Photos/Fotos

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I have been slow to post recently, but I did spend two days attempting to update my weblog software, until fortunately the problem was solved and the work done by Garvin Hicking, who is the Serendipity developer, with the help of the user Timbalu, who first realized that the MySQL database on my provider’s site was extremely ancient and the mysterious feedback I was getting, e.g. suggesting I increase permissions on subdirectories I could not even see, resulted from MySQL being unable to cope with the data. My fault, no doubt, as I had not updated since 2007.

To make up for the silence, here is a photo taken in Fürth last week.

Although I haven’t heard mention of the royal wedding in my many phone calls with the UK, I gather from the German press that everyone in the UK is really excited about it. If so, you might consider the book Knit Your Own Royal Wedding (amazon.de, Daily Telegraph).

Here is a picture of a bookstand at Erlangen station. Things were not like this twenty years ago:

Now an example of new German, in case you are out of touch:

And finally, taken this morning, part of a flea market outside the TV shop run by Ingomar Schnatzky:

Pictures/Bilder

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I haven’t got much time to post at the moment, so here are some photos from the Black Forest.

This one is black and white because I pressed the wrong knob on the camera:

E-learning:

This is not water photographed at a slow speed, but ice photographed at a fast speed:

A view of the Alps:

This cathedral (apparently called Dom in the sense of dome) has the third largest dome in Europe, after St. Peter’s in Rome and Florence Cathedral:

The Guardian on Germany/Die Guardian zu Deutschland

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A bit late this link, but this week the Guardian has started examining some European countries, starting with Germany – see neweurope. More detail here.

There seem to be more articles every day. I noted in particular some articles on German literature, with more suggestions in the comments (Join the new World literature tour to Germany). Then one on the life of a German family:

Back home, Gerrit opens some lovely Hassaröder Pils beer, while Katleen, in a rare lapse of taste, drinks Beck’s. They put on a CD by a German R&B singer called Joy Denalane. To my ears, it sounds as authentically uninteresting as its English-language counterpartsz. “For me, one of the great things about the past year is that German-language music is becoming popular,” says Gerrit. Fair enough, but the current German top 10 is all in English, even when the songs are sung by Germans.

On the kitchen shelves, there’s a nostalgic East German cookbook, teeming with pictures of men in feather cuts at the wheels of Trabants, and recipes so stolid that subsisting on them would make you look more like Helmut Kohl than a member of the DDR’s gymnastic team.

There’s a hisory of German cinema in clips (including a very long clip, nearly two hours long, from Leni Riefenstahl’s ‘Olympia’ – presumably the whole film – Jesse Owens in first heat at just after 38 mins.), on the war against anglicisms
, on the piecing together of shredded Stasi documents in Zirndorf, and an at-a-glance guide to Germany. And a lot more.

Coming soon, for one week each: France, Spain and Poland.

Shooting star

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The Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung on Karl-Theodor zu Guttenberg after his eventual resignation:

Die Union stritt derweil über den Umgang mit ihrem ehemaligen Shootingstar.

Germans use the term shooting star to refer to a rising star rather than a falling one, so he has now become a ‘former shooting star’. See earlier entry of May 2007, quoting an interview with Hilary Hahn in which she was surprised at Gustavo Dudamel being described as ‘the shooting stare from Venezuela’.

I you do a Google search for Guttenberg “shooting star”, you get over 235,000 ghits. Although the number of those in Germany should be falling now.