Learning English the Calvin and Hobbes way

I never get any peace and quiet anymore between the time the little red-haired girl goes to bed and her falling asleep, but I don’t mind at all.

“Daaa-deee,” she’ll call from her bedroom five minutes after bedding down. “What does philanthropic mean?”

So I get up out of my chair and go in to tell her.

“Well, philanthropic is being nice to other people, but in a way that benefits everybody. Like you donate a lot of money to support a hospital for sick children, or for buying space for young artists to work in. That’s being philanthropic. It has two root words in one - philo- meaning love of, and anthropos- meaning human being.

Forfeiture

Epiphany

Sophisticated

Pandemonium

Euphoric

Voyeurism

Subjugate

Co-dependent dysfunctionality

I’ve always spoken English with her, but she’s only 11, been taking English in her German high school for all of eight months, and I’ve never used such vocabulary in my conversations with her, so where does it come from?

Calvin and Hobbes. The Complete Calvin and Hobbes, 1400 pages spread over three volumes in a boxed set covering 10 years’ worth of colour and black-and-white comics.

She’d already dog-eared the two Calvin compilations I’d given her, books from my younger days when I too was a fan of the little guy with the big ideas and his imaginary tiger. She bought another one herself a few months ago, but after also reading through that one several times  over, went on a hunt for more. After discovering the three-volume set up for auction on eBay, she snapped it up, using her own allowance and birthday money.

I know she’ll probably not retain half of the new words she comes across this way, but that’s not important right now.   Expat parents are always trying to make sure their native language gets passed on to their kids in the face of the constant bombardment of the majority language and culture they swim in.

If she’s found something in English she not only loves to read but can’t seem to get enough of, my job is that much easier.

© 2008 lettershometoyou

Possibly related posts definitely not for everyone

It seems to be a WordPress habit. Friday afternoon rolls around, time to spring another feature on a million unsuspecting bloggers just in time for support to high-tail it to the dude ranch for the weekend.

Latest addition hard on the heels of the wildly successful upgrade of early April is the addition of Possibly Related Posts. It’s being billed as a way of leading readers elsewhere to posts that might be about the same thing you have written.

The operative word you have to keep in mind is Possibly.

A quick survey of the links now inserted at the bottom of a couple of my posts include:

• A link to a crime story set in Indonesia on a post about the strange language I speak with my brother Gordon.
• A link to a story about some guy whose dad was a tv repairman in the same post
• And three well-meaning but somehow not-at-all-related posts about shift work tacked on to my most recent post about being refused a ride in a taxi in the middle of the night.

Other bloggers have had the ultimate creep-out: one complained in the forum of links to porn inappropriate content, for example.

If you’re not happy with links appearing on your blog you never chose and have no control over, there is fortunately a way to disable it. Go into your dashboard and click on Design, then Extras. A page will pop up. Check the box marked: Hide related links on this blog.

But to give WordPress credit, they are saying that over the coming days we’ll be allowed to tweak the results to our liking. Hopefully that will include the ability to filter out the crap. Not a bad idea, but one that should have been there from the beginning.

© 2008 lettershometoyou

Taxi driver refuses midnight fare to broken-down cyclist

The last two posts combine into one as my love of cycling to work clashed early this morning with the usual crappy German customer service.

About twice a month I have to get up in the middle of the night and work the hell shift. It’s tough on the system to blast your body into night shift mode and back again so quickly, but I do it because I like my job; it supplements my blogging income.

Anyway at about 3:20 this morning I’m wheeling along enjoying the cool air and stillness on the way to the office when suddenly I get this scraping, crunching and banging from the back wheel. I can’t shift gears anymore and the chain’s not catching on the rear sprocket set.

I stop to look and realise that one of those two little sprockets that keep the tension on the chain derailler had popped out.

Excellent. Middle of the night and only half-way to work.

