460 New Words

Ich habe nun viel mehr Flüssigkeit auf Deutsch aufgebaut. (If you can "build up" something as swooshy and pouring as fluency, that statement has to be true.)~ And did I make a mistake in that sentence? I wouldn't dare post up anything longer because I surely would. I did German A-level nearly 20 years ago, so I think I can be forgiven for having to look up such elementary terms as "suddenly" and even "actually" in the dictionary. Having said that, I worked out that I have a 93% comprehension rate of the German I am reading. That is: (after flying through the entire book without dictionary) I have ploughed through 25 pages at approx. 360 words per page, ie about 5400 words and looked up and listed 20 pages full at 23 lines to the notebook page of definitions. Ie there were 460 out of 5400 no! 9000 words! I did not understand. Giving me a comprehension rate of about 95%.

The book in question, in case you have not been reading is called Christiane F: story of a child prostitute and heroin addict. I found it very depressing first time round. The book is made up of tape recordings by two Stern journalists who found out about the then-15-year-old heroin addict after she was prosecuted for three cases of drug-possession. "We the children of Berlin Zoo" (the main railway station and hence a meeting place for junkies) was such a successful series of articles in 1977 that a full version, published in book form became a popular bestseller. The centre pages are full of pictures of very young kids, most of whom say they started fixing between 13 and 15 (younger for girls). Page 186, next to a picture of a girl who resembles a tall china doll, says: Livia S began using at 15 and died aged 18 in the public toilets in Hansaplatz. In her pocket was a letter to the Social Welfare Office pleading for a place in rehab. "Could you please find me a place as soon as possible. One extra day out here could cost me my life. With your help I could turn into a healthy, employable person again." And page 187 shows her dead body, laid out in the toilet cubicle with what appears to be a drugs works and a packet of something beside the corpse.

The bit I'm still on is about an idealized childhood of a country girl who couldn't understand why in Berlin you weren't allowed to play on the grass. Now I know all the words for metal grille, barbed wire, giant sign, concrete bunker and so on ... It takes such a long time looking all these up and writing them down (I have to write them down: otherwise I can't read the book back with a list of every word I don't know in order of appearance). I started starring every word I've consulted in the dictionary. My memory is so bad there are some I end up looking up five or six times ...

Well I have to go. Time is vanishing quickly. Hope y'all had a nice weekend ...

Illustrations: Langenscheid and Oxford-Duden, 2 of best German dictionaries; "works" ~ when I first moved to London I used to think people had dropped very narrow number-decorated pencils on the road; Gropiusstadt ~ Berlin suburb by Neuköln, where Christiane F grew up (and you're surprised she ended up on heroin~??..)

African Pygmy Meeces!

FURRY FRIDAY (ON SATURDAY)

AFRICAN PYGMY MICE are the smallest rodents in the world.



At 2" fully-grown long they're the length of a roborovski hamster, yet far slighter in body. Meaning some beetles are actually bigger than these mice!



They're popular with the pet trade because they're very social and just like roborovskis love climbing on top of one another.



They love mousing around:



Shy by nature (just like roborovskis) they can, with patience, become hand-tame:



Like all rodents, the babies are born blind and utterly naked. They resemble "baked beans with paws" ...



Here you can see how tiny and cute an African pygmy mouse mother with babies looks ~ coo!



Direkt aus Deutschland:
Here's a beautiful longer filmclip:
(Don't worry ~ it needs no subtitles as there are no words...)

Industrial Roast Beef Dinner

NO NEWS except I've been irritatedly dragging myself to and from counselling sessions, trips into hospital to see sick friends, daily trips to the chemist (thanks to bitch druggieworker who put me back on daily pickup some months ago ~ she does that. Fine. But she ain't gettin' no favours off me. Or insights. Or revelations. I don't trust her.) In other words I've been running thanklessly to and fro when all I want to do is stay in alone with my book with doors locked and the phone switched to silent.

