A bristly visitor

What’s the difference between a Porsche and a porcupine?

With a porcupine, the prick’s on the outside.

We don’t have porcupines in Germany, but we do have hedgehogs.

Cute little buggers.

Yesterday after school the little red-haired girl buzzes downstairs and I push the button to let her in. I wait. And wait. Five minutes later, she’s still not up, so I go down to see what’s what.

There she is, still outside, crouched over a six-inch, oval-shaped ball of quills.

“It’s not moving,” she says. “I think it’s sick. Or dead.”

“I doubt if it’s dead,” I tell her. “They roll up into a ball to protect themselves when they feel they’re in danger. Look at how well they blend in to the background. Walking by here, you’d hardly notice it among the dried leaves.”

I get down close to it, give it a nudge.

“Ouch!”

Those quills are as sharp as needles.

“I think I saw him move,” she says.

Covering my hands with my fleece jacket, I pick hum up gently.

“Are we going to bring it home? If he’s sick, I can take him to the vet.”

“Where would we put him at home?” I ask. “Besides, his home is out here.”

“But we can’t just leave him by the building here. There are people walking around.”

We decide to take him a few yards away over a small knoll, down the other side away from the walkway and out of sight of passersby.

This morning, he was gone.

Damn, I’m a sucker for a pretty face.

© 2007 lettershometoyou

Murder, she messaged

I’m a collector of tales of how human beings do nasty things to one another, but I missed this story completely. Passing it along in case you did too.

A man is to go on trial in Buffalo, New York today, charged in connection with the killing of a colleague in a love triangle that raises serious questions about how we conduct ourselves over the Internet. It’s one of the most bizarre stories I’ve heard in a while. Though it apparently has been out there for nearly a year, I only caught wind of it on a recent BBC Podcast. (scroll down to get the audio)

Forty-eight-year-old factory worker Thomas Montgomery, married with two teenage kids, went to a website two years ago and started to pretend he was someone he wasn’t.

He became an 18-year-old Marine. Taller, stronger, fitter, richer, more well-endowed. A perfect catch for 17-year-old blonde student Jessi, who fell in love with him almost before their first IM chat came to an end.

Soon the middle-aged man and the teenage girl were spending several hours a day online, professing love via instant messaging and getting horny. He sent her pictures of a man who fit his description. She sent him panties and trinkets. He proposed marriage. She accepted.

Then the man’s wife found out. She contacted Jessi and told her who the man she thought she was in love with really was.

Jessi, suspicious that the wife might actually be a jealous teenage rival, found another man online to check out the story for her. Brian, a 22-year-old who worked part-time with Thomas, confirmed what the older man’s wife had told her.

And then, Jessi and Brian also started an online love affair.

You’d think Jessi would have cut off contact with her older and fraudulent friend, but no. They stayed in touch, and sure enough, Thomas caught wind of her relationship with the younger man. In a jealous rage, Thomas shot Brian to death one day after work.

Bear in mind that Thomas had never met this young woman in person.

Police soon had Thomas as a prime suspect, and located Jessi in West Virginia. Local police went to her house, but when they knocked, it was her mother who came to the door.

Jessi was away at school, she said, and wouldn’t be back for weeks. No, she wouldn’t give details.

But soon the mother was forced to admit the truth: She was Jessi. The 17-year-old sweetheart infatuated with the 18-year-old marine was in fact a 45-year-old housewife in a fake relationship with a 48-year-old factory worker. In another sick twist that makes you wonder where the woman’s head is, she had used her 18-year-old daughter’s real name and sent him actual photos of her.

Thomas confessed to the shooting, but before sentencing in late-August changed his plea, saying he wanted to go to trial because he claims his lawyer gave him false information in hammering out a plea bargain.

Beyond the lurid details and chatroom transcripts you can find in this excellent Wired story, what interests me is how often we come across examples of how the Internet renders possible what a decade ago would have been almost inconceivable. Contacting old friends and lovers via Facebook, for example.

Second Life, anyone?

Perhaps it’s a cautionary tale.

Live in the here and now. Cherish your loved ones. Be real.

© 2007 lettershometoyou

PS: Sockpuppetry has a long tradition. This recent article looks at a few high-profile examples and shows how you can spot and thwart them.

The London Underground is not amused

Imagine getting fired for having a sense of humour.

For breaking out of the mould, for letting people know you’re capable of more than simply warning commuters to Please Mind the Platform Gap.

