14.01.2008

German States Prepare to Do Battle over Dumplings

Two German states fighting over food?  It would be laughable if it didn’t happen every other month.  This time, Bavaria and Rhineland-Palatinate are getting all steamed up over a dumpling.

One of the best ways of celebrating your survival after completing a hair-raising descent of an icy Piste is to shed your skis or snowboard and get stuck into a Dampfnudel.  While literally translating as steamed noodle, it’s essentially a massive dumpling, served either in savo[u]ry or sweet form.  It can be the best way of reaffirming life after partaking of death-defying winter sports.  Combined with a bucketload of après-ski alcohol, the Dampfnudel makes everything good in the wintry world.

Such a culinary treat should be treasured, and the Dampfnudel is certainly championed as a fine example of German cuisine in the places where it is held most dear.  But, as with most things coveted by the many, it is fiercely defended by the few.

Instead of devouring the monstrous ball of dough with vigor – or with either mushrooms in white sauce or custard and jam, depending on your taste – the good people of Bavaria and Rhineland Palatinate are channeling their energies into slagging one another off over the origin of the Dampfnudel.

Arguments over food and drink are not a new thing in Germany.  Most recently, the Berliners have had to defend their Currywurst against covetous northerners while the people of Hesse almost came to blows with Brussels over their Apfelwein [a mildly alcohol potable made from apples].  So, apart from it all being rather petty and unseemly, what’s the deal with this new outbreak of culinary hostilities?

Bavarians stake claim on the Web

Well, as with most food fights it all stems from perceived ownership and the regional pride a particular food can instil.  The Bavarians have stolen a march on the Rhineland folk by proclaiming on the electronic oracle of all that is truthful (the Internet to the rest of us) that the Dampfnudel is a speciality of Bavaria.  The Rhinelanders fear that this will lead to their rivals to the south staking a claim for ownership of the dumpling at an EU level.

“We will not allow them to take the Dampfnudel without a fight,” proclaimed Rhineland-Palatinate’s Minister of Agriculture Hendrik Hering in a local newspaper article on the growing crisis.  He added that all judicial and diplomatic efforts would be employed in keeping the origin of the Dampfnudel associated with the Rhineland.

Rhinelanders expose rivals as culinary magpies

On first glance, the Rhinelanders may appear to be the antagonists here.  The Bavarians have done nothing other than stake a claim, rightly or wrongly, to something they believe to be theirs.  But on further investigation, it appears that Bavaria has form when it comes to snaffling other regions’ delicacies and calling them their own.

Glancing at the offending Internet site, “Food from Bavaria,” there are the obvious specialities from that most proud region of Germany: the veal sausage, Abensberger asparagus and Hefeweizen wheat-based beer among them.  But since when did Swabian Maultaschen, the oversized savoury-stuffed pillows from neighboring Baden-Württemberg, come from Bavaria?  How long have the Swabian Spätzle noodles been a Bavarian invention…?

Digging deeper, one can see that maybe the Rhineland has a point…

DW staff (nda)

DW staff (nda) | www.dw-world.de | © Deutsche Welle.

{And it will surprise nobody who knows me personally that I’ve gussied up these native-born Goddam Krauts’ Englisch before passing this tidbit along to you….}

Well, consider the brief news-agency story that’s just landed in my virtual lap from Germany’s eagle-eyed dpa (short for Deutsche Presseagentur, which manifestly comes close to marking the sparrow’s fall), about an international competition that took place down in Bavaria last week with unfairly little fanfare.

According to dpa, this avant-garde “International Bottom Championships” competition gingered up life down in Munich last Wednesday.  The dpa account salutes Bulgaria’s Kristina Dimitrova, 19 and female, and Romania’s Andrei Andrei (sic), 24 and male, as the gala event’s winners, each of them taking home a prize of 10,000 Euros ($14,400 in what proud American shoppers abroad back in better days used to call “real money”), not to mention an insurance policy that also came as an additional part of their prize package.

