More fun with comic books
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Fun with comic books
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Unfortunately, pants
When people throw things at me and call me an uncultured shit — which happens frequently while shopping, hiking, and vomiting in public — it sometimes occurs to me that they’re wrong because I’m bilingual. Being bilingual is a rarity in today’s America, where most people don’t even speak one language, and instead manage to eke out a parody of communication through a series of grunts and gestures.
Today, I can sort of read a German magazine and can carry on a German conversation. I can sometimes follow German TV or radio. When I lived in Luxembourg in 1998, I even watched Alf in German. Get this: the German word for Alf is “Alf.”
It wasn’t always so rosy. I started learning German in high school, where I was taught how to tell people my name, how to ask where the disco was, and how to inquire as to whether or not Mrs. Schmidt was at home. At first, I didn’t understand everything. I didn’t get that when my teacher said “Pass auf,” she was requesting our attention rather than our unconsciousness. But it got easier, and I slugged through it. By the time I graduated high school, I was able to determine the whereabouts of the train to Berlin, what Wolfgang and Helga were doing after school, and at what time we would be invading Poland.
So, when I got to college, I was okay but not great. I figured I’d take my required two more quarters of German language, and then begin the arduous process of forgetting all of it.
College German required a lot of partner work, and my partner was a freshman named Jim. We were told to introduce ourselves to each other over and over and to tell each other our ages and to inquire whether or not the other liked sauerbraten. When we learned a new construction, we were told to create sentences using that construction. If we didn’t know how to say something, we were allowed to ask, but had to do it in German using the phrase ‘Wie sagt man…?” It all made me mentally tired — as if I was going to pass auf.
Once, deep in the midst of an assignment on relative pronoun phrases, we walked over to our T.A. to ask a question.
“Ja?” she said.
“Wie sagt man ‘pistol-whip’?”
She didn’t understand, so I pretended to beat Jim with the butt of an imaginary revolver before repeating the question.
” ‘Mit einer Pistole schlagen.’ “
Jim tried it out in German. ” ‘The man, who is wearing the blue hat, is pistol-whipping Tony Danza.’ ” He nodded. I thanked the T.A. and walked away.
More questions arose as we continued with the assignment. “Wie sagt man ‘flesh-eating bacteria’?” Jim asked later.
“Wie sagt man ‘break-dancing fiasco’?”
“Wie sagt man “David Bowie’s hairdo’?”
By the end of the session, we were turned around on the German language. We were further turned around when the T.A. brought in a popular German CD for our listening enjoyment. On the cover were four very white people in ostentatious studded sunglasses and various ridiculous hats — a hip-hop group by the name of “Die Fantastischen Vier,” or “The Fantastic Four.”
“Isn’t that a group of superheroes?” Jim asked.
The album turned out to be brilliant, and thanks to my increased skills, I was able to easily translate the lyrics (”The Smudo, the Smudo, I am the Smudo. I don’t know Karate and I don’t know Judo.”), which made me feel smart. I took the borrowed DFF album to the deli I worked at and played it loudly and proudly.
My boss, Ryan, was intrigued. He said that he only knew two German words. One was “dankeschön” (which he, like everyone else, mispronounced as “dunka-shane”) and the other was “lederhosen.”
“What does that mean, anyway?” he asked.
I knew that “hosen” meant pants, but the other half of the word had me mystified. So I pulled out my dictionary and looked it up.
“Here it is,” I told him, running my finger down the page. “It means ‘unfortunately.’ “
“So ‘lederhosen’ means ‘unfortunately, pants’?” he said.
“I guess.”
“As in, someone puts pants on their head instead of a hat and you point out their error by saying, ‘Excuse me, but unfortunately… pants.’ ”
I agreed that this was odd, so I asked my T.A. She was still afraid of me after the pistol-whipping incident but informed me that although “leider” did in fact mean “unfortunately,” “leder,” which was correct, meant “leather.”
