Timothy J. Gibbons

Friday, March 8

Weekly news round-up - a regular feature spotlighting things you would have read if you hadn't been captivated by my love of vegetables:

European countries on Monday applauded a decision by Switzerland to join the United Nations after 57 years on the sidelines ... "This historic decision puts one of Europe's oldest democracies where she belongs — at the heart of global decision-making," British Foreign Secretary Jack Straw said.
The U.N is at the heart of global decision making? Eh, sorry ... just having an Americo-centric moment ...

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Superman will be weakened and suffer irreparably if a hair company is allowed to keep marketing a green hair gel called Kryptonite, the superhero's creator claims.
First, that's an awesome lede. Second, does it matter that Krypton is a real element? Third, it'd be cool if they came out with red Kryptonite gel: "I used this new gel, and look -- now I have an ant head! and grew a third arm! Nifty!"

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A determined cow that hurdled a six-foot fence to escape from a Cincinnati slaughterhouse and eluded police for 11 days will be allowed to live out the rest of her natural life. The 1,200-pound Charolais was an hour from death when she bolted from a barn at Ken Meyer Meats, bowling over workers leaving for a break.
See, this is where kryptonite could come in handy. What, you're telling me that's a normal cow?

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Some people live in New York ... perhaps only for the mysteriously pleasurable sight of a stranger on the morning subway or the evening bus slithering into an empty seat or getting a good grip on a pole and then deeply resuming his or her paperback of "The Counterlife" or "Glitz" or "The Vampire Lestat" or "The Idiot" or "All the Pretty Horses" or "A Journal of the Plague Year," or, most likely of all, a book you've never heard of.
Oh, c'mon ... you're saying that the people on the subway are actually readingthose books? I've always figured that anybody with an on-so-serious tome on public transportation is just showing off. They really have have a comic book or something stashed inside.

posted at 4:45 PM by Timothy J. Gibbons | link

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Thursday, March 7

Mmmmm ... corn ....
I've been eating more vegetables recently, mainly as a result of not cooking for myself. Restaurant meals come with salad, cafeteria food almost always includes some sort of veggie, and even German frozen pizzas are topped with corn.
No, don't leave yet -- this has a point.
The strange thing is that I find myself liking them. I've never been a particularly picky eater, but my vegetable cravings were pretty much sated with potatoes. Usually in the form of french fries. Or mashed. Mmmm, mashed potatoes ... Anyway, I was the guy in college who tried to convince people that Combos could count as vegetables 'cause they had paprika in 'em. Hey, it's green -- that should give it points for something.
Just as I got to the point that I look forward to feeding on fodder -- a plate of peas Monday, carrots Tuesday, corn yesterday -- it's like I'm channelling the Jolly Green Giant or something -- the cafeteria staff decides to play with me, proffering red cabbage and brussel sprouts today. Sure, I like vegetables, but cabbage and sprouts are like the evil minions of the vegetable world: red cabbage looks like the stuff left over when you boil nuclear waste (kids, don't try that at home) and brussel sprouts are evil little munchkin cabbage-wannabes. Or possibly peas hiding behind a Buffy-style vampire mask.
Either way, they're bad.
Uhh, now that l look back, I see that I lied: I don't have a point. I swear I started out with one. Maybe vegetables cause memory loss. Whatever.
Let me just leave you with this: Corn ... mmmmm ...
Brussel sprouts .... not so much.

posted at 7:21 PM by Timothy J. Gibbons | link

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Quick site notes: The Guestbook is down, for some bizarre reason that I'm still trying to figure out. So if you have something to say, mail it to me, and I'll post comments when I get it back up. In happier news, the Links section is being updated again, and now features a nifty list of permalinks. Go and enjoy.

posted at 12:33 PM by Timothy J. Gibbons | link

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Wednesday, March 6

I'm not really trying to make this wacky German week -- though I am curious to see how many people type the phrase "wacky German" into Google -- but once again I've been flummoxed by situations that just shouldn't be that difficult.
I've been working at Gruner + Jahr, a German publishing company, for more than two months now. Each morning as I come in, guards at the door check my (as well as everybody else's) ID. Now, not to perpetuate stereotypes, but the guards are, eh, stereotypical Germans: Same people, every day, I say hi every morning -- and when I forgot my ID last week, I still had to call somebody from upstairs to come and fetch me. I figured they were just really bad with faces, but found out that, nope, it's just the rules; sure, they've seen me come in before, but maybe somebody was just impersonating me this time. You can never be too sure ...
Today's bizarreness wasn't my fault, though. See, I don't have a standard ID card, which would have my picture and stuff on it: Since I'm just a contract employee, only here for a few months, I have a card that gets me into the cafeteria (another high security area) and, supposedly, the front door. Whatever its actual purpose, the card I have has gotten me entrance for something like 50 consecutive days.
Today, though, the woman at the door decided to hassle me about it. (I've been sitting here for something like 10 minutes wondering if it would be in bad taste to use the phrase "door Nazi." I figure it would be, so I'll go with "woman at the door" instead.) So, once again, I'm forced into a pidgin German/English conversation in which I really have little idea about what's going on. In the end, they let me in, but told me to get a note from my boss.
You know, I wonder if I have any old high school hall passes stashed somewhere ...

