February Highs and Lows 2015

I'm never sorry to see February end. At least when it's March, we can say it's nearly April. There's just nothing nice about it, although I'll take February in southern Germany over February in Wisconsin. It's flippin' below zero (-18°C) in Wisconsin this morning and was colder earlier in the month! I definitely prefer "below zero" temperatures in Celcius. It's been around 2°C here lately, and even I am thinking it's time to start keeping the window open at night again.

Here are this month's highs and lows.

HIGHS

• watching the miniseries Pillars of the Earth. I read the book a year ago and loved it, and the movie has now refreshed my memory so I can read the second book, after which I'll watch the second part of the miniseries. Ken Follett is quite a writer!
  
  
  


• Monday afternoon phone calls with my parents, two of which lasted 2 1/2 hours!


• this conversation in our living room, stemming from my reading of World without End:
  B: "M, do you know what the Latin phrase 'Caput tuum in ano est' means?"
  M: "Hm..." (works through words in his head) "Head of yours, in ass is."
  B: "Yep, it's translated here as 'Your head is up your arse.' How would I say 'Head of HIS, up ass is'?"
  M: (more calculating) "Caput suus in ano est."
  B: (writing that down) "Thanks!"
  M: "Benefits of a classical education..."           (<== bonus points if you can name that movie!)


• receiving the final multi-thousand dollar bill for my daughter's final term in college! (She graduates in June.)


• an insanely delicious three-course Valentine's Day dinner at our favorite restaurant
  
  

  

  dessert
• trying a new recipe that I didn't completely botch; Überbackene Schweineschnitzel, with peppers and onions, garlic, crushed walnuts, mashed potatoes, and Gouda cheese. I only made a half recipe so we wouldn't have leftovers in case we didn't like it.
  
  
  
• having to stop at the crosswalk near our house to wait for a woman on a big black Friesian to cross! Horses make my heart stop. I may or may not have put the car in the garage, grabbed my camera, and run down the street to where I thought they were headed. Yep, got 'em (sort of)!
  
  
  
• participating in our second Kochkurs (cooking class) at Straub's Krone ("our favorite restaurant"), which we are doing right now, on the last day of the month. I know it will be a highlight.

LOWS

• driving home from the store in a brief blizzard with a big truck in front of me struggling to make it up an incline in the road - I never got out of 1st gear, we were moving that slowly, his cab going kind of sideways-like. I worried when I saw another big truck in my rearview mirror, but not for long. He just stopped right in the road because he couldn't even get up the incline and disappeared from my view within a few moments.


• seeing part of an episode of the American TV show "Moonshiners," starring three hicks named Tim, Tickle, and Jim Tom. Tim wears denim overalls, no t-shirt and a felt hat. Jim Tom makes stills. Tickle is...his name is Tickle. Why, for the love of mercy, is this show aired in Germany? 


• catching the plague a nasty cold - though the first one since I moved to Germany 2 1/2 years ago - probably from the germ-infested train. Can't you sometimes just feel the bacteria or viruses crawling into you when you have to touch something on public transportation during Grippewelle season?


• Finding surface mold on one of our bedroom walls just before bedtime last night. This came from having a virtually air-tight house and not doing Lüften every day, and/or not keeping our bedroom window open because I kept whining about being cold. They say the risk is especially high in the bedroom because of the humidity our bodies emit while we sleep. That's it - I'm sold on Lüften, and I will follow our neighbors' example and do it every day.


• almost finishing World Without End. I put this as a low because I have really liked this book - all 1235 pages of it! - and I'm sad to come to the end of the two-book series. Luckily I have my next book lined up already, which arrived this week: die Stadt-Ärztin, the story of the first female doctor in Germany (16th century), Agathe Streicher of Ulm.

Other Moments

• waking up one morning as whatever I was dreaming about faded away into the mystical sleep world, and hearing my own voice in my dream say, "Those darn sheep!" I'm still wondering what those sheep did, and whose sheep they were.


• waking up in the early morning to M's teeth grinding and somewhat abruptly reaching over to rub his shoulder (which usually gets him to stop grinding at least temporarily). Unfortunately he was closer to me than I realized, and I ended up punching him in the back. Oops. He stopped grinding, though.


