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2008-02-21: The Awful German Toilet

Nod to Mark Twain for the title.  I have traveled to many countries (upwards of 30 by now), and have used many different models of toilet*, yet I have never, ever seen toilets like these outside of Germany. To be brief and blunt — well, there’s this sort of viewing platform : a large, almost flat area in the bowl. It is almost impossible to Evacuate one’s Bowel without the opportunity to critically examine the product. Despite the ease with which this design permits collecting a stool sample for one’s gastroenterologist, I found (and still find) this quite repellent. But being of a somewhat imaginative bent, I thought that perhaps it would make sense to incorporate some 21st-century features into this ubiquitous model — something I would be tempted to call the ViewMeister 2000, for example. The new model would incorporate all the (waterproof) hardware necessary to facilitate a biometric readout of salient stool conditions (weight, density, laser-based “topographical” measurements). The
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2010-01-06: Oh noez!

 (Let me toss in a Shakespearean “forsooth” here to counterbalance the LOL-cat title.) I didn’t post anything on January 5th. I thought I would, but got distracted (a) by a certain party (not me) who spilled her beverage onto a laptop keyboard (not mine), then (b) by cleanup (not particularly of laptop per se; Mr Mo kindly came back to Aix from Quinson, where he had driven just that very morning, to deal with this); then (c) by packing. But mostly, if truth be told, (d) by wanting to finish reading a book that I cannot take with me to Germany in a few hours. (I did not finish the book. It will keep.) And thus it is. Amen. I will cut myself some slack if I manage to post another entry later today (at some sane time this afternoon, that is; this is a wee hours’ “I cannot sleep anyway” extravaganza). Anyway, yes, back I go to Walldorf (the small one near Heidelberg where Johann Jakob Astor, aka John Jacob Astor of Walldorf Astoria fame, came from) to work for a few days. Too many technica
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2010-05-30: Shades of Santa Barbara

As Mr Mo knows all too well, I am apt to be teary-eyed and a bit surly after I emerge from another round of reading about the catastrophic BP gulf gusher, for all of the same reasons that other people are in tears of grief and outrage about the fish and birds and marine mammals killed, the beaches and wetlands irremediably destroyed. It isn’t just American shorelines and livelihoods that are mortally jeopardized: Mexican and Caribbean shores and workers stand to be victims as well. As I write this, the gusher is still going strong, with no solution in sight for weeks to come. With every passing day, the potential for damage beyond the limits of the Gulf increase exponentially: the eastern seaboard of the U.S. may be affected, and even Europe may get a taste of oil via the Gulf Stream. To all this, I add my memories of going to the beach after the much smaller, but still calamitous oil spill off of Santa Barbara in January 1969. We didn’t go to the beach more than a handful of times eac
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2009-02-26: Tiring of tribtalk

Well… I hesitate to say that I tentatively think that I might have possibly decided to stop bothering with writing comments in response to letters to the editor in the Salt Lake Tribune . “Oh!” (I hear you say.) “I didn’t even know you were writing comments in the  Salt Lake Tribune .” Well, yes, I was. And sometimes lots of comments. But after taking a bit of a break over the past couple of weeks, I went back the other day, posted a couple of things and decided that I really wasn’t enjoying it. For one thing, the same old crowd is there (as one might expect). The waves of conservatives vs. the waves of liberals. Both camps have a couple of articulate writers. Given my own political sensibilities, I have found the points of view expressed by the conservative camp — especially the articulate ones — to be singularly misinformed, reliant on very questionable sources. Some people on both sides of the political divide are inarticulate, semi-literate, frequently rude, and sometimes just down
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2010-01-03: An American breakfast in France

This morning we brought the trappings of an “American breakfast” up to Jim and Claudia’s — a Dutch/German couple who speak English to one another, and who have bought a condo in an old farm complex up on the Plateau de Valensole above Quinson. Claudia’s parents are visiting until Tuesday from Greater Frankfurt, and it was somewhat at the instigation of Claudia’s dad that this event transpired. (He’d mentioned in the course of our going with them for an impromptu drink at the local bar the other night that he and the missus loved, loved, loved American breakfasts, especially the breakfast buffets with all the bacon and eggs, etc. I/we offered to make them an American breakfast; however, given the fact that our tiny eat-in kitchen could not possibly accommodate seven adults, we prepared everything and took it up to J&C’s gracious and spacious place.) Despite his fears that they would not turn out well and thus embarrass him, Mr Mo made pancakes and they were delicious as ever. We als
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2009-10-18: Archivist or packrat?

Okay, I know the answer to this one, especially after having spent part of today wallowing in a sea of receipts, museum and movie tickets, birthday and anniversary cards, brochures, maps, photos, and other potential/real memorabilia. Not to mention Papers That Must Be Kept for tax purposes for a minimum of seven or ten years or whatever the current French or American statute requires. (In reality, of course, such papers may abide with me eternally.) I have a respectable box full of papers that will go to the recycling bin tomorrow. But the box barely makes a dent, as certain Family Detractors will no doubt point out with a mix of glee and exasperation. Andy Warhol kept a lot of papers as well, with each year’s worth of invitations and programs and suchlike deposited into its very own large drawer. It is the stuff of dreams from a researcher’s point of view, or at least a biographer’s, I suppose. I don’t know if Warhol’s collection includes anything quite so pedestrian as receipts from
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2009-11-04: I’ve been a French citizen since October 22, 2009!

