Ich bin ein [Texas-Born] Berliner

I wrote this same essay almost 10 years ago (here), but time has passed and it’s due for an update. I can’t think of a better time to do that than on his birthday — March 3, 2010. Paul and I met, as I said in that first essay, online in iLink Writers in the [...]

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From all I know about Paul, I believe he might have posted this if he were able to do so. Soundscapes – by Ace Norton from IE HAGY on Vimeo. My most recent conversations with him indicate that he is doing as well as can be expected, but his stroke, coupled with his apparently approaching [...]

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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, began [...]

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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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When I first came to Europe as a mere stripling of twenty-five (can you think all the way back to 1949?), I couldn’t help noticing fairly early that when the French and the Germans – whether in print, on the air, or almost anywhere – meant the respective vernacular of fuck, they came right out [...]

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Right here at the beginning, I wish to express my sincere thanks to that perhaps not quite Nobel but definitely noble British “public corporation” known throughout the world as the British Broadcasting Corporation, alias BBC, affectionately referred to on its home turf (which Shakespeare in King Richard II proclaimed “This precious stone set in the [...]

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Herewith some additional horrifying background material on how the Lone Star State tells the country’s supreme legal authority to kiss its Lone Star ass and insouciantly continues its self-legalized killings, including some prisoners awaiting appeal proceedings that could reverse their previous sentences. From The New York Times on June 14th: “Texas juries in capital cases [...]

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   Let no one still mired out of date in world history of half a century or so ago come at me with “Hmphhh . . . they should talk!”  I hope the word has finally got around that the Germany I’ve adopted as my own country today glories in one of the most vital [...]

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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 – [...]

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Friends of mine have had a tough time with my recent naturalization as a full-fledged (albeit Texas-born) citizen of the Bundesrepublik Deutschland – the Federal Republic of Germany, the emphatically democratic successor of the Nazis’ ineffably hideous self-proclaimed “Thousand-Year Reich” – which in fact ceased to exist after only twelve, wiped out of existence by [...]

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