• Reading that Wisconsin governor Scott Walker, who is very likely going to run for president of the U.S., had this to say at a political conference: "If I can take on 100,000 [Wisconsin union] protesters, I can take the Islamic State." Really?  Really?!? I say we send him over there and let him have a go.  Please, please let that be his presidential campaign slogan.
  Washington reporter Chris Cillizza makes a good point: "As soon as you are comparing something that doesn't involve mass deaths and unspeakable atrocities to something that does, you've lost the argument."

I hope your highs outnumbered your lows this month.

Bring on March!

In the News III

Time for another round of "What's been in the local paper lately?" 

Toads on Tour

It's still too cold at night, but soon the local frogs and toads will begin their annual migration across roads to...get to the other side, I guess. In areas with heavy frog and toad populations, commuters will have to reckon with traffic restrictions such as lowered speed limits (often 20 km/h, or 12.4 mph) and stop-and-go traffic as conscientious drivers attempt to squash as few of the slimy or warty beasts as possible. These road restrictions are expected to last until the end of April, when all the hoppy critters are either deceased or on the other side of the road.

26. Feb. 2015

Haben Sie....Kabelbinder?

The British builders' supply chain B&Q dramatically increased their supply of Kabelbinder (cable ties), Seile (ropes), and Klebeband (tape) in the first half of February, not because of a building boom in the U.K., but because of the release of the movie Fifty Shades of Grey. They want to be able to assist their customers who want to reenact various scenes from the film. To this end management also ordered hundreds of copies of the book to loan to their employees so that they can give good advice to customers' "sensitive questions".

12. Feb. 2015

Big Brother is Listening

The NSA and its British counterpart GCHQ used hacker methods to steal the codes to millions of Sim-cards manufactured by the Dutch company Gemalto, allowing them to listen in on private telephone calls of cell phone users worldwide. It sounds like this was done several years ago. Gemalto is one of the main producers of Sim-cards (the little device inside your cell phone usually under the battery that allows the phone to connect to networks), but there are others as well and the manufacturer is not identified on the device. Only about 50% of Sim-cards are made by Gemalto, and I'm sure the NSA/GCHQ didn't steal the codes to all of them, so don't worry. Your phone probably isn't one they're listening to. Besides, if you're not talking about something illegal, what difference does it make?

Hey, it's all in the name of national security and our safety, right?

21. Feb. 2015

I Lost My Key!

About a week after the Kabelbinder story above appeared, we got another peek behind a door most of us would rather not open. This one takes us to London, where the police have reported an increase in 9-1-1 calls (to the emergency center) since the release of the movie Fifty Shades of Grey. It seems many would-be Greys are not able to free their partners from the Handfessel (hand cuffs) they bought to use in their sex games. Each incident costs British taxpayers about €400, according to the London fire and rescue chief.

The writer of the article, D. Leibbrand, went on to say that Brits may have a reputation for being stuffy, but clearly they are more loose and casual than we pietistic Swabians are. The Stuttgart rescue squad has not been called to any such emergencies despite the movie having been released in Germany more than a week ago. Perhaps it's because of the price - here in Baden-Württemberg the handcuffed sex kitten or her partner would have to pay the cost of the rescue.

Ms. Leibbrand also suggests that the order-loving Stuttgarters - keyword Kehrwoche (weekly sidewalk sweeping) - probably simply make a point of remembering where they laid down the key...

21. Feb. 2015

Local Reminder

Hedges, thick bushes, and large trees may not be cut back after March 1st, so get it done this month. The purpose of this rule (I think it's a law) is to protect the Lebensraum (living space) of the local feathered community, who may have already taken up residence in such prime locations. On March 1st they start scoping out where they will build their nests, and it is unfair - not to mention unchristian - to reduce their options once they've started looking. The poor little bahstards have a hard enough life, so do them a favor and cooperate. You'll save yourself paying a hefty fine, as well.

That just about covers it for this round.

Size Matters in America

M and I decided to brave the Saturday grocery store crowd yesterday because we needed just a few things and wouldn't even need a cart to navigate through the slow-moving hoards. I remembered we were low on Toastbrot, so I grabbed a loaf. I've written about German bread before, as most expat bloggers have, but today I want to write about American bread as Germans see it.

