Tag Archives: Language

Practice Your German Tonight

June 17, 2015 By in Hard Facts, Helplessness, Hideology, History, Home Cooking, Hurt Feelings Tags: , , , , , , , , , , , Leave a comment

And your Cold War attitudes from the 80s, while you’re at it. Looks like we might be needing them again.

Deutschland 83

“Deutschland 83” premieres 11 p.m. Wednesday on SundanceTV.

SundanceTV’s “Deutschland 83” is the first German-language series ever broadcast on a U.S. network. The eight-part fictional spy thriller is set in 1983, when the then-split Germany was the hot spot for escalating nuclear tensions between NATO and the Soviet Union.

Vladimir Putin: “More than 40 new intercontinental ballistic missiles able to overcome even the most technically advanced anti-missile defense systems will be added to the make-up of the nuclear arsenal this year.”

Bavarian Codebreaker Needed

June 7, 2015 By in Helplessness, High Art, Home Cooking, Humor Tags: , , , , , , , , , , 1 Comment

Not everybody can speak this lingo. I assume it has something to do with the G7 demonstration festivities going on in Elmau, Germany right now but I can’t say for sure.

I am also assuming here that “Yes Mia Spuin” must be in honor of Obama’s visit and can only mean “yes, we can.” The guy with his face all up in the camera has sure got me stumped, however.

Dorf empfängt Obama mit Alphörnern und Weißwurst

German Of The Day: Auf Dem Linken Auge Blind

May 28, 2015 By in Habitudes, Helections, Helplessness, Hideology, Home Cooking, Hurt Feelings, Hypocrisy, Hysteria Tags: , , , , , , , , , 1 Comment

That means “blind in the left eye” and that’s what mainstream media in Germany is. When it comes to politically motivated attacks, I mean.

Frauke Petry

More German n-word nonsense here. Apparently, if you’re a eurosceptic and anti-immigration – and a top dog in the AfD protest party – that automatically makes you a Nazi these days.

This woman isn’t a Nazi, of course. Not by any means. But her views are troubling for a lot of people in Germany because it’s how they think, too, only they are not able to speak their minds out loud. So the enlightened left just just took over the conversation for them and attacked her with a paint bomb at a meeting in Göttingen, calling her a Nazi because, well, they can. And, when in doubt, everybody uses the n-word here so this is nothing new. And extreme left-wingers are, I dunno, cute or something.

See Goodwin’s law if you’re confused on this point. These folks just refuse to grow up.

“Sind Sie Frauke Petry?”

Stress Lady’s Back

May 20, 2015 By in Habitudes, Hard Facts, Health, Helplessness, Home Cooking, Humor, Hustle (Hoax), Hypochondria, Hysteria Tags: , , , , , , , , 4 Comments

Now she’s stressed out about being in something called the “sandwich generation.”

Stress

Just eat more vegetables and get over it already, sweetheart. Sheesh. When this broad ain’t stressed out about sandwiches she’s stressed out about this, this, this or this. She’s really starting to stress me out. Know what I’m sayin’?

Rund 82 Prozent der deutschen Frauen zwischen 40 und 59 Jahren fühlen sich nach einer Studie zwischen Beruf, Familie und teilweise auch Pflege von Angehörigen immer wieder überfordert.

PS: Oddity 448. The word “Stress” is used more frequently and has a much more negative connotation in German than it does elsewhere. It is a very dirty six-letter word here. Germans strive to achieve a stable, stress-free life within predictable confines and anything that interferes with this is more stressful for them than any of us non-Germans out there can imagine. Germans will even get stressed out about stress that they don’t even have yet, thus subjecting themselves to even more stress and feelings of inadequacy (for not being under this type of stress yet), which can also be very stressful. Needless to say, this makes it very stressful for those otherwise non-stressed individuals out there who have to witness all of this.

German Of The Day: German Mut

May 18, 2015 By in Helections, Higher Education, Home Cooking, Humor Tags: , , , , , , , , , , , , , , 1 Comment

Nope, that doesn’t mean German pooch or mongrel. That means German courage.

German Mut

And it takes quite a bit of German courage for a German political party to come out in support of economic-liberal policies and free choice in a country like Germany these days (in the end, most Germans want everything regulated for them and prefer equality and conformity to free choice). But that is what the FDP (FDP 2.0?) is trying to do. They’re still on the outside looking in after their ousting in 2013 but appear to be bouncing back, at least for the moment.

They are currently so courageous, in fact, that they must be high. Not only are the Free Democrats now proposing that marijuana be legalized, which isn’t all that original these days, they also think it’s time for Germany to introduce a flat tax. Good luck on that. That’ll be a real hard one to sell here, as elsewhere. Who’s going to “eat the rich” then?

