Saaga

One of our teacher’s aides came in to the lunch room today with that awful fake tan look. Besides me there was only one other person in the room for me to exchange amused glances with, but I didn’t say anything because I don’t know her very well, although this didn’t stop my other colleague.
“Oh you have a tanning bed at home,” she said.
“No, I was just in the sun,” replied the clearly lying woman.
It seems that all the Germans that undergo this process want to pretend that they gained their new pigmentation accidentally or at worst through natural labour. However, when you are as white as a ghost one day and orange the next, everyone knows what happened.
I thought about asking her if she meant that she was actually in the sun, because that is the only possible ‘natural’ explanation for her increased melanin response.
I wanted to ask her about her adventures on the sun; what had she seen? Does anyone live there? How does one become a Helionaut? But I knew that she wouldn’t tell me any of these things. Bloody Helionauts and all their damned secrecy.

We have visitors again, which is always good. Chris and Naomi are staying with us for a few days, so we get to show them around Düsseldorf and act like real locals. I was sounding Chris out to see if I could get him to break the Schweinebrötchen eating record, which was originally set by Nathan in December and then broken by Evan in January. However after we hearing of the Herculean effort made by Ev and the subsequent and immediate effect on his health, Chris politely declined.
I believe the current record is just under two and a half Schweinebrötchen per day, which is a very solid performance, however I think that if we had been aware of this delicacy while Kurt was here, he may have set the bar high enough to kill Ev during his own attempt to beat it.
Tomorrow we are heading off to Münster, which is a couple of hours (on the slow train) north of Düsseldorf. It’s supposed to be very charming, but that epithet is attached to almost all European cities, with the obvious exception of Kaiserslautern for which the word awful is reserved.
It looks like we are playing football twice a week now, which is going to be great for my overall health, although my legs may beg to differ, especially after times we have played consecutive days. Last time we played there was a fantastic German moment: our group was on the vacant pitch number three warming up, when our organiser came over to inform us that we were actually meant to be on pitch four. Looking over to pitch four we noticed that there was a game in progress. What had happened was that the people on our pitch didn’t realise they were supposed to be on number three and just picked the first unoccupied one they came across. After a few minutes of conversation with their people, it was decided that we would swap to our correct pitches, even though we had both booked for the same amount of time and that there was no difference in price or quality of the pitches. Our location really made no difference to anything except the diamond hard sense of propriety of their inner germans. My inner Australian was aghast at the waste of time that would ensue as we all switched fields. When I voiced this, they all looked at each other as if what I was suggesting was totally out of left field and could possibly result in death sentences all round, but after another minute of consultation they decided that they would throw caution to the wind and stay where they were…victory!

My friends Jay and Brad (aka The Longest Day) have just released their second album and I am really enjoying it, especially the second song called forgotten. I was lucky enough to have a copy mailed to me by the artists themselves.
The Album is called sounds of Jupiter and if you want to hear a couple of the tracks, Jay has kindly posted a link to them on his blog.
I always find with music written by my friends, that I most like the songs that they themselves are least happy with. This may have something to do with the fact that while I have friends that are musicians, I am not one myself; infact, sometimes I believe I am whatever the opposite of a musician is.

My only problem with the album is the fact that the all the writing on the cover and the liner notes is in lower case.
I hate the lowercase thing that seems to be so prevalent these days. If you don’t know what I mean, then just browse the numerous blogs and sites out there on the intermaweb and you will notice a distinct lack of Capital letters, even on proper nouns! This trend is very common on pages to do with technobabbledry and computertrons. I can’t really say what purpose it serves and I shouldn’t shout too loud because I have close friends who, much to my chargrin, have their own blogs set up like this. It’s funny what gets under my spines.

In what I suppose is a similar way, a friend of mine hates the smiley emoticons and insists that the original alphanumeric smileys are better. I’m not hung up on this the way she is* and don’t really have an opinion myself, maybe she is just being an 0£Ð $(h00£ £337 h4(|{z0r. Maybe that moniker can be applied to the pair of us.

*my friend may not actually be hung up on this.

So I was leaving work yesterday and I was one of the very last staff left on the premises. There were some parents still talking in the car park even though school had ended more than an hour and a half before. They told me that the kids at the end of the car park were kicking a ball around and that it had hit one of their cars and they were really pissed off. I think the thing that pissed them off the most was the fact that they were powerless to do anything because the children were locals and none of the parents spoke German.
The only other staff member there was our Assistant Principal, who when I asked him, said we should move them on. However the only one there with any ability in German was me. So we walked over toward the group of four boys and as we were arriving, the ball bounced and hit the car again and as luck would have it, rolled over to me.
I picked it up and stood there looking at them and I new I had their attention, because they were worried about what I was going to do with their precious. So I started speaking to them in my halting German, explaining that they should find somewhere else to kick the ball around because we didn’t want the ball hitting the cars anymore.
One of them (the one I addressed) pointed out that it wasn’t school property where they were kicking the ball, which was probably true, but nevertheless I was winning so I pressed on. I said I don’t care if you kick the ball, but if it hits another car I am calling your parents. Despite the fact that I had no idea who they were or where they lived, the child believed I would call his parents and started gesticulating wildly at his friend, telling me that it was him too.
At this point I left them to it and as I walked away, it dawned on me why the child had started to panic at the end of our ‘little chat’.
I was addressing the whole thing to him and not to the group: In English we use the word ‘you’ to address one person or a group, but in Deutsch there are many words for these functions and I used ‘deine’ which is singular instead of ‘eure’ for plural.
I also reflected how I would have reacted as a ten year old if someone had ranted at me in English the way I had in Deutsch.

Crazy angry man: Hey kids. Not kick ball here you must. Damage the cars you will!
Me age 10: Fuck off Yoda

The King of the Mountain is dead and already reports have said that he died doing what he loved; but that is wrong. He loved finessing powerful cars around difficult race tracks whilst blowing the doors off his competition. He did not however, love losing control on a hairpin turn and skidding off the road and into a tree.

Possibly it’s my fault that he is dead. It was pointed out to me that it took Peter Brock to die for me to show some kind of appropriate emotion about death; the kind I didn’t show when Steve Irwin Died.
So it is only logical that if I had mourned Steve Irwin, instead of poking fun at him, then Peter Brock would not have been killed (in my less rational days I may have said: ‘killed by God’) to teach me a lesson.

Hubris?…hmmm

I am sick of track backs spamming up our blog. For the most part they are for online ring tones, which I suppose the modern person can’t do without, especially now as a mobile is not a device but a lifestyle choice.
I don’t really understand how it all works; something to do with the way websites reference one another or something. This allows comments to get past our maths question security system and pollute the blog. I won’t mention what this does to the security offered by Wordpress, except to say that Wordpress can’t sit down at the moment.

I never really liked Steve Irwin and I am not about to start saying positive things about him now that he is dead. However, it is obviously a shame that he died, but I never realized that it would be, until now. So many of my colleagues think he is/was fantastic. I imagine this is largely because they found his adventures interesting and his antics amusing, as he made himself out to be mad and at the same time enthusiastic to the point of being over the top about everything.
However this is not the general mood of the Australians (not that there are many of us) here. ‘Embarrassing’ and ‘dickhead’ are the two most commonly used words and if he hadn’t just died, I bet many others would agree with this sentiment.
The spirit of the Crocodile Hunter is free now, but where will it take root again?
Might we see the ‘Emu Flusterer’ or the ‘Wombat Whisperer’ in the years to come? Maybe we will see a resurgence in the popularity of the Bush Tucker man or, dare I say it…the Leyland Brothers.