Football hooligans/Ein Hool

One of Werner Siebers’ clients is a football fan:

Der Mandant ist Fußballfan; nicht Hardcore, nicht Ultra, kein Hool, aber mit Überzeugung.

On Google, there are about 1480 ghits for “ein hool site:de”. It seems to be an abbreviation of hooligan.

I don’t know how long this has been around. There is a 2009 song ‘Meine Mutti ist ein Hool‘, but whether that invented the term, I don’t know.

Easter customs in the UK/Osterbräuche in England

From Süddeutsche Zeitung:

Kätzchen-Tätschler in Großbritannien

In Großbritannien berühren sich die Menschen gegenseitig mit gesammelten Weidenkätzchen, das soll Glück für das nächste Jahr bringen.

‘(At Easter) In Great Britain, people touch each other with pussy willow branches to bring luck for the coming year.’ (Kätzchen: catkins)

Highly mysterious.

It also says, apparently correctly, that in Australia, chocolate bunnies are sometimes replaced by chocolate bilbies – the bilby is a rabbit-sized marsupial which was a victim of the plague of rabbits. See the At the Elephant blog. Mind you, the chocolate rabbit is more of a German thing. I have heard of people in Upminster buying chocolate rabbits at Aldi, though.

Here’s another curiosity from a site in global English:

As a part of Easter tradition, there is a trend among British people to eat yummy hams, in order to commemorate the Easter Sunday.

Surely it takes more than three days to make a ham?

The same site refers to unisex Easter bonnets:

For offering prayers in the church, men and women dress up in their special outfits and as a part of their wardrobe, colorful Easter bonnets embellished with flowers is like a must.

Easter/Ostern

Happy Easter to everyone. Here’s what it looks like in Fürth:

Russian Easter cake (from Russia):

Easter bunny of quark-oil dough:

I was looking for one of these but only found it at Greller’s Backhaus (Fürther Freiheit). The quark and oil yeast dough is very soft and moist. You can find recipes via Google, but most of them are for the baking-powder variety, which I have never tried. Here is a fairly similar recipe (top one with butter and yeast, not bottom one with oil and baking powder) and here is a recipe in German.