Luckily I’m right close to a hotel, so I walk into the lobby and ask the friendly night shift guy to order me a taxi so I could at least make it to work on time.

The taxi arrives and it’s the usual boat - a station wagon. Great, I say. I can take the wheels off and bring the bike with me.

The driver looks at me with suspicion.

“Is it OK if I put the bike in the back?” I ask him. “I’ll pay you extra.”

“Well… only if it fits.”

I take the wheels off and he lifts the back door. Taking extra care not to scrape anything, I slowly try to edge the frame in, but although it passes the back door, it doesn’t fit inside by a couple of inches. Then I notice the rear seat backs are split to fold down to make a huge space.

“Can we fold the wider one down to make room?”

“Geht nicht,” he tells me. Can’t do it.

“Really, it’s just a flip of that lever. We have the same thing on our car.”

“Geht nicht,” he tells me again. “Why don’t you lock the bike to that pole and pick it up later?”

Well, I’d thought of that, but the last time I left my bike out overnight in Hamburg, thieves had stolen my derailler. I didn’t want to come back to find just my frame attached to a post.

But rather than get into an argument with this guy over why he can’t just flip the damn lever so I’d have lots of room to put the bike in, I tell him forget it, pack my stuff up and trot off.

© 2008 lettershometoyou

Another typical day in Germany: the customer is never right

This is about what happened this morning, but first we have to back up six months. Last fall I took the beast in to get the winter tires put on. As usual, I stopped in first beforehand on my bike to make an appointment.

Oh, sorry. We don’t take appointments anymore.

Why not?

We found that too many customers weren’t showing up, so we had mechanics sitting around idle.

Well how am I supposed to plan for anything? My wife needs the car on some days to drive to work. I can’t just show up and hope for the best.

Well, sorry. You can leave the keys with us tomorrow morning, and we’ll try to get to it during the day.

Fine, I say.

Fast-forward six months to this morning. I stuff the car with four summer tires and head to the same place to get them mounted. I walk in and get served right away.

Do you have an appointment?

… moment of stunned silence….

But I was here yesterday. I talked to the guy who said I should just drop in this morning with the keys. He didn’t say anything about making an appointment, and I didn’t ask because six months ago I was told you didn’t take appointments anymore.

Well, you should have made an appointment.

But that’s just the thing, I tell him. I was told by you people when I brought the winter tires in last fall that I couldn’t, and besides, nobody told me that when I dropped by yesterday.

Who did you speak with?

(As if I know their names) Well, it was a guy with a beard, older fellow.

Naw, couldn’t have been him.

Well anyway, I don’t understand how I’m supposed to guess whether or not I can make an appointment or not.

Well, maybe it was just a temporary thing due to certain conditions back then, I don’t know. Just leave us the keys and we’ll try to squeeze you in today, but you probably won’t get the car until tomorrow night.

© 2008 lettershometoyou

How to make every day a car-free earth day

One of the big things with this year’s Earth Day is going car-free and finding other ways of getting people to wean themselves away from the oil-drunk vampire which is our modern economy.

Not that labeling one day per year in honour of the planet we live on is going to change attitudes or the misguided policies which lock most of us into the most inefficient mode of transport.

Change has to come on a personal level. If you really want to do something that counts, you have to vote with your feet, and the best way to do that is to stick both of them on pedals and get moving.

It’s really not that hard to do.

All you have to do is buy a bike, seven pairs of bike shorts, three pairs of bike gloves, two pairs of bike shoes, a pair of bike paniers, a water bottle, helmet, front and back lights and a small tool kit and you’re on your way. For an average commuter, that means for the price of a year or two worth of gas you can be cycling to work for the next five or ten years almost for free.

It won’t be easy. Most drivers are cool but there is a solid base of jerks out there waiting to honk their horns and scream at you for the slightest perceived provocation, so be prepared to turn the other cheek a lot. I think they hate the fact you get to work quicker than they do and pay no taxes, but I could be wrong.

