Caption Contest Scandal

So there's a feature that allows you to look at all of the entries, which is kind of addicting. Last week's cartoon is here:
The winner was, "Brother, can you spare a lime?"
Kind of lame. But the amazing thing is that the same caption was submitted, literally, hundreds of times. There are 8 pages worth of submitted captions, and I went through two of them, each time finding between 50 and 60 captions that were exactly that one, or very close ("Hey buddy, can you spare a lime?", etc.). This means that about 400 different people submitted this caption. I would think that being so uncreative would disqualify you, but I guess not. The other most popular option, of which there are about 100, involved the word "stay-cation."

Some other favorites, which make me feel good about my chances of eventual victory:

What! You expected this in Florida, or something?

INFINITE TO INFINITE

Hey man, where are you going?

HAY MAN! HOW ABOUT A LITTLE BREAD ? YOUR NOT GOING TO NEED IT WHER YOUR GOING.

They foreclosed on my house. "my wife toldme to get any job." thank you thank thank you.

PENNY FOR THE GUY!!

Two things i love

1. Chinese food, specifically hotpot. To that end, I am venturing to a hotpot restaurant on Friday. This might move into the "things I hate" column. Germany has, in general, atrocious Chinese food. It's possible that this will be better, as it comes with vague recommendations from faint acquaintances. However, the only review I can find online gave it one star out of four, claiming that it led to Übelkeit (this could simply mean "queasiness" but could also mean "vomiting").

2. The New Yorker Caption Contest. I go through fits and starts with it. Before I die, I would like to win one. Here is this week's cartoon. My captions are below. If any reader wins this week, I will give him/her a "The Langoliers are Coming" T-shirt.
1. "Now that's one way to get ahead!"
2. "I've heard of headhunters, but this is ridiculous!"
3. "I'm sorry, Krang, I don't know when your suit will be fixed."
4. "I'm going to have to let you go. My old paperweight wasn't so nosy."

Two things that I hate

1. I hate it when, in order to make a case about some perceived Western failing, people compare prosperous nations to other, putatively dismal, ones. This happens all the time in health care journalism. "The United States is ranked 40th in the world when it comes to low infant mortality rates. This puts us below Bosnia." "Britain is ranked 50th in the world in terms of intrusive government surveillance. This means it's worse than Singapore." These are two examples that I've come across recently, the first from the NPR and the second from the Guardian. If you look for it, this kind of strategy is used all the time. No story about failing American education can resist the temptation to compare our math scores to other countries of which he have bad impressions, or by which we feel threatened.

It goes without saying that this is not an argument but a rhetorical tool. We're asked to think, "The United States [or Britain, or whatever] is a good Western country. Yet we are worse at [whatever] than these third-world hellholes. The idea that these places could outrank us in any statistic whatsoever is outrageous and points to flaws in the system." It's just annoying that "The West is obviously better than the rest" still works as persuasion. Of course, the rhetoric says on the face of it, "In this case the West is worse", but the ploy is only effective if we implicitly follow this up with, "And that is an assault on the natural order."

2. I hate it when books or movies have nameless protagonists. This seems so common at this point that it's almost refreshing to read a book in which people have names. This struck me as I've recently seen "Antichrist" and am reading "The Invisible Man" (Ellison, not Wells). I also read "Breakfast at Tiffany's" a few weeks ago, and just read a review of Colson Whitehead's "Apex Hides the Hurt" in The New Republic. All of these books/films feature unnamed protagonist(s). I propose that this is almost always a bad idea. In "Antichrist" there is no reason to leave them unnamed; it only adds to the mythological pretensions, which turned a possibly interesting movie into something stupid. In "The Invisible Man" it makes sense. In "Breakfast at Tiffany's" it is pointless. I haven't read the Whitehead novel, but it sounds pointless there, too. Every Everyman has a name.

Nothing is certain but death and lions

In case you do not slavishly follow Facebook feeds, I wrote an article that can be found here.

