Only once every few months do I laugh at something hysterically surreal in 4chan. Meanwhile, it’s been much longer than that since I shared the source of those yuks. Let’s fix that, shall we?
Poor Big Bird’s expression says more than the dialogue. Well, obviously, but…you get the idea.
I’ve taken an unfortunate scapegoat approach to pinpointing romantic shortfalls. Common sense indicates that I am single because I’m the one in control. It’s much easier, though, to blame everyone else, and I do that to an astonishing degree. Facebook indicates you have a new flame? You’re holding hands on the street? You’re walking slightly abreast of someone of the opposite sex? Then you are the cause of everything that makes me miserable, and I will secretly want to take an axe to your face in lieu of leaving my apartment and meeting people. Count on it. Good lord, I’m a cranky 70 year-old 45 years too early.
Unlike schadenfreude—’taking pleasure in the misery of others,’ literally ‘pain pleasure’ in German—there is no word to describe this sensation. Jealousy or envy doesn’t quite cover it, as there is no sense of misery and too much sense of covetousness. The nameless phenomenon is an odd absence in English.
I propose, then, what is essentially (schadenfreude)-1: freudenschade, ‘finding misery in the pleasure of others.’ ((This probably means the body of English words is not an abelian group: commutivity of multiplication is violated.)) I know you feel it; why not speak it now, too?
I adopted a kitteh on Friday evening, and will get to pick him up on Monday. Excitement! Like any first-time pet owner, there is a little fear that the poor thing will drop dead in a few days. For me, though, I have a greater problem: I have a tendency to supply untitled things with horrible, stupid names when given the opportunity. I have always known that if I ever come in possession of a pet, I would—not might, would—baptise it with a name that would get it beaten up on the playground if it were a six year-old human.
Rather than keep a mental list of possible names, this post will help me remember when the moment of choice comes. It will also help you see how doomed this cat really is.
So Honecker—excuse me, I meant the Party Chairman—opens his window one morning and says to the sky, ‘Good morning, sun!’ And the sun replies, ‘Good morning, Chairman.’
That afternoon, the Party Chairman opens his window and says to the sky, ‘Good afternoon, sun!’ And the sun replies, ‘Good afternoon, Chairman.’
That evening, the Party Chairman opens his window and says to the sky, ‘Good evening, sun!’ The sun remains silent. The Party Chairman, feeling hurt, asks the sun, ‘Sun, why are you so silent?’ And the sun replies, ‘Screw you, I’m in the West now.’
Extracted from Das Leben Der Anderen. Not funny? Fine, go stick your prolitariat humour where the sun don’t shine, see if I care.
In 7th grade (1997) I sneaked into Frau Bouska’s classroom at the end of her German 1B class, the 8th grader class. The room was dark, and every face was glued to the TV set up front. A man was dancing in place and singing. It made sense in theory, but it was in German and had the production values of a scaled back cable access TV channel, so it made my brain hurt.
‘What is this?’ I asked The Frau. She refused to tell me; for the answer, she said, I’d ‘have to wait ’til next year.’ It was clearly too special for 7th graders to appreciate.
Fast forward to 1998. She popped the PAL-to-NTSB-converted cassette in the VCR, and the secret was unwrapped. We were watching Falco music videos. To the unfamiliar, you probably know Falco best as the singer of ‘Rock Me Amadeus.’ To the girls, Falco was swoon-worthy and extremely sexy in his Miami Vice-style garb. To me, he became my favourite 1980s icon and one of mainland Europe’s finest pop musicians. As we watched the TV, everyone in the room agreed: we were watching a treasure.
‘Der Kommissar’ (imported to America by After The Fire) featured a music video so primitive, it wasn’t just filmed at the birth of the music video boom, it was music video’s premature baby, the result of snorting too many cocaine lines in discotheque bathrooms. It was a flagrant abuse of green screen technology. And for that, it was brilliant.
Today I compliment Frau Bouska for her decision to hold these videos only for advanced ages. Falco videos are fine wines intended to be aged. For a chaser, here’s the video to Rock Me Amadeus, which actually has production quality to it, likely because it had three more years of experience and development behind it than ‘Der Kommissar’:
I’m willing to forgive some people’s confusion between you’re and your…even though it makes you look like a 2nd grade C-student.
But I’ll nail your ears to the floor if I hear you pronounce Friedrich Nietzsche ‘Free-drich Neet-shee.’ It’s ‘Free-drich Neet-sha.’ Do you really think a German (a German advocating the vision of the superman, no less) would have had a dorky, non-Teutonic name like Neetshee?
I could almost see Neetshee being the name of a Chinese dude in the 12th of 11 overly racist and censored Merrie Melodies cartoons made prior to 1945.