Toastbrot is the processed, packaged-in-plastic bread that has a shelf life of about three weeks and is really only good for making...well, toast. It comes in white or wheat varieties, the slices are 9 cm (about 3.5 inches) square, and they fit nicely into the toaster. No self-respecting German would eat that bread "raw", though this is the closest to what Americans normally use for sandwiches. Its quality is a bit better than Wonderbread®, but eaten raw it still sticks to the roof of your mouth.

Germans have this idea that everything in America is BIG. I wonder how they got that idea... Anyway, this is Toastbrot marketed for the benefit of visiting Americans, complete with American flag design on the packaging to draw us in:

Look! It's American bread!

Why is it American sandwich bread? Because it's....50% bigger than regular German Toastbrot. These huge honkin' slices of squishy packaged bread are 11 cm by delicious 11 cm of good ol' processed American goodness. The package says a special dough is used to keep the bread extra soft - just like Americans like it.

Here you can see a slice of the little German Toastbrot next to the big mother slice of American sandwich bread.

The whole bigger is better thing in America is widely known here, as seen in American movies and TV shows aired on German TV - SUVs and family vans, TVs, houses, garages, yards, hotels, beds, parking lots, super stores, garbage cans...

And it's not just a false perception of Germans. I bought this bottle of cold medicine in the U.S. last time I was there, but only noticed the "50% bigger" label the other day. Wait, this is medicine. "Bigger" medicine? Didn't they mean 50% more effective? Nope. Just bigger. As in this 8-ounce bottle is bigger. 50% bigger than what? Read the fine print.

"50% bigger than our 8-ounce size"
Thanks for the math lesson.

This bottle contains 12 ounces - not just 8! - of near-coma-inducing elixir. It tastes like shit (though with a little imagination the green flavor can taste vaguely like ouzo), but a dram of this and I can only hang on for about 24 minutes before I'm out cold for the rest of the night. Despite her many faults, America does know how to do cold medicine.

Back to the BIGASS AMERICAN sandwich bread, in trying to figure out what to do with all this Toastbrot I bought, I decided I could make french toast (Germans call that Armer Ritter, or "poor knight") for brunch this morning. I haven't made that in a coon's age, and I have all the ingredients I need including maple syrup, which is totally uncommon here (it's too sweet for the Germans). The only trouble is that I'll have to squish or cut the American sandwich bread to fit two pieces into my German pan.

Avoiding Messy Marketing

Yesterday when I took the photo for Wordless Wednesday, I realized I had another topic for a blog post, courtesy of Procter & Gamble, makers of Vicks® products for colds - VapoRub, Nyquil, etc.

If you'll notice in the picture below, the little green symbol identifying Vicks® is the same on the two products, one purchased in the U.S., and the other purchased in Germany.

But if you zoom in (click on the photo) you'll notice the product name in the little green symbol is different on the box of pills sold in Germany. It says "Wick" instead of Vicks®. Why is that?

First of all, the V in German is pronounced like the English F. So Vicks would be pronounced "Ficks." Not a big deal, right?  Well, "ficken" is a vulgar German word for "to fornicate," and I'm guessing the Procter & Gamble Powers that Be decided a product thus labeled would not market well here.

So they went with the change from V to W (Vicks to Wicks), but here we have another problem. The W in German is pronounced like the English V, so we should be back to the English name for the brand, "Vicks". True, but this also presents a problem because "Vicks" is too close to the German word "Wichser," which is equivalent to the British "wanker," or the verb "wichsen," which is "to masturbate." So they dropped the -s, changing the brand name to Wick - pronounced "Vick" over here. Close enough, and far less potentially controversial than the other options.

I would have loved to have been a fly on the wall during the meeting of the marketing team of Procter & Gamble the day they discussed what to call Vicks® VapoRub on their product packaging in Germany...

"This is critical, folks. We can't screw this one up! If our customers rub this stuff on the wrong body part(s), there will be hell to pay."

**Disclaimer: I'm just makin' this shit up - I don't really know the story behind the changing of Vicks to Wick. But what other explanation could they have, right?  :-)

Update: That IS the reason! M looked it up, and sure enough, in Germany the name Vicks was changed to Wick "to avoid sexual connotations." I just explained the issue with a little more detail.

Wordless Wednesday