Back in the U.S.A... um... well we were...

We just flew in from our whirlwind "N. needs to experience a REAL American Thanksgiving" tour. The visit included my pop's house in Kansas (do NOT insert Dorothy joke here) to get the full Turkey Day experience, see my Pennsylvania bro, catch up with some friends, and reacquaint myself with the step-nieces/nephew.

I think that for now bullets will just have to do:

• OVERSTIMULATION on the English already! It is everywhere! My ears are tuned into the stuff and I can't seem to block it out. Maddening.
• Is it me or is Chicago ALWAYS cold as ... hmm, I guess hell doesn't really fit in here... OK, cold as a well digger's ass in November? Cold as a witch's tit in a brass bra? Cold as a cast iron commode. Perhaps you get the idea.
• Chicago is filled with pro-Obama stuff. Yup, I even bought a shirt that says, "1-20-2009, The End of an Error". LOVE IT!
  
• My home town is building a huge arena in a depressed, downtown area. Visitors will actually have to walk about 3 blocks to get to the place, and they're pissed.
  
• Renting a car is expensive. It might even get more expensive because N. has fallen in love with the Nissan Murano... uh oh!
• The grocery stores in my home town have all taken to including a "home" section complete with furniture and bedding. WTF? Do I really want to have sheets and raw chicken in the same basket?
  
• Coke Zero is hard to get in America... shame.
  
• Six flights (three coming - three going) and no delays, no luggage troubles... it was lovely. Well, as lovely as spending an entire day traveling halfway around the world can be.
  
• Has anyone else noticed how LOUD Americans are? I felt like I was constantly surrounded by a group of people who just wanted to shout at each other. (Inside voices, people!)
  

We tried to sure that my sweet German wife, N., experienced all the traditional Thanksgiving events... did I miss any?

1. Dinner with all the trimmings with not one but two groups... one is family, the other friends... thankfully not both on the same day.
2. Football... Nebraska Cornhuskers... not at their best may I say.
3. Macy's Day Parade complete with goofy news people saying inane things about huge balloons with such a tone as to let you know they are reading the pre-written statements and would never actually THINK these things.
4. Pumpkin AND Pecan Pie!
5. Sweet potatoes AND mashed potatoes... to hell with the double starch rule! No one complains when you have two vegetables.
   
6. Tearing apart a wishbone... and winning!
   
7. Drinking way too much as a way of relating to the family around you.
8. Reading a fat Thanksgiving Day newspaper to scope out Black Friday ads.
   
9. Black Friday shopping starting at dark thirty.
10. Friday evening meeting up with friends, preferably at a bar.
11. Last minute dash to the grocery store for that forgotten item.
12. Realizing after desert that the rolls are languishing on the counter instead of being served at the table.

Please let me know if we missed anything... maybe we'll have to go back.

This is going to mess up my whole day

Don't these people understand?
I rely on MY bakery and the nice bakery lady to be here EVERY morning!

This is what I saw when I rounded the corner to my local bakery today. Two men tearing my favorite breakfast place apart. No rows of happy little rolls waiting to go into a paper sack and taken away. No rack of robust German bread loaves. No piles of tantalizingly warm Brezeln (soft pretzel) with different coverings from salt to seeds. No lines of sweet temptations begging to be taken away.

The two large signs in the window proclaim that the haven of fresh bread smells will be closed for refurbishing until the 2nd of December! (Good thing I'm going out of town, eh?)

I NEED my two Kürbiskern-Brötchen (pumpkin seed rolls) with a crisp outside and a soft but hearty inside that come fresh out of the oven. I NEED my nice bakery lady to welcome me into the shop with a smile and to pull out the "best of the batch" for me, not too crispy, not too browned.

These people don't seem to understand how much they can upset their loyal customers by doing such a thing!

OK, OK, So I know that there are four other bakeries within one hundred meters. Of course I traipsed my sad self over to one of those. BUT, the ladies in the other bakery were not so nice. In fact throughout my one and a half minutes of waiting in line, asking for what I want AND having money demanded of me, "Don't you have five more cents to make this easier?", I encountered enough Berliner Schnauze to last me a week. (Good thing I'm going out of town, eh?)

