Pretending it's summer

Now I'm not sure what it's like where you live, but here (in the Southern Europe of Germany), it's winter time and therefore it's dark and it's cold and it's miserable. It's also grey and it's damp and it's limiting. There's no sunshine or warmth or really hope of any kind and let's just say it's not exactly Los Angeles. Not sure if LA is the pinnacle of hope and warmth and sunshine and all that but maybe for some people it is. But anyways, if you're not loaded and/or in the elite or whatever (or, of course, living in some warm place like, well, LA I guess) then Covid has made it impossible to do the normal things like flying somewhere warm or just being warmed by the sight of your giant piles of money (I guess) then you have to improvise. And so, while we can't transplant ourselves to where it actually is summer (or at least warm, sunny winter) we can at least pretend it's summer. And what better way to do that than drinking IPAs with cool edgy artistic and summertime-thought-inducing colourful labels from a hip brewery in Barcelona?

Prost!

On a roll

Several months (years?) ago I wrote something about how if you're new to a place then it seems there's a lot to say because you really notice the differences. When you first arrive in Bavaria you notice that nothing is open on Sundays, that people drink beer pretty much everywhere, and that every second car is a BMW (probably other stuff but since I've been here so long I don't notice it and I also forget it). But as you stay in a place for a long time, you lose your original bearings and the "weird" stuff becomes normal and all of a sudden you're all out of those catchy "how the French properly strike" or whatever it is. But, in the thick of the ten year celebration in which we find ourselves, something actually stood out to me today that had momentarily been pushed to the sidelines (side note: there's actually an evolutionary explanation for this and it's an important part of how the brain works related to purposely ignoring anything that has become normal as part of an initial filtering process that without the brain would become overwhelmed and not be able to focus on anything) but it really is rather strange. And that is the issue of Germans just loving to swear and to do so in English all the while assuming (or probably not even thinking about it at all) that it's the equivalent of saying "Scheiße" (which of course translates directly as "shit" but I would translate taking severity or shockingness into account as more like "oh darn"). Everywhere you go, in informal as well as formal (or, like, business) contexts, people are swearing up and down in English. Now, there are quite "bad" or offensive words in German that you would definitely not hear in the workplace (if "workplace" were a common thing now, that is) and you would most definitely not see or hear them in advertising. But somehow, English curse words are just all the rage and totally somehow acceptable everywhere in German society. It's especially weird in light of the fact that of all the big EU countries like Germany, France, Italy, and Spain, Germany by far has the most fluent English speakers and it's very common for Germans to speak quite good English. It's not like in China where they just write random English words on clothes because it looks cool; for the most part it seems people know that these are bad words. But who knows.

So there are some classic examples such as Unilever Germany (heard of them?)'s 2012 ad campaign: "Fuck the Diet". It was huge and it was everywhere. The ad campaign on regular television and on billboards was really Fuck the Diet.

Another humorous example comes from the BVG, the public utility which runs the transportation system in Berlin. This is a "normal", well-respected company or commission or whatever it is and is basically synonymous with the TTC in Toronto. And I have to give it to the BVG because this is pretty hilarious. Now some of you older folks may not have the requisite background so I will fill you in. Back in the good old days of the 90's, there was a very influential rap group called the Wu-Tang Clan. And their best known song went: "Wu-Tang Clan ain't nothin' to fuck with" basically over and over again. It was pretty rad for a teenager. Anyways, the other context that you will require to really get the full humour of the whole thing is that in German the subway is called the U-Bahn. And here is their rad ad from 2016:

Good old U-Bahn-Clan ain't nothing to fuck with. That is some golden advertising right there. But now we come to the latest event that reminded me of this rather hilarious cultural idiosyncrasy of the German people. I've noticed some new billboard ads popping up all around town lately advertising what is, I presume, a new gym. Ok, I looked it up: it's a fitness studio with a few locations around Munich (and several more throughout Germany) and it's called "FitX Fitness Studios". Fair enough. The ad campaign has a tagline "Do you feel X?" and it's got your standard hardcore fitness stuff like "What limits?", etc. And then there's this golden example, of which there are at least a handful of ~10 ft. tall exemplars around our neighbourhood:

 Funny stuff!