“Dunker-shane.” I told her.
Her wariness of Jim and me did not improve with time. We were scheduled later in the day to perform a dialogue for the class about a campus issue. We had chosen the oft-lamented parking problem.
“There aren’t enough parking spots here,” I began, speaking in German.
“Yes. Yes there are not,” Jim agreed.
“There should be more.”
“Yes. Yes there should.”
“What if there was less parking?”
“That would be unfortunately,” Jim said, capitalizing on what we had learned about leiderhosen.
“But,” I pointed out, “that would mean more room for a…” I paused, then turned to the T.A. “Wie sagt man ‘Taco Bell’?”
” ‘Taco Bell,’” she answered.
“That would mean more room for a Taco Bell,” I told Jim.
“We should no parking places, and Taco Bell make,” Jim agreed.
“But what of the commuters?”
Jim rubbed his chin. “They need parking places?”
“They need.”
“We could kill all of the commuters,” he suggested, nodding.
“But what would we do with the bodies?”
“We could throw them in the river.”
“Ah,” I said, nodding back. “Yes. Let us eat tacos.”
We looked to the T.A. when we had finished. After a silent pause, she slowly offered one criticism. “When you talk about throwing the bodies into the river,” she explained, “you should say ‘in den Fluß,‘ not ‘in dem Fluß.’ Using dative case implies that you aren’t throwing bodies into the river, but are instead standing in the river and tossing them around.”
“That’s what we meant,” I said.
“Like a Frisbee,” Jim added, doing a pantomime for emphasis.
By the time I went to Luxembourg, I was set. I knew how to explain my tossing of bodies. I knew about Die Fantastischen Vier. And fortunately, I knew about my unfortunate pants. Which is pretty essential to getting the attention of Germans, as it turns out.
The time change continues to suck
I’m up at 5am, again, because my 6 month-old daughter has embarked on an anthropological study to see how much of this I can take.
To most people, 5am is an ungodly hour — one they pass dreamily while camping nude with the Rockettes in pre-war Germany or fixing a birdfeeder with their girlfriend from junior high. 5am is not a time when you’re up, reading Tweets that don’t concern you. It’s not a time you should be deleting Viagra spam email. It’s a time that you should be asleep — blissfully, forgetfully asleep. Ah, how I miss sleep.
But instead, here I am, awake. And about the only good thing I have going on is that it’s quiet at 5am — except for this baby here, who agrees with me about this stupid time change.
Let’s start with a little history lesson. Approximately 120 years ago (or maybe even longer), either God or the Flying Spaghetti Monster created the universe and programmed the sun to rise in the morning and set at night, which was a pretty good system as it lined up well with when most people were asleep or awake. He then created time zones, and decreed that said Zones shall not necessarily follow state boundaries, even though that would have been less confusing. In His infinite wisdom, He placed California three hours behind the east coast, thus ensuring that the two worlds would forever be incompatible with and alien to one another, even prior to and following Schwarzenegger’s tenure as governor. Then, because He was late for a Toastmasters meeting, He trusted the mortals to assign times to the zones and wrote His instructions on an amulet, which He gave to Karen Allen. And it was good.
But an evil French man named Belloq tried to steal the amulet. He crafted his own Staff of Ra to take to the Map Room at sunrise, but did not take back one kadam of its length to honor God, and was shown the wrong times. And while Indiana Jones followed soon after, Jones was thrown into a tomb filled with snakes and the correct information was lost forever. So for half of the year, we travel back in time one hour and live our lives in increased darkness. Having solved the problem of shortening days by making it worse, thus were the dumb Children of Earth pwned, so sayeth the Flying Spaghetti Monster, Amen.
I hate the time change. I don’t say that lightly, like saying I hate nuts in brownies. I mean that I want to find the time change where it sleeps, slit its throat, and eat its brains. I want to burn its house, destroy its crops, and salt the earth so that nothing will ever grow there again. I want to kill its livestock and sell it to Longhorn Steakhouse. I want to convert its pets to Scientology and record over all of its TiVo programs with reruns of Eight is Enough.
