kiss and ridezone

Welcome to Germany, a country desperately in need of some sort of language police. Maybe not rabidly nationalistic Quebec-style language police, but someone to remind them they have a language of their own, and that it would be a good idea to use it on signs once in a while.

Already you can see the confusion a sign like this must cause. Kiss is pretty easy, but then they have to figure out what a ridezone is. At first glance I thought it was some term I’d learned and forgotten while failing 9th-grade biology.

Besides, if you take the German underneath - and you’d assume they should be reading it since it IS in their language - it means drivers are only allowed to stop for passengers to get in or out. I can see how kissing might lead to some ins ‘n’ outs and to some riding, but to make it all official like that and put it up on a sign topped off with an exclamation point? Takes all the fun out of it.

Still, it’s an improvement on the first German/English sign I ever read. I must have been eight years old. It was an old, yellowing xerox, taped, re-taped, curling at the edges and tacked on the wall above the massive photocopier in my Dad’s office. All I have to do is say one word of it and brother Gordon will get on a roll. So will my other brother, come to think of it.

ACHTUNG! ALLES LOOKSENPEEPERS!

Das maschine ist nicht fuer gefingerpoken und mittengrabben. Ist easy schnappen der springenwerk, blowenfuesen und poppencorken mit spitzensparken. Ist nicht fuer gewerken bei das dummkopfen. Das rubbernecken ist OK, but keepen das cotton-pickenen hans in das pockets, relaxen and watchen das blinkenlights.

Variations and updates thereof available here.

Suspected pedophile Oliver Shanti on his way to Germany

Damn, this is good news.

A new age musician and sect leader going by the name of Oliver Shanti has been arrested in Lisbon, Portugal and is now in custody awaiting deportation to Germany.  Born in Hamburg the 59-year-old is wanted in connection with more than 300 acts of molestation against six children - a girl and four boys from Germany, as well as another girl from Portugal. All of the children were between 10 and 14 years of age at the time.

Shanti, the object several months ago of my first and only Wikipedia edit, had been among Germany’s most-wanted list for several years. According to media reports, Shanti molested the children in one of the communes he founded in the Bavarian forest, another in Munich and again in Portugal. He was arrested outside the German Embassy in Lisbon last Friday after an embassy employee recognised him and alerted police. He had gone to the embassy to renew his passport, apparently on his way to Brazil to receive treatment for Leukemia.

I first came to hear about Shanti when I stumbled upon his Wikipedia entry while doing research for work. Stunned to see that the entry made absolutely no mention of the horrendous charges against him and the €3000 reward the Munich police were offering for any tip leading to his arrest and conviction, I signed up for Wikipedia and added that information. Not the most earth-moving of gestures, but maybe it helped somewhat in the hunt for him. Who knows?

In the meantime, there’s no shortage of drivel and slop passing for music by Oliver Shanti available on YouRube. On this one, notice the Viva music channel logo in the top-right corner. If they haven’t done so already, will someone please tell those people to stop putting this guy’s crap on the air?

BTW, if you didn’t click on his fan site, at least check out the guest page. Brutal stuff.

Starbucks closing 600 stores a good start

News that Starbucks is going to close about 600 stores and lay off 12,000 people over the next year in the United States is obviously going to be hard on the people who work there, and my sympathies go out to them.

But fewer Starbucks stores? Now there’s a trend I wish would catch on over here.

Quite frankly, I wish Europe would give Starbucks the boot. For good.

I know Starbucks-bashing is old hat, that websites dedicated to hating them have been up for a while and that… damn, they’re everywhere, OK? Just might as well get used to the fact that there will always be a market for pretentiously named, overpriced coffee that tastes like battery acid strained though a lumberjack’s socks.

But it’s not just how much of a degrading experience it is to drink coffee from a paper cup, nor even how mountains of garbage are vomited out their back doors every day.

Having lived here for so long and Germany until a couple of years ago have been spared the Starbucks invasion, if not its equally foul, expensive, disposable imitators, it was only on forays to London and back home to Vancouver that it really hit me just how all-pervasive Starbucks is. Their outlets seem to be everywhere. On some corners, it’s possible to see two or three of them in your field of view. Like noxious weeds or rats, they fill every niche, every corner of a once diversified and vibrant cityscape which once made the feel of each city unique. Now you arrive and see the same thing at the airport as you do downtown, strewn garbage and all.

I guess expecting Starbucks to go away is as pointless as wishing McDonald’s would. But you can always dream, sipping real coffee from a real cup somewhere else.

Where tires roll uphill and nothing is as it seems

I rarely insert videos but since George Carlin up and croaked the other day and posting anything about him without a video would be just wrong, here I am with yet another: what was all lined up before the great funnyman passed on.

Do you have 10 minutes?

So much of YouTube is 30-second brain candy, clicked away if it fails to load in under four seconds, but here I’m asking you for 10 minutes. I know - 10 minutes! In this age of continuous partial attention, who has the patience to watch the same thing for 10 minutes?