Munich, the beer-guzzling capital of the onetime kingdom of Bavaria and for many years now a Freistaat (Free State), has a widespread reputation for stumpfsinnige residents and daily routine.  Well, make up your own mind.

You can read dpa‘s unabridged report by merely clicking here.

Germany’s radical, even revolutionary “student movement” during the late 1960s totally dumped – forever, let’s hope – the long traditional stiff-necked authoritarian German methods of child-rearing that gave the world, among other calamities, Adolf Hitler and his unprecedentedly murderous Third Reich.  At that time, during the 1960s, revolutionary trends among those wonderfully courageous students sometimes swung a bit far in the opposite direction, but one lone book changed German attitudes towards education in a totally benevolent way: Summerhill, by England’s maverick educator A. S. Neill.  He’d adopted as his own personal guru Sigmund Freud’s most radical disciple Wilhelm Reich, the title of one of whose books will tell you a good deal about that (quite literally) mad genius: The Function of the Orgasm.  Under Reich’s dominant influence, Neill founded in England an unprecedented school for children who’d proven such behavior problems that their parents, finally at their wits’ ends, had literally no place else to send them for schooling that would even touch them with a bargepole.  One basic sentence suffices to sum up the sole rule Neill imposed upon his nippers: total – and I do mean total – freedom, as long as that unbridled freedom didn’t violate the rights of others.

One salutary offshoot of those yeasty days here in the 1960s’ Berlin (which fell well within my own first quarter-century sojourn here, from 1956 to 1981) took the form of what became known as the Kinderladen – literally “children shop”: parents sufficiently interested in shielding their kids from those horribly destructive traditional authoritarian methods joined together in groups and simply rented cheap empty storefronts (to use the American term), and in them housed newly created private kindergartens, with carefully selected teachers who shared their views about teaching during those early formative childhood years – in turn an echo of one of Freud’s primary fundamentals of psychoanalysis, which recognises the first six or so formative years of a young human’s life as uniquely important for what that human will then in time develop into.

My apartment building in Berlin’s Wilmersdorf borough has had such a Kinderladen nextdoor since before I moved into it immediately after returning to Berlin twelve years ago.  One little boy there attracted my psychologically educated attention the first time I saw him: pallid complexion, dead eyes, withdrawn manner – he immediately evoked my limited experience with that still puzzling psychological phenomenon called autism.  From time to time, when my Dachshund boss Maxe walks me, I pause for brief conversations with the two young women in charge of the place, and when I asked one of them about this obviously far from happy little boy, it came as no surprise when she told me: “Er ist Autist.“

Returning with Maxe from our first walk this morning, I saw ahead of us, on the stretch of sidewalk in front of my building and the Kinderladen, those two women’s considerably younger new assistant, whom I’d noticed a few days earlier because of his clearly harmonious relationship with a group of the kids coming back from the spacious playground in the aptly named Volkspark – People’s Park – a short walk away.  This morning, as I approached, I could barely believe my eyes to behold that autistic little boy actually smiling – something I’d never before seen him do.  That behavior had an obvious reason: that young assistant had taken him – and him alone – out to play with him, on a tricycle on our stretch of sidewalk.  That sight so gladdened my heart that I spoke to him and complimented him on his clearly manifest expertise in dealing with all those kids.

The day, which had begun with unseasonably sunny weather, seemed to cry out for me to make the most of one of our last fair days before the temperature will force me to caparison myself with such things as gloves, so since Maxe’s exceptionally attenuated spine (his first X-ray revealed that Maxe – the world’s champion dog by anyone’s genuinely disinterested, truly objective standard, has one more vertebra than nature intended for even a Dachshund to have) precludes his making longer walks than necessary, I set out alone.

