German TV ad campaign F-bombs dieters

Even if you don’t speak German, you’ll understand what they’re saying at the 16-second mark:

This ad is on German television and is intended to sell over-packaged low-cal products.  You can also find it in print.

Of all the horrible advertising I’ve seen in my nearly 15 years of being bombarded by visual crap in this country, this slogan has to be down there with the worst.

The following is what a German website has to say about it.  The politically correct will now be excused.

We really don’t know what they’re trying to say with this adolescent-level slogan, beside which we ask ourselves how this is supposed to work.  You can literally translate “Fuck the diet” as “Shit on the diet” in German.  Why this company has sunk to using such ghetto talk is beyond us, but let’s have some fun with it.

How do you fuck a diet?  Is it code for, “Have sex with fat people, they’ll thank you for it?”  Or should you just have some Cola Light before having sex?  What about using sweeteners instead of Viagra?  It’s worth an experiment.

Well now.

If they really wanted to use such an offensive slogan as part of their ad campaign, at least they could have dropped the wannabe English coolness and used something equivalent in German.  But maybe that might have woken up what passes for an Advertising Standards Council, and it wouldn’t have been approved.

1918 – 2011

I remember the first time I said a full sentence to her in the language she could understand.

Ich lade Euch herzlich ein, inviting my mother-in-law and wife to lunch, rolling my tongue seven times in my mouth to make sure I got it right the first time.

It was summer, 1997 and we’d just moved to Germany, still waiting for the shipping container to pass the Suez Canal.

Oma went on a lot of our trips back then.  She’d take care of the little red-haired girl while we went off to the sand dunes, or cook up for breakfast when we were still flaked out from overnight duty.

She had a long life.

Born when the First World War was still in its dying months, she became a young wife in the middle of the next, marrying a soldier on home from leave who left for the Russian campaign a week later.

Pushed out of her home in the East by the threat of advancing Russian forces, she carried her first daughter in the middle of winter over streams and borders to arrive in the west and give birth in the dying days of World War II nine months later.

Her soldier husband had no idea of her ordeal, nor did she of what had happened to him.  Nursing a baby girl to her first steps unable to know whether her love still saw the sunrise, flung between the limits of hope and despair without a word one way or another.

Until one day nearly a year-and-a-half later she opened an envelope from the Red Cross, knowing it was either from or about him, afraid to discover what was inside before reading in scratchy script:

My dear wife and daughter,

I now have the great pleasure to give you a sign of life.  I can tell you that I am doing well and am still healthy, and hope you are too.  I wish you all the best and send my most heartfelt greetings.  Yours ever,

It took still another year and a half for him to finally return from a prisoner of war camp on the Caspian Sea near Baku, in present-day Azerbaijan.  She said he’d become a brute in his years of fighting and imprisonment, couldn’t remember at first how to conduct himself in company or at table.

If, from then on, she led a quiet life in the countryside as a wife and mother, it must have been to make up for the way it began.

Her second daughter, my wife, came along a few years later.  At the time they were living with two other families in a house you’d swear wouldn’t fit a childless couple.  But her husband was a carpenter and builder, and they moved 51 years ago into the new house she lived until suffering a stroke and, two days later, passing away the day before Christmas.

Still on my way by train, I was told to take a taxi at the station and go straight to the hospital because there was no time for them to leave her bedside.

Arriving at the hospital I walked up the stairs to the first floor and opened the door to room 201.  She lay peacefully, a red rose placed below her folded hands.  The whole family was there.   I said little, but did what I could to console them one by one.

In this way it was a Christmas like no other for us.  The funeral was held on my wife’s birthday, Christmas dinner – for the first time, just the three of us – on New Year’s Eve.

It’s a time for looking back and looking ahead.

I was chatting the other day with an old friend from Montreal.  She said we’re all at that age when our parents are getting old and dying.

She said: I don’t want to get old.

Nor do I, I said.  But I don’t much like the alternative, either.

House listing withdrawn as forest animals wreak havoc

A central Hamburg real estate listing has been withdrawn after forest animals were discovered gnawing away at the newly built house.  A black bear and two raccoons were found ploughing their snouts into the exterior trim as owners Wolfgang and Hildegudrun Schmeddlapp returned today from a woodcutting expedition.

