Miscellaneous stuff

Oh no, I feel randomness coming on!

German license plates are different from American license plates. The first one/two/three letters always correspond to the name of the town/area where the car is registered, followed by a hyphen and one/two more letters and four numbers. The number of letters before the hyphen correspond to the size of the municipality, with big towns getting one letter (so Berlin is B), small towns getting two letters (HD=Heidelberg) and truly podunk places get three letters (I suppose podunk would be PDK). One popular way to express your road rage is to call someone a "three-letter farmer" because the driver is visibly from a rural place and hence doesn't know how to drive (although this assessment may be relative -let me assure you, even my Boston friends, that Germans are the biggest asshole drivers I know).

This also leads to some funny letter combinations before and after the hyphen. I suppose S(Stuttgart)-EX is too famous for its own good by now. Some good ones I've seen recently driving around:

SU-ME
HO-HL (vacuous in German)
TÖL-E (bastard dog in German)

Well, maybe it just doesn't translate well...

Classifieds:

Congratulations to Jerry and Kate on their recent big boy/big girl acquisitions (see their blog)

Also, congrats to Sarah for finding a gorgeous wedding dress (I guess there's still hope for puff sleeves and low waists for the bridesmaid dresses)

Thanks to all the nice people in A2 who wrote the notes that were recently delivered via Tam and Emily (and thanks to Tam and Emily for conveying them)!

Cool stuff

I'm not one for advertising stuff, but the other day, I was talking to my friend (Cocky Vassar Student) Victor on AIM and he mentioned this ueber-cool website to me that his almost-special friend was running/designing for, and I just _love_ it, as Ms. K8ie Lane would say.

Check it out!

http://www.shoplooponline.com

Classifieds:

Happy Belated Birthday to Susanne, who joined me in the club of 20+9-year-olds recently!

To be filed under 'lost causes'

My mother's car is a 1989 Fiat Uno in a funky, late-80s "dolphin-blue" color. It's a total jaloppee -at the point where you do start wondering if the bumper stickers are keeping the car together (as far as I've seen we have the only car in Germany that has more than 2 bumper stickers on it). I've driven through the entire city and on the highway at 65 mph with the emergency break on, and I swear I didn't notice anything about the car's performance. The driver-side window doesn't open, and the sunroof kinda leaks. The dashboard is VERY basic -we're talking little plastic handles you push up or down to turn on lights, wipers, etc. Oh, you can't lock the hatchback door either. And the passenger door lock really sticks.

The car has about 100k miles on it, which isn't much in the land of Japanese engineering, but for a pasta-burner, this must be getting near some record running time. Maybe if we can keep it alive for a few more years, we can retire it to the Fiat museum in Turin and they'll give us a new car for our steadfastness.

Anyway, yesterday I was filling up the car at a gas station, and this woman comes up to me and asks me, completetly seriously: "Would you like to test-drive the new BMW 1-series car?"

I just stared at her in disbelief. Good woman, if I had the money to buy that kind of car, would I be driving the one you see me standing by?!?!?! I think someone needs better marketing research skills...

Family entertainment

I don't know if Germany was ever know for rock-hard journalism. Even if not, the "human interest" story has made its appearance here as well, just like everywhere else. As a matter of fact, there are numerous shows on every night between 6 and 8 pm (8 pm is when the 'real' news start and you better not call anyone during that time -it's sacred time here) that are devoted to human-interest stuff.

So tonight they had this thing on about women who like to ride horseback in the buff, even in winter. They say it's not that cold because the horses give off so much heat. Riiiight. Let's not discuss the deep psychological implications of this practice. Then they show a video of this to people in a shopping mall to get their reactions (another speech event that has no real name -except "reacting in shopping mall to video of women riding horses naked in the winter"), including a woman with a kid that looked to be about 3 years old and the kid is watching it too. Strangely enough, no reaction from him.

You know I'm no prude. Actually, this is not about being prudish, this is just so German. This is on at 7 pm...well, we all know what's on after 10 (the film length version of the idea of riding horses naked), so I guess this was just an appetizer. Yum yum.

Classified fun

Two recent gems from the classifieds of a major Berlin newspaper. I swear, I'm not making it up!

Massage Parlors
Phuket: New team! Phone XXXXX

Miscellany
I, Sunilkumar Puttegowda, son of GT Puttegowda, resident at X address, and of Sri Devi Nilaya, resident at Y address, have changed my name from Sunilkumar Puttegowda to P. Sunilkumar Gowda in front of the special magistrate of Bangalore. Please make a note of this.

Belated: Ode to Jerry Orbach (on the occassion of his death -Dec 2004)

I don't know if you knew, but I loved Jerry Orbach. I was sad when he died.

Jerry Orbach played the kind of roles (at least the ones I saw)
That were important for all kinds of reasons:
Fighting crime and a cop’s personal demons
Watching over teenage daughters’ personal revolutions
Delivering sarcasm and straight-talk
Pushing the boundaries of mandatory retirement and
Of the orangeness of age-defying cake make-up.
And always, in some way, having the last word.

Maybe my love for him (or was it for Lenny Briscoe)
Was a matter of a primal penchant for patriarchal men
Or plain grandfatherly family resemblances
Or successful manipulation by clever script-writers.
Probably all three
And all very mundane.

Just like the question
Where Jerry ends and Lenny starts.
The answer would, even if found,
Be somehow insignificant.

In the end, his role on Law&Order
Did not typecast him
But created a world in which
That certain New York City cop
Dangerously close to his professional expiration date
Could not be played by anyone
Except that tall and lanky guy.

‘Cause nobody puts Baby in a corner
Or Jerry Orbach into retirement.

Change of plans

I don't even know if anyone is still trying to read this blog, but if you've been wondering whether I've been swallowed whole by a peat bank, here's the story behind my recent 'silence':

After leaving my island at the end of the world in December for a little break from 'the field' in Germany and for a highly secret (I guess not anymore) visit to my honey back in the US, I decided to return to Germany because my mother's melanoma was found to have spread to her brain, advancing her to stage IV and making the condition terminal in the sense that statistically, less than 10% of patients at this stage are alive after one year.

This was quite a shock, obviously, but after the initial insanity, things are quietening down a bit as we're adjusting to living at this stage. At this point, there have been two rounds of chemo and radiation of one of the two brain mets, and everything is still up in the air -it takes about 8-10 weeks to see if any of these things are doing anything.

I was debating for a long time whether I should continue posting to this blog, since it probably won't be (hopefully) amusing "aren't they crazy" stories from the land o' peat and prebyterians. But since I'm essentially a stranger in this land of my childhood, I realized there can still be "aren't they crazy stories", and it may be cathargic to recount my experiences in the land of stage IV cancer here.

I dunno, we'll see how it goes...