What, you might ask, is Berliner Schnauze? Hm... Pleite did a great job of describing it here. It might be explained as a feeling you get from the average Berliner that their city has made them as rough and gruff as possible. I would say that it is an aloofness mixed with arrogance and displayed as rudeness.

How can a reasonable person WANT to start their day with a bakery lady giving out Berliner Schnauze with their morning bread?

Ahem, on a side note... the Mohnschnecke (poppy seed snail) in the Schnauze shop looked so good... I simply HAD to pick one up.
Well, come on.
Concessions had to be made to assure that my day wouldn't be THAT messed up!

The Final Frontier returns

Is ANYBODY else as excited about this as I am?

"Space is disease and danger, utter darkness and silence... buckle up."

Check out the trailer here.

What McCain means to me now.

I'm ready for the word McCain to go back to what it was before all of this Palin scare... a company that sells french fries. In this case out of a vending machine at a train station. Oh... and yes, you can get ketchup OR mayo with these babies!

Yes what you see on the ground in front of the machine ... those are fries carelessly thrown aside.

AIDS cured in at least one patient

Rare Treatment Is Reported to Cure AIDS Patient

Out of Berlin's Charité Hospital comes the news that a leukemia/AIDS patient has been AIDS free for 20 months after a risky bone marrow transplant provided to him by a lucky person who is immune to the virus.

Of course only time will tell if the disease is truly at bay, but 20 months is a long time.

Stem cells... who would have thought?!
Maybe stem cells are not as evil as everyone says.
MAYBE America should stop these antiquated views and begin seriously working with them again.

The article says that they've tried this before, without good results.

I've said it before, and I'll say it again. IF they cure AIDS, it will crush a multi-billion dollar industry. Maybe this is why you have Dr. Robert Gallo (one of many men making a fortune and fueling his ego from this disease) saying that he would rather take his chances with antiretrovirals.

The Resident - on being a liberal

Last night my deeply Republican mother and I had a political conversation. This usually ends badly as I am so far to the left, and she is so far to the right.

What it came down to was her using the term "liberal" as though it is a dirty word. The tone of her voice when she says it exposes her deep sense of loathing for the word and the deed. It is the same tone she uses when she calls me un-American, or Agnostic.

Perhaps what the latest presidential election has meant to me is that my elected leaders are no longer going to use the word "liberal" as a dirty word. It is no longer equated so easily with this un-American terminology.

I, like The Resident, am proud to be an American... and a liberal.

"This is about the human heart."

Someone please give me this guy's contact information.
I want to give him a hug.



Thanks Matt

Don't want to watch?
Maybe you should just read it.

Special commentary
Keith Olbermann—Countdown, MSNBC
11/10/08

Finally tonight as promised, a Special Comment on the passage, last week, of Proposition Eight in California, which rescinded the right of same-sex couples to marry, and tilted the balance on this issue, from coast to coast.

Some parameters, as preface. This isn't about yelling, and this isn't about politics, and this isn't really just about Prop-8. And I don't have a personal investment in this: I'm not gay, I had to strain to think of one member of even my very extended family who is, I have no personal stories of close friends or colleagues fighting the prejudice that still pervades their lives.

And yet to me this vote is horrible. Horrible. Because this isn't about yelling, and this isn't about politics.

This is about the... human heart, and if that sounds corny, so be it.

If you voted for this Proposition or support those who did or the sentiment they expressed, I have some questions, because, truly, I do not... understand. Why does this matter to you? What is it to you? In a time of impermanence and fly-by-night relationships, these people over here want the same chance at permanence and happiness that is your option. They don't want to deny you yours. They don't want to take anything away from you. They want what you want -- a chance to be a little less alone in the world.

Only now you are saying to them -- no. You can't have it on these terms. Maybe something similar. If they behave. If they don't cause too much trouble. You'll even give them all the same legal rights -- even as you're taking away the legal right, which they already had. A world around them, still anchored in love and marriage, and you are saying, no, you can't marry. What if somebody passed a law that said you couldn't marry?