“We couldn’t believe it,” wailed Herr Schmeddlapp.  ”By the time we got home, they’d already eaten the door, window shutters, half of one side of the roof, and nearly an entire wall!”

The Smeddlapps, a Swabian back-to-the-land farming couple from Stuttgart, say they’d put their life savings into the house.  ”Work-work-build-a-house.  That’s what they always told us to do in life.  It’s all gone now,” moaned Frau Schmedlapp. “Just look at the place.  We might as well have invested in Greek bonds for all it’s come to.”

Wildlife experts say it’s highly unusual for black bears to come out of hibernation to feed.

“They usually store up a lot for the winter,” said Bea Lotto of the Hamburg Tierschutzvereinunddingsbums.  ”What we want to find out is why a house made with ginger and molasses, glued together with a mixture of egg white and icing sugar and decorated with Smarties, Gummy bears and those awful round things you get from Aldi around Christmas would attract bear and raccoon.  It’s a mystery.”

A banding found on one of the raccoons may give a clue to its origins and behaviour.

“If you look closely at the leg of that fellow up there on the left, he’s wearing an ID bracelet,” said Lotto.  ”It’s highly unusual for a Waschbaer – err, sorry, raccoon – to be tagged.  It might be a clue he’s from Munich.  We’ll have to do a scat sample to check for Weisswurscht just to be sure, though.”

Hamburg car burnings hit close to home

A wave of car torchings that started in Berlin a couple of years ago and spilled over to Hamburg hit close to home over the weekend.  This burned out lump of charred Mercedes was sitting just around the corner from our place when I came across it this past Sunday afternoon.

There have been well over 300 car burnings in Hamburg so far this year.  It’s even worse in Berlin, where more than 500 have gone up in flames.  Police are powerless to do anything about it because it’s completely random who’s doing it and for what reason.  Putting an extra 200 Hamburg police on night patrols didn’t work out, so now they’ve scaled them back to 20, with just as much effect. 

Some say there’s a political motivation behind the attacks, that it’s the marginalised of society roving around getting their kicks watching fat-cat Mercedes, BMWs and Porsches reduced to scrap.   But there’s no pattern to the burnings or their timing, and there are never any notes left behind.  A couple of yahoos here and there have been charged and thrown in jail, but it just keeps on happening.  

We always thought we were living a decent life in a safe and modern country.   But having once again been the victims of theft and adding up everything that’s going wrong right in our midst, sometimes we get the feeling we’re living in some besieged Middle Ages village, its citizens left to fend for themselves and wondering when the next attack will hit.

Remember the bike we made look too crappy to steal? It got stolen.

Careful readers of this humble blog will recall a post almost exactly three years ago – the last time the little red-haird girl’s bike was stolen - telling how we slapped some rust-stain stickers on her new bike to make it look too crappy to steal.  I’d ordered them from an artist in England who produces them.  And it really did look beat up once we’d put them on, at least at first glance.

And they worked – for three years and 10 days.  Saturday morning, sometime between 9am and noon, a wave of bike thefts hit our building.  Her bike, complete with all the stickers and scrapes and scratches it had picked up along the way – was ripped off.  A downstairs neighbour had it worse: his family had two bikes stolen.

So.

Pissed.

Off!

Not only because at the same time we’d bought her new bike, I’d spent hundreds of euros and countless hours setting up a safe, secure place in our cellar area – behind three locked doors – to store them in.

I’d picked up a special concrete drill bit to install three wall anchors to lock all our bikes to, and we somehow got used to laboriously carrying them down the stairs to the basement every night.

We thought at the time that with all the work and cost involved, maybe we were over-reacting a little, but we saw no other way to store them overnight.

I’d also always thought that locking them up inside overnight was the reason the bike hadn’t been stolen.  Not, of course, because of some stickers.

But now it looks as if they’ll get stolen outside our place in broad daylight, too.  On a Saturday morning, a time you’d think there’d be enough people milling about to keep the scumbags at bay.

