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.

Talking to a 14-year-old about Canadians and Americans

Girl: There’s this boy in my class. He’s SUCH a jerk!  All he talks about it how great it is in America and how lousy Canada is.  He even said he was going to do a class report on how much better the USA is than Canada.

Me: He must have been joking about that part.

I guess so.

–Does he know you’re also Canadian?

Of course!

–He’s just trying to get a rise out of you.

I know.

–Has he even been to the States?

Probably.  Yeah, I think they went to Florida on vacation.

–Florida!  They probably saw more Canadians there than Americans.  They all come down to escape the winter.

Girl laughs.

–You know, when I was a kid in Britannia Beach we had American families living among us.  The mine was owned by Americans.  Some of their kids would brag to us all the time about how great it was down in the States.  We used to roll our eyes every time and then talk about them later.

Laughs again.

–Americans are always shooting their mouths off about something, but Canadians don’t like it when people brag.  Actually, it used to be that way, but now I’m not so sure.  Last time I was in British Columbia I noticed how they now put The Best Place on Earth as a slogan on their license plates.   Canadians always used to be so modest, and now they’re trying to tell everyone that BC’s the best place on earth?   I mean, when you know you’ve got something special, you don’t go around bragging about it.  That’s the way we grew up, anyway.

A new challenge: public speaking

I really need a new challenge.

No, I’m not looking for a new job, a new life or a new wife. Just something I’ve never done before, something I know I’m not good at, something I hope will really help me in some areas I really need improving, and maybe have some fun to boot.

Actually, the fun part has already been happening on Tuesday night for the past couple of months.

I’ve been going to Toastmasters.

Oh no!

Not Toastmasters!

Not those sweaty Republicans in loud suits! Those used car and life insurance salesmen! Run away! Run away!!!!!

Seriously, if you’d have mentioned Toastmasters to me up until the first night I actually showed up for a meeting, my out-dated, pre-conceived notions of who shows up and what goes on there would have kicked right in.

But as I’ve come to realise over the first half dozen two-hour sessions, the people who show up to the Hamburg chapter from vastly different backgrounds and walks of life, all with one goal in mind: to feel confident while delivering an engaging speech before a live audience.

Not a bad skill to acquire.

I used to speak to a live audience estimated at one million every single workday, but I was sitting all alone in a tiny studio in front of a TV camera with the aid of a teleprompter. Having had no formal television training, all I had to rely on was what I could glean from watching those broadcasters I admired, but I soon realised after a few weeks on air that after overcoming the idea that you’re actually being watched, reading the words as naturally as you can pull it off is not that big a deal.

Public speaking at a podium before an audience, however, is so different. For one thing, you have all those faces staring back at you, and you alone.   What’s good about Toastmasters, though, is the feedback you get.  Your speech is evaluated on several levels the night you give it, so you always know what you’ve done right and what you still need to work on.  My colleagues in television usually stopped at ‘nice hair’ or ‘you picked your nose again – did you notice?’

So Toastmasters International will officially have its 230,001st member in August when the new session gets underway.  I will keep going as a guest until the summer break, and then formally join up. Until then I can participate in the meetings by speaking up in the two-minute improv rounds they call “table topics,” but I’ll have to wait until I’m officially a member before actually getting up there for the real thing.

And since I’ve already been out for a few beers with most of the faces staring back at me, the first time I get up there to give ice-breaker Speech Number One will feel less like being thrust in front of a roomful of strangers and more like saying a longer hello to new friends.

I might even put on a loud suit for it.

Berlusconi on Obama: he’s young, handsome, and even suntanned

Sarah Palin may have been banished to the frozen north for a while, but trust Silvio Berlusconi to take up the slack when it comes to politicians you wish would just get off the god-damn stage.

This from the Italian Prime Minister at a press conference in Moscow:

The Italian press is going ape-shit over it, calling it a “racist gaffe” and “an insult loaded with dangerous ambiguity.”

I’d call it simply more of the same from Europe’s biggest embarrassment.

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

What if you’re white, and don’t like stuff white people like?

I’m a white guy. A real white guy. I am so damn white, I need factor 35 sun cream to go skiing or sunbathing. I am so damn white, there is a genetic skin disease in my family going back an untold number of generations called Epidermolysis Bullosa, a rare affliction which renders the skin as fragile as a butterfly’s. Though the disease doesn’t discriminate for race or sex, it first showed up in my family in the area of the northern British Isles where my ancestors lived, and where asses don’t get whiter.

My two white brothers have it, my white father did, so did his white father, and his white father, his white mother… and that’s about as far back as we’ve been able to trace.

Born in Canada, so already a member of the lucky sperm club, I can count myself one of the luckiest damn white guys on the planet, because I don’t have it.

Still, I’m stuck with being white, and can’t do anything about that. I was born this way. This is who I am.

Apparently, some Americans have been carefully observing me and my fellow white people, and decided it’s time to let everybody know in a blog what white people like. Called Stuff White People Like, it has shot like a rocket to the second-most popular blog on wordpress.com in only its first five weeks of life, pulling in a total of more than six million hits as well as hundreds of comments for each post. The “About” page alone has nearly 2,200 comments last time I looked.

I read through it and shrug.

