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.

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.

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.

Have a happy Canada Day. Or else.

1. If you were to lay the history of planet earth from its frothy formation to the present day on a timeline representing the 7,300 kilometres from Canada’s West to East coasts, Canada’s birthday - July 1, 1867 - would be about 10 centimetres from the Newfoundland shore.
2. I’ve never measured this for accuracy.
3. It’s easier to cycle across the country from West to East, but more rewarding to go East to West. Why? You always have the best part to look forward to.
4. Someday I want to try to do this.
5. To Albertans, BC is short for Beyond Canada.
6. Two Canadians meet an American in a bar. The American says to them: it’s cold up here. The Canadians say: Sure is.
7. That counts as humour in Edmonton.
8. Some claim that Brian Mulroney was Canada’s worst post-war Prime Minister, others say that title belongs to Pierre Elliott Trudeau.  Discuss.
9. It is a little-known Canadian fact that Jesus was not born anywhere near Victoria, BC because they could locate neither three wise men nor a virgin.
10. It’s often said that Canadians define themselves by what they are not: they aren’t Americans.  True, but we’re more like Americans than we like to admit.  We also have social problems, toxic waste dumps and looming environmental catastrophes, serial killers and wannabe rightwing talkshow dingbats. 

And now it’s time to say a special hello to all you hospital patients and shut-ins, those who can’t get out to the  game, hope you’ve enjoyed this Canada Day broadcast on CKNW.  

For more Canadian content, visit

Raincoaster

Beaverboosh

Mausi

Azahar

Expatraveler

Wandering Coyote

timethief 

Canadada

Romi41

Brown Amazon

Zoom (aka knitnut)

Rositta

plus that unforgettable K-Tel advertisement staple: and many more.

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.

I’m sure he wouldn’t take offense to that.

To the man whose album Occupation: Foole I can rattle off by heart simply because at the age of 12 I listened to it so much and who died Sunday in Los Angeles of heart failure: we’ll miss you.

On a long ride in my brother Gordon’s pick-up truck between Calgary and North Battleford, Saskatchewan in the summer of 2005 the hours became shorter and the laughs louder with every single track on the George Carlin MP3s he’d downloaded and burned onto CD.

Who says downloading is draining off artists’ sales? I was so happy to hear George Carlin again, I went out and bought two of his books when I got back to Vancouver: Brain Droppings and Napalm and Silly Putty. Still laugh when I take them off the shelf for another look.

Not his most famous routine, but a good one:

Another post about blogging. Sorry, Bruce.

I look at all I’ve written over the past year and a half and can’t complain about not being able to post regularly. Still there’s so much more I’ve wanted to post, but haven’t been able to get around to it.

I wanted to post:

• At least one write-up of our trip to Mallorca last October, though I could write six. Yes, Mallorca, that German-package-tourist-hell-on-rollerblades. Know what? It was wonderful. Really, it was a great trip. Maybe photos and a few captions will have to do.
• A supplementary page to A Month in South Africa and Lesotho, because we’ve actually done two months there, but three years apart. The page with photos and write-up is of our more recent trip. The first trip was very different, but still worth writing about.
• An obituary, a eulogy, a letter I wish I’d written while he was alive to a special person and old friend from Quebec who died back in November, 2007. I got the news three weeks too late to even send something to be read out at his funeral.
• Another one involving death, this time someone who interviewed and rejected me for a job as reporter at the South China Morning Post in 1994 when I first arrived in Hong Kong. I found out only a few months ago he’d died in 2000, an apparent suicide in London.
• More on Paris. It was a very multi-layered, multi-textured encounter; a reunion, a look back, a look ahead, a language lesson, a mini second honeymoon.
• A tragically hilarious account of a trip to Bucharest for work in early April, just before booking off sick for more than a week.
• A follow-up to a post in January where I promised to later post some translated excerpts of a book I read in French and whose English translation won’t be out until September. A lot of readers said they were looking forward to it. I’ve read the book, but still have to deliver on the follow-up.

Those are just the ones I can name.

I have another two dozen drafts sitting in the queue, waiting for some more bone, blood and flesh. They’re like scraps of paper, really. Sometimes I wish they weren’t stacked up in such a straight, orderly line, because it takes away from the experimental feel to it.

Are two dozen drafts a lot or a few?  Blogging guru Lorelle says you should write your drafts and then publish right away so that your ideas don’t go stale. I think she has a point. The problem with letting things sit around in draft mode is there is no longer any urgency. I can write them anytime, so that’s when they get written: Whenever.

Or maybe I’m just lazy and have been taking the easy way out. Looking over that list, I know that each one of them would be a time-consuming challenge. The eulogy has to have just the right tone. The South Africa and Mallorca travel write-ups involve all that photo sorting and uploading. The Hong Kong/London suicide story might take a couple of telephone calls to sort out an unanswered question or two.

And besides, it’s summer.  Who wants to blog?