It’s terrible that we have this time change, but honestly, what makes it worse it the welcome it receives. My fellow citizens have sold out! People, you are given one extra hour of sleep on one night — true. But the price you pay is five months of darkness at 5pm! Yet people don’t see that. They only see their forty acres and a mule.
Well, no longer.
I say we fight the time change. And in fact, let’s go in the other direction. Move your clocks two hours forward, negating last weekend’s change and then reversing it. Let’s go to work two hours earlier than yesterday and then leave two hours earlier. Let’s reclaim 7pm. And, let’s reclaim 5am.
My daughter has started the movement already. Who’s with us?
The 2008 election results are in!
I know a few foreigners, and sometimes when we chat, they’ll ask me about the election. They’ll ask me who I think is going to win, and if things are getting exciting. And then, they’ll sometimes ask if I could explain the American election process to them, because it seems complicated. I’ll pause, wanting to make sure I get the description just right.
“Sure, no problem,” I tell them. “The best way to describe it is this: It’s really, really retarded.”
Our election process is dumb. Two people run, and each picks a running mate. Then, each team heads out into the world to call the other team a couple of assholes. It’s important to do a good job of calling your opponents assholes, and to effectively deflect asshole references directed at you. Then there is the talent portion of the contest, in which each candidate demonstrates how well he can infuriate Tom Brokaw. Then eveningwear, and then the swimsuit competition.
However, ultimately, each election is decided based on media photography.
Consider the past few elections and you’ll see I’m right. As you think about each pair, try to think like Joe the Plumber. Joe isn’t really thinking about his political allegiance or his plumbing business. Joe is being fed images between reality TV shows, like all Americans. (You know, except you. You’re actually smart and awesome. And you can fly.)
Let’s look at our first pair:
Who are you going to pick? The guy who looks near death, or the guy who looks like he’s totally going to nail the soccer mom down the street? Now look at the next election:
Again, the choice is between a walking corpse and a guy who plays the saxophone on Arsenio while wearing badass sunglasses. Even Bob Dole said privately that Bob Dole wouldn’t vote for Bob Dole if Bob Dole didn’t have a vested interest in winning because Bob Dole was Bob Dole. Bob Dole!
Now let’s check out 2000:
Okay, our choice is a cool party guy who snorted coke off of the backs of hookers while waterskiing nude through a half pipe made from the bones of legendary rock bands, or a dude who breathes fire. Easy choice.
Now obviously, by 2004, Bush had proven himself to no longer be a legendary party guy and had lost the confidence of a lot of the country, but check out the choice we had to make:
I mean, he’s older, whiter, and his ears stick out more. He can barely speak English, and he’s being serviced by a turkey. But just look at Kerry. This country can’t have a president who can’t even catch a fucking football.
Okay, caught up to the present. So the question is, who will win on Tuesday? John McCain, or Barack Obama? Well, let’s look at the evidence:
Okay, wait… that’s a pretty bad picture of McCain. Caught at a bad moment; it could happen to anyone. Let’s try again.
Hmm. I’m thinking he was in a pirate play, or perhaps yelling at kids to get off of his lawn. Try again.
Hang on, try this:
Wait.
Oh, come on! Now he’s just doing it on purpose.
Sorry, John. You seem like a good guy with some good ideas, but I don’t think you’re going to win this one. Not based on that photo record. It’s late in the game, but you might think about getting some sunglasses or a sax. Or doing more drugs. Or maybe wearing a funny hat. But make sure it’s funny in a “cool guy” way, not a “what a douchebag” way.
Oh, and lay off the telephone calls. Barack never calls me, but your people are on me like three times a day. For real, John… put the phone down. And the sax. Get a saxophone, and get some hot chicks to stand around you. It’s your only chance.