BLOG ON SEMI-HIATUS (Sticky Post)

I have left St. Louis for job in Cologne, Germany.

This blog is in a state of semi-hiatus, as of September 4, 2018.

I’ll write posts here every once in awhile, just to update you all on how I’m doing, and my thoughts on whatever big news breaks. Our favorite doggy will chime in every once in awhile with his own guest posts. Other than that, expect posting around here to be sparse going forward.

Reading material:

My Labor Day 2018 farewell post — My final post from St. Louis for awhile, perhaps ever.

My post from July 26, 2018, announcing my departure.

The preview of my Summer 2018 travelogue that I’ll probably never get to write in full.

My long and frequently updated post on my condition and recovery — If I experience any significant progression or regression in my recovery, I or our favorite doggy will let you know, and this post will be appendaged. As of the time of my moving, my cognitive functioning has mostly recovered in full, but my physical functioning is still far from it, I’m still in a wheelchair during waking hours more often than not, and if I can stay upright on two feet, it’s for an hour at the longest, usually less.

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Alphabets and Arrows

Portland, Oregon

Two things happened within four days that either made me come to a profound observation, or made me late to the game, or in this case, the match.

Back on Tuesday, Major League Soccer awarded St. Louis a franchise.  Back in May 2017, city voters turned down a proposition that would have helped fund a soccer stadium west of Union Station.  What must have happened in the meantime is that private money came together.   I see one of the sources is Enterprise Rent-a-Car, and Carolyn Kindle Betz in specific.  Remember, Jack Taylor, who I know died recently, was a really big sports nut.  He hired many a former Mizzou athlete who never made it to or in the pros at Enterprise.

But I digress.

To me, one of the things that happened in reaction to it was the really curious and interesting thing relating to it, rather than it itself.

It’s the fact that, the night after, the parties and celebrations happened in The Grove, St. Louis’s big concentration of gay bars and establishments.

Hold that thought.

Three days later, on Friday, there was an MLS game, Seattle at Portland.  During the game, there was a planned and deliberate silent protest by fans of both teams.  MLS prohibits overtly political signs and banners and displays, and this has made soccer fans in both cities upset, because they want to bring in what is called the Iron Front, which is, the southwesterly-pointing triple down arrows, associated with Antifa.  As you can see, and check out ESPN, SI and The Oregonian, especially the latter’s photo gallery, there were lots of rainbow flags being flown as part of this silent protest.

So, you have gay, soccer, St. Louis, and gay, soccer, Portland and Seattle.

Hmmm.

It’s now becoming apparent that American high level and professional men’s soccer and especially its fandom is becoming a flash point for LGBTQ and Antifa, and probably also other associated sectors.  Of course, it has been obvious for a long time the significant crossover between high level and professional women’s soccer and lesbianism.

Why?

On this continent plus Cuck Island, if there are any political connotations to soccer, they are populist and nationalist, due to the fact that the organizational model is ground up, and club-centered, (e.g. most of the clubs in this year’s Bundesliga are way older than the Bundesliga itself, an alien concept to American sports fans), as opposed to the league and franchise centered nature of the MLS (note that St. Louis was awarded a franchise) and the American sports business model in general.  While I can understand, and in fact, have personally seen multiple times since living in Germany, how club-centered soccer is conducive to populism and nationalism, I don’t grok how a league-centered soccer business would necessarily contribute to the political opposite, American soccer fandom being heavily gay and Antifa.

Another theory I can come up with is that gay-Antifa-left in the United States are merely countersignaling against the other football, and how its territorial imperative potentially feeds a nationalist mindset.  Even though here in the real world, the photographic negative and ally of the soyboy left, the black undertow thug-excusing BLM/SJW milieu, are converging football.  That’s not counting the less recent events of the last three generations, where TPTB used football as an anti-nationalist weapon to wear down white Southern resistance to integration and the civil rights movement, and continues to do so today to dampen white reaction to the violent and stupid black underclass and undertow.

Maybe even more disconcerting than that is that LGBTQ-Antifa are latching onto soccer as a silent sort of elitist and hypocritical method to protest and separate themselves from the black undertow and its love of football.  That which makes Dontravious a great cornerback is that which also makes him a bad citizen — The ability to make quick impulsive reactionary decisions serves him well in the defensive secondary but horribly in the bars.