I've been having pub-lunch style roast beef dinners nearly every day courtesy of Iceland, the wondrous frozen food store. They sell Sliced Beef in Gravy 200g for £1; Cauliflower and Broccoli Cheese 680g (3 big portions) for £1.50. It's 30% cauliflower, 30% brocooli; 60% creamy cheese sauce. The creamy cheese sauce is yummy and melts all over the plate. Despite instructions claiming 45 mins is required the whole lot's done in half an hour in a non-preheated oven at 225C.

This I put in with Potato Croquettes, which in case you're not working class British are tubular mashed potato shapes covered in a delightful crispy crumb coating. With these I put in a couple of industrially pre-done Yorkshire Puddings. You fork in some of the industrially cheeserunny broccoli and some industrially thin-cut roast beef (sliced in the manner only large canteens manage to do ~ no-one ever naturally gnashes roast beef like that at home.

All in all it's very lovely with a cyder-passionfruit cocktail "of" an evening... In fact ~ surprise, surprise! ~ I think I might have it again tonight!

Here's a clubbed-up mix of Madonna's Celebration:~

What Happened

I HAVEN'T BEEN AROUND FOR A FEW DAYS: I have been indisposed. It all started out at the weekend, when I tripped on a root. No I have not been pestle-&-mortaring "shamanic" Amazonian herbs. I mean I literally fell over on my chin, nearly broke my nose off and got bruises all over me, because of an inexpertly shorn-off 2" stub of root sticking under an evergreen by the library. I could barely move for 15 mins I was seeing so many stars. And I had headache all day and felt sick. People told me to go to Accident and Emergency but why bother? Last time I went and definitely did have concussion I got discharged! Then spent the next week wandering around not knowing what I was doing!

Then three days afterwards, I realized this pain in my side that got worse after I got up and it clicked notably and then I poked it really hard like a disbelieving doctor ~ it really started to hurt then and I realized I might actually have broken a rib!

So now I have to write to the local council telling them they're lucky I'm not an old age pensioner because I might be on a drip now if I was. I mean what kind of idiot person gets rid of humungous fricassing bushes and then thinks ~ o no! I can't be bothered to pull that last bit out. I'll just leave a 2" high stub and another section trailing like a tripwire. That'll make my employers REALLY HAPPY!

Hmmm... Yes and there's more. A couple of days later the phone rang. It was an old acquaintance offering a free sample of some "legal high" thing he said was "like E(cstasy) mixed with coke ~ you'll love it". Well I did try it. 0.2g of a white powder that smelled uncannily of candy. I snorted half up each side of my nose because he said swallowing it produced more uneven effects among different people and snorting was more reliable. But it killed my nose! Then just three minutes later the most incredibly pleasant high started off. It was far nicer than snorting cocaine and way quicker than MDMA (ecstasy) ever came on up my nose. 20 minutes later I was diving deep in my own brains and feeling like Buddha, a feeling that lasted a good 2 hours, followed by about 4 hours of quite some speediness. I took it at 6:30pm and got no sleep till nearly 5am.

Now of course I feel more run down than ever before. And I don't even know what that stuff was. He said it's called "Rush" ~ I suspect he selected that name as virtually Google-proof. And I'm not at all convinced it's legal.

When I was much younger and far more impressionable I shelled out £20 or so on a vast tome called PIHKAL by Alexander Shulgin. The title stands for Phenylethylamines I Have Known And Loved. Phenylethylamines are drugs in the ectstasy-mescaline category and run a spectrum from quite speedy (MDEA) to very entactogenic or empathogenic ~ or even entheogenic ~ as they like to say (MDMA) to trippy (MDA) to very trippy (2CB, mescaline et al). This man had a licence from the United States Government to manufacture for personal use and experiment with these otherwise illegal substances. There are about 150 of them. He tested all and wrote up notes, complete with dosages and remarks. Now I suspect this stuff was a rarer one of these. I know that stuff called PMA (paramethoxyamphetamine) was going around in the 1970s, and it was then, long before MDMA ever became an issue, that the entire family of these drugs were banned in Britain.