I keep hearing this term "re-defining" marriage.

If this country hadn't re-defined marriage, black people still couldn't marry white people. Sixteen states had laws on the books which made that illegal... in 1967. 1967.

The parents of the President-Elect of the United States couldn't have married in nearly one third of the states of the country their son grew up to lead. But it's worse than that. If this country had not "re-defined" marriage, some black people still couldn't marry...black people. It is one of the most overlooked and cruelest parts of our sad story of slavery. Marriages were not legally recognized, if the people were slaves. Since slaves were property, they could not legally be husband and wife, or mother and child. Their marriage vows were different: not "Until Death, Do You Part," but "Until Death or Distance, Do You Part." Marriages among slaves were not legally recognized.

You know, just like marriages today in California are not legally recognized, if the people are... gay.

And uncountable in our history are the number of men and women, forced by society into marrying the opposite sex, in sham marriages, or marriages of convenience, or just marriages of not knowing -- centuries of men and women who have lived their lives in shame and unhappiness, and who have, through a lie to themselves or others, broken countless other lives, of spouses and children... All because we said a man couldn't marry another man, or a woman couldn't marry another woman. The sanctity of marriage. How many marriages like that have there been and how on earth do they increase the "sanctity" of marriage rather than render the term, meaningless?

What is this, to you? Nobody is asking you to embrace their expression of love. But don't you, as human beings, have to embrace... that love? The world is barren enough.

It is stacked against love, and against hope, and against those very few and precious emotions that enable us to go forward. Your marriage only stands a 50-50 chance of lasting, no matter how much you feel and how hard you work.

And here are people overjoyed at the prospect of just that chance, and that work, just for the hope of having that feeling. With so much hate in the world, with so much meaningless division, and people pitted against people for no good reason, this is what your religion tells you to do? With your experience of life and this world and all its sadnesses, this is what your conscience tells you to do?

With your knowledge that life, with endless vigor, seems to tilt the playing field on which we all live, in favor of unhappiness and hate... this is what your heart tells you to do? You want to sanctify marriage? You want to honor your God and the universal love you believe he represents? Then Spread happiness -- this tiny, symbolic, semantical grain of happiness -- share it with all those who seek it. Quote me anything from your religious leader or book of choice telling you to stand against this. And then tell me how you can believe both that statement and another statement, another one which reads only "do unto others as you would have them do unto you."

---

You are asked now, by your country, and perhaps by your creator, to stand on one side or another. You are asked now to stand, not on a question of politics, not on a question of religion, not on a question of gay or straight. You are asked now to stand, on a question of...love. All you need do is stand, and let the tiny ember of love meet its own fate. You don't have to help it, you don't have it applaud it, you don't have to fight for it. Just don't put it out. Just don't extinguish it. Because while it may at first look like that love is between two people you don't know and you don't understand and maybe you don't even want to know...It is, in fact, the ember of your love, for your fellow **person...

Just because this is the only world we have. And the other guy counts, too.

This is the second time in ten days I find myself concluding by turning to, of all things, the closing plea for mercy by Clarence Darrow in a murder trial.

But what he said, fits what is really at the heart of this:

"I was reading last night of the aspiration of the old Persian poet, Omar-Khayyam," he told the judge.

"It appealed to me as the highest that I can vision. I wish it was in my heart, and I wish it was in the hearts of all:

"So I be written in the Book of Love;

"I do not care about that Book above.

"Erase my name, or write it as you will,

"So I be written in the Book of Love."

---

Good night, and good luck.

Improv Everywhere In Berlin On Saturday

Charlie Todd of Improv Everywhere was in Berlin today to visit a movie event and of course to carry out a mission!

Adam of That Queer Expatriate had found out about the mission and quite happily was going to be in town on this day, so he suggested that we get together for a little fun.

Alexanderplatz was the chosen location for the Berlin mission. Participants needed to download an Mp3 found here and follow the other simple instructions such as wear a red, yellow, blue or green shirt... have an umbrella... and have a balloon. Everyone started their player at exactly 2.30 and most people seemed to be synched together.

