Most of Munich's many fountains are shut off and boarded up, but the Fisherman's Memorial, near the Stachus, soldiers on.
EDIT: My bad. It's actually the Brunnenbuberl (1895), or Knave's Fountain. The Fisherman's Fountain is down the street, and covered in ice, it kinda looked the same. 
@ Iggy:
Beneath the ice is a clothesless knave, trying to shut off the flow of water (wine?) to the elderly satyr above. When King Luitpold saw the naked imp, he asked for a fig leaf, but the sculptor refused. Which, according to city lore, shows that in Munich, the artist is king! Nowadays, pretentious, wannabe artists get the same priveleges, it seems.
Also @ Iggy
IG, you're an architect. If you click on the link, you'll see that the statue is mixed media: stone and bronze. Could the combination of materials explain why the city fathers don't need to shut off this fountain in winter?
The more you fly, the more you fear flying, they say. Yours Truly, whose frequent flyer cards drip with gold, diamonds, plantinum and emeralds, is such a flyer. Sheer mathematics convince anyone with a nervous disposition that his number must come up, sooner or later.
That's why I got in the habit of (don't laugh) counting the rows to my nearest exit, which, for those of you who weren't paying attention, may be behind you. If you fly Qantas, the sultry-voiced Angela Catterns scolds blasé frequent flyers to listen up; you may think you've heard the safety drill before, but every aircraft is subtly different.
Nonetheless, even the biggest scaredy-cat browses the in-flight magazine during the life-jacket bit. Nice in theory, but no pilot has ever successfully ditched in water. One wing generally touches the surface first, and flips the plane. Or the whole kit-and-caboodle is so busy dropping out of the sky that your seat cushion-cum-floatation device may be too little, too late.
Until yesterday.
Much has been written about USAirways #1549. About the skill, heroism and modesty of the pilot. About the speed with which NY Waterways craft were able to rescue the passengers. And a lot about divine intervention, prayer, grace, or sheer good fortune. FlyerTalk, and the Australian Frequent Flyer Community, both discuss the matter at length.
My first thought on reading the news, though, was this. Aviation seems to be getting safer.
Before you scoff at my bad taste, hear me out. Time was, not long ago, that any catastrophic system failure was a death sentence for passengers and crew.
Ironically, I was sitting in the USAirways lounge at LaGuardia in 2005 when an Air France plane skidded off the runway in Toronto. As news helicopters circled the flaming aircraft, broadcasters solemnly mouthed pity on the travellers inside, unable to imagine that anyone could survive the flames. Yet, everyone escaped alive, thanks to an incredibly alert and well-trained crew.
Last year, I was actually booked on the British Airways flight from Beijing that crashed-landed at Heathrow. It may seem odd to write that it "crash-landed successfully", but no other phrase seems more appropriate. Everyone lived.
Those in the know, credit the pilot's skill. "He deserves a medal as big as a frying pan," they said. Let's hope he got one.
(An aside. At the last minute, accountants at my firm switched the ticket to Air China, on cost grounds. They take this incident as a moral lesson in the virtues of pennypinching.)
And now, USAirways 1549.
Yesterday, benevolent forces controlled the universe. Or, just as important, even in an atmosphere of absurd cost-cutting and near bankruptcy, the behaviour of the pilot and crew suggests that airlines seem not to have skimped on human factors in aviation safety. Perhaps, they took lessons from safety breaches, and trained crews for many more contingencies. Perhaps they recognise the human element as the most important factor in air safety.
I never thought I would say this. Goodonya, aviation industry. And--no, hear me out-- congratulations to USAirways. They may cancel flights and lose luggage, but they appear to have put real effort into improving their safety record. EDIT: Spoke too soon, perhaps?
Personally, I am grateful. Munich and Pittsburgh, for obvious reasons, are two airports I use a lot, and USAirways maintains a significant presence in both.
It seems that the pilot of the stricken plane was, in fact, one of the key movers responsible for crew training standards. His LinkedIn profile shows two recommendations. When he gets to work on Monday, I would be surprised if there were not, at the very least, 155 more.