Phenylethylamine, the substance after which this entire druggie family's named, naturally occurs in chocolate. It's also known as PEA. Women's magazine articles will cite this and it's supposed high-inducing properties. But Shulgin found it to be orally inactive in any dose...

... (Unless, that is, something else in chocolate kicks the stuff in!!)

And also, I just realized, of course, he's a MAN ~ it's WOMEN who get off on chocolate... so maybe that's our PEA-mystery ....

Now I've little more to say, and apart from all this I've been totally absorbed in my book. I read the entire thing; now I'm ploughing back through with dictionary and notebook, so I can read yet again ~ and every single word with which I was unfamiliar's been translated ...

And how was YOUR week ..??!?

PS If you're interested in any of those mysterious substances mentioned the best place to read about them is EROWID.

PPS: read Dr Shulgin's write up on PEA, the supposed "active" ingredient in chocolate here.

MADONNA TUNE
The UK top 20 was playing last night and MOST of the tunes had this Ibiza-trance sound. I've never heard the British charts sound so ridiculously similar ever ...

And all else I can say is: Madonna, you're a 50-year old woman. Really!

CELEBRATION

Hummingbirds!

FEATHERY FRIDAY (ON SATURDAY)...

Famous for their iridescent colours ...



Hummingbirds are native to the Americas and are some of the world's smallest birds:



They feed on nectar from flowers ...



Their wings can beat at up to 20 times per second; they can hover in mid-air and fly at speeds of up to 54kph (34mph). Every year the tiny feathery swines migrate from North to South America, a journey of several thousand miles ... then back again! Which just doesn't look possible, considering their size ...



Can become quite tame ...



Look at those amazing feathers up close:



And the babies are very very tiny ...



... and the eggs are miniscule!

Christiane F

FINALLY THE BOOK I'VE WANTED FOR AGES CAME TODAY!

Christiane F: Wir Kinder Vom Bahnhof Zoo.

real name Christiane Felscherinow.

It is the story of a girl from a middle-class house who likes to sneak out to discos at night time. There among the bright lights she discovers heroin and life takes a downward slide. She finds herself leading a double life: going to school by day and sneaking out at night to Bahnhof Zoo (Berlin's equivalent of Kings Cross station) and prostituting herself for heroin money. And it takes her mother two years to realize what is wrong!

The book was a big bestseller in Germany. I heard it is (or was) a set text in German schools.

It WAS translated into English, published by Transworld in the UK but is now out of print. I doubt it has ever gone out of print in German.

In the English-speaking world the film Christiane F (with soundtrack by David Bowie) is of course far more famous. What's remarkable (for a film) is that the on-screen Christiane and her boyfriend Detlef really do look like the real-life pair.

Not much is known about what became of the real Christiane F. She gave an interview in her early 20s (link below) ~ when she had just been busted for heroin possession again. I heard that she has died ...

This was Christiane Felscherinow towards the end:





Christiane F age 23 ~ interview

Amazon Review:

I borrowed this book from one of my German school-exchange partners & although had just taken my GCSE at the time, I found I could understand the vast majority of the book, as it was written by a teenager and therefore doesn't contain many complicated words!
I have tried to buy this book several times in the *cough* 13 years *cough* since I read it, but always found it was out of print. So when I found out a couple of years ago that this book had come back into print I just had to buy it.

Wir Kinder Vom Bahnhof Zoo really is one of the most powerful books I have ever read, if you are a parent of German speaking children I would thoroughly reccommend you give them this to read when they are about 14 or 15. I'm sure it will definately make them think twice about taking drugs!

Like all the best books I have ever read the 'characters' in the book really do leep out at you, you can just imagine being in 1970's Berlin alongside these teenagers.

I think that this book is so powerful that if it were ever translated into English (& why I ask hasn't it been already???) it should be taught in our schools.

Here's the Christiane F filmclip formerly on my sidebar:

Christiane F
("Wir Kinder vom Bahnhoff Zoo")
Berlin has long been a centre of "alternative" living, attracting the artistic and dejected. And of course heroin rushes into such a void:



You can see the film in its entirety on my random blog by clicking HERE.

