Seriously, Though, What IS Kava?

I think I am now an official Ithacan: I'm now friends with a kava bar on Facebook. When I moved back here four months ago, I didn't even know what kava was*.


(*Kava is a plant from Polynesia valued for its relaxing properties; it seems to be beloved of hippies all over the US, but Ithaca being Ithaca, this little town has not one but two kava bars. Which makes me smile.)

Zug- oder Lokführer? (aka, the German Language Is So Weird)

Ah, German. The language in which being overly literal about how you build words leads to strangely non-literal complications!

I was helping out a local friend-of-a-friend-of-my-parents (or something), who writes articles about trains, and has one that's been translated into German to be published in a magazine in Germany, and he wanted to check and make sure they'd gotten everything right, so I read the German version of the article and then answered his questions about it. Anyway, that brought me across this gem of a linguistic fact:

A "Zugführer" and a "Lokführer" are both jobs on a train; however, despite the fact that they look practically like synonyms ("Zug" = "train" and "Lok" = "locomotive," and then they both contain the word "Führer," which can mean either "leader" or "driver," depending on context), they are emphatically not. The "Lokführer" is the engineer, the one who drives the train, while the "Zugführer" doesn't drive anything – that's the conductor, the person who goes through and takes tickets, etc. I suppose the logic here is that the "Zugführer" "leads" the train in some sense? So one is the "driver" of the "engine" and the other is the "leader" of the "train," and it just happens to come out looking like synonyms?

Why, German? Why?

This reminds me of my deep resentment when I first learned that the word "Zugbrücke" (which is LITERALLY "train" + "bridge") is not a train bridge. No, no, it's a drawbridge, because the word "Zug," though usually used to mean "train," actually derives from the verb "ziehen," which means "pull" or "draw," and thus a "Zugbrücke" is one that draws up. Duh, right?

And if you want to talk about an actual bridge that a train goes over, you have to say "Bahnbrücke" ("railway bridge").

Despite how clearly absurd all this is, I'm feeling nostalgic right now for the days when I got to muck around with the German language as my job all day!

(And appropriately, as I'm finishing writing this, the lonesome whistle of a freight train is wafting to me through the night air, as it passes through the edge of town. European trains are a hundred (a thousand) times superior when it comes to actual usability, but for nostalgia and romance, nothing beats a mournful American train whistle in the distance.)

The Passover Section of the Supermarket

It's good to be home. (I missed religious pluralism! Say what you will about US society in other ways – and I certainly do, frequently – but this is a thing we've got, and it's an important thing.)

Extraordinary Cover Versions (That Will Make You Hear Over-Played Songs as Something New)

Okay, how did I not know about these guys until now??

Also, this three-part-harmony, all-female, almost-acapella cover of "Wrecking Ball" is amazing. Who knew a Miley Cyrus song could be...beautiful? (And I say that as someone who loves Ásgeir Trausti's cover of it!)

Ithaca Key West Tourism Board

Ha ha ha, oh, I finally get the joke (I didn't get the joke when someone used it as a team name at trivia night last night) now that I've read this article: "Ithaca, New York, tourism site: Don't come here, go to Florida."

The article explains that the Ithaca tourism folks did a sort of spoof thing on their website, where they told people that the weather is too cold here, and they should go to Key West instead.

Unsurprisingly, the Visit Ithaca website itself seems to be down (too much traffic, I suspect, now that the joke's out there in the national news world?) but here's a screencap of what the site looks like, or at least looked like yesterday, as shown in the Ithaca Journal:

It really is an unusually harsh and long cold snap this winter. Apparently I'm the only one avidly enjoying it...

Philosophical Bathroom Graffiti

(I love you, Ithaca.)

"Ten Degrees and Getting Colder (Down by Boulder Dam that Day)"

Wheeeeee!

That's -17°C / feels like -23°C, for you European folks.

(The alarming fine print on that "Wind Chill Warning" reads, in part: 

A wind chill warning is issued when winds combine with bitterly
cold temperatures to create extremely dangerous conditions for
exposed skin.  The wind chill will be cold enough to cause
frostbite in about 15 minutes or less...and could lead to
hypothermia if proper precautions are not taken. If you must go
outside...remember that several layers of clothing will keep you
warmer than a single heavy coat. It is very important to cover
all exposed flesh to protect yourself from frostbite.

But I walked home in it, and it didn't seem that bad!)

SNOW, more

And a few more...

And one I'm calling The Perils of the Steps (icicles to spear you from above, treacherously slick steps to wipe your feet out from under you below!):

SNOW!

Snow!

I'm finally in the right place.

Bad Grammar and the Detritus of a Childhood

Remember mix tapes? Walkmans? The phone trees that schools used to send out to families, back before all information was conveyed by email? How about those free trial CDs that AOL was forever mailing to everyone, in the early days of the internet? And printer paper with perforated edges? For that matter, remember floppy disks??

All these and more I've been sifting through, as I sort, clean and ruthlessly dispose of things from my childhood bedroom.

Also, look, I found old middle school German tests! My grammar was so strikingly bad!

(I'm sure I'll have more to say about being back in the US once it's settled in a bit more... For now, I'm in an odd sort of limbo, and don't know quite where I am. Patience!)