* * * * *
The photo credit is a triumph for the citizen journalist. It is Janis Krum's first Twitter photograph of the plane in the Hudson, sourced through (ironically enough) a website named Boing Boing.
Germans have a name for the folk who inhabit the southern reaches of the state of Baden-Württemburg. They call them Swabians.
The name carries some unfair baggage. The stereotype paints them as dour, mildly pessimistic, stubborn, cheap (EDIT: thrifty), prone to one beer too many. Swabians are, many mantain, the Scotsmen of the Continent.
Fun-loving Bavarians love to diss Swabians. How can they live so close to France, and not pick up some joi d'vivre? How can they make the world's most superb luxury cars, and take so little joy in personal luxuries? And why do they have such lousy senses of humour, even by German standards*?
Stuttgart is the capital of Baden-Württemburg, and I travel there a lot for business. On the way home yesterday, a curious sight confronted me at the Hauptbahnhof.
The Argentine** Tourist Board sent two tangoistas on tour, to encourage shivering Germans to enjoy a sunny, South American summer.
The tango: a dance of love, a declaration of passion, a sexual intrigue on four feet. Here is what the Argentine Tourist Board says about the tango
"Feeling that is danced and percolates through the curbs of the one hundred porteño neighborhoods...By contrast, poet August Lämmele writes the following verse about SwabiansSo far, everyone from the intellectual to the suburban[ite] create, feel and speak the language of tango. And even though much has happened since 1880, the essence of tango, brazen, unrestrainable and bonded by blood, remains latent in the canteens of La Boca and in the saloon bars of Recoleta."
Drink what agrees with you,(By the way, Lämmle is considered a Swabian wit.)
Eat what you have available,
Do what you're supposed to do,
Say what you're allowed to say,
Think what you want to think.
You know who you are, my little honeys.
In Japan, you can choose from two kinds of New Year's parties.
A bonenkai happens in December, where everyone curses the shitty old year and gets drunk. A shinenkai happens in January, where everyone celebrates the hope and promise of the new year. And gets drunk.
In between, the partying goes quiet, with visits to family, church, and emperor.
Other cultures, whose sense of ceremony demands less thoroughness, tend to fall into one of those two emotional camps.
Bavarians, ever the realists, stake out the bonenkai camp. On the Silvester, everyone wishes you a good Rautsch.
I think it comes from the German word Rausch. That is, a good flush. Open the sluice gates, because a torrent of last year's bad karma is going to make its way downstream. Hose it into the gutter for good.
The rest of Germany uses the word Rutch (so I discovered--thank you Damon!). It means to slide, trip, or fall. A landslide can be a Rutsch. Effectively, you collapse into the new year.
Maybe this confusion stems from the fact that we were pretty Rauched by the time we chatted about it.
Though it specifically refers to getting hammered on New Year's Eve, The Bavarians I know apply the word Rautsch to pretty much any serious drinking session.
That, and the word blue ("blau"). As in English, the word blue can mean sad or depressed, but in German, it also can mean drunk.
Does this suggest Germans have an unhealthy relationship wth alcohol? Does it suggest that the sober order of day-to-day life conceals a good deal of sadness? Ah, repressed emotions! No wonder I feel at home.
Shinenkai Français
Well, bugger that for 2009. Master Right was in Japan on a family matter, so I tagged along with Miss deYoung to a splendid party hosted by a French-Finnish couple. Most of the guests were French, and their spouses came from across the globe.
This turned much of the converstaion to English, which seemed to be everyone's relationship lingua franca. Not that it mattered. One of the miraculous qualities of alcohol is that, if you drink enough of it, all languages become mutually intelligible.
Still, this was a party with a definite French accent. No Rautsching allowed! French culture follows the shinenkai school. I think they call it joi d'vivre.
Here are six EDIT: seven reasons to go to a New Year's party where the hostess is French.
