If Loving You is Wrong

A few days ago, J, wife of Prophylactic Paul, forwarded along another German sex story:
Demetrius Soupolos (29) and his wife were very keen to have a child together, but when doctors found that Demetrius is sterile, they began to seek other options to become parents.
The option the couple decided on was to hire their neighbor [...]

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Don’t Be Needy

One thing living in Germany taught me was the ease with which one can overestimate how necessary some goods are to a happy life.  Doing without a freezer or oven for 6 months proved but a negligible inconvenience,  for instance, and certainly far less of one than I would have thought beforehand.  This lesson has [...]

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Ways Germany’s Changed Me

My default assumption is stores are closed after dusk.
Perfunctory pleasantries and hyper-attentive American waitstaff  irritate the ever-loving crap out of me.
There’s a compulsion to pay with cash and coin to the exact cent.
I cringe whenever a single small item–a book or travel alarm clock, say–is automatically bagged at the register.
Forever closed windows choking off frische [...]

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Time Value

To my dismay, I left my alarm clock in the hotel on a brief trip to Hilton Head this weekend. It was a good travel clock, and had been pretty much everywhere I had in the past half dozen years, imbuing me with some sentimentality for it.
My heavyhearted search for a replacement began online, but [...]

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Homunculi

A truly astounding series of German condom advertisements are making the rounds this morning—each features a sketch of a sperm made to look like Adolf Hitler, Osama Bin Laden or Mao Zedong. Their not so subtle message being, “Better wrap it up… unless you want to bring evil into the world!”
On one hand, these ads [...]

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