Remember this?

We had a phase back a couple months ago where it was unusually hot -- got up well into the 90s Fahrenheit -- but today we have a high of 60°F. And a steady drizzle.

A colleague of BoE's is an Englishwoman who has lived in Germany since she was 11. She speaks fluent English, of course, but she freely admits that since she missed her teen years in the UK, she's utterly lacking in slang.

Note the first city listed on the calendar.

The kids and I are so there, dudes and dudettes.

(NASN was advertising this on heavy rotation as we watched the Twins go down swinging against the O's.)

Just got a call from one of the local papers, asking my opinion about Obama and McCain.

Today was one of the English children's groups, and although BoE and the kids aren't here for the weekend, I had to go to let people into the parish hall that we use.

I was invited to a friend's birthday bash. She's a treehugger (though she's not the militant type and doesn't take it that seriously, but unfortunately some of her friends are) and she likes to have an annual theme for her birthday parties, so this year it turns out it's a vegetarian cookoff, with people bringing their own vegetarian creations. She sent me an invitation announcing this via e-mail. My response:

Hmmm...vegetarian?

1. You are what you eat.
2. Cows eat plants.
3. Therefore cows are plants.

I'm bringing beef (sorry, bovine plant) chili and bovine plant steaks. :-)

Keep an eye on the Hannover news to see if there is a small riot of environmentalists in a couple weeks. ;-)

Our apartment is, by German standards, fairly good-sized -- 105 m², to be exact, with four rooms, plus bath, kitchen, hallway and balcony. Thing is, the building was restored just after the war, and being an old building it's got pretty high ceilings (almost four meters high), so heating it isn't too fun.

The additional thing is that the windows in the living room and kitchen were replaced a few years ago with vinyl double-glazed thermal windows -- really good ones -- and just before we moved in, the windows in the workroom were also replaced with the same type. Unfortunately, the window and balcony door in our bedroom and the window in the kids' bedroom were still the old single-glazed wooden-framed type -- and worse, the balcony door (which could both open swinging inwards or also hinge on the bottom to tilt in, a common type in Germany) wasn't closing properly, sometimes popping out of the hinges and only hanging on by one hinge and the latch.

We complained to the management about it a couple times, and they sent a guy over, who sprayed WD-40 on the hinges and proclaimed it miraculously healed. Unfortunately for the management company, no such magical healing powers exist in cans of WD-40, and I pointed out the rapidly worsening signs of water damage in the frame and on the floor in front of the door (not to mention not being too happy about the door not latching properly when two small kids play in front of it).

So they finally caved and agreed to replace the door and window. The workmen came by today and did it. The only downside being that I couldn't get any work done while they were here, since it made a huge racket cutting out the old frame and installing the new one.

I immediately noticed a difference in how the living room (which adjoins our bedroom) and our bedroom felt warmer. Just in time for winter, hopefully saving us a ton on heating costs.

It sucks that the kids' room (adjoining our room) is still badly insulated -- it has two exterior cinderblock walls and most of the ceiling is also exposed to the outside (being the upstairs neighbor's terrace), and the window is still the old type, but at least it's not as leaky and drafty as our old balcony door was. It used to be that, if we left both doors to the bedrooms open from the living room (but had the windows closed), you could clearly feel the draft of the cold air coming in from the bedrooms (which is why we generally closed the door to the bedrooms in winter). Now that is no longer the case and we can let the kids use the bedrooms in wintertime more. w00t!

On the front page of the local section of today's local paper, it was reported:

• that the fire department was summoned by a fire alarm at a big supermarket. It turned out to be a balloon that had gotten itself in the laser detectors and was tripping the alarm. The fire department didn't have any ladders tall enough to retrieve it, so they in turn called the animal control department to bring a dart gun, which was used to shoot down the balloon.


• that the local airport was laid low by a mouse. It seems the mouse chewed through a cable on a transformer in a nearby hotel, which set off a chain reaction that caused a temporary power outage, delaying some flights. The mouse, alas, did not survive.

Though a rather more lively report was that the neo-Nazi political party NPD had a party meeting in Hannover, with some 500 attendees. The city tried everything it could to block them from having the meeting in the city's convention center, but legally there was nothing they could do, since the NPD is a registered political party. So the meeting went ahead -- oddly enough they had to share the building with a New Age esoteric trade show that had already been booked previously, and which decided to stay in spite of the neo-Nazis next door.

Panicked about a possible violent confrontation, 2,000 police were brought in from all over Germany to seal off the meeting.

In response, the hoi polloi of Hannover organized an anti-NPD rally, with leaders of all the major churches, other political parties, Jewish representatives, union leaders, leading business figures and so on participating in a rally at the opera house, then a march to the convention center, and culminating in a rally in front of the convention center, with the theme Bunt statt braun (literally "colorful instead of brown", brown referring to nationalist extremism in German political jargon). In all, the police estimated 20,000 people joined the various rallies, which for a city of Hannover's size is pretty huge.

Thankfully, no serious confrontation happened -- one policeman was injured by a lefty radical breaking his hand (needless to say, the radical was arrested) and one NPD member was arrested for greeting the demonstrators with a Heil Hitler salute, but otherwise everything went peacefully and without incident.

