Video of Camille

I was in this storm as a one-year-old baby in a trailer home in Slidell LA.

Quotation marks versus capitalization

In German, nouns are capitalized whether they are proper or not. In order to distinguish between a proper noun and a common noun, Germans are forced to put their already capitalized noun in quotation marks.

In English, we can distinguish between an action plan and a Action Plan with simple capitalization, however. Our quotation marks serve a different purpose – signifying that we don't quite believe the word, a bit in the way we might say something like "so-called friends."

The result, when Germans write in English, is quotation marks around nouns already marked as proper by means of capital letters.

Today, I see that my translator colleague Jill Sommer has posted a nice cartoon along these lines.

Money vs. message

Yes, it's propaganda, but this speech is probably the best defense of just about everything I believe in that I have ever heard, and I couldn't have written it that well, much less delivered it that well. And the fact that it was delivered by a healthy, good looking, eloquent black woman is something that I was not sure I would ever see in my lifetime back when Jesse Jackson made a mostly symbolic attempt at the White House.

I was feeling fairly pessimistic about US politics after Citizens seemed to tip the scales once and for good in favor of big money, but the main Republican message at their convention was, of course, based on an intentional misreading of a sloppy, but nonetheless unambiguous wording by Obama.

So it looks like it's money versus message in November. I was afraid money would, as so often, win, but after Michelle's message I'm not so sure.

"Central Europe"

The Germans use the term "Mitteleuropa" (Central Europe) which has no real equivalent in English (but see this entry at Wikipedia). Now, the Economist has published an interesting video, which argues that the term Eastern Europe is also out of date.

Some of the new terms proposed must be in jest, but it is interesting that the term "Central Europe" is not among them.

Charges for stolen goods

Over here in Germany, the music industry, the movie industry, and book publishers have put a surcharge on just about everything from printers to USB sticks in order to make up for losses they say they incurred because people increasingly copy music, movies, and books. You pay several euros, for instance, for that memory card in your digital camera. (Not sure how many people use digital cameras to copy material.)

Now, a website has been put up to show you what you pay where. You can also enter the number of items you purchased over the past few years, and the site shows you how much you paid in charges for stolen goods. In my case, it is around 275 euros.

I have always found interesting the claim that copied material would've otherwise been purchased. I wonder how many people copy or download something to see whether they like it and then decide they don't.

Before and after photos of Germany

I just came across this collection of photos of Eastern Germany taken around the time the Wall fell and then years later, after the buildings had been renovated. The contrast is stark, and I can tell you from personal visits that they are not exaggerated exceptions – this is what has happened to eastern Germany over the past 20 years.

Berlin

I'm in Berlin for a few days, and while riding my foldable bike back to my hotel from a business meeting, I realized how many memories I now have here – even though I have never lived in Berlin.

I left the Heinrich Böll Foundation (the German Greens) building just across the street from Deutsches Theater, where I sang on stage at open mike night two years ago, and only a few streets down from where I was offered a job as editor of the German photovoltaics magazine in 2008; rode across Under den Linden, where I purchased a real East German copy of Karl Marx's Communist Manifesto back in June 1989 (just a few months before the wall came down, but even then no one saw it coming); passed by Galarie Lafayette, where I went shopping with Nelson Mandela's daughter back in 2001, when I served as an interpreter for her on an official visit here; took a right before reaching Kottbusser Tor, close to where some of my in-laws live and two streets from a German journalist who did my first two magazines with me in 2006 and 2007 (the person who was the German exchange student at the University of Texas in 1990 brought us together) – and a few blocks from the bar where a jazz trio used to offer open mike once a week (but, alas, it is no more); and finally back to my hotel just down the street from Postdamer Platz, where I have sundry memories not worth listing in detail.

Next life, I'm moving to Berlin.