These last two theories I mention may well intertwine.  Antifa de la Soyboy in Portland loves soccer because xe hates football, and xe hates football because one group of people xe politically despises likes it, and another group of people xe personally fears plays it.

One more thing:  St. Louis now has a soccer team, big whoop.  The Region in which I live all by itself has six teams in this season’s Bundesliga.

Weekend Open Thread

Guest post by Puggg

If anyone’s still home, here’s your open thread.

I’m sure you all saw the two different shootings at two different football jamborees last night, one was by Soldan on the north side, and the other at Parkway North.  Of course we know who was behind both.  If this is the way it’s going to be, then basketball season is going to be fun.

Then the Illinois trooper from Waterloo murdered in the line of duty yesterday serving a warrant in Washington Park.

I’ll close my part with this.  Our normal host says that the way to stop mass shooters is to cut off their publicity.  They just brought in one in Jefferson City who threatened one on the internet, and he told the detectives that he wanted to outdo the ones in Columbine 20 years ago because he thought they were wusses.

The Implications For Me

Your Blogmeister’s German Desk

First off, the article dateline is Berlin, so they show a big picture of Frankfurt.

Smart.

I don’t know when this pic was taken, but I know the camera was pointing west, and Wiesbaden is about 19 miles west of Frankfurt as the crow flies, and I know that it’s in the direction of a little bit to the left of the center of the vantage point.  Probably the pic wasn’t taken high enough to see the tops of Wiesbaden’s tallest buildings and the top of the tallest spire on the Marktkirche, even if you were able to blow it up to a very large size, and I don’t know when it was taken, if it was taken any time in the last few months and at a point when I was in Wiesbaden.  But for what I’m thinking, in theory, if you could blow it up, you just might see me waving way off on the horizon.

Hi mom.

But seriously.

More than any of this, the coming German recession has implications for me personally, and our sector.

Assuming the rest of my rehab is successful and timely, I’ll be in the market for a brand new car at the end of this year.  A one-two punch of clearing out the old model year and a recession will make it very much a buyer’s market, meaning I’ll be able to expand my range of legitimate options in an upward and upgraded direction.

For our sector, the German economy has been on a ten plus year winning streak, the longest feast stretch of any in the German economy since the Wirtschaftwunder post-WWII years.  That has served to blunt public anger over immigration and refugees enough to keep Union/Merkel from falling through the floor, barely so.  Also, it has served to mask growing inequality and working class anxiety, which in turn are partially caused by the mass immigration.

With an actual recession, all that masking and blunting is gone, and all bets are off.

Criminal Justice Reform.

Guest post by Puggg

Four years for an act that’s legitimately Murder 2.

That’s that Circuit Attorney that the city has, sheesh.

Sunday’s Word Salad

New York

We know it’s silliness.

First off, last season, the average player salary was $6.1 million while the median was $2.5 million.  Those of you with at least a rudimentary knowledge of statistics know what this means when the average is so disconnected from the median.  Either way, there aren’t $2.5 million slaves, anywhere.

Second, there must not be any real problems in this world, if this is a BFD.

But if there’s any there there to any of this foolishness, it’s for the fact that American English as a language uses “team” to refer to both the organization/business and the men.  Most people get it.  They know that the owners own the business, and the business employs the men, not that the owners own the men.  Yet and still, the homonymic nature of “team” in this context may contribute to this muh slavery mentality.

That’s a problem that the country I’m in does not have.

In German, “Verein” means team as a business and organization, while “Mannschaft” (literal translation of the parts is how it appears:  Man shaft), means the team as the men and players.  The owners own the Verein, so nobody ever thinks they own the Männer in the Mannschaft.  “LeBron James returns to the team after recovering from an injury” would use Mannschaft;  “Steve Ballmer is the sole owner of the team” would use “Verein.”

