The storm that wasn’t

A couple of days ago, Germany was about to be battered by gale-force winds as a windstorm swept across central Europe, leaving destruction and mayhem in its wake. This I had to document, so I set up my camera for some awesome timelapse photography.

In the event, of course, the storm had petered out by the time it got here, and while it was wet and blustery, it wasn’t anything like on the scale we’d been promised.

The first sign of madness

This is a video I just did more-or-less on the spur of the moment, and it involves me talking to myself. Which you can do in a video, of course.

It’s a simple enough video to make, and I even decided not to bother with a costume change. Already, one viewer congratulated me on a great parody of an interview given by a the politician Karl-Theodor Freiherr zu Guttenberg, but I have to admit that this was furthest from my mind when I wrote the script. I suppose you could analyse the hell out of this one, but really… it’s just a bit of fun.

Why I want to learn Humpback Whale

Sometimes, it’s difficult to know what to make a video about, and this is one of those times. Thankfully, I have my faithful viewers and subscribers on hand to help me think of stuff to talk about.

It’s that time of year again

With a certain inevitability, the calendar creeps towards that special holiday where we all have to be fun-loving and jolly and yet peaceful and with goodwill to all men in our hearts (“goodwill to all people” would be more in keeping with our more egalitarian times, but doesn’t really sound right).

All of this is fine with me as far as it goes, but if you really want to put me off a festival, you only have to impose on me the sort of enforced jollity over a period of several weeks that makes me feel I’m somehow letting the side down if I have a bad morning. Suddenly, I go all cynical to the point where it’s fun to pointedly refuse to join in the fun.

Around here, people go slightly insane from the first Sunday in Advent, although it all begins as early as September when the first chocolate Santas appear in the stores. Suddenly, people are draping their houses in LEDs, inflatable snowmen and dummy Santas hilariously hanging onto rope ladders (if you want to burgle a house in Germany between Halloween and New Year’s, just get a Santa costume and practice moving like a lethargic sloth). Oh, and relentless Christmas music, most of it almost as old as me, is played at you everywhere (and while we’re on the subject, Last Christmas by Wham! is not a jolly Christmas tune, it’s a song about the break-up of a dysfunctional relationship).

Of course, it’s not Christmas itself I object to, but all the stuff leading up to it and the stuff you’re expected to do. My ideal Christmas would start on Christmas Eve, the house would be simply and tastefully decorated, there would be a nice meal, an exchange of small but meaningful gifts, and the next twelve days would be full of slightly more alcohol than usual, visits to and from friends and relatives I actually like and punctuated by a big party on New Year’s Eve.

Call me a killjoy if you will, but an even bigger killjoy is the Catholic Church in Germany. Every year in the run-up to Christmas (the new word for Advent), the Catholic Church has a campaign to ban Santa Claus. You see, Santa is an American tradition which has usurped the much more venerable tradition of St Nicholas, whose day is 6th December. The original German tradition is that St Nicholas brings small gifts for children on that day, while the big Christmas gifts are brought by the Christ Child on Christmas Eve, rather in the manner (we are led to believe) that someone having a birthday is expected to buy everyone a round of drinks.

Glossing over the fact that the Christ Child dispensing gifts in Germany is almost universally associated with a pubescent girl in a nightie and sporting angel wings, the Church sort of has a point here: Santa did get here from America. Having got to America from the Netherlands, and getting a bit confused with Father Christmas from Britain.

But how mean-spirited do you have to be to actually launch a campaign banning Santa from Germany? Demanding that shops remove their chocolate Santas and replace them with chocolate St Nicks (the only difference being that St Nick, being a bishop, wears a mitre) seems like a pointless gesture. Putting up posters with the face of Santa with a red diagonal stripe through it (“Say No to Santa”) is just spiteful.

So what if five-year-olds imagine their gifts are delivered not by a winged girl pretending to be a baby boy, but by a jolly fat man in red? Seriously.

Beer mugs: untold possibilities

Now, here’s a video that caused me more trouble than I’d expected. The actual filming and editing went smoothly: it’s not difficult, just me talking in front of a green screen with some small amount of technical wizardry. It’s just that when I uploaded it… closed captions weren’t showing up. Well, that’s sort of what happened; it’s more accurate to say that English captions were sometimes showing up in the track list in the video settings (at one point three copies), but not on the video at all, only to vanish again and then reappear. Eventually, the system got its act together and I was able to let the video go public.

But anyhow: the news report that inspired this video is typical of the sort of little article that finds its way into our local paper, and this being the sort of place it is, the police take this very seriously. It’s probably the most interesting case they’ve had to deal with in months.

Taking humour seriously

A while back, I made a video about German humour as it appears to non-Germans, especially Brits (since I am particularly qualified in that area). If you haven’t seen it yet, it’s this one.

Fascinatingly (if such a word exists), a great number of comments came from Germans pretty much proving my point by failing to notice the humour and talking it all too seriously. And then getting annoyed, thinking I’d just told them their humour sucked.

This is what prompted my latest video, a 16-minute run-down of just what it was I was trying to say. Which is quite the longest YouTube video I have ever made, so I hope everyone’s satisfied. I’m not upset, by the way; but I am very amused.

I have a new toy!

It’s a Chromebook. Google nicely gave it to me ahead of its official launch in Germany in order to put it through its paces, and tell as many people as possible about it. And this is what I’m using right now to write this post.

For those who don’t know what a Chromebook is, it’s basically a netbook with an operating system consisting of a file manager and a browser. And that’s it. The idea is that most computers these days are pretty much exclusively used to connect to the internet, so all you really need is, well, a browser. And since pretty much everything these days is done on the web — e-mail, social networking, and even (thanks to Google Docs) word processing and spreadsheets — that’s all you need, most of the time.

I’m still finding my way around it, but it’s an interesting little tool. Some are skeptical about whether it’s really any better than a tablet PC or a smartphone, but I do appreciate having a proper keyboard (as “proper” as is possible on a netbook).

Since it hasn’t any need for a hard drive, or any drive at all, and the OS really is just a glorified browser, there’s precious little to boot up, a process that therefore takes a little under ten seconds. It’s also quite light — about the same as a medium-weight hardbound book.

I’ve been given the Samsung version (Acer also does a Chromebook). The version sold in the US comes with a Verizon chip for those times when you can’t get a wifi signal, but that’s illegal in Germany (it ties you down to a specific provider), so instead it has a slot for a SIM card, and it’s really difficult to get the SIM card in and out. There is a SIM card provided free with a German Chromebook, with free three months’ flatrate internet access, but the provider Google chose to team up with happens to have the worst HSUPA coverage in Germany, so in my village I can only connect via GPRS which is horribly, horribly slow. So thank you, German lawmakers: I can switch to a different provider (which I may do when my three months free trial is up).

But it is a nice gift from Google all the same. Thanks, fellas.