posted at 8:01 PM by Timothy J. Gibbons | link

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Tuesday, March 5

Sie haben die falsche Zahl. Die Hauptzahl ist Drei Zeiben Null Drei Null.
That's my German phrase for the week.
For the past few days, I've been receiving calls at work from people who are looking for someone else. While my German is good enough to understand them and tell them to call the main number, it's not really up to snuff in terms of having full-fledged telephone conversations, hence the memorized stock phrase. (And why, by the by, is talking in another language on the telephone so much harder than doing it in person? People who speak German much better than I do have confirmed this. It's not like I'm lip reading or anything.)
Telling them to call the switchboard usually works, though, and if it doesn't -- if, say, my pronounciation is off (not that that ever happens ...) -- I'll ask if they speak English and try to carry on from there.
Today's call, though ... well, today's was weird. The conversation started off the way it usually does: The caller says she looking for somebody else; I told her to call the main number. She repeated her request for the other person; I asked if she spoke English. She said no; I repeated my "call someone else" response in German.
This little routine, for some reason, prompted her to begin speaking very fast, very loud German at me, saying, to the best of my understanding, that it was very important that she speak to the woman she was looking for. My repeated mutterings of "ja, ja -- nein, nein" did nothing to stem the tide. When she wore down, I tried again to tell her to call the main number, a task I was somewhat stymied at by the fact that I couldn't recall if the noun "call" (Aufruf) is the same as the verb "call," but decided to use it anyway.
I figure I ended up sounding like an illiterate dog. "Aufruf! Aufruf!"
We went back and forth a bit, a conversation that mainly consisted of me saying something in German, her going "uhhh..." and me trying again. After a few minutes -- like four! or five! whole minutes! -- of multilingual mutterings mixed with periods of silence, the woman suddenly said in English "I think I have the wrong number" and hung up.
Now I know why Germans serve beer in the cafeteria ...

posted at 8:49 PM by Timothy J. Gibbons | link

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Monday, March 4

So the wacky landlord is back in town, creating all sorts of bizzare hassles. You know, it seemed so easy when I moved here: go to housing agency, find place, hand over money, wait a few months and then I'm gone. What I didn't realize is that the guy I ended up renting from is functionally unemployed or something -- when I moved in, he told me he was going to Berlin for a job, which I assumed would last the four-to-five months I was renting the place. Turns out the job lasted two weeks or so, and I guess he just wants help with the rent for the rest of the time.
I moved in around the middle of January, and he left a few days later, only to show up again at the beginning of February. He stayed for a week, living on a couch of a friend in the same apartment building, although he came to his own place to shower, cook and clean clothes -- and in the process, ended up breaking the washing machine. (And I'm not, at this point, even going to get into the whole mess that developed from that; suffice it to say that I'm still ticked off about it lo these many weeks later.)
This past Friday, I'm opening the door to leave the place when the doorbell rings, giving me just enough time to begin formulating curses in my head before I see him. For this sojourn in the Hanseatic Harbour, I find out over the weekend, he's actually moving back into the apartment; he didn't want to "wear out his welcome" on his friend's couch. Granted, he's cutting my rent in half for the week he'll be here, but, see, if I wanted a friggen' roommate, I woulda ordered one. And it's not even a roommate situation, actually: That I could probably handle. It's more like being a houseguest of somebody I don't really know, in a place that, despite the fact I'm paying half the rent, is his.
The guy's leaving next Saturday, he says, but plans on coming back for a week at the end of the month, as well as intermittently during April. He's gracious enough to let me break the lease at the end of March, if I so desire, meaning I'd have to find another place for about six weeks. So now I have to decide if the irritation of him eating my food and yapping at me every time I sit down to read is high enough for me to actually try moving.
Or I could just kill him in his sleep. There's always options

posted at 8:45 PM by Timothy J. Gibbons | link

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