Crossing the Bundesallee (the pre-war Kaiserallee) on the overhead footbridge, I first came upon the spacious enclosure where dog-owners have official permission to let their mutts run free, and I paused for a few minutes of fond regret.  When Maxe took charge of my life about twelve years ago, I tried taking him there every afternoon to let him wear himself out by trying desperately, on those truncated legs of his, to keep pace with longer-legged dogs, but he soon proved, to the surprise of no one with the least experience of this most headstrong of canine breeds, so anarchic that in order to re-leash him, when time came to go home, I had to enlist one or more strangers to help me corner and overwhelm my recalcitrantly headstrong mutt.

Continuing on my way eastward this morning, I passed another spacious enclosure, this one for young bipeds.  Does anyone reading this recall Cat Stevens’ poignant song about modern city life “But Where Do the Children Play?”  My beloved Berlin has certainly long since answered that vitally important question – in every neighborhood of this huge city, twenty-five miles across at its widest diameter – once and for all.

At the easternmost end of my walk I came to the building that had once, soon after World War II ended in 1945, housed what every German at that time knew as RIAS, the acronym for Rundfunk im amerikanischen Sektor – Radio in the American Sector of that era’s four-power city ruled over by the victorious Allies: Britain, France, the Union of Socialist Soviet Republics, and the USA.  RIAS (pronounced REE-ahss) became one of the most implacably persistent thorns in the Soviet authorities’ Communist sides, and it remained that until 1989 brought Germany’s reunification and RIAS got absorbed into today’s RBB, Rundfunk (literally circular spark, a term that also includes television) in Berlin and Brandenburg, the federal state that completely surrounds the city-state Berlin.

When Maxe got me home, one of the two ladies in charge of the Kinderladen happened to tarry outside its entrance, and I seized the occasion to zing in a good word for their young new assistant Johannes.  I told her that his noticeably excellent wave-length with his young charges, in particular with that little autist, had made it a surprise when he told me he’d studied foreign languages but had no actual specific training as a Kindergärtner.  “No,” she said, “he’s only twenty-eight and he’s going this job as his” – here she used an abbreviation new to me, something I recall as Zivi (pronounced Tzee-vee), obviously short for Zivildienst, a catch-all term for various kinds of public service available to all young Germans as an alternative to going into uniform as legally required by my adopted country’s “universal” military service.  How wonderfully sensible, I couldn’t help thinking, that such young Germans today (another of them: a newly married young physician I’d first photographed, the son of friends, at the age of less than twenty-four hours, who with his lovely fellow-physician pregnant wife had graced the party given for me a month or so ago to celebrate my naturalization) have available this possibility to serve today’s Germany – my Germany – truly pro bono publico.

And then several hours ago, what should fall into my lap but yet another story, this time actual news, of the kind I especially enjoy distributing for two reasons: it seems to me characteristic, even typical, of the Germany I so sincerely and gratefully love, and because its kind of story about my own today’s Germany so often simply remains unknown abroad.  Instead of my even partially summarizing it for you, I’ve instead made it available in its entirety to anyone reading this bloggery who can work up the energy merely to click here.

After that encounter last summer I naturally used it to bore every Berlin friend and neighbor I could collar, some of whom considerably extended my education about this topic – for instance, one lady who lives in the same house said she’d not only seen but even photographed citified foxes in the little garden colony beyond the foot of our own little plot of garden; another told me that in her Schöneberg neighborhood, not far away, foxes sometimes sit out on the sidewalk in front of the apartment buildings.  Most recently of all, the early morning and late afternoon have sometimes brought into our own little garden the tiniest cottontail rabbit I’ve ever seen, so irresistibly miniature you could – in the highly unlikely event he’d hold still long enough – pick him up and cradle him in your cupped hands.

But I started out to tell about today’s most recent development in The Case of the Divebombing Crows.  At that time, everyone I told about it voiced the melancholy but realistic assumption that that poor almost featherless crow-chick would definitely not survive.  Its devoted parents clearly had no feasible way of hoisting it back up into the nest, and the little Schoelerpark, where cruel fate had left it stranded and totally unprotected (except for those murderously irate parents), has numerous roaming cats, plus a few dogs, that comb the area for mice and anything else edible.