That’s what Emma Clarke has been doing for past eight years as the voice of the London Underground.

But for putting a series of spoof announcements up on her website, they’ve sent her down the tube. Fired her. Given her the sack!

And the Brits say the Germans have no sense of humour.

I think my favourite is the one where she tells Londoners to get out of their shithole of a city from time to time, reminding them that the M25 is not the edge of the universe.

Great career move, Emma! Hope that site holds up from the explosion of hits you’re going to get.

© 2007 lettershometoyou

Update:  Her site has not held up!  Now that Reuters and the BBC have picked up the story, it’s been swamped with visitors.

Whom would you miss if bloggers went on strike?

Just saw a long list of TV shows hit by the Hollywood writers’ strike. After nearly three weeks of no new jokes, punch lines, plotlines, storylines or storyboards, production has stopped or forced many to go off the air or in re-run, while the launches of 24 and Cashmere Mafia - whatever the hell that is - have been postponed.

As a union member, I sympathise with strikers hitting the bricks for what they believe in, even train drivers who indirectly put my life in danger.

But as an expatriate Canadian living in Germany, the writers’ strike is a faraway sideshow, playing out in a land I’ve never lived in and wouldn’t like to. The only shows I watch out of the whole list are The Daily Show with Jon Stewart - because it comes on CNN and we have that on cable - and The Colbert Report, because I find him hilarious and make an effort to find him on spewtube. The rest? Don’t even recognise them.

But what if bloggers went out on strike? Sound crazy? We’ve got our grievances too, you know! From spammers, sploggers, scrapers and thieves to the petty annoyances of comment trolls, we’ve got every right to lay down our laptops and pick up our picket signs. And just because we have absolutely no hope in hell of ever getting any of our gripes addressed doesn’t mean it should never happen, if only for a week or so.

And if we did, I sure would notice. That’s because I’d miss:

• My nurse, who brings me my daily drip of medical weirdness.
• Bombay Duck, and not only because she’s an old friend from journalism school.
• The oozings of madness pooling from The Leaky Brain.
• The oddball observations of Hermann the German, even though I don’t agree with him half the time, and tell him so.
• Indeterminacy, a blogger who challenges you to write your best.
• The Elle Effect, because I admire raw talent in one so young.
• Charlotte, because she writes so fluently and I learn something new every time I go there.
• The Dilbert Blog.
• Passive-aggressive Notes
• Euro Like Me, whose writing came highly recommended from EuroTrippen.

No particular order, and of course I’ve left out many who should be on the list. But if you head over to EuroTrippen’s write-up of last weekend’s whiney expat meetup in Dresden, you’ll find some more .

Whom would you miss if bloggers went on strike?

© 2007 lettershometoyou

What to do if you’re getting as sick as I am of having your blog copied

1. Get used to it. I still get a little pissed off whenever another case comes up, but a little less each time because it’s becoming so frequent. Latest case: A “travel” blog scraped and copied yesterday’s Dresden bloggers’ weekend post word-for-word.
2. That being said, don’t pass it off as something you can do nothing about, or worse, think it’s some form of flattery. One comment I once received was, “gee, I wish MY stuff were being copied.” If everone had that attitude, blogging would be doomed.
3. Develop a routine so you don’t have to re-invent the wheel each time. I have a form letter on file ready to fill in and fax off to Google Adsense just in case the thief is dumb enough to use them. Considering its mammoth size, Google has been surprisingly quick and unbureaucratic in getting them to pull my content and their advertisements from offending sites.
4. Go to The Blog Herald and read their post on the Five Content Theft Myths.
5. Or save the following. It’s what Google sent me when I complained the first time this happened.

To expedite our ability to process your request, please use the following format (including section numbers):

1. Identify in sufficient detail the copyrighted work that you believe has been infringed upon. For example, “The copyrighted work at issue is the text that appears on (URL to your post)”

2. Identify the material that you claim is infringing upon the copyrighted work listed in item #1 above. You must identify each page that allegedly contains infringing material by providing its URL. Make sure it is the URL of the thief’s post.

3. Provide information reasonably sufficient to permit Google to contact you (email address is preferred).

4. Include the following statement: “I have a good faith belief that use of the copyrighted materials described above on the allegedly infringing webpages is not authorized by the copyright owner, its agent, or the law.”

