Culinary possibilities have enormously improved since I originally arrived in Munich (directly from two years in Paris yet) 56 years ago last fall. During my five Munich years my frustrated gourmet’s heart leapt up when the Guide Michelin itself, which I’ve sometimes thought of as perhaps the only incorruptible institution in la douce France, [...]
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Back during the period when German television strove mightily to adopt and adapt the lucrative magic formula that had created such American advertising bonanzas as the pioneer talk shows of Jack Paar, Dick Cavett, et al., I once with stricken eyes watched Cavett’s interview, conducted in Cologne by the Westdeutscher Rundfunk’s chief honcho Werner Höfer [...]
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When a day begins with one unexpected pleasant surprise, it has the same effect upon me that William Wordsworth’s rainbow had on him. When two further unexpected surprises bless the day, that rare benison gooses me into at least mental writing - in this event into what involuntarily took form between my ears during a [...]
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Habitués (naturally including any additional sons of habitués) of this playpen may recall that when my Knoxville blogfather Perry Nelson finally bludgeoned me into getting it started I led off with a true - but highly improbable - nature story from here in Germany’s thoroughly metropolitan capital, of how a parental pair of crows, with [...]
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To my fellow codgers, the phrase “good Germans” has specific overtones from the 1930s and ’40s, referring to those uncountable but numerous purportedly “good Germans” who emphatically did not elect the Nazis into power but, to quote one source verbatim, did “nothing … while Hitler destroyed Europe and murdered 6,000,000 Jews, and 5,000,000 Poles, Russians, [...]
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Oh, you poor dear people who have to live anywhere else in the world except Berlin - for me by far the most fascinating of all the fascinating cities I’ve managed to live in, and those others include New York (seven years), Paris (two), Munich (five), and San Francisco (thirteen), before my belated awakening to [...]
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I plan for the imminent future a little stroll down this particular geographic and psychological stretch of my personal Memory Lane derived from the first sixteen years of my life, spent in my birthplace El Paso (where you could walk across the international bridge over the sometimes totally dry “Silvery Rio Grande” into Los Estados [...]
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With me, for example - and the rest of us blogniks.
I’ve previously mentioned Ol’ Eagle-Eye Perry Nelson here, my Knoxville, Tennessee blogfather who virtually whupped me into opening this rumpus room. I’ve known Perry for years as a virtually infallible fountain of wisdom when it comes to what my fellow Germans call Informatik - or, [...]
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I’d intended to write something quite different this time (in essence: about the almost innumerable subtly nuanced little psychological surprises and “gotchas!” directly connected with my recent naturalization as a German citizen), but into my lap this morning dropped this tasty tidbit of sexual esoterica - and who could possibly resist passing it on to [...]
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From this morning’s New York Times, this much as a teaser:
Multimillionaire Dog Can’t Buy Herself a Friend
By MANNY FERNANDEZ
She has a thing for cream cheese and long walks in the park. Like many New Yorkers, she is well fed, well groomed and well medicated (for her thyroid and kidney troubles). At the age [...]
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