Note:  “Verein” could also mean “society,” but in the context of a tangible organization.  Gesellschaft (lit.: Fellow shaft) means society in the abstract.  “Cancer Victims Support Society” would use Verein, while “Society’s declining morals” would use Gesellschaft.  But to make matters more confusing, add “Aktie” in front of “Gesellschaft” and you’re back to a tangible organization, i.e. a publicly traded corporation, “Aktie” = Joint stock.  Aktiegesellschaft, abbreviated as AG, which is why you see AG behind the big German corporations.  BMW AG, Siemens AG, Bayer AG.

This isn’t the first time I’ve encountered this sort of thing.  “Free” in English could be free as in speech, or free as in beer.  In German, you use “Frei” to mean speech (to the extent that Germans actually have it — Ed.) and “Kostenlos” (lit.:  Cost-less) to mean beer.  Even though I’ve seen “Kostenfrei” on occasion in the wild.

I better stop before I go any deeper down this Kaninchenbau.

Point being, sometimes you wish English was as wordy as German. (???)  And that the Sapir-Whorf Hypothesis is A Thing.

 

Real Housewives of Cologne

Your Blogmeister’s German Desk

So you want to know how it went last night meeting her family.

I think I might have walked right into the middle of a real life reality show. More than that, my walking in is what sparked the drama.

First things first: Her father and I hit it off pretty decently. That was the sine qua non of the whole evening for my initial concern. While nobody there was naive about what anyone there is doing with anyone else, not least of all her father vis-a-vis his older daughter and myself, I still wanted the evening to end with her father and I not disliking each other, at the bare minimum. Turns out he and I have some things in common, which is probably one of the reasons why she likes me so much. If our relationship is a long termer, I can see how he and I could be assets to each other on occasion, other than just purely getting along well. More than that I cannot add so publicly.

Things went okay as well with her mother.

But then, her sister and her brother-in-law.

Whoa boy.

Just to set the scale, you already know I’m 42 and the g/f is 32. Her father is 61, mother 57. Sister, her only sibling, is 30. Her husband is about to turn 30.

SOYBOY~!

That wound up helping me put a few pieces of the puzzle together. The g/f and I had already discussed our previous difficulties and bad luck with the opposite sex before now. At first, I thought her problems with men were just the same generic sort of bad luck that I have had with women. And some of that might still be true. But once I got a whiff of the soyboy-in-law, I started to think that her “bad luck” with men is nothing more than her getting tired of the soyboy army of western Germany, and for the fact that she would rather be alone than end up with a wuss like her brother-in-law. So I come along into her life almost a year ago now, sorta like the average guy from the year 2005 who winds up time travelling to the year 2505 in Idiocracy. I’m no big time alpha myself, but in the land of the blind…

Then there was the sister. Half the evening it seems like, she stared at me like I was some kind of T-Bone steak and she was a desperately hungry wolf. Everyone else at the table knew it, and could see it, and figured out what was going on, except for the oblivious soyboy, who seemed like he was gawking at his phone half the evening. I certainly hope, for my own personal sake, and ironically so, that, in that marriage, she does all of the automobile driving.

If our relationship is a long term one, then we’re going to have to contend with the chronic threat of her sister trying to get in between the two of us. Complicating matters will be her father, her mother and the soyboy, how those personalities intertwine with the drama and politics of it all.

But for this, I would be indifferent about the sister, she’s there, takes up space, but I neither like nor dislike her.  But because of this, I’m praying that her job soon transfers her to Outer Mongolia.

After it was over, and the g/f and I broke ranks to went back to her place, we talked about this (and did other things), and were of the same mind on everything. Except she said that she should have been able to foresee the whole sister problem, and seen to it that she and her soyboy weren’t there. I would have agreed, except I told her that if we do go long term, it would have been inevitable that they would have been introduced into the social mix. Meaning the problems would have started later rather than sooner, but they still would have started.

If only her parents would have stopped after one.

And stay tuned for the next episode of Real Housewives of Cologne. But none too soon, because I’m about to catch a train later today, and I’ll be away from this budding drama to the tune of three weeks and a few hundred miles, er, kilometers.

With Cuomo

Shelter Island, New York

If someone ran up on my yelling words that are vaguely ethnic slurs relating to myself, I’d be a bit nonplussed, too.

Gotta go what will probably be against the grain of our sector and side with Fredo on this one.