Musical comedy? I prefer stand-up.

Kitchen gadgets? Please.

Multilingual children? There are hundreds of millions of white people here in Europe, where the best jobs are hard to find without foreign language skills.

Threatening to move to Canada? I had a howl at that one, because at the end it says – possibly after someone pointed out that there are white people in Canada who read the blog – that white Canadians threaten to move to Europe.

Naw, we just look south and shake our heads at the latest example of how little regard or even awareness many Americans have for what goes on beyond their own borders. Having successfully thrown their cultural weight around the planet for more than a century, they automatically assume that what goes for white Americans goes for white people everywhere.

There are dozens more examples of Stuff White People are Supposed to Like. White Americans, maybe. Yuppie Americans for sure. Yuppie American dinks (dual income, no kids) absolutely. It stops there, though.

National Lampoon in its 1970s glory days once ran a Race Issue which, depending on how you took it, either tried its best to insult every race on the planet with equal measure, or satirise racism as a useless exercise because we all have traits which define us as individuals and, like it or not, as a group.

One look through the comments and you’ll see that readers of this new blog don’t know what to make of it, either.

Me? I prefer Weird Al. At least he’s funny.

© 2008 lettershometoyou

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And the Brits say the Germans have no sense of humour

The parents of Madeleine McCann are said to be outraged and threatening legal action against a German satire magazine that puts their missing child’s image on products in a fake advertisement.

Note to Gerry and Kate: as much as I feel sorry for your being in the situation you’re in and hope you find your daughter, get a grip. This is the real world. When you decided to start a universal media campaign to find your daughter, you entered into a devil’s bargain. You got the media exposure, you got a huge free advertising campaign, but you also left yourselves open to criticism, ridicule and even tasteless satire. Accept it. That’s the price you pay for an open media in a free society.

Besides, aren’t the British always pointing out how humourless the Germans are, how they have to be told when a punch line is coming because otherwise it’ll pass them by? Often it’s just a question of style. It takes a Brit about five minutes after hello to insult you in some way, but they call that just taking the piss. No harm done.

So lighten up, will you? Titanic is a hilarious little rag. I bet there’s a satire magazine editor in London kicking himself silly right now because he didn’t think of it first.

© 2007 lettershometoyou

Canadian cyclist blocked, gets called a jobless bum

Dear all,

I’ve been going along for a good stretch enjoying all things Germany has to offer (white asparagus excepted) but the past couple of days have knocked me back into that danger zone you can get into as an expatriate: it’s true! The stereotypes, the complaints, the whining forum posts – they’re not only based in fact, they go further! Like today:

Riding my bike with my tail between my legs after having been admonished yesterday by a full-geared bicycle Polizist that It Is Verboten To Ride Your Bike In The Wrong Direction On The Bike Path, I was dutifully enjoying some bone-jarring brickwork and upthrusting tree roots instead of the smooth roadway as I usually do, when suddenly a familiar obstacle loomed ahead: the dreaded Vannicus Blocus Pissmeoffagus, easily identifiable by the careless manner in which the driver – too self-important to obey the rules and after all they’re only cyclists so who really gives a damn anyway – wedged his nose in just enough to cover the path completely but leave a little room on the sidewalk- oh, Dankeschön – for cyclists to slip by.

Taking out my camera, I did for a moment pause to consider that in the lineup of daily irritants some have to put up with this is pretty trivial stuff, but I thought: enough’s enough.

So as I was taking a photo of this twerp’s disregard for the rules of the road and with an idea slowly forming that maybe it’s time for an English-language Hamburg Driver Wall of Shame page on this blog for all 26 of us to marvel at occasionally, along come a couple of cyclists.

“You going to put this on the Internet or something?” a man asks me.

“Yeah, but it’s just a blog, and besides it’s in English, it’s a long name, I don’t have a pen…”

“Well… (he’s speaking to me in perfect German) I’m Canadian and I’d like to see a photo of this somewhere.”

From then on of course the path of least resistance took over and we talked about all and sundry about how we’re forced to obey the laws to the letter but at the same time put up with the carelessness of drivers who outnumber us 200 to one and whaddyado wearyafrum howlongyabinhere, this here’s my girlfriend, say hello, when out of the blue….

“Don’t you people have JOBS to go to or something?”

Some pinch-faced woman in a tin can car wearing those oversized Prada Chanel wrap-around sunglasses and obviously mistaken with the notion that an entire bottle of jet-black hair colouring might make her look a little less like a witch was speeding away before I had much of a chance to blurt out, “hey Lady, just so happens my two fellow cyclists live in Hamburg but are on HOLIDAY, I work FULL TIME but am on DAYS OFF!”

But who needs an explanation for such people? As a pedestrian I’ve been bitched at by drivers at empty intersections in one-horse towns because I walked across on the red. This is so classically German it’s barely worth mentioning, but for someone to automatically assume that just because we are not in an office at noon on a weekday we’re jobless bums, and furthermore, we’re forced to ride bicycles because we have no income… well that’s a new one on me.

Also says something about attitudes to the unemployed: you’re in my way, you’re not needed, you don’t count.

What the hell, I met a fellow Canadian out of it. Hiya George! Beer sometime?

all for now,

Ian