Happy birthday, Der Schockwellenreiter!

Jörg Kantel, the blogger behind Der Schockwellenreiter — The Shockwave Rider in English, one of the best-known German blogs out there — turns 50 today. Der Schockwellenreiter is a great blog in the spirit of BoingBoing that covers technology…and everything else! For example, they recently pointed to an article on content management systems and made mention of Willie Nelson’s birthday. Now that’s breadth. I highly recommend it; if you can’t read German, try running it through Babelfish, or do what I do: ask your German foreign exchange student friends to translate for you.

(The best way to get German foreign exchange student friends is to drink lots of Jagermeister and play the accordion.)

Best of all — and I was unaware of this until Scott “PapaScott” Hanson emailed me — Jörg is an accordion fan. He agrees with my assessment of the squeezebox, calling it “das most sexiest instrument“. A Google search for “most sexiest instrument” yields only links related to Jörg (well, at least until this blog entry gets indexed). Jörg, you are a genius with impeccable taste!

Jörg’s been at the accordion a lot longer than I have — here’s a photo of him back in 1987. At the time, I was 19 and had just bought my first synthesizer, an Akai AX-60. With the exception of one evening when I borrowed my friend Rob Weirmeir’s accordion for a couple of hours, I wouldn’t start on the accordion for another 12 years.

Happy birthday, Jörg!

[Thanks to PapaScott for telling me about Jörg’s birthday!]