5. Include the following statement: “I swear, under penalty of perjury, that the information in the notification is accurate and that I am the copyright owner or am authorized to act on behalf of the owner of an exclusive right that is allegedly infringed.”

6. Sign the paper.

7. Send the written communication to the following address:

Google, Inc.
Attn: AdSense Support, DMCA complaints
1600 Amphitheatre Parkway
Mountain View CA 94043

OR Fax to:

(650) 618-8507, Attn: AdSense Support, DMCA complaints

It’s that simple. I admit it’s not the whole solution, because it only covers Adsense, but it’s a start. I haven’t zapped them all, but if I get a few, it’s worth it.

© 2007 lettershometoyou

Dresden reeling after expat weekend onslaught

This is Definitely Not the Daily News reporter Telly Vishun was recently given a three-day pass and a generous supply of meds by ward attendants at his Hamburg mental health care facility, allowing him to attend the third-annual whiney expat meetup in Dresden this past weekend.

by Telly Vishun
Dresden (DNTN) - Dresden officials held an emergency meeting late Sunday evening to discuss ways to protect the city in future from expat bloggers bent on having way too much of a good time.

“We’d been monitoring blogs for weeks leading up to last weekend,” moaned city councillor Pennsell Puscher after the session. “We thought we could sit back and relax, what with that locomotive driver’s strike and all. But they gave each other rides! They found alternate means of transportation! Most of them managed to show up anyway!”

Puscher reeled off a laundry list of misdemeanors the bloggers committed in their effort to get to know one another face-to-face instead of just through blogging.

Faces were stuffed! Beer was drunk! Fights broke out! Jokes were told! CO2 was produced!” he wailed. “Not only that, they spread salacious rumours about one of the founders of our city having fathered more than 300 children, bought cruise tickets for a dozen phantoms, trespassed on a boat, and if that weren’t enough, went on an aimless late-afternoon rampage through some of Europe’s most magnificently restored architecture in an attempt to locate Stollen, which - as anyone here will tell you - is available in Dresden in the months before Christmas from any retail outlet staffed by those with a pulse!”

Canadians there too, eh?

The Canadian Blogging Sub-committee Duo in Charge of Making Sure Americans Be Made Aware That We Don’t Say Aboot was also on hand. The better-looking one had the brains to wait ’til Saturday when the strike was over before hopping a train, while the eldest of the group - some guy whose blog’s photo is 15 years old because he just doesn’t want to admit he’s pushing fifty - found a ride Friday via mitfahrerzentrale.de.

“It was really easy,” he said. “First I typed in Hamburg, then Dresden, the date I wanted to leave, and ba-da-boom! One expensive phone call later I’d set up a ride with a student. Too bad I only found out later that she was determined to break the Hamburg-Dresden land speed record, despite driving a French-made four-banger through snow and heavy traffic with her mother along for the ride.

“I shit you not!” he continued. “At one point she failed to notice that traffic ahead was at a standstill. She tromped on the binders and skidded to a stop less than a half-car length from the next bumper, avoiding a rear-ender only through the quick thinking of a driver in front of us who zipped into the right-hand lane as we approached. “

Dazed, confused and feeling lucky to be alive, the geezer-in-training was later spotted mumbling to himself in the Dresden Verkehrsmuseum, which he’d first assumed was a wax exhibition of popular German sexual positions only to discover after buying his ticket that it was stuffed full of old cars, bicycles, motorbikes, planes, rail cars and Dinky toys.

“Not that intercourse and traffic are mutually exclusive,” he said, “but sometimes you have to be careful with the translation.”

Czech food and drink in great abundance

Those who managed to make it Friday evening gathered at the hotel before heading to a Czech restaurant which - to everyone’s astonishment - served dumplings.

Officials are analysing the tape from a CCTV camera to determine which of them may have caused a fight between staff members to erupt behind the restaurant’s bar.

“It was awesome,” said JeweledConcrete’s boyfriend, who was seated facing the combatants. “I was just about to dig into my delicious plate of roasted lamb shank in dark gravy with vegetables garnished with fresh slices of crustless white bread, when I look up to see two of them flicking towels at each other. They were really going at it for more than an hour.”

“Oooh, I like the sound of that,” said That Queer Expatriate, announcing shortly thereafter that whatever it is men and women do to each other, he simply does not want to know.