“Die erste Reform, die wir unserem Land empfehlen, ist eine Reform der Mentalität.”

As If German Women Talking During Sex Wasn’t Bad Enough Already

May 17, 2015 By in Habitudes, Helplessness, Higher Education, Home Cooking, Hotness, Humor Tags: , , , , , , , , Leave a comment

Now they’re talking about it again. Like afterwards even.

Sex

Must be a slow news day. This is clearly a re-run of a re-run that’s already done run. Not just the talking part, I mean. These clips, too.

But at least it’s in German. German women speaking German are pretty sexy, I find.

Frauen sprechen über Sex: Das erste und das letzte Mal

German Of The Day: Nervensäge

May 15, 2015 By in Helplessness, Hideology, Home Cooking, Hysteria Tags: , , , , , , , , 4 Comments

That means “nerve saw” or annoying person. And heaven knows that Claudia Roth of the German Greens has spent an entire career making a name for herself in that department.

Roth

The Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung even once referred to her as the “Mother of All Nerve Saws.” But that was then and this is now. She has clearly mellowed out now that she just turned 60 (today). Now it’s more like she just gnaws on your nerves.

Happy Birthday, Claudia!

Selbst Etiketten wie “Mutter aller Nervensägen”, wie die “FAZ” einmal schrieb, ärgern die streitbare Politikerin nicht. Im Gegenteil: Im Bundestagswahlkampf 2013 griff sie das Thema selbstironisch auf, eine Parteikampagne für mehr weibliche Mitglieder warb mit dem Spruch: “Wer nervt mehr als Claudia?”

German Of The Day: Behindert

May 12, 2015 By in Habitudes, Hard Facts, Home Cooking, Hurt Feelings, Hustle (Hoax), Hypochondria, Hysteria Tags: , , , , , , 2 Comments

That’s what Germans are. Or at least one out of eight Germans are these days: Disabled.

Behindert

Not only are they getting more and more old and gray and in the way, they also seem to be doing so less gracefully.

Funny how the number could be so high here so quickly though, don’t you think (up 7 percent since 2009)? This couldn’t be another popular scam for some, could it? I’m so ashamed. How could I even think of such a thing?

Whatever it is, it reminds me of a German oddity I have observed here in Berlin: Oddity 168. If there were only two Germans left on earth, one would try to take advantage of the other by pulling out his “Schwerbeschädigter Ausweis” or disabled person ID. I was boarding a bus in Berlin once when two passengers got into a real argument over one of the seats reserved for the disabled by waving around their IDs and yelling back and forth at each other about who was the more disabled of the two. It came dangerously close to a real brawl. That made me wonder. Would the winner of the fight have then been disqualified for no longer being the most disabled one?

Gegenüber 2009 ist die Zahl der Menschen mit Behinderung um 7 Prozent beziehungsweise 673.000 Personen gestiegen.

German Of The Day: Krawalltourismus

May 1, 2015 By in Habitudes, Helplessness, History, Home Cooking, Hurt Feelings, Hysteria Tags: , , , , , , , , , Leave a comment

That means “violent demonstration tourism,” more or less. And May Day (or International Workers’ Day) is booked out completely for this every year in Berlin.

May

These international workers are off that day, you see. And it’s a bewitching event that these folks just can’t afford to miss. You know, tradition and all that?

Weder mystisch noch romantisch. Für die Berliner Polizei steht run um die Maifeiertage viel Arbeit an.

German Of The Day: Heimatfilme

April 29, 2015 By in High Art, Home Cooking, Humor Tags: , , , , , , , , , , 2 Comments

Heimatfilm (German pronunciation: [ˈhaɪmatˌfɪlm], German for “homeland-film“; German plural: Heimatfilme) is the name given to a film genre that was popular in Germany, Switzerland, and Austria from the late 1940s to the early 1970s. They were usually shot in the Alps, the Black Forest, or the Lüneburg Heath and always involved the outdoors. These films were noted for their rural settings, sentimental tone and simplistic morality, and centered on love, friendship, family and non-urban life. Also, the polarity between old and young, tradition and progress, and rural and urban life was articulated. The typical plot structure involved both a “good” and “bad” guy wanting a girl, conflict ensuing, and the “good” guy ultimately triumphing to win the girl to the happiness of everyone and the children.

Heimatfilme

Well that’s cool and all but I guess they’ve tweaked the genre around a bit because they’re going to film the next bunch of “homeland-films” with lots of guns and blood and terror and stuff right here in not so non-urban Berlin itself. But still.

The fifth series will pick up two-and-a-half years after the previous one ended, with main character Carrie Mathison out of the Middle East and in self-imposed exile in the German Capital.