Hannover's boring. And I like it that way.

I mentioned in my previous blog entry the German conservative politician who wanted to introduce intelligent design into biology classes in Hessen -- then announced she was a lesbian. OK, that's a pretty unexpected thing, which makes my head spin a little.

But some time ago, I was shopping at a new big grocery store downtown for the first time, where they have a large fresh fish counter. I was walking up to the fish counter sort of absentmindedly, noting that the fresh fish selection looked pretty extensive. The attendant was standing there with his back to me, sharpening a knife or something, and I didn't pay much attention to him. I just stood there, scanning around to see if they might have catfish (which is getting easier to find over here, much easier than it used to be).

Then he turned around abruptly and spoke to me.

Now three things hit me all at once about this person at this moment.

1. He was Turkish.
2. He was wearing lots of makeup and dangly earrings.
3. He was speaking with an outrageous gay lisp.

Any of these things, taken individually, I would hardly take notice of (if at all). Two together, I might mildly take note of, but no big deal. Put all three together, especially when caught completely off guard like that, and my mind went SPLODE and I stood there, with my brain trying to catch up to all of this. I managed to stammer something to the effect of "uh, thanks, just looking" (which was a half-truth, as I was looking at his...quite remarkable earrings) and made my way to the frozen section, where BoE was waiting. I related this to her, and she of course was highly amused at my expense.

This is, of course, why she married me -- I supply her with endless such entertainment with my moments of weakness.

This was originally in response to a post by neim0 in Some Woman's journal. I moved it here. neim0 asked if Germany's population was still increasing, and if so, if it was due solely to immigration; he also asked about what life is like for Jews in Germany.

Germany's population is more or less holding steady or very slightly decreasing, and even then it's not imploding wholesale because of immigration. (Though Hannover actually managed a slight increase in its birth rate for once this year -- woo-hoo!)

There are literally whole towns being dissolved (as in, torn down and wiped off the map) and counties being merged in eastern Germany to save administration costs. Even here in Lower Saxony, our state, some towns are struggling to survive with occupancy rates of less than 50%. There is also some talk of merging entire states. (Imagine merging, say, Vermont and New Hampshire to save money, and you get the picture of the direness of the situation.) Yet a lot of people here have a "what, me worry?" attitude about it...

Some regions are still growing strongly (not surprisingly those that are heavily Catholic), while the former east is pretty much collapsing wholesale, in spite of the massive (and I mean massive) amounts of money being pumped into it in the form of subsidies and investments by the government (the so-called Solidaritätszuschlag -- an extra tax paid by all Westerners and paid out in the east in the form of investments, tax breaks and subsidies) and much lower cost of living.

As an aside, what gets me is that after the war, they carved up apartments and houses left and right to make space for people (our apartment is actually a third of what was a much larger one before the war -- when it was rebuilt they just carved it up into smaller units). But rather than re-combine them, they just tear them down or leave them standing empty. You can't get larger apartments even if you want them -- 3 and 4 room apartments (plus kitchen, hall and bath) are the norm, 5 and 6 room ones are nearly impossible to find.

Anyway, as for Jews in Germany, it's actually kinda funny. Jews today have the opposite problem of being almost worshipped by a lot of people. I've heard that it's hard to be "normal" as a Jew in Germany just because some people try so hard to be nice to you. Some carry it to the extreme of wanting to be Jewish themselves (which I suppose there's nothing wrong with that, but it does seem a bit odd and some Jews get annoyed by it). Meanwhile there are unfortunately a few idiots running around who wouldn't know a Jew if a bar mitzvah happened right around them, but they spray swastikas on Jewish monuments and so on just to be dumbshits.

Either way, Jewish life is actually starting to come back pretty strongly, so things can't be too bad. Today there's 100,000-200,000 (depending on how you count them) living here and a Jewish rabbinical school, Abraham-Geiger-Kolleg, recently graduated its first students (the first such students since the war), and a number of synagogues have been founded (not least in Munich). We have a synagogue in Hannover, for that matter, though their website is a serious eyesore...and it sure doesn't compare to the original pre-war one destroyed in Kristallnacht.

I was rough on Iamthefallen yesterday, and today in the local newspaper I have the explanation as to why.

It reports that there was a Lionel Richie concert in Hannover last night. The vibes must have made me severely aggressive.

I'm sure Fallen will understand and forgive me.

BoE decided to take off this weekend to stay at her parents' for a couple of days to recharge, which leaves me to batch it over the weekend.

Just now I got the weekly e-mail newsletter from the multiplex cinema downtown. Since we haven't had the time to go to see a movie in eons, normally I just chuck it and don't read it. But this time I thought, hm, maybe I could look and see what's playing. Normally they have a movie in English running (I hate dubbed movies -- it's rare they're done that well and the dubbing just bugs me).

It used to be that there was a cinema -- a crappy one, but still a cinema -- that showed only English movies. They went out of business some years ago. The multiplex began dedicating one screen to non-German movies, which always meant English; their other location sometimes showed stuff in Russian or Turkish, but the multiplex stuck to English as the "special" language.

This time they have a non-German movie in the original language, all right.

In Turkish.

Well, fuck. Guess no more English movies in Hannover anymore. *sigh*