Afternoon cruise and city tour

The mayhem continued Saturday after a noontime meetup at an Ice Cream parlour near the hotel, where Heidelbergerin, Ward, The Big Wide World, their spouses and friends and a few others joined the mob from the day before. Successfully repelled from a cruise ship they had attempted to storm after fording the Elbe, they boarded a neighbouring vessel and, after testing the seating arrangements offered on several levels, settled for the room where the tables were longest and heat set on highest.

“It was like a frickin’ sauna in there,” muttered one member. “It got a bit alarming at one point because the blue-rinse set by the opposite window started to peel off their clothing, and when that happens in Germany, ya gotta watch out.”

Lulled into a stupor by the oppressive heat and a tour monologue delivered in florid, Saxon-accented German by someone clearly in love with the sound of his own voice, they cruised past some of the most stunning regional examples of what the Prussian aristocracy used to do when they felt like stacking a few bricks into a castle, complete with terraced riverbank upon which to grow vines to sustain their alcohol addiction.

Streaming off the boat, the group invaded the old quarter only to find their first destination - The Church of Our Lady or die Frauenkirche - closed to visitors. An alternate touring strategy consisting of lurching en masse from one amazing landmark to another was quickly devised.

After visiting a Cathedral which had already attracted a large gathering of seated followers and soaking in the twilight atmosphere of the Zwinger courtyard, they were immediately seized with the idea of eating Stollen.

“…Must….locate….Stollen….” they murmered in unison, ducking down alleyways in lockstep. The sugar-coated raisin-stuffed bready goo safely tucked away, they then decided to fan out to commit separate acts of drinking and shopping, only to regroup later that evening for the final assault of the day: a meal at Mama Africa’s

After barging between seated patrons and settling in around the table placed at the furthest reach possible and thus thoroughly surrounded, they somehow managed to defend themselves by subjecting neighbouring diners to boisterous conversation interspersed with outbursts of laughter. The evening’s entertainment having deserted them in search of more generous tippers, the expatriate bloggers waited for dinner to be served before demonstrating the proper way to remove one’s dental fixtures, as well as exchanging a brief string of jokes including:

What’s the difference between pussy and mashed potatoes?*

What’s the difference between a gay man and a straight man?**

After they all raved about the food, That Queer Expatriate wandered off to a Think Pink party, The EuroTrippens succumbed to a couple of the sweetest voicemail messages you’ll ever hear while the rest of them braved the wilds of Dresden’s nightlife scene in search of a bar with air you didn’t need to cut with a knife.

Because this reporter had to return home early to replenish his meds, you’ll have to consult any of the others in attendance to get the full report of Sunday’s mop-up activities. I’m sure they’ll oblige.

*Mashed potatoes doesn’t make its own gravy.

** 12 beer.

© 2007 lettershometoyou

PS: If having a good time and a few laughs isn’t reason enough, see The Blog Herald for a post on the value of meeting up with fellow bloggers. - I 

The Facebook temptation. Poke, send message, or just ignore?

The only way to get rid of a temptation is to yield to it.

- Oscar Wilde

I was feeling homesick for Canada and all things Canuck early last month, which as any North American dressed in a tuque for pond hockey will tell you was around the time for Canadian Thanksgiving. But with no turkey, stuffing or pumpkin pie in sight, I went looking for a little home comfort in the CBC and Radio-Canada sites as well as a few Canadian blogs.

Stumbling upon a Québécois one, I could hear that familiar twang and drawl come through in the writing and it brought back a flood of memories, and of course they included certain people. So I got to thinking that since I’m now on Facebook, why not see if any of they are there too?

Big mistake.

Because now I’m tempted to send a message to Nicole, a Québécois woman who dumped me more than 20 years ago. Her name is very common so I had to scroll through a few pages, but when I saw her picture, I knew it was her. Maybe a little puffier around the edges, but otherwise still the same.

We had been living together in our 14th-floor apartment for little more than six weeks when one day she said, “I think we both have to face up to the fact that we’re just not compatible. We have to break up.”

It wasn’t out of the blue. I could see there were problems germinating even before she started hanging out with her friends all the time instead of with me, and soon I was doing the same, both of us avoiding the inevitable.

The endgame was difficult and painful, but at least I learned who my real friends were. Like Max, who helped me move, offered tea and sympathy and beat me sometimes at Scrabble in French, as I beat him once in a while at squash. Or Brad, - gay as they come in Vancouver and sick of all my hetero turmoil - who said one day: Ian, to hell with it. Just ditch the bitch and make the switch.