At least it’s some consolation that it’s insured, and that we might be able to pick up some sort of a deal on a new bike.  Fall isn’t exactly the time the bike stores are crowded with shoppers.

Forgotten moment of joy

This week I’m a straw-widow.**  Or widower, more like it.

Wife K and the red-haired girl have taken off to Turkey for a week’s short holiday.  Missing them both, I’ve been looking at old home movies shot on our sturdy old Hi-8 camcorder.

It’s been fun testing out an analog-to-digital converter a friend lent me, and at the same time re-discovering clips I hadn’t seen in a dozen years.

Here’s one tiny moment of joy I’d completely forgotten:

That girl and I are still playing together.

If we have time when they get back, we’ll make one showing what we’ve been practicing lately.

**A direct translation of the German term Strohwitwe(r), which you become when your spouse is away for a while.

Cologne on high alert as Germany expat bloggers gather

by Dirk Dajerk

COLOGNE (CP)  A special task force has been set up in the western German riverside city of Cologne to prepare for what officials are calling “a catastrophe waiting to happen” as Germany’s band of English-speaking expatriate bloggers prepares to descend on the city in late October.  Police have already booked reinforcements from neighbouring Bonn and Aachen to help cope with the threat.

“They trash practically every place they visit,” moaned Cologne police desk sergeant Pensell Puscha.  ”Just look at what they did in Dresden.”

Now generally known as the “Dresden Disaster,” in public safety circles, the 2007 bloggers’ meetup/donnybrook at the eastern German city on the Elbe is now used in training sessions as an example of how not to prepare for a visit from Germany’s English-speaking bloggers.

“Dresden was hit totally by surprise,” said Cologne city counsellor Bieriz Mylaff.  ”By the time we called in for extra help, the rioting was totally out of control.  We’re definitely not going to let that happen to us.”

The annual bloggers’ meetup has grown from an informal gathering eight years ago of five online droolers desperate for the real-life company of anyone willing to tolerate for more than five minutes their tedious whining about the trials of expat life to an unwieldy gaggle of at least 25 who plan the event down to the last triviality for months in advance on three different platforms: their own blogs, an event website and discussion board, and now Facebook, that death of all blogs.  That’s not to mention the usual slurry of time-sucking drivel on Twitter.

“You’d think they could just decide they’re going to get together somewhere and have a few beers, but no-ooo,” lamented Cologne police detective Slyck Dyck. “From the morning after the last meetup ends they start planning the next one.  They plan side trips with Umlauts.  They plan Friday night dinners and guided tours the next morning.  They kick back for the afternoon, but that has to be planned, too.  They gather for a Saturday evening dinner and then go out to a frickin’ gay bar!  Not that there’s anything wrong with that.

“Then they all have this thing they call brunch when they’re all hung over on the Sunday.   They even make allowances for kids, the annoying little brats.”

The choice of Cologne as a meeting point and the timing itself has been the subject of controversy ever since both were decided months ago in an online poll.

“Cologne?  Nothing but a massive pile of bricks, bells and gargoyles surrounded by whackos, clowns and an ugly shopping centre,” lamented one blogger from Hamburg.  ”I haven’t even considered going there for years.  That part of Germany is so full of whores, they outnumber the cars!  Even the neighbouring city of Bonn has decided to take action, setting up parking meters so the city can recoup a few losses on the clean-up.

“And while we’re at it, what about the timing?  Why hold it at the end of October? It’s damn near winter!  Didn’t we decide a few years ago to hold it closer to summer so we could at least have half a chance to enjoy a warm evening or two?  November in Dresden, we had to burn buildings just to keep from freezing to death.”

Critics are also pointing out the dangers of just walking around Cologne, citing the tendency of entire buildings to suddenly collapse in on themselves, swallowing up irreplaceable manuscripts by, among others, Karl Marx and Heinrich Böll –  along with the odd human life or two.  They’re calling for safety checks to ensure visitors won’t end up in some sort of black hole.

Feeling stung by the criticism, organisers are scrambling to reassure attendees as well as the general public.