The weather’s improving and on nice days the sun will warm your face as you discover the freedom of not having to sit in traffic jams, but come late fall and winter, you’ll get out of bed and shake your head thinking: there’s no way in hell I’m going to bike through that and arrive soaking wet to work.

Well, I do it all year round and sometimes arrive at the office drenched to the bone, but it’s really no big deal.

Before you leave, carefully roll up the clothes you plan to wear so they won’t wrinkle too much, stick them along with a decent towel in a sturdy plastic bag and carry it all with you in one of the paniers. Shoes go in a separate bag. Carry an extra t-shirt, bike shorts and socks for the ride home in case your stuff doesn’t dry during the day, and you can at least start the ride home again with clean and dry cycling clothes.

Our family does own one car. Based on the the city mileage it gets and current gas prices in Germany I save around €35 a month on gas alone by riding a total of 12km to the office and back every workday. If it’s true what they say that an average car costs 50 cents per km once you add in all the other costs such as annual registration tax, maintenance, insurance and the like, I’m saving about €125 a month, or €1600 a year. Wow, more than €10,000 over the past eight years. Not bad.

But beyond the financial, it’s how I feel when I arrive in the morning that keeps me on the bike through all types of wind and weather. On rare occasions when I absolutely have to drive because I’m running an errand after work, I have a lousy day. Why? Not because I’m expecting it to be so, it’s just that the pedal to work in the morning wakes me up and gets the blood moving more than three cups of coffee ever could, and the ride back home again squeezes out any stress I might have built up over the day.

But I won’t advise you to cycle to save the planet. I forget where I read this or I’d provide the link, but apparently those who commute to work by bicycle benefit so much from the exercise, they add an average of nine years onto their lives compared to their car-bound cousins.

That means that instead of kicking the bucket on cue, I’ll be hanging around another nine years. So simply by living in one of the world’s most highly industrialised societies that much longer, I’ll be consuming the equivalent of as many of the earth’s resources as I’ll have saved in all my years of bike commuting.

Piss on it. I’m going SUV shopping.

© 2008 lettershometoyou

The brother who speaks my language

It doesn’t matter how many months - or, lately, years - it’s been since I’ve seen my older brother Gordon, we always greet each other the same way.

One of us will say, “Hi, how the fuck are ya?”

The other will say, “fucking great, man” and we’ll give each other a bear hug.

Then we’ll step back and the next thing one of us will say is Well. That was never five minutes just now.

Anyone witnessing this or any other exchange between the two of us could be excused for thinking we’re more than just a little bit daft, because if each of us has his own particular set of quirks and foibles, stir Gordon and me together for a while and a whole lifetime of slang, sayings, even our own rhythm and cadence kicks in, and nobody else really gets it.

One of the main things we get into is adding the suffix -age onto everything. Length, for example, becomes footage. So to ask, “how far is it to…” we would ask, what’s the footage to get to….

It can sometimes get to ridiculous extremes. Damn, I’m hungry. I need some foodage, and maybe some drinkage too, at which point we silently call a truceage and cut out the crappage before we drive each other around the bendage.

Perhaps not surprisingly, a lot of it stems from late-1960s to mid-70s pop culture and television, which coincides from the time Dad bought our first TV ’til Gordon left home to go to university.

If someone’s having trouble opening something, we’ll say really fast just jiggle it a little, it’ll open. Try it. Justjiggleitalittleit’llopen. It’s from an episode of I Love Lucy.

Greetings can also be Hey Goob or Hey Goobah, which comes from Gomer Pyle, USMC. From goober we get goobernatorial, a play on the real word gubernatorial, which as Canadians we always found should refer to something stupid anyway. How goobernatorial is that?

If we’re playing a game and it’s the other’s move, we’ll say itchy goom, something our Dad mis-heard when we were telling him we were watching the TV game show It’s Your Move.

