This song, 'Happiness at the Trade Fair', sings the praises of the Düsseldorf Conference Center. The reference is to a meeting in Hall B3 in which Herr Sakamoto whips out his 'finest software', if you know what I mean.
Month: April 2016
‘Rostock is a Beautiful City’
A brief slice of an educational English-learning TV show from the former East Germany. Unfortunately, it cuts off just before the good part, in which Muttonchop drops some Sweet Slabs of Socialist Science™ on the English reporter:
Quote of the Day: ‘People of Strong, Broad Sense’
"All people of broad, strong sense have an instinctive repugnance to the men of maxims; because such people early discern that the mysterious complexity of our life is not be embraced by maxims, and that to lace ourselves up in formulas of that sort is to repress all the divine promptings and inspirations that spring from growing insight and sympathy. And the the man of maxims is the popular representative of the minds that are guided in their moral judgement solely by general rules, thinking that these will lead them to justice by a ready-made patent method, without the trouble of exerting patience, discrimination, impartiality, without any care to assure themselves whether they have the insight that comes from a hardly-earned estimate of temptation, or from a life vivid and intense enough to have created a wide fellow-feeling with all that is human."
George Eliot, The Mill on the Floss (source)
Begins With a Musical Sneeze
German Word of the Week: Schleimbeutel
German words for parts of the body are much more colorful and descriptive than their prettified Latin counterparts in English. Fuck nostril, German gives you 'nose-hole' (Nasenloch). Suck it, placenta, in German you're 'mother-cake' (Mutterkuchen). Don't think about that last one too long.
And now for the synovial bursa. WTF is the synovial bursa? This:
A bursa (plural bursae or bursas) is a small fluid-filled sac lined by synovial membrane with an inner capillary layer of viscous fluid (similar in consistency to that of a raw egg white). It provides a cushion between bones and tendons and/or muscles around a joint.
It comes from the Latin bursa, or purse. This is why people in English get bursitis.
Ooh la-de-da, bur-si-tis!
German, the Moe Szyslak of languages, doesn't bully its speakers with this hifalutin' Latinizing.
What is the 'synovial bursa'? It's a bag.
What's it filled with? Slime.
So the German word is Schleimbeutel — literally, 'slime-bag'. Now, you could also perhaps call it 'mucus-bag', since the German word for mucus is also 'slime'. (Hence the German word for the unpronounceable train-wreck of Latinate fuckwittery we English-speakers have to call mucous membrane is Schleimhaut — 'slime-skin').
But the synovial bursa isn't filled with mucus, is it now? No, it's filled with a 'lawyer of viscous fluid' — er, layer of viscous fluid — similar to an egg white.
In other words, slime. And if your slime-bag gets infected, you have a Schleimbeutelentzündung — slime-bag inflammation.
Now you know that in Germany, there are dozens of slimebags inside your body. In addition to the ones in high office (ba-da-BOOM!)
German Joys 