Well sir, this morning brought fairly solid evidence that that chick has indeed, almost miraculously, managed to survive after all.

The little Schoeler-Schlösschen (a miniature sort of modest castle) has directly behind it, between it and the Schoelerpark proper, a fairly spacious fenced-in area – presumably what remained for the Schlösschen’s occupants of that time when Berlin, by long tradition a populist kind of city, opened the erstwhile castle garden to Berliners in general, and this morning, as Maxe and I approached, I saw a man from time to time leaning forward over that fence and talking to, I assumed, a dog or some other animal down on the ground within that enclosure. That seemed unlikely, for no gate permits free access between that enclosure and the park itself.  Finally I saw that he addressed himself not to some small quadruped but to a bird – a crow, by golly, and by appearance a young one.  The two obviously knew each other reasonably well, for he addressed the little crow as Lotte.  (Don’t ask me how he’d ascertained his little friend’s sex; could you have?)

When I regaled him (naturally) with my own Berlin crow story from last June, he reciprocated with his own.  Gestures indicated that he lives in one of the two apartment wings that today embrace the Schoelerpark, and he spoke the purest form of the knife-cuttable proletarian Berlin dialect I love so that I’ve sometimes almost atavistically had the feeling that in some earlier incarnation I must have spoken that as my mother tongue.

Lotte, he told me, appears regularly to keep their presumably daily rendezvous, which he’s made more interesting by rewarding her with various kinds of tidbits.  When Lotte either saw or smelled Maxe, she immediately put some distance between herself and the fence, but not so much that I couldn’t get a fairly good look at her.  Not only her small size indicates her youth; she hasn’t yet become all black, with her back still grey, maybe silver-grey.  All things considered, I can hardly imagine that I err in recognizing Lotte as a slightly older version of that helplessly floundering chick from last June 3d, the pride and joy of those two vicious crows that divebombed me.

It goes without saying that from now on I’ll always equip myself with crow-bait tidbits whenever Maxe and I head in that direction, which we customarily do at least twice a day.  Since I’ve thus far had no experience whatever in the care and feeding of crows, whether young or old, I immediately sought the advice of two wise old spinster sisters who live a couple of floors above me and know this area of Berlin like the back of their hands.  When to them I wondered aloud what crows like to eat, they had a simple pragmatic answer ready:

“Anthing.”

On an Internet-age impulse this morning, I yielded to the impetus sparked by Frank Rich’s Op-Ed contribution in today’s New York Times and submitted the two-word phrase “good Germans” to www.Google.com – which in an eye’s merest twinkling knocked me flat with “about 66,300″ hits on that term – all of which you can wade your own way through by clicking here. 

I cordially recommend that to any historically minded visitor interested in comparing those sincerely good – but passive – Germans with all the similarly intentionally good Americans now, in frighteningly similar fashion, passively accepting the present administration’s chipping away at the very foundations of the historic American tradition of democracy that became the envy of much of the world due to a brilliant Constitution that marked a change in all world history.

But since Frank Rich’s column this morning galvanized me to the extent it did – especially since I proudly claim ownership of an opulent certificate from the administration of the city-state of Berlin (which I’ve made arrangements to have suitably framed for hanging in a prominent place in my Berlin apartment), dated August 16th, 2007, proclaiming me a citizen of the Federal Republic of Germany – let’s concentrate for the moment on Frank Rich’s column.

He immediately clobbers us with this sledgehammer lead: “‘Bush lies’ doesn’t cut it anymore.  It’s time to confront the darker reality that we are lying to ourselves.”

Got that now?  Rich continues:

“Ten days ago The Times unearthed yet another round of secret Department of Justice memos countenancing [sic!] torture.  President Bush gave his standard response: ‘This government does not torture people.’  Of course, it all depends on what the meaning of ‘torture’ is.  The whole point of these memos is to repeatedly recalibrate the definition so Mr. Bush can keep pleading innocent.