Also, I went to a museum of medieval and early modern art. I've gone ahead and admitted to myself, a lifetime of cultural conditioning notwithstanding, that I don't really enjoy art museums. This one was different, though-- medieval art is really fun, maybe because "art" as we know it did not really exist. There were lots of dragons, people being martyred in gruesome ways, etc. I can see why so many people's fantasy lives (role-playing games, D&D, etc.) revolve around tropes from medieval art, and not abstract expressionism. The coolest thing is pictured below, and was appropriately called "Death Riding a Lion". The most amazing thing about it: in the 16th century, when it was made, it also functioned as a clock. Every hour, death would smash that bone onto the lion's head, which contains a bell.
I can't imagine where this would be an appropriate piece of furniture, except for Skeletor's castle.

I had a weird experience going through newspapers the other day. I was looking at a left-wing Catholic newspaper from 1930 until it was shut down in 1934. This period covers lots of events with which we are familiar from history books: Reichstag fire, etc. It was really creepy, though, to watch it happen sequentially in a newspaper. Like, I watched the lead-up to the 1932 election, in which the Nazis won huge gains and it became kind of clear that they could take over the government. They were heartbreakingly optimistic: in the weeks before, they thought all these Catholics would win, and then on election day there was a sticker saying "Vote Zentrum [Catholic Party]", and then the next day this huge horrible headline about how Hitler had won so many millions of votes out of nowhere, and then it was downhill from there. It was like watching a movie that you've seen before, but you hope that somehow it will turn out differently.

This is probably an experience that real historians have very early on. For fake historians like myself whose research mostly involves J-Stor, it was a revelation.

dissertating, again

It has been a while since I've posted, I see, except for that cryptic haiku, which came about because I was thinking about a board game I used to love that had riddles, and I was also thinking that it should be a phrase to say, "Stop being so Web 2.0."

The most exciting thing I've done of late was to have brunch in a bowling alley. This is the kind of quasi-surreal thing that maybe would not seem so weird if it happened in America, but everything in Germany is already a little weird so stuff like this seems off the charts. I was having brunch with a bunch of other people yesterday, and there was no room in the restaurant. But then this one, apparently maverick, waitress, said, "Why don't they sit downstairs?" And all of the other wait-staff thought she was crazy, but she carried the day. We went downstairs, where there was (unadvertised!) a bowling alley, which was completely empty and dark. There was one table at the corner, at which we sat, and it had one flickering light bulb. It was all kind of like the end of "There Will be Blood." The best part was when people came down looking for the bathroom, and instead of a bathroom they found a huge dark bowling alley and 7 people eating omelettes. Then I went to another carnival, which was completely unremarkable except insofar as it demonstrated again the incomprehensible but enormous love that Germans have for carnivals.

Oh, and I heard someone say what I've decided is actually the most American phrase of all time. It is not, "There's not enough parking at this Chili's." It is not, "I'm gonna rip you a new one." It is, "Hang a louie."

Also I watched a German game show devoted to RV-parking. There were all these German Dad-type figures in lederhosen, and a studio audience. Their task was to park an RV as fast as possible. If this were in America, they would not be portly Dads, but celebrities in bikinis, and they would have to, I don't know, juggle while they did it. But in this case it was just very serious-looking Dads, looking the way that Dads do when parking, while the audience went wild.

But mostly I've just been dissertating, which is, you know, hard. The closest thing I can compare it to is putting together a puzzle, but the pieces are scattered all over the world, and you don't get to look at a picture while you do it. There are lots of ways to go at it: you could group everything together by color, but since you don't know what the whole will look like, maybe some objects will be multi-colored. Or you could start out by looking for the edges, which is definitely the way to go in puzzles and hopefully in dissertations, because that's what I'm doing now. There is always the possibility that, when completed, the puzzle will be of a completely stupid object, but that's best not to think about.

Maybe my mind first leapt to puzzles because I have a bad memory about puzzles. When I was little, I loved puzzles. But then, one fateful day, I sent a piece of a Hulk Hogan puzzle, along with twenty dollars in cash, to the Hulkster himself, who had pledged via the box to sign said piece and return it to me. He never did this, and I will never forgive him.

Late night haiku

For complex reasons, I just endured a lengthy walk home in the rain at 2 in the morning. During my walk, I composed a haiku, which is recorded here for posterity. Clap along!