Especially if you might have seen it before. It is, after all, their best-known work. But if you haven’t, maybe watching it here will give you an idea of the brilliance behind the work of Peter Fischli and David Weiss, two of Switzerland’s best-known artists. And if you’re anywhere near Hamburg this summer, you now have a reason to go see it in person.

Because instead of the 10 minutes on a small screen on your computer, at the exhibition you’ll see a full half-hour of astounding ingenuity on a screen five metres square: chain reactions combining the forces of gravity, air and water pressure, fire and chemical reactions into a mind-bending thread of child-like playfulness. Set up and shot in stages, The Way Things Go took more than three months of trial and error before they finally got it right.

The film is of course only a small part of their work on display. Photos of impossibly balanced objects, sculpture in unbaked clay or polyurethane as well as a video showing how they put The Way Things Go together, it’s a look back at three decades of collaboration between the two artists. It’s on at the Deichtorhallen near Hamburg’s central train station until the end of August.

For more information - in English (!) - visit deichtorhallen.de

UPDATE:

Thanks to Jennifer who pointed out in her comment the similarities to the artists’ work and a Honda Accord commercial.  According to ace bullshit-sniffers snopes.com, the pair attempted to sue Honda over the advertisement.

If you follow the link to the commercial - much better quality video than youtube, by the way - you’ll have to agree the similarities are pretty obvious.

So nice to see you after all these years

We’re going to a reunion this summer, a three-day fest on the Rhine gathering together former employees and spouses of Hong Kong’s German-Swiss International School.  My wife was a teacher there in the early nineties, had been for three years before I landed in early 1994, got a job, found a girlfriend, broke up, met K, moved in, married her, had our daughter, quit my job and then moved to Germany.

Along the way I met many of her colleagues, some of whom we’re still friends with after all these years.  Looking over the list the other day of those slated to attend, we smiled and said how much we were looking forward to seeing many people who up to now have existed only in that place and time we filled before moving on. 

There are at least a half-dozen I want to have a long catch-up with.  One of K’s girlfriends back in the day will I hope recall an incident barely a week after I’d started going out with K.  The three of us were at a bar somewhere up near The Peak and Karin was wearing a dress that showed off that great figure she still has.  When K went off to get some drinks I turned to her friend and said something like, “damn, she looks fantastic, doesn’t she?”  She gave me this horrified look and spat back, “WHAT did you say?”   With the loud music and her not understanding English very well, she thought I was making a pass at her the moment K’s back was turned.

But as much as I’m looking forward to the reunion, there’s a certain dread about it too.  Not that I might feel like an outsider, because I do know a lot of the people.  It’s just that I know exactly what’s going to happen.  If you’ve ever been to a high school reunion, you know the drill.

Not long after you arrive you’ll see the people you’ve been thinking about all these years and you’ll rush over and greet them.  After the first excitement of recognition has blown by you’ll have the catch-up gab, the what-you-doing-now where-you-been-in-the-meantime chat, the great-to-see-you-again tap on the arm for good measure when you go refill your drink.

It will go on like that until someone gets up to make a speech or the buffet is served.  With any luck the food will be decent and drinks flowing.  By now you’ll have coalesced into groups you used to hang out with ‘way back when, avoiding those you don’t know or only had a superficial relationship with.

The evening will be a pleasant one and it will all end a bit too soon.  If there are events the next day and evening, you’ll enjoy them, basking in the memories and nostalgia which, if the atmosphere is right, will come in bunches.

As the last event draws to a close and everyone drifts off saying their final farewells, there will be hugs and shoulder shakes and thumps on the back, cards swapped, telephone numbers, email, website and blog addresses scribbled on the back of napkins or scraps of paper, and sincere looks exchanged as you look each other in the eye and say, “It’s been so much fun to see you again after all these years.  We must keep in touch.”

But you know what?  You won’t.

Talking with an 11-year-old about insurance fraud

We finally broke down and bought the little red-haired girl a new bicycle last week. Summer’s already here and besides, pretty soon I’m going to have to drop the little.

We’d been holding off because it’s just so difficult to find a decent bike for a growing kid in Germany. You either find junk at the bottom end of the scale - expensive junk to boot - or top-flight bikes that will get ripped off the moment you leave it outside, which she is forced to do because there is no other place to lock them up where we live.

Then at one shop where we’d finally found one that was right for her, I told the guy that we wanted a really good lock, mentioning also that I’d had parts ripped off from my own bike after leaving it outside for only one night.

No problem, he said. If you’re worrried about security, you can get a complete insurance package for only eight euros a month. It includes replacement for theft and new parts if they’re stolen or the bike vandalised. Even if she has a fall, they’ll fix it for her.

So I signed up for the deal, thinking that it’s cheap at twice the price if I don’t have to worry about replacing a stolen bike a week after buying it.

After explaining to her that the insurance only works if she locks the bike around a bike stand or pole so that it can’t be carried away, she asked me:

How does the insurance work? What if you had two kids who needed bikes, but only enough money for one? Couldn’t you just hide the bike and tell the insurance company that the bike was stolen? Then you’d get another one for the other kid for free.

Sure, you could do that. I’m sure there are people who have done that. Would you like to be one of them?

No.