The mission itself was 45 minutes from start to finish. It seems that most of these events take place in a city park or something because in the beginning and the end the participants should be lying on the ground. Well, I just gotta tell you, I've seen what goes on at Alexanderplatz, and you weren't going to catch me lying on that nasty concrete around that fountain!

Anyone who has been in this famous city square knows that there are always MANY people meandering about, a good many of them tourists. I can just imagine the confusion they felt as they watched two hundred or so folks huddling together holding up umbrellas as though to shut out the sky, humming all the while.

Several of the confused souls actually approached me and inquired as to what the deal was. I think they came after me because I was certainly one of the oldest participants, and hey, I probably wasn't looking quite as crazy as the rest of the group.

We did several interesting things such as make human Tetris pieces, jump in the air in unison, high five non-participants, twirl umbrellas and of course the EPIC BATTLE! It was a balloon fight which pitted participants of different colored shirts against each other.

In the end as everyone was lying on the ground the voice on the recorder, "Steve" let us know that just as in real war, there are no winners. That was the most political statement of the entire event.

All in all, a very cool event and I'm extremely happy that I was finally feeling well enough to check it all out!

My photos, shush, don't tell anyone... we were supposed to be participating... not taking photos.

When they post official photos and video, I'll make a new posting.

Here you can see some of the past events and get an idea of what happened here in Berlin.

The Mp3 Experiment Tour from ImprovEverywhere on Vimeo.

UPDATE:
Enjoy video wrap up of the Improv Everywhere in Berlin here.

Virtual Post Election Bash

Welcome to the Virtual Post Election Bash courtesy of Diane at Martinis for Two!

I'm not sure if this is what she really had in mind with her idea, but after deep reflection throughout this November 5th, 2008, it is exactly how I feel.

For the entire time I've lived abroad it has been my habit to cringe when a well-meaning person has asked where I hail from originally. "Ummm... the United States."

"Oh, the land of George W. Bush", or something similar almost always comes out of their mouths next. Usually this is followed by some smart-assed comment about the Iraq War, Freedom Fries, WMD or "Where is Osama bin Laden anyway"? Some have even been callous enough to ask outright if I voted for the guy. To which I have always proudly answered that I didn't vote for him either time.

Talk like this on my part is what my mother would call "Un-American". Yes ladies and gentlemen, admitting that I am proud to have ticked my ballot for "ANYONE BUT BUSH" is not patriotic.

When I moved to Germany she implored me to not move away and "run down America" at every opportunity. What she didn't understand was that W was doing this much more efficiently than I ever could have.

As conservative America gasped in horror at Michelle Obama's statement that she was proud of her country for the first time... I was not horrified... I was mollified, relieved, calm even.

“For the first time in my adult lifetime, I am really proud of my country,” she told a Milwaukee crowd, “and not just because Barack has done well, but because I think people are hungry for change.”

Ladies and Gentlemen I too was horrified for years as I watched my friends and family support what I felt was a regime which was steadily approaching fascism. I myself gasped in horror every time I watched W impose another dictatorial control over the American people.

I observed with pain in my heart as he compromised the United States Constitution by his actions of disregarding the voices of both houses of Congress, the elected representatives of the citizens of the United States of America. With his every utterance of the word "Terror", designed to control and frighten the American public to its core, I held my breath... in the words of John Mayer, "Waiting on the World to Change".

And then along comes this guy. He's kinda goofy looking you know? His head is shaped a bit funny and well, let's admit it, his ears stick out.

But he opens his mouth and just like Michelle Obama, for the first time in my adult life I too am proud to be an American.

After decades of disregarded promises from politicians who always manage to sound like used car salesmen, after eight years of failed policies by George W. Bush, after feeling personally affronted by Bill Clinton's administration for bullshit like "Don't Ask, Don't Tell" and don't forget the "Defense of Marriage Act", after all of this... I had almost lost hope for a LEADER to enter the White House.

Yet today I believe for the first time that a leader has come to this important position. On January 20th it is my feeling that a real man will be sworn into the Presidency of the United States, and I am proud.

