I intended to leave this topic (see recent entry) but now see that the Burns Night festivities in Fürth took place later than I thought. Photos of the event.

Das Bühnenprogramm bot den Zuschauern jede Menge Abwechslung. Jenni Heron sang zum Beispiel Lieder von George Burns.

It’s a long time since I’ve thought about George Burns, who died in 1996. Apparently he was born Nathan Birnbaum, not a very Scottish name.

But I do remember Jenni Heron, not only as a member of Nuremberg’s Scottish Vorzeigefamilie, but as a member of the cast of one of the wonderful musicals put on by the US forces when they were still in Fürth and the base had the biggest military court outside the USA and a small theatre called Stage 13 in Building 13 (all now demolished or converted into flats). One missed the exciting murder trials and the singing and dancing in a small and cavernous theatre.

Some kind of successor to Stage 13 apparently exists, albeit with a British spelling, presenting pantomimes: Theatre 13. And there have been English-language carol services in Erlangen featuring the unfortunately named choir SING A-MOLL.

Last week the suffix -gate was chosen as the German Anglicism of the Year 2013. Unusually, this award recognizes the positive contribution of anglicisms to the German language. -gate has been around a long time, even in German, but was particularly common last year.

I seem to have missed Mopsgate (puggate). And this despite the fact that I recently saw two women and six pugs on the corner. This was explained when I traced a pug breeder to a nearby road. Trevor kindly found a collection of German pug quotations for me.

The story is the disappearance of a 6-kilo gold-painted stone figure of a pug from a monument to Loriot, the stage name of Vicco von Bülow, who famously said that life without a pug is possible, but meaningless. The pug figure was placed on a stele by unknown persons, so it was not physically attached nor part of the original monument. It may have been blown off and shattered.

Stuttgart sucht also weiter einen Mops aus Stein, 27 Zentimeter groß und sechs Kilo schwer. Die Polizei kennt den Fall, hat aber nur so lange ermittelt, bis feststand, dass die Figur nicht zum Denkmal gehört. „Das wäre ja dann ein besonders schwerer Fall von Diebstahl“, sagte ein Sprecher. Es liege keine Anzeige vor. „Keine Beschädigten, keine Beschuldigten, keine Straftat – so ist das bei der Polizei.“

There is a lot of literature about pugs in German, not just by Jandl. I remember from Boris Godunov ein Mops kam in die Küche und stahl dem Koch ein Ei, but I am indebted to Trevor for the other link. And apparently Queen Victoria had multiple pugs (why did the Queen descend to corgis?)