Let the festivities begin

Welcome readers to the tenth (yes, you read that correctly, that's 10th) year of the Internet-famous Grenoble WMD Blog. Actually, after just one year had passed since its inception, we would have been in the second year so I guess technically this is the 11th year of the Blog, but the important point is that in around 2 weeks from now, Pemulis and Joelle will have been European residents for a full decade. That is some scary Scheiße.

The scariest part of it by far (while the sheer large amount of time is quite up there) is how much stuff one (or two or now actually four) can accumulate over the course of a tenth of a century (keeping in mind that the 3rd and 4th were only actually present for some portion of those ten years and therefore only contribute so much). Yeehaw one of these days we're gonna have to put on one heck of a mean garage sale.

While the official ten year anniversary of our arrival is almost 3 weeks away, I think that now is as good a time as any to start a series of celebratory posts to mark this momentous occasion in both the Blog's life (not that many blogs have existed for more than a decade you know) but also our own. In this particular instalment, let's take a step 3650 days into the past and begin that dangerous exercise where you see what's changed and what hasn't over the course of a good chunk of time.

The biggest difference is of course that now we have both a record player and a cargo bike. In other words I'm able to now say that my goals for adulthood have been met. Not bad for the "ten year challenge". Other minor differences include the fact that I lost all my hair, I now enjoy eating white sausage for breakfast, we can no longer come anywhere close to living our lives to the fullest due to a major global pandemic (though I guess we're not at all unique in that regard), and we have two kids. All the other differences fall somewhere down in the cracks.

It hasn't all been strawberries and rainbows, of course. While the ten year challenge was started by Facebook at the behest of the US government as a simple way to update their facial recognition databases and build more powerful models that could predict what fugitives, dissidents, and climate activists living in the shadows might look like in the time since a viable picture was able to be snapped, the general principle of "seeing how far you've come" in ten years can have a painful side as well. At a societal level there's of course the pandemic. Think about the freedoms you took for granted ten years ago that we can only dream about today. But personally for the Pemulis Family, we are forced to contend with the fact that ten years ago, we could imagine a future where we could travel back to Canada any time we wanted. Oh wait, that's back to Covid stuff again. Wow it's hard to think much about anything else these days.

But for once let's try to focus on some good, shall we? Some kind of festivity tied into this whole ten years in Europe celebration thing and connected to something new in our lives. Ready? We are now connoisseurs (well, appreciators at least) of Port Wine. Man if you drink a real bottle of Port? Not that shit from the grocery store but an actual real live bottle of Port? Wow. Now that's a real experience that we needed to reach the ripe old age of 40 to understand. Good God. I know we're missing out on the whole legal marijuana in Canada thing but we do have Port here. And Port is good. Well, come to think of it, I presume that one can also buy real port in Canada. So I guess the goodness dies down a bit. BUT, I think we can say that appreciating Port is something to celebrate in a ten year challenge sort of way. Maybe. I'll just go find out...

Talkin Omicron Blues

This is called "Talkin' Omicron Blues"

I was feeling kinda like I couldn't breathe
Plus I couldn't taste anything and had a fever of 103!
The Omicron was a-comin' around, it was in the air, it was on the ground
It was showin' up all over

It had come up here most hurriedly
Probly takin' a route through Italy
Got me a Pfizer booster shot, put on a FFP2 mask, yoo-hoo
I'm a real threat now to the Omicron, look out!

Now we all agree with Djokovic
Although the quarantine hotel can be a bitch
It don't matter too much that he can do anything he wanna
At least you can't say he's bowing down to big pharma!
That's to say like if you're feeling cold you should drink an ice coffee at the North Pole!

I was lookin' everywhere for the Omicron and an antigen test
I got up in the mornin' to get in line and beat the rest
Looked at the Apotheke and the DM
Looked behind the Edeka and the Corona Test Zentrum
Couldn't find any

Looked behind the sink, behind the chair
I was lookin' for them Schnelltests everywhere
I looked inside the Cargo Bike
Looked under a big pile of maggots
All I found was Bob Saget
(too soon?)

I was sittin' home alone an' started to sweat
I could feel the Omicron in my TV set
Sure don't want the long Covid
I got enough problems with my kid!

When I finally started thinkin' right
I went to see my doctor and got into a fight
He told me the Omicron is like a flu!
You know the one? Last year it killed a million or two.

Finally found a test
Swabbed the back of my nose and my throat...

Hope it's negative! Good God!