nog

I could not drink wassailing wine all around but I think the only thing good about the annual increasing precedence of the Christmas season, making it a movable feast that comes earlier every year, is that one can find such drinks. The latest one is a spicy concoction called Glogg from Sweden, by the purveyors of all things Swedish and flat-pack.

let's play global thermo-nuclear war

Watch this turn out to be an advertising ploy for the new disaster movie 2012--but a top bank is urging its clientele to prepare for total and sustained economic collapse. I wonder what sorts of contingency plans they have formulated and whether they are anything better that pushed the economy down that staircase in the first place. Or how about a nice game of tic-tac-toe?

the word gullible

I had always guessed that Americans were the only ones with national obsessions and tolerances for hoaxes and general strangeness: like Groundhog Day, overwhelming bureaucracy, toothfairies and hand-sanitizers. It seems however, Germany has quite a few of its own. There is an old elm tree in the northwest of the country that has its own zip code and people send postcards to the tree. I love it--that's so much better than mumbling to the Lincoln Memorial for advice. Now, I found that the SPD has had a non-existent member of the Bundestag since 1973. He's even counted in the officially partlimentary rolls.

some people call me Maurice

H and I took a short trip on a lazy Sunday to nearby Coburg. Usually, I have to hunt through the city center to find a unique manhole cover to take a picture of, but in Coburg, every one had a depiction of the crest, an image of St. Moritz the city's patron. It had been years since I had been in Coburg and had never managed to see the town itself, only the fortress on the hill where Martin Luther was kept under house-arrest and finished translating the New Testament into German. Queen Victoria and Prince Albert cohabitated there for a time as well, and the whole city is drenched with seated and dethrowned royalty. There's row upon row of fantastic art deco buildings and a sackful of little castes knocking about--including one that looks like a transplanted Buckingham Palace. Albeit, there were some notorious things that went along with that hertitage as well, but it seems that sometimes city's forget and maybe appreciate the reminder that they are not some historical backwater. Even our fair village was founded by Holy Roman Emperor Charlemagne as a gift to wife, and who's ever heard of Wickedawesomestadt?