As a child in the 1960s, I recall The Ed Sullivan Show on Sunday nights. My parents would switch it off whenever the Beatles appeared.
The Beatles were a bad influence, they said. Disrespectful. Hair too long. Radical politics. Talk of free love.
But an equally subversive act slipped past their radar. One evening, amid the silly circus acts and mediocre comics, I sat mesmerised by a woman singing in French. Eartha Kitt.
If any woman could put a heterosexual spark in my gay loins, it was she.
My first career ambition was to become one of the tuxedoed dancers behind her, who spun a walking stick and snapped his fingers. Tall, handsome men who vamped si bon as she boasted, without shame, of her greed. All in French, save for important words such as yacht, Cadillac, and millionaire.
I had no idea of sex at that age, except to sense that these young gentlemen, and not the millionaire, would get most of it.
The real meaning of Eartha Kitt went straight over the heads of people like my parents.
On the surface, she sang songs about her quest for a man. It was easy to paint these as love songs. In reality, they were sex songs. Songs about sex and money.
Sexually unsophisticated audiences of the fifties and sixties really couldn't tell the difference. A woman singing about a man was reassuringly predictable; she idolised her lover, or pined over him. It never struck them that a gal who demanded, in exchange for sex, two apartment buildings labelled Hers and Hers, might actually subvert the patriarchy just a tad.
But those with a keen sense of irony got it. That included the producers of Batman in the 1960s, who cast her as the quintessential Catwoman.
She took no shit from the patriarchy, even as they blackballed her for a chance conversation about the Vietnam War. Later, of course, the patriarchy rediscovered her famous cocktail-jazz standards.
And you know what? She still goes over their heads, as this 2006 clip shows. (Santa sure gets it, though) Bear in mind, the woman was seventy-nine years old when they filmed it.
In the interest of full disclosure, let me boast that I once shared a plane with Eartha Kitt across the Pacific, as she returned from a tour to Australia in the late 1980s. I never struck up a conversation. I was scared. She has that effect on men.
Sad, but beautifully appropriate, that Eartha Kitt died on Christmas Day. It seems her biggest hit was not C'est Si Bon, I Wanna Be Evil, or any of that popular disco quatsch which paid her rent in the 1980s. It was, in fact, Santa Baby.
If you're reading this, Mr. Claus, you still owe her a sable. And a platinum mine, if memory serves.
* * * * *
Another sad, but beautifully appropriate death for Christmas Day was Harold Pinter, playwright and Nobel Laureate.
He gave one of his last interviews to Charlie Rose, on American public TV. Listen to the poem Rose reads, and hear Pinter speak of its inspiration. You'll see how few other men were better equipped to spoil a holiday than Harold. Were not two of his best-known works, The Birthday Party and The Homecoming, stories of celebrations ruined?
Pinter certainly went over my head when I first read him, at university. The English department swooned, but I just didn't get what the fuss was about.
Innocent talk which somehow made everyone uncomfortable, and eventually angry, seemed pretty normal. At least, at my house.
Reading Kafka helped me understand Pinter. Beneath Kafka's banal language of bureaucracy or polite society, hid contempt. Pinter unearthed the same bilious mess in the language of family and friends. Critics called it a "comedy of menace".
The notorious "Pinteresque pause" is commonplace between hateful intimates. It's a short breather in a little dance of hurt. Both parties, the attacker and defender, gird their loins for the next assault. Eventully, one of the intimates wins. As Pinters's plays show, the victory seldom tastes sweet.
Not hearing the dialogue hindered my understanding immensely. Even after all these years, I still haven't seen a Pinter play in production. Not until I saw Peter Brook's 1973 film of The Homecoming, could I actually understand what was going on.
This clip features Ian Holm as Lenny. Holm was one of Pinter's favourite actors, who instinctively knew what evil undercurrents flow beneath the commonplace. This seems to have equipped him for later roles that require an understanding of the Kafkaesque, from Dr. Putney in Strangers with Candy to Mr Kurtzman inTerry Gilliam's Brazil.