Globalization!
The poison's in the ice cubes.
Yo, Web 2.0!

Scattered observations

I just had the strangest revelation (this is what drove me to post). I have not, in the 37 days I've been in Germany, consumed or even seen a piece of ice. Isn't that weird? On one level, it's a stupid thing to even notice. But on another level, it seems highly bizarre, like if I realized I hadn't ever worn socks or used the letter E. There are two main reasons for this. The first is mundane and specific to me: I'm somewhat frightened of the freezer in this apartment, so haven't attempted to make any ice myself. Whenever I've opened it, an avalanche of frozen peas comes out. The second, more broad, reason, is that Germans have very different attitudes towards liquid consumption than Americans. I don't understand how they don't all die of dehydration. In America, I probably drink liters and liters of water every day: water is thrust at you in restaurants, available at water fountains every 30 feet, etc. None of this is true in Germany; you have to buy any water in a store and carry it around with you, and if you order water in a restaurant you have to pay for it (and it is wildly expensive: the one time I did this, it cost $3 and still contained no ice). Even at the cafeteria this is true (you have to buy expensive bottled water). So I almost never see German people drinking anything besides beer. Maybe they have humps, like camels, and they all go down to a river every night. So I guess what I should do is buy bottles of water and fill them up at home, etc. But this makes me paranoid because I don't want to ride a bike with water and my computer in my bag. So, in reality, I just remain parched until I get home. Or, sometimes, I drink out of the faucet in the library bathroom, like an ANIMAL, which is very embarrassing when someone comes in, but until they spill their hydrating secrets they will have to deal.

Non-ice-consumption is probably the most interesting thing that's happened to me recently. I did go back to Oktoberfest the other day, with the same people as last time. We decided that we would actually like to see it, instead of just being herded into a beer-tent. I can't say I'm really that much more impressed by it, but there was more going on than I expected. It's pretty much like a state fair in America: the same rides, the same surreal music choices and carnie banter, etc. The only thing I actually paid to go to was a "mouse circus," which sounds, if I'm not mistaken, really awesome. I don't think I thought it through rationally, but I sort of assumed there would be a tiny three-ring circus, and mice dressed up like circus-performers, etc. I thought, in perfect seriousness, "I wonder if they will shoot a mouse out of a cannon." In reality, it's pretty much like going to a petstore. There were three big mouse cages with maybe 100 mice, sans costume. Their special talents included: (1) sleeping; (2) running in a wheel; (3) obviously having sex with one another despite signs assuring us that they were not. This is very much unlike any circus I have ever been to. There were half-hearted attempts to make the cages appear circus-like, but they just made it seem more sad than it already did. German children were decidedly unamazed despite enthusiastic parents who wanted their 2 euros' worth. Most of them just tried to grab the mice, which is obviously not allowed and which caused the mouse-circus employees to bellow in rage. I decided that I would not enter any other Oktoberfest attractions, despite an enticing flea circus, with a sign that was, for no reason, extremely racist.

The best part was probably the art on the rides, which is the same as art on American carnival rides, but I never noticed how interesting they were before because, as a child, I didn't know what a "postmodern pastiche" was. Below are some of my favorites.
This is for a ride called "Techno Power," and I'm not mistaken that's Coolio on the side, and possibly Frankie Muniz with him. I love the guy in the back flipping off the riders. Also they are in space.
This was for a funhouse, and for some reason I found it extremely creepy. It's obviously some version of the last supper, but it seems to be populated with obscure 80s celebrities, plus Jon Lovitz as a waiter, a possible Seth Green eating a sausage, and a sheepish-looking Bavarian man on the right side. There are lots of disturbing details if you look up close. For one thing, there are huge pigs under the table, which you can't really see because of people's heads. Disco Stu there on the left appears to have a dog instead of a hand. The guy/girl in the back (the one that looks like either Siegfried or Roy, who were all over the place at this carnival) is holding a key that says "501". I've looked on the internet, and the only possible reference I can find is that, last January, a woman (from Munich!) was murdered in a hotel room in Düsseldorf, in Room 501. I think this is a clue.
I really have no idea about this one. The only thing I can say for sure is that if I ever get a tattoo, I want it to look like this.