Have some crispy french fries, cousin Cesspool is a set phrase we throw in when offering any type of food to the other. It comes from a misunderstood TV commercial for Crisco Oil.

If we see or hear something stupid, idiotic or just a little weird, one of us will say eww, ginchy. Ginch is a derivation of that classic Canadian slang term for underwear gaunch.

To ask the time we’ll say time diddehhh? - drawing out the second syllable for some reason. We can also ask the time in French, but instead of the simple Quelle heure est-il? we’ll say Quelle heure est-il maintenant ou pas? adding the nonsensical now or not? at the end.

We also invert many things so that they sound French, but aren’t. A CD player will be a player de CD, a paper bag a bag de paper, a hockey stick a stick de hockey and so on.

To say excuse me we say Scoozay-mwah, see-voo-play, that is all my French to-day.

To offer milk to the other we say Would you like some Millek with your Fillem? I was the one who introduced that, because I had a teacher in Grades 6 and 7 who used to prononce film as the two-syllable affectation fill-em.

A helicopter is not a helicopter, it’s a hobbidy-cobbidy, a knife is not a knife, it’s a kaniffy, McDonald’s isn’t McDonalds it’s Flap-doodles but the latter is more Gord’s and I just adopted it.

If you noticed the Monty Python reference in That was never five minutes just now, that’s just scratching the surface. We both know the entire repertoire inside-out, dragging up snippets of skits and sometimes whole monologues to fit various situations. If death comes up on the panel the high point of the Dead Parrot sketch will be played out, if one of us says Could be the other will say, Could be, could be taken on a holiday, and any reference to Christian religious ritual one of us will start reciting the monologue of how the Lord sent an Angel to comfort Victor for the weekend, and entered they together, the jacuzzi.

Here endeth the lesson.

Well, not quite. Because if all this stuff and nonsense has you thinking we do it because we have nothing at all to talk about and it’s just filling dead air, that’s not it. We know how much is too much, had tons to discuss and argue over and contemplate and laugh about, and had been doing for an entire week despite my being ill for half of it, before he left yesterday for London and then home.

Dammit Gord, great funnage. Sorry I was such a wreckage when you got here. See you this fallage.

© 2008 lettershometoyou

This site may harm your computer

Waiting for a flight at Hamburg airport early last week I sat down at an internet terminal and was about to drop a coin in before the nice man sitting next to me said, “take mine, I have to go and there are about 25 minutes left on it.”

I thanked him warmly and sat down in his place, immediately typing lettershometoyou into Google to see if I could find Adsense ads on my blog. You’ve probably heard that they’re out there, lurking on every wordpress.com blog. It’s the price you pay for free hosting, and no amount of whining is going to get wordpress to take them off short of your paying them to do so.

Problem is, if you’re logged in to wordpress.com you never get to see them.

So every once in a while I slip into the skin of Joe Regular Blog Lurker to try to find out how Google is making an even greater mess of my blog. Do they stick ads for jock itch powder next to posts about my mother-in-law? Blurbs for psychiatrists next to write-ups about psychos? Tart up my skiing posts with pitches for helmets and handbaskets and other crap I have no use for?

The list of hits Google chucked up had me scrambling for my camera. Not for what they said, but for the public terminal’s net-nanny warning label:

At first I thought they were referring to my blog. After all, even if there are no trojans waiting to ambush the unsuspecting visitor, there is a ton of stuff here people might find harmful. Fake news, accounts of deception and outright lies, denunciations of crap, transcripts of discussions with an underage female child concerning condoms, naked girls in newspapers, death and more death. I don’t know why I haven’t already been hauled before a judge as a menace to society.

Then I realised the warning was all about WordPress.com. How could it not be? The link is to wordpress, not lettershometoyou, which only appears in the description.

Maybe it was just a forewarning, because a few days later I and millions of other unsuspecting WordPress.com bloggers logged on to find our blogging universe turned inside out without so much as a ‘”hey guys, guess what? Big changes coming up tomorrow at 4pm Pacific Daylight Saving Time.”