Is This The Most Evil Spider In Britain?

A BRITISH WOMAN "CHEATED DEATH" YESTERDAY after being bitten by the country's only venomous spider.

Emma Craven, 31, from Bournemouth, tried to toss the arachnid out of her bathroom window, assuming it was harmless ~ until it decided to chomp down on her hand.

She rapidly went into life-threatening anaphalactic shock following the bite, and required emergency hospital treatment.

False widow spiders are British relatives of the famous American black widow spiders. On average one person a year in the UK requires medical assistance following a false widow bite.

Spiders: top and right ~ false widows; bottom left ~ the famous black widow, bearing funky red arachno-"tattoo" ...

Woman in anaphalactic shock after "false widow" bite (Daily Mirror) ...

The truth about false widow spiders (Natural History Museum) ...

False Widow Spiders (UK Safari)

"Did the false widow bite?" (old news story: November 2006)

"Widow" Spider Breeds In Britain Due To Climate Change (Sun)



PIXIE LOTT: MAMA DO

This is a really catch tune. But I couldn't find it on Youtube for yous all ... Kept thinking it was by Little Boots ... Well y'know: gnomes, fairies and pixies ... would wear little boots ... easy mistake to make, surely ...!



ABSCESS PUS JAMBOREE!
Don't watch this if you're of a queasy disposition, I warn you.
Here's wondrous footage of a pus-overflowing abscess being lanced by medical professionals.
See how they expertly kneed out the gunge and milk it dry!
Many of my friends have had to go into hospital for inpatient abscess surgery on infections that make this look like a blackhead in comparison. I've always wanted to see what actually happens as the yucky infection goes under the knife ...

Legless

YES THERE IS INDEED NO REST FOR THE WICKED. I am run off my feet with ... what to do? Just pointless little tasks. When I actually "want" to stay at home and properly actuate this "Spring Clean" (because so far it's got only a quarter done, twice) ... I never get anywhere. Come here. Go there. Do this. No! Stop and do that ... and what was I meant to do? It's all like this.

On a totally discordant "note" hey ~ I had another idea. For children's stories. I don't know why, but I always wanted to be a writer of children's adventure stories since I was a child.

I don't remember standing up in class assembly (when we all, one by one, had to declare our ambitions to the entire school) ... standing up and saying "I want to be an author!" It's only because an evil girl in a higher year (and I was so tiny back then that she towered over me like a monster) came up that afternoon and mocked me: "Author! Author! I want to be an author!" that I remember the fact. And that little event has spurred me on ever since.

And no it's not about wizards.

Yesterday I remarked on how many ideas I have (and how many come to fruition?) And was reminded it's far better to have ideas that have yet to bloom than no ideas at all! Too true!

When I was very young someone much older than me told me this. And I've had a penchant for mentally collecting proverbs ever since... That if you don't send some boats out, "your boat" will never come in ...

And that's extremely true also!

The illustrations are (in case you have a crap monitor, or don't know the books): No Rest For The Wicked ~ Ozzy Osbourne album; Enid Blyton's Five Run Away Together ~ she is the world's biggest selling children's author with sales of over 600 million (though seemingly virtually unknown in America!); R L Stein's Goosebumps ~ huge number of titles with aggregate sales said to be in excess of 250 million ...

Not Drunk on The Juniper Gin

I HAVE STARTED DEEP INTELLECTUAL HEARTRENDING personal-inner-pus-spilling counselling sessions!

I use such language because most counselling "dynamics" seem to operate upon the premise that human beings are all traumatized. We are all like boils who need our pus massaged, oozed-out and cunningly extracted.

