every Sunday. These 90-minute murder mysteries have been on air since 1970 and have become quite an institution. I've come to believe, that Sunday Tatorts have taken the place of Sunday Sauna in my weekly rhythm. Both are somewhat purifying and masochistic experiences.

I discovered help from an unlikely source. Recently I voluntarily watched an English language film dubbed into German – not Die Hard 4.0 but V for Vendetta. No problem whatsoever, everything was loud and clear. With the mandate given by the results of the revered PISA study, I've had a bit of a stuck-up outlook on the culture of dubbing, but now the tables turned. There, I may have found the missing link.