Did someone at WP central hit publish instead of save by mistake before turning out the lights for the weekend?

I’m sure after a few months this will all die down and we’ll wonder what all the fuss was about, but in the meantime wordpress.com probably is harmful to your computer. Judging by the number of pissed-off entries on the forums, I’m surprised there hasn’t been a youtube video posted of someone throwing a laptop out the window frisbee-style in frustration. I don’t care what it looks like, merely uploading an image, for example, has become a mind-numbing chore, a multi-stepped process where once a couple of clicks sufficed.

This in an upgrade? Sure the savvy bloggers using wp.org had a go at it for a while, but given the huge drop in skill level between those bloggers and duffers like me using wp.com, didn’t they think to test it on a few hundred of us wp.com users who’d never seen it before? They could have run a little sneak-preview contest, choosing a hundred or so bloggers to run it through it paces for a month just to iron the kinks out.

Hell, maybe they did test it out on no-brain bloggers like me, I don’t know, but the way it was released reminds me of the time I bought a new desktop from Dell a few years back. The monitor was a new flat-screen model from the Korean firm LG, back when flat screen meant the surface was flat. The rest looked like an old-style monitor.

Anyway, the first one they sent didn’t work, so I sent it back.

The second one arrived three days later. It didn’t work properly either, so I sent it back, too.

The third one arrived a few days after that, and it didn’t work either.

So I phoned up Dell to complain - not for the first time - and asked them why they couldn’t ship me a monitor that worked. Their response? We can’t test the monitors as they come in, we just ship them along.

Fair enough, I said, but can’t they at least have someone switch it on at the factory? Twist a knob? Tweak a button?

Nööö, too expensive. It’s cheaper to ship them halfway around the world and have the consumer do the testing.

Happy blogging.

© 2008 lettershometoyou

A few comments on comments

So it is possible to post from bed. Though my lap may be overheating, I have to start hacking away at the backlog of things to post. One of them is about comments on this blog, something I was meaning to get to a month ago.

I used to maintain a really strict commenting policy: No comments posted without moderation. I figured that was the safest way to keep the spammers, psychos and occasional foam-at-the-mouth neo-nazi at bay, as happened when I wrote a series on racism in Germany around the time of those horrendous attacks on Indians last summer.

But one day while rummaging around in the WordPress Dashboard - before the nuclear meltdown latest upgrade - I discovered you can allow those whom you’ve previously approved to post comments immediately, while those posting for the very first time are still held back for moderation.

Wow. Didn’t notice that when I started out, and never bothered to check up on it again.

So I quietly changed the setting to allow regular commenters to have their say right away. I do hope regular readers appreciate this loosening of the tie, so to speak, and hope that new commenters will understand theirs will have to be vetted the first time.

And speaking of new commenters, three comments waiting for me one morning last week were such a welcome gift, they’re worth talking about here.

The first one was most unusual. More than a year ago, I raved nearly uncontrollably about the new ski lift installed in 2007 at St Anton, Austria, our usual ski holiday destination. I was so completely overwhelmed by its design and engineering, I wrote a post about it, complete with photo and video. Well, it took more than a year for the first comment to appear, a thank-you from one of the engineers who worked on it.

Unexpected? I’d almost forgotten I’d written it!

I’d like to thank you, sir, for taking the time to tell me who you are and your connection to it. Great work. I hope to be back there again next year.

Though I hope she doesn’t say it to all the boys, the second one made me smile: I just love your blog. Thanks, Rebecca.

And finally, the third in the queue that morning: a comment that had me sitting up and saying wow. It’s from CaliGerm, a couple who’s recently moved to Lüneburg, which is just down the pike from Hamburg.

It really encourages me to keep doing what I’m doing when I’m told this blog was one of the few which inspired them to start their own.

© 2008 lettershometoyou