Didn’t switch, though I did fight a lot, eventually giving up and moving on, the stained fabric of her memory faded yet interwoven with a time I was still trying to figure out what I wanted to do with myself.

A generation ago this temptation to contact someone again would never even have come up. You’d move, change phone numbers, avoid people they hung out with, places they’d go, and even if you lived in the same city, that would have been it. You’d never have had to see them again, unless, too late diving into the frozen food aisle, you’d be forced to spend a couple of awkward moments at the supermarket.

Yeah, not much. You? OK, uh… see you.

Now she might be living on the other side of the world, but because contact is only two clicks away, why not? It’s not as if I had to devote weeks of intensive research and detective work into tracking her down, so I won’t come off as having some ulterior motive, sinister or otherwise.

But why, 21 years after a woman pushed me out of her life, do I even feel the slightest pull to do this? Is it mere curiosity, or is something else at work? Is it the desire to say, See? I was a bit of a lost soul back then, OK, but I’m not anymore? Why should she care? Why should I?

And what is it about the temptation to contact her, but not others? The three pricks who called me Chicken Bones and shoved me around all the time in Grade 8 gym class because, having skipped a grade, I was a year younger than they were and a hell of a lot weaker? Canada’s most toxic waste dump / flute player? The no-talent colleague from my Hong Kong TV days who blatantly tried to use our so-called friendship to bolster her relentless career ambitions, and, when I refused to give her a crash course in Economics 100 from Adam Smith through stock markets to the Federal Fucking Reserve, had a screaming, arm-waving histrionic shit-fit in a newsroom packed with gaping journalists, later topping it off by spreading vicious lies about me?

Not that I harbour a life-long grudge or anything, but I’d sooner be strapped naked to a massive block of ice and let a pair of starving ferrets chew through my eyeballs to the back of my skull than see so much as a blurry thumbnail of these losers again, let alone waste a nanosecond searching for them on Facebook.

But how about this:

Salut Nicole!

West End Vancouver, summer of Expo ‘86? Four months of fun and three months of none? How are you? Are you still nursing? In case you’ve ever wondered what became of that guy who didn’t know what to do with the rest of his life, here’s a short update for you. I quit wasting my time with that awful job with those awful people, went skiing for a while and kicked around a bit, left Vancouver two years later to live in Montreal, went back to school for journalism, worked as a reporter in Sherbrooke and Hong Kong, where I met my wife and where my daughter was born. We’ve been living in Hamburg, Germany for the past decade. I’m still in media and still enjoying it. Hey, guess what? That post-university quarter-life crisis I was going through when you knew me? It now has its own label, website, support group and everything! And you can now - perhaps too easily - get ahold of old girlfriends on Facebook, but believe me: I hesitated a long time before hitting the send button.

I don’t know. I might do it, but then again, just because the Internet has rendered effortless something which was impossible only a few years ago doesn’t make it worthwhile.

© 2007 lettershometoyou

Norman Mailer: the song comes to an end.

If you’re looking for the definitive obituary on Norman Mailer, the great American voice which fell silent today, I’m sure there will be no shortage over the days ahead.

What I can tell you is this. If you’re looking for a book that will grip you with its story-telling, overwhelm you with its depth of research, and dazzle you with its clarity of style, read The Executioner’s Song.

I was a teenager in the mid-seventies when the trial of Gary Gilmore played itself out in the newspapers. With the years to come spread out endlessly before me and the thought of my own death impossible, I couldn’t comprehend how anyone - even a murderer - could come to the conclusion that his life wasn’t worth living. Gilmore asked the State to execute him, and the State carried out his wishes.

But when the book came out in 1979, I was doing other things and never read it. It won Mailer one of his two Pulitzer prizes. I still didn’t read it. The story was old, I’d heard what it was all about second-hand, my curiosity into the turmoil of the condemned man’s psyche had waned.

But upon seeing the movie In Cold Blood - based on another book I’d never read - I was ordering the book on Amazon and up popped the suggestion to buy The Executioner’s Song. I don’t usually fall for advertising pitches and abhor pop-ups like everyone else, but I thought: now or never.

Forget that it’s nearly 30 years old. Forget that it runs to more than a thousand pages. From the moment I picked it up the day it arrived, I was hooked.

It’s so good, I’m going to read it again.

© 2007 lettershometoyou