“We’re gonna have like, fun and stuff, so they should just lighten up, you know?” said one organiser.  ”Besides, if they don’t like it they can just stay home.”

The Cologne engineering department is taking no chances as the group is set to storm the upper reaches of their famous cathedral sometime on the Saturday. “We’ve installed structural reinforcements, so we’re reasonably confident the building will withstand the extra burden of the lot of them humping up those stairs to the upper reaches,” said chief city engineer Helmut Askew.  ”We’ve also taken the precaution of installing audio reminders at every level suggesting they look up from their smartphones once in a while at the amazing artwork surrounding them.”

Participants are expected to hold a vigil in memory of one member who has been to every meetup since the beginning, but will no longer be attending.  J, or J for short, has finally decided that Germany – or at least Bonn – indeed does suck, and has voted with his feet accordingly.

J’s absence will most be felt on Saturday evening when the evening’s traditional gay bar outing will take place.

“He never really used to know whether we were in a gay bar,” said one blogger, “and so we had to remind him that yes, indeed, we were in one, even though he might not have realised it at the time.”

Other absentees include Eurotrippen, holder of much of the blame for the 2007 Dresden Disaster.  Having lived the expat life for a number of years, Eurotrippen and brood returned to the States in 2009 to become ex-expats, then returned to Germany not long after to become ex-ex-expats, but are now back in the States, finally having decided that the status of ex-ex-ex-expat is what they enjoy the most.  For now.

Any illusions the gathering is attended by all of Germany’s English-language blogging scene will be shattered by a brief Google search.  Perennial hold-outs include the culprits behind Observing Hermann, Planet Germany, Charlotte’s Web, Ich werde ein Berliner and some guy in Cologne itself who calls his kid His Holiness.  The Irish Berliner, voted in an informal poll of one as Germany’s most outstanding blog, is a newcomer to the no-show crowd.

“Well, that’s a good thing,” said one Cologne officer. “The damage would be much worse if they showed up, too.”

Soak, rinse, repeat! How to get rid of those brown stains

It’s great to be back in Germany.

Best thing I’ve seen in the two weeks since our trip to Canada is this great T-shirt idea.

A man gave away 250 T-shirts at a recent gathering of neo-Nazis in eastern Germany.

The message on it was the usual crap you’d expect to see them wearing, so the sluggos lapped it up.

Problem for them is that a different message appears once you put the shirts through the laundry.

The message tells them to drop their Nazi ways with the help of an organisation of those who’ve already left. 

What your t-shirt can do, so can you.

This is such a brilliantly executed idea, but there’s only one problem: the assumption that the people wearing them actually wash.

Facebook planking craze hits Hamburg!

Planking, the Facebook craze destined to last at least a few more hours one more week, has gone global.  Even the sleepy backwater of Hamburg, Germany has caught on.  We in Hamburg are more sensible than the rest, though.  Understated refinement is how we go about things here.

And because already at least one person has plunged seven storeys to his death in pursuit of the perfect planking position, in the interest of safety the editor and staff at Letters Home recommend you at least be sober before attempting your plank.

OK, so I bent a few of the official rules here.  But the penguin IS lying rigid on a 31-year-old German turntable.  Top that, plankers!

Merkel lines on bin Laden

They say that bin Laden
Got shot through the noggin
Flown to the Arabian Sea.
Wrapped in a shroud as white as a cloud
And dumped overboard.  Now he’s just shark sushi.

In New York, in DC, when they heard the news
They flew to the places Al Qaeda had burned.
And crowed out so loud, so long, and so proud
Bin Laden is Dead!  But the news cycle churned

And in reaction, Frau Merkel, said she,
Was glad that bin Laden was as dead as can be.
Poor ol’ Frau Merkel, her words didn’t fit.
You just can’t say that.  It’s un-Christian, you twit.

But if she’d have said she’s sorry he’s dead
I suppose they’d be calling right now for her head.

So here’s some advice for dear Angie to take,
Reflecting on all that’s come in its wake,
Better to say in a roundabout way – just to keep the judges at bay -
I’m pleased that he’s no longer able to harm

Or just keep your mouth shut.
Works like a charm.