My appreciation of Pinter paralleled recovery from a toxic family of origin. Once I actually got what was going on in his plays, I shuddered to read them. They hit home.
The Economist obituary wonders how Pinter learned the language of loving cruelty, given his benign upbringing. I suspect he picked it up through his well-documented male friendships. Even men who are close to each other, and who admire each other greatly, engage in alpha-dog one-upmanship. They can't help it. In many of his plays, it is women who are the most uncomfortable with the state of affairs, and who sometimes call their menfolk's bluff.
His ear for the evil behind the bland served him well offstage, too. Increasingly, he devoted his later years to political causes.
His Nobel Prize acceptance speech, in 2005, is chilling. He delivered it by video, from a wheelchair, too ill to travel to Stockholm.
In it, he describes of a number of British artists and humanitarians, who met with the deputy American ambassador to the UK from the Reagan White House. They protested the senseless and deliberate slaughter of innocents by the US-backed contras in Nicaragua.
The deputy ambassador simply replied, that "[i]n war, innocent people always suffer." As though this were the most perfectly reasonable thing in the world.
Pinter tells us that a shocked silence followed. Now, when Harold Pinter says there was a pause, you damn well know there was a pause.
It was rather like his plays. The act of speaking attempts to conceal a truth which the silence reveals.
He adds, "So language in art remains a highly ambiguous transaction, a quicksand, a trampoline, a frozen pool which might give way under you...at any time."
It's sad that Pinter passed away, just when much of this official language has begun, in many quarters, to crack under the weight of truth.
EDIT: On reflection, the best picture of 2008 goes back to January 1st. I was lucky and caught this picture of the free-for-all fireworks celebrations at just the right moment. The woman was, no doubt, dealing with a flood of Happy New Year texts.
The people at Photo Friday have challenged followers to choose their best photo of 2008. Not sure if this is the best, but it's one I like, and haven't used before. That's a candy stand at Oktoberfest. Enjoy!
The well-known Coffee Funny cafe, in the heart of Shitomachi. As much as I am loathe to, I've got to agree with your teenage antagonist on the 'natt-choes' thing. That used to drive me batty about the Brits (and the Aussies for that matter). And 'pass-tah'. Although I'm being told hear that our new car is not a Mah-zda, but a Maa-zda. Maybe you could ask Mister Right's opinion?The Japanese View
Where is he gay today? Mayfair, London
G.F. Trumper. Official Barber and Gentleman's Perfumer to the Court of HRH Elizabeth II 
If you embiggen the pic, you can see the plaque that confirms Mayfair's oldest wine bar serves Mexian and Polish food. I don't make this up, you know. 
When two lovers meet in Mayfair
So the story goes
Church bells ring
Birds begin to sing
That certain night
that night we met
there was magic abroad in the air
There were angels dining at the Ritz
and a nightingale sang in Berkely Square.
Where is he gay today? Blackfriars, London
First, the Gothic Revival grandeur of St. Paul's. They don't allow you to take pics inside, but trust me, the building is breathtaking. Cool crypt, too. Makes Westminster Abbey look mediaeval. 
Modern art is supposed to shock and confront, and the Tate Modern is a shocking, confronting building in which to house one of the world's great collections of it. 
Highly cool. Highly recommended. 
I didn't know you had to pay to do it. If they ever catch up with me, I'm gonna owe these guys a lot of money.
Many of us have heard the story. A Japanese department store once created a giant Christmas display which featured a jolly Santa, nailed to a cross, smiling down on the busy shoppers below. The incident became known as Santa Cross, a near-perfect confusion of Christianity's two most sacred celebrations.
Atomic Mutant Christmas Monster!Master Right and I have just installed candles on the Adventskranz, and since we're a week late, we wonder which candles we should light; two adjacent ones, or two opposite ones? He looked it up on Japanese Google, and worked out that they should be two opposite candles. Christmas in an authentic Christian country delights him, and he's a stickler for getting it right.