…And I only found out about it this past Monday, November 2nd, after our letter carrier came by with the mail.  When I saw the three envelopes from the French Ministry of the Interior (one addressed to me, one to Mr Mo, and the third to Youngest), I have to say that I steeled myself against a refusal: surely we were being informed that, sorry, there was something wrong with the (mountains of) papers you submitted, so you can’t become French, try again. Mr Mo heard my whoops and hollers as I tore open my envelope and saw these words: J’ai le plaisir de vous faire savoir que vous êtes Française depuis le 22 octobre 2009. — It is my pleasure to inform you that as of October 22, 2009, you are a French citizen. Mr Mo guessed what had produced my unusual cries even before I got up the stairs with the letters. Well then, hot damn — dual nationality. The news reduced our Youngest to tears of joy and more than one skype-based panegyric (if such a thing can be thus described). And I, too, have
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2010-01-10: Sonnstag in Deutschland

It seems odd to be writing a little something about Chiune Sugihara while working here in Germany, and about whom I just learned in reading the second of the two Hark! A Vagrant!comics on this page . “Japan’s Schindler” went unnoticed and unsung back in his native Japan, after having risked his career (and possibly his life) to save anywhere from 6,000 to 10,000 Jews by granting them transit visas as a vice-consul in Lithuania. Had I known to look for the monument in his honor in Vilnius, and the other one in Little Tokyo in Los Angeles, I would have done so. Sugihara puts me in mind of Hamburg’s golden paving stones ( Stolperstein ), sprinkled here and there in the sidewalks (usually in front of apartment buildings), and inscribed with the names and fates of the deported Jews who had lived in those places. Some apartment buildings were torn down, of course, and stores and markets put up in the spaces, but the paving stones remain, seemingly unnoticed by the hundreds of customers and
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2010-10-10: Getting along in German

(Pardon my instinctive response to this post’s title; it is heartfelt: Ah hahahahahaha, ha! ha! ho! ho! Heeeeeeee! ) I just now finished a kind of second breakfast with Gisela and Gerald. As I have written elsewhere, my German is pathetic. Gisela’s English is slightly better than my German, Gerald’s English is much better than my German, but not fluent by a long stretch. So having a conversation is challenging, but do-able. They always seem fascinated by the bizarrities and (quite honestly) outright horrors of some of America’s ways, especially in terms of health care and workers’ rights and all. The fact that a long-time American employee can show up at work and find him/herself fired, entitled only to two weeks’ pay, and often escorted to their desk, supervised as they pack up their belongings, and escorted out — without even so much as the chance to say a proper goodbye to one’s coworkers — astounds them.  They worry that the German safety net, as with the French, is being slowly re
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2011-01-16: Reactions to the Haitian horror

(Written in transit from Walldorf, Germany, to Marseille, France, on January 15th) The catastrophe in Haiti saddens and appalls me — I am saddened for the loss of life, for the unfathomable sorrow of the survivors, the pain of the injured, for the fact that the survivors have lost so many and so much. Some have lost their entire families in addition to escaping with only what they were wearing at the time the earthquake struck.  I am appalled because much of the loss of life was preventable. Hmm. That may be hyperbole borne of wishful thinking: preventing the deaths in Haiti would have meant years of fixing so many systemic problems as to render “prevention” meaningless: replacing, for example, the shantytowns with affordable, built-to-code structures; providing meaningful employment; benefitting from competence rather than corruption at all levels of government, and so on infinitum ad nauseam . The photos tell the story: there doesn’t seem to be one building anywhere in Port-au-Prince
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2014-01-10: Coming or going? (Mormons as Ugly Americans, and so on.)

When I'm on facebook these days — and I’m on much more than I should be — I hang out a bit on the Feminist Mormon Housewives page… with occasional forays onto The Mormon Hub and Mormon Liberals pages, too. (Yeah, fine, I’m still a junkie that way.) Unsurprisingly, I come across quite a few people who are grappling with their faith, trying to reconcile all of the same kinds of things that Mr Mo and I tried for years to reconcile about the church and logic and morality and all… until we finally couldn’t stand the cognitive dissonance anymore and stopped going. We are nonetheless still Members of Record.† But just before Christmas, while I was whiling away the time on facebook, a message window popped up from a dear old friend of mine from Pittsburgh days, and lo! She wanted me to read her letter of resignation — having decided that as of 2014, she was not going to be mormon anymore. Though I was a little surprised at the “out of the blue”-ness of the experience, I wasn’t particularly
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2015-01-01: So no, I don’t read music

Well, OK, yes, of course I do, but I know only the American system of solfège. (And how is it that I only just discovered that this word is the same in English as it is in French?) It is embarrassing, occasionally humiliating, not to automatically know what note “ré bémoule” is, for example. I end up comparing the do-re-mi vs. ABC scales in my mind, much as innumerate people count on their fingers to calculate. Even with that, I am sometimes wrong (and laugh it off though I may in public, it’s excruciating to me inside). And then I see terms such as “fixed-do” and “movable-do”… and am filled with dread and fear that this will all be too hard and complicated to learn — at least on my own. — Indeed, it was the fear of being continually embarrassed by my ignorance that greatly contributed to my not having joined any choirs since moving to Europe in late 2001… until this past year in Grenoble, when the need to find some kind of non-work social outlet to keep from going crazy with loneline
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