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HAPPY TURKEY DAY!
Thanksgiving and Christmas are my favorite holidays. I wish I could be eating a nice big turkey dinner with mashed potatoes and gravy, homemade cranberry sauce, apple-chestnut stuffing, and delicious pumpkin pie a la mode today. I considered cooking a turkey on the weekend when Rainer is here, but I don’t think I am in any shape to do this.
Life sucks right now. My back pain is worsening every day. One or both of my slipped discs is now pinching the sciatic nerve, so I can barely lift my right leg and am in constant pain. I can’t sleep. My doctor started me on new meds (Celebrex), but this doesn’t help very much against the pain. So, no long posts for the time being, since sitting is pretty unbearable. Argh! I have to keep a heating pad on my back and right hip all the time now. The physical therapist said not to let my muscles get cold. So, maybe I will go sit in a hot bath for a while.
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It’s Christmas time…
ebags.com rocks. We’re getting a purse for my aunt for X-mas and maybe one for Rainer’s niece. I can’t believe I never thought of visiting this site before.
It’s supposed to snow tomorrow. It has been a surprisingly mild fall here in Rostock, last year we had snow in early October. Well, I guess summer didn’t start until mid-July, so maybe the seasons just got a little off this year.
I’m still having trouble sitting for very long and my back hurts like hell. I forgot to mention it before, but when I missed the step last week, I managed to not only sprain my ankle, but we found on Monday after X-rays and a CT scan that I also slipped two discs in my lower back. At least my ankle is almost better now.
Rainer describes Christmas gift-giving in my family as war of escalation. German’s don’t spend outrageously at X-mas. $10-20 a gift is a good amount for them. Last year we gave presents from the both of us and this year Rainer says we must fight back and give presents separately because we were given presents separately last year.
I need a new job.
Counting flowers on the wall, that don’t bother me at all…
The Girly-Man Dollar
American Dollars to 1 EUR
The US Dollar has reached a record low against the Euro. As you can see in the above graph from x-rates.com, the Euro is rising steadily against the US Dollar (same trend can be seen when the US Dollar is compared against the British pound, Japanese Yen, Canadian and Australian Dollars).
German exporters like Porsche, Volkswagen and Siemens are worried, as their profits are dropping drastically. Siemens has reported that the prices of it’s products have risen 30% in the US in a very short time span.
Some financial experts are predicting that this rapid fall will continue to the end of the year, with the Euro/dollar ratio eventually reaching 1.35 and pound/dollar ratio reaching 2. Man, and I thought London was expensive when the ratio was 1.5.
What does this mean? Unless you have unlimited funds, don’t travel outside the US and don’t buy foreign-made products if you’re an American. What does it mean for me? Woohoo, 30-35% discount on all my Christmas shopping this year.
Recently Viewed Movies
Scary Movie 3 - okay, if you keep your expectations low.
Dawn of the Dead (remake) - this got panned by critics, but I thought it wasn’t that bad.
Van Helsing - better than I thought it would be. Still, Anthony Hopkins was a cooler Van Helsing and Gary Oldman a cooler Dracula.
Schultze gets the blues - very good German movie along the lines of About Schmidt. Schultze is a miner who must retire early. At first, he has trouble filling his days, but after hearing a zydeco program on the radio, he becomes almost obsessed with it. It starts with playing zydeco songs on his accordian, to cooking jambalaya for his buddies, and progresses to him flying to the US, buying a small boat and cruising around Texas and Louisiana. I highly recommend this film.
Open Range - enjoyable cross between Lonesome Dove and Unforgiven.
Adaption - wierd. very wierd. I liked it, but I don’t think I’d be much into repeat