Counselling, I have always thought can transpire as an almighty waste of time. At one extreme it can be like gazing at one's own eyes endlessly in a mirror indulging in the marvel of how beautiful they are; at the other, you can use the sessions as an outlet to complain about your life every week for 50 minutes flat, do nothing at all about it and return next week to complain again. In the middle, perhaps one might find a place where one might learn and grow. How on earth you learn or grow when the counsellor does little more than clarify what they think you've said and "reflect back" beats me: but if you're willing to put in some welly, it somehow does appear to bear fruits.

My last experience of counsellling wasn't very happy. The counsellor said I turned up to one session and curled up in the foetal position crying for an hour. But I don't remember this. (But I do recall being very upset.) She kept saying she thought I needed more help than she could give me, which didn't make me happy. She was talking about psychiatrists and I've never trusted their dogmatic interpretation of the extremes of human suffering. I just think a lot of them are there to pay their credit cards, cars and mortgages. But aren't most people??

Well I'm going to give this thing a go. Apparently you DON'T have to bee absolutely and 100% opiate and -oid free to benefit from counselling's understated (or unstated) delights. So as I say I'm giving it a bash ~ and who knows what might "transpire" ...??

PS the gin-reference is to my new Spanish counsellor's name. I never did get a hold of it, but it sounds something quite like JUNIPER ... as in those bitter berries that Gordons, The Bombay Sapphire Company et al crush into gin ...

PS See that Juniper berries pic top lefthand corner and see why most gin tastes of pine-fresh toilet-cleaner..!

Paris Match, Stern-Magazin... und meiner Mutter!

TODAY I WENT TO SEE MY MOTHER and her husband (never really a step-dad to me ..) down the West End. We were going to eat Thai food, until we realized the "Indian and Thai restaurant" my Mum thought she'd found was actually offering Thalis ~ not a Thai menu at all! Both of my parents have the same problem: they read what they think is there. And I picked up this habit from them. But I don't think I'm as bad. It's a genetic thing. I think if it was very much worse it'd be called "dyslexia" or something ...

In fact we ended up talking about my humungous spelling problems I had (I was put in retarded readilng group) in primary school. My Mum used to teach me with flashcards and the teachers said this was confusing me as the "progressive" 1970s school was teaching reading by "phonics". In short let me tell you phonics do not work. They're based on the ridiculous premise that the English language can be taught "phonetically". And thanks to this I was constantly banging my head upon the brick walls of head not pronounced "heed" knees that were somehow K-less and so on. I still remember puzzling at a young age "why are there Cs and Ks. And Ss and Cs?" None of it made sense. My early writing books were a tangle of red corrections. And yet I grew up with the ambition to write novels!

We had a lovely lebanese dinner. My Mum had chicken skewers. I had lamb skewers (too much chicken's gone to my head. I've grown a gizzard. If we didn't have a "socialist NHS" the doctors would want $5000 to chop it off ... Branzy, unfortunately for him ordered something that sounded charming on the menu, but looked like bulls' testicles floating in a yogurty ejaculation. He kept quiet and kept nabbing bits of our salad ...

Afterwards I remembered I'm supposed to be learning Central European Dialect (ie German) so I raided the local cosmopolitan newsstand for Paris Match, Stern and Die Spiegel magazines, and sat there pretentiously leafing through on the tube home. The woman next to me was reading a novel in Swedish ...

And that was that. Today was meant to be hammybuying day but I spent so much time stressing about this evening's food experience I never did anything except the rudiments of getting ready and still I was late ...

Hope yous all had a cheery day too ... Cheerio for now!

Manatees

BLOBBEROUS FRIDAY ON SATURDAY ...

Also known as sea-cows, these are the weary miniature-whale-like dwellers of the tropical shallows.



... they are only miniature compared to whales, however. These gentle giants graze day-long on seaweed and other straggly underwater greens ...



Their inset eyes appear closed when they are open:



Though not conventionally pretty, they are very photogenic with kindly-looking faces:



Manatees often became victims to boat propellers till the laws were changed in Florida and some other places, insisting that propellers be housed in cages just like the wire box manufacturers have to put around household fans:



Manatees are mammals so their babies drink milk:



The babies are tiny and very cute ...



V I D E O . . .