“By any legal standards except those rubber-stamped by Alberto Gonzales, we are practicing torture, and we have known we are doing so ever since photographic proof emerged from Abu Ghraib more than three years ago.  As Andrew Sullivan, once a Bush cheerleader, observed last weekend in The Sunday Times of London, America’s ‘enhanced interrogation’ techniques have a grotesque provenance: ‘Verschärfte Vernehmung, enhanced or intensified interrogation, was the exact term innovated by the Gestapo to describe what became known as the ‘third degree.’  It left no marks. It included hypothermia, stress positions, and long-time sleep deprivation.” 

For those insufficiently versed in modern German history, GeStaPo abbreviates Geheime Staatspolizei, one of Hitler’s two most effective instruments of terror (the other: the SS, which among other accomplishments ran Nazi Germany’s vast multi-national ramification of concentration and extermination camps) which, thanks to previous organization exemplifying the phrase “German efficiency”, had Germany figuratively but paralytically by the balls within mere days after his appointment to the Chancellorship by the aristocratic, hysterically anti-Socialist President Paul von Hindenburg.   

But since I’ve made Frank Rich’s entire column easily available to anyone who simply clicks here, let me turn you over to the courageous author of this powerhouse piece of top-quality journalism.

As far as I know, the USA has no weekly newspaper comparable to The Observer in London; I guess the rich Sunday edition of The New York Times comes closest.  Unlikely as it may seem, I have a distinct recollection of an off-hand mention by an English teacher at El Paso’s Crockett Grammar School almost a lifetime ago that some British newspaper called The Manchester Guardian had attained a world-wide reputation for the highest journalistic standard anywhere.  In time, its reputation and influence became so powerful that it dropped the Manchester and settled into London’s Fleet Street as simply The Guardian.  It seemed only natural that it join forces with the separate but equal weekly Observer, as it did some time back. It remains my favorite of all daily newspapers, in no matter what language, and thanks to the bounty of my favorite of all home-page websites – http://www.aldaily.com/ – I have constant access to it simply by clicking on “Newspapers”.

Kate Connolly of The Observer recently pressed a visit on our fair city, and her report of that sojourn fairly bursts into song.  Some purely chance encounters (which even a gung-ho Berliner like me could hardly claim as characteristic) made such an electrifying impact on the lady that she uses them as her article’s lead:

“It’s not, is it? Clint Eastwood downing a beer in the Helmut Newton Bar, John Cusack cycling along a cobbled street, Matt Damon strolling through a courtyard of fashion boutiques drawing on a cigarette? Nearly two decades after the fall of the Berlin Wall, the cultural life of the city has suddenly exploded again and is propelling it on its way to becoming the new New York.”  Her London’s editors have headed her piece “America’s creative élite invade Berlin, city of cool”, and the sub-head starts to explain why: “Affordable rents and the cultural buzz are luring top-level US talents to a reborn German capital”.

But why put up with me as a mere go-between bearer of good tidings instead of providing you direct access to that unabridged original by simply by clicking here….

Every Texas young ‘un memorizes and sings, hand on heart, what long ago became that one-time independent republic’s national anthem, unofficial if not 100% official, but not even many of us natives really know that inspiring old song’s history, which you can catch up on by clicking here.

For the moment I’ll attempt to grab your attention for my approaching Memory-Lane stroll with my all-time favorite Texas story, from Dallas – where, as all native Texans know, two kinds of millionaires compose the really important part of the population, the poor millionaires and the really big-rich rich millionaires.

One of the latter genus, as a proper Dallasite, soon after his most recent financial killing had acquired along with it a sense of obligation to do something for his beloved city along the lines of what my newly acquired fellow Germans lump together as Kultur.  For openers he hired a high-priced eastern architect then much in vogue to design a new dream house for him and his beloved wife.  When the architect asked about specific wishes, his employer had only one: a spacious living room, say somewhere along the lines of a football field, large enough for him to ride his hoss into should he sometime take a notion, with a vast expanse of wall-space where he envisaged what he called a muriel, in keeping with his hobby as a recent American-history buff.