I know that today for the first time in many years, I will be able to hold my head up and answer the question of my national origin... not with my normal hesitation... not with fear of retribution... but with PRIDE.

Thank you Barack Hussein Obama for bringing back my hope and pride in my homeland.

Maybe starting today the label Expatriate won't feel so much like Ex-Patriot.

Based on the content of his character

What a momentous occasion... America, even the world, is going through a transformation.

The country which re-elected George Bush in 2004 has shown amazing flexibility in electing an agent of change into the White House.

Three hundred thirty-eight electoral college votes. This man truely has the "mandate" which Bush claimed to have in 2004. The people of America have spoken. "We want change."

It is a testament to the quality of Obama's leadership that he was able to mobilize the American people in such a way as to get out his message and overcome great odds to win this election.

I have hope that the man displaying these qualities can help this struggling country and its people rise to the possibilities we all know they have.

Earlier this evening I heard something which astounded me, and I hope I got that right. The "spark" for the beginning of the National Association for the Advancement for Colored People (NAACP) was a race riot in Springfield, IL in 1908 - the beginning spot of Barack Obama's political career. In 2009 - the year Obama will be sworn into the office of the President of the United States - will be the 100 year anniversary of the official founding of the NAACP.

Congratulations Barack Obama.
Congratulations America.

Sunday Mornin' Comin' Down

Wow, I'm finally seeing an end to this stupid health problem. A simple cold morphs into a sinus infection which then morphs into an eye infection. This is something I would rather not repeat.

I've learned some things while being sequestered in the apartment:

• The new neighbors with three kids (about 6-10 years old) have a discipline problem. One of them really enjoys screaming at her parents for about four minutes then running into her room and slamming her door. Lovely. It wouldn't be so bad if she didn't do this about six times a day. Once she even performed her little drama at 3am!
• I have enough DVD movies that if I wanted to stay at home for 4 weeks with a movie running during all waking hours, I wouldn't have to watch any of them twice.
  
• Laptops are lovely, but they suck to edit pictures.
• My cat really enjoys it when I pull out the sofabed and live on it. He then does his best to live on top of me.
• We live quite close to Tempelhof Airport. The final days before it closed there were many OLD planes offering rides. Let's just say that it was pretty noisy. BUT, the silence we hear now is almost bothersome. Really I didn't care either way ... keep it open, or close it... but it still is a shame to see such a part of history just disapear.
  
• My local Kaiser's grocery store was closed for remodeling when I got sick. It SUCKS to have a cold yet need to take a bus to go get "sicky food". So I had to make due with what was already in the cabinets or what I could have delivered... at least until N. could make it to a grocery store for me.
  
• When looking for serious spicy/hot foods (to aid icky nasal stuff movement) in Germany, most people are SOL. I however, found out that the local pizza place delivers hot wings which are actually fairly hot! Yea! They just needed some Tabasco and off we went!
• German doctors are more than happy to keep you away from work if they believe that you need rest and relaxation time.
  
• German friends keep telling me that when I get a little more healthy I must take a three day weekend and go visit a "wellness hotel" for true recuperation.
• Pharmacies in Germany really are a racket. They charge at least twice as much than American pharmacies for prescription only goods, and three to four times as much for simple over the counter items. You'll have trouble finding a bottle of Ibuprofen with more than 100 tablets. IF you do, it will cost four times what it would in the States. Most drugs are actually behind the counter. The customer must describe and discuss their symptoms with the pharmacist. When asking directly for an item, odds are you will be asked for your symptoms anyway.
• Election coverage on CNN International and BBC International gets boring after about 30 minutes. I'm just hoping that the election comes out as predicted.
  

Speaking of the election...
For your viewing pleasure:
SNL with John McCain and Tina Fey as Palin on QVC hawking campaign-related goods while getting their message out.
I particularly like the part where Palin says, "Available now, we got a bunch of these 'Palin in 2012' T-shirts. Just try and wait until after Tuesday to wear 'em, OK? Because I'm not goin' anywhere. And I'm certainly not goin' back to Alaska. If I'm not goin' to the White House, I'm either runnin' in four years or I'm gonna be a white Oprah so, you know, I'm good either way."