Well, I’m glad to hear that. Did you know there are people who try to get out of working by pretending they’re sick, saying things like their back hurts all the time, or that they can’t get out of bed?

No…

They get to go on disability pension, which means they get money every month without having to work anymore, even though they’re not sick. But there’s a catch. The insurance companies have people who check up on them. If they see them carrying around a pair of skis, riding their bikes, whatever, they get cut off their money, they don’t get to go back to their old jobs… they end up with nothing.

Oh…

Trying my best not to sound preachy, but probably failing because I’m doing all the talking, I add:

It just makes more sense to be honest and tell people the truth. That way, you don’t have to remember what you said to anybody, because it will always be the same thing.  You won’t always have to be looking over your shoulder, either.

A few bloggers I’d like to meet, but maybe not in the sauna.

For personal reasons it was lucky that I was unable to attend the 2006 Whiney Expat Bloggers’ meetup in Bonn, but to make up for it I had a great time with many of Germany’s English-language bloggers in Dresden last year.

Now that we’re all having to decide where to meet up in 2008, you may be forced to get out a map to find the town of Wiesbaden because the voting seems to be headed in that direction. Wiesbaden? Where? What? And perhaps above all: why Wiesbaden?

Is it because the place is famous for and dominated by a huge spa?  Do you realise that if we were to meet in Wiesbaden and not go to the spa, it would be like squeezing into a small diner for lunch never once mentioning that 800-pound gorilla plopped down in the corner?

And of course you all know by now about German spa and sauna etiquette, right? I know some of us like to bare all online, but…

Anyway, I haven’t heard much of the place, so I thought I’d ask my wife and favourite German for her opinion, seeing as how I was pretty sure she’d never been there before.

So have you ever been to Wiesbaden? Never.

What have you heard about Wiesbaden? Pretty, with rich people.

Why rich? It’s not that far from Frankfurt, but it’s smaller, - anyway, not nearly as ugly as Frankfurt.

What have you got against Frankfurt? It has no soul. It’s just business and banks.

Would you go to Wiesbaden? Why should I?

Well, there’s going to be a bloggers’ meetup there. At least that’s the way it seems to be going. Are you going to this meetup?

I’m asking the questions for now. If you were to pick one place in Germany you think we should meet, where would it be? Hamburg.

You can’t pick Hamburg. (laughs) OK, Leipzig or Weimar. They’re two cities I’m interested in getting to know.

By the way, I like your haircut. You look very good at the moment.

So there you have it. Hamburg balcony poll results confirm a swing in sentiment away from Wiesbaden and toward Leipzig or Weimar. Besides, how can you not trust the opinion of someone who makes an observation like that?

And now: A few bloggers I’d like to meet who weren’t there last year. Not a complete list and in no particular order:

• Charlotte of Charlotte’s Web. That is, if we don’t interfere with her novel-writing.
• Headbang8, the man behind Deutschland über Elvis
• Jen of HeisseScheisse. Yes, I know you were in Hamburg long enough for us to meet but it didn’t work out.
• Tatiana.
• Beaverboosh. He’s actually blogging from Norway, but being Canadian he gets a free pass, if not ticket.
• Cathy, the woman behind the blog and the book Planet Germany.
• Jul.
• Indie of Indeterminacy. OK, we’ve already met, but it would be great if he could attend.
• Click-clack gorilla.
• And last but not least, azahar, who is going through a rough time.

Oooh, kind of a stealth meme. How did that happen?

Europe’s largest-circulation newspaper runs photo of naked 13-year-old

It always bugs me how many hits I get on this blog from knuckle-draggers and mouth-breathers looking for kiddie porn, naked 10-year-olds and similar illegal content.

It’s a Google phenomenon, I guess. If you’ve built up a collection of posts with completely unrelated tags or words in the title that add up to a string of words one of these losers is typing in, Bang! Someone looking for naked kids comes to your blog.

But they wouldn’t even have had to have gone online had they been lurking around German newspaper stands on August 3, 2003. That was the day that Bild, Europe’s largest-circulation newspaper and world’s fifth-largest, ran a photo of a naked 13-year-old girl.

An excerpt from the Spiegel online article which translates what Bild wrote as a caption:

Hotsy-Botsy, this summer is becoming a catwalk for naked children.** The sun is stroking our beautiful women in their birthday suits more beautifully than ever before. Melanie from Leipzig, too, just can’t keep her clothes on in this heat. Do your clothes slip off in this desert heat, too? BILD is seeking the hottest summer girl. Send us your beat the heat photos.

The editors give a gosh-we-didn’t-know-she-was-underage excuse, which is funny because as the excellent Bildblog points out - in German - Melanie’s write-up that day was the only one in the series which didn’t mention her age.

I guess given the tabloid’s reputation for getting it wrong willfully or through incompetence it would be asking way too much to expect Bild’s editors to adhere to one of the guiding principles of journalism: when in doubt, leave it out.

But like the old line, Never let the truth get in the way of a good story, here they must have been saying Who cares? As long as our sales aren’t the only things that are firm.

© 2008 lettershometoyou

**Literal translation of the German Nackedei, which you call kids as they run around naked.