To paint that muriel he commisioned a muralist from one o’ them European countries, who’d cut quite a swath through Dallas’s upper-crust rich millionaires.  When the painter asked for tips about what he might have in mind, his patron summed that up in three words: Custer’s last stand.  Then he and his wife took off on a world tour.

When they finally got back, they set out to explore the brand-new palazzo awaiting them, but when they came into the living room they both stood rooted to the spot, horror-struck.  At the mural’s left-hand end the artist had painted a cow, with a halo over her head, regarding what composed the entire remaining vast expanse of wall-space: one sweeping, seething, sweating expanse of naked Native Americans, copulating with one another in every imaginable position and constellation.

The new house-owner let out a bellow, and the artist came on the double.  “Look, stupid”, his patron roared, “what that hell ya tryin’ to do to me – me, a pillar of this community, not to mention the Southern Baptist Church?!”

The artist said he’d done exhaustive research, and really extended himself to depict in an artistic medium what someone at either the Library of Congress or The Smithsonian Institution had definitely provided him as General Custer’s last words.

“Last words?  Who the hell said anything about Custer’s last words?  I wanted you to paint Custer’s last stand!”

“Sir, a thousand pardons, but I swear that in your excitement you asked me for his last words.”

“Words?  Stand?  What’s the difference?”

“Sir, the most exhaustive historical scholarship available to me said that local oral history had recorded General Custer’s last words, just before those irate natives massacred him and his troops, as “Holy cow – look at all those fucking Indians!”

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, for short, IT, computer technology – but he also seems to do the IT equivalent of marking the sparrow’s fall: he’s just surprised me with a pertinent article about bloggery from the trade publication Advertising Age, headlined with a truncated version of “The New York Times Has Seen the Future: It’s All the Blogging That’s Fit to Print” – for you provincials an allusion to that grand old newspaper’s longtime slogan “All the News That’s Fit to Print”.

In this article, Simon Dumenco takes off on that august paper’s recent decision to stop soaking us parasites when we come around to the paper’s rich website to schnorr articles and information and revert to its earlier, less mercenary policy of making them available – to all comers – for free.  Dumenco takes off thus:

“I have seen the future of The New York Times — in the Times itself. 

“Last week, technology editor/reporter Saul Hansell had a short item in the business section that began, rather shockingly, ‘If there was ever a measure of how little traction Sir Howard Stringer is having as chief executive of Sony, it is the company’s comical inability to find a coherent approach to delivering content online to its wide range of digital devices.’ 

“Truth lives here: In blogs, Times reporters don’t suppress what they really know, feel.”

If you’d care to read that entire Advertising Age article, click here.

My first sixteen years in this vale of tears I passed under the strict, strait-laced Southern Baptist roof of my Mississippi-born parents (e.g., just for openers, no card-playing or movie-going on Sundays), with my almost hysterically religious/superstitious mother the dominant figure in that ill-starred dyad.  They did not belong to what their native state knew as a “Primitive Baptist Church” – a term I first discovered during an early visit to that exotic part of the country in my mother’s charge, where you’d see signs out in front of an occasional run-down church proclaiming it the This-or-That “Primitive Baptist Church”.  When I asked my mother the obvious question, her answer consisted entirely of this: “With foot-washin’”.

At least not snake-handlin’. That customarily indoor sport seemed focused elsewhere in the deep dark South, I believe in the hillbillier areas of Tennessee.  I’d long known that such things did enliven the “religious” services of some ultra-fundamentalist Protestant sects, but my own eyes – figuratively out on stems – didn’t witness that until an unforgettable documentary film (Dutch-made, as I recall) turned up years ago on German television, and branded itself indelibly into my memory.

During that part of the church service the European visitors had managed to film, the congregation members first danced themselves into an almost literally hysterical frenzy, then out would come the snakes, in a box where the totally ecstatic celebrants would take hold of them, lift them out, and hold them more or less at arm’s length while their frenzied dancing continued.  The filming even captured the instant when one serpent actually sank his fangs into the arm of the man “handling” him; the case-hardened pros behind the cameras naturally let their film run uninterrupted, and the man finally lapsed into his fatal last coma with them recording every last second of it.

These nuts justify what they do with some obscure verse from the omniscient, unquestionable Bible, naturally; this poor devil lapsed into unconsciousness flat on his back, clutching a Bible thoughtfully placed into each hand by his attentive co-religionists, who prayed their fool heads off for the good Lord Jesus not to let him die for merely having obeyed what they interpreted as a divinely inspired Biblical command.  (If this folkloric activity interests anyone reading this, let me know and I can go into more detail about that permanently unforgettable film at another time.)

Anyway, getting back to today’s posting….  My first sixteen years exposed me to a downright pathologically unhealthy anti-sexual childhood I somehow managed to survive.  When I finally went from El Paso’s Stephen F. Austin High School to New York’s Juilliard School of Music, unshakably confident of course that at sixteen I already knew just about everything worth knowing, I’d never once had a talk with either parent about sexual matters.  That deprivation has left me with a lifelong insatiable curiosity – especially after my introductory encounter with psychoanalysis, which in time came close to becoming my profession – about every aspect of the human animal’s almost infinitely variegated sexuality, some of those aspects exotic indeed … but what popped up today on my monitor screen surprised even comparatively case-hardened me.

“Red” Camp, the wild and wonderful jazz pianist married to a faculty member during my two post-Juilliard years at the University of Texas  in Austin, used to joke about some gentlemen he described as “queer for doorknobs”.  Well, this English dude brought to my unprepared attention this morning a specimen one would have to call queer for automobiles.

I forget the name of an especially sleazy tabloid (the Enquirer?) sold at the check-out of virtually every U.S. supermarket, but if you think that sleaze-sheet sets a journalistic low, you haven’t yet wallowed in the bottom-scraping equivalent area of the British press.  The present story at hand came from one of that London ilk’s standard-setters, The Sun.

To get finally to the point, Chris Donald, a literally passionate Cheshire mechanic by profession, in some mysterious way “makes love” to classy automobiles (The Sun uncharacteristically draws a veil over explicit details) that somehow ring his libidinal chimes.  The paper does at least in passing drop a tantalizing mention of exhaust pipes….

But instead of teasing you with mere paraphrasing, let me without further ado turn you over to that complete article.

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 of 8, she has already been the star of a national advertising campaign and the subject of at least one messy lawsuit.

    She has spent most of her days in pampered luxury, in a penthouse apartment at the top of the Park Lane Hotel, at the southern edge of Central Park.  A hotel pianist once wrote a tune for her.  A hotel chef cooked her meals, and a housekeeper served them, hand-feeding her steamed carrots and other vegetables with grilled chicken.

    Life, in fact, got to be so good that some people had to watch what they said around her.  They didn’t want to offend her — or her owner and best friend, Leona Helmsley — by calling her, of all things, a dog.

    “Nobody could say ‘the dog,’ ” said Zamfira Sfara, 48, a former housekeeper for Mrs. Helmsley, who Ms. Sfara said preferred a more regal term for her beloved pet:

    Princess.

    But she is a canine — the richest, most talked about and most controversial dog in a city of dogs. Mrs. Helmsley, the hotel magnate who died last month at age 87, showed her enduring love for her dog, whose actual name is Trouble, by leaving the dog $12,000,000 in her will.  Mrs. Helmsley was not as generous to her chauffeur, who was awarded $100,000, or to two of her grandchildren, who received nothing, the 14-page will states, “for reasons which are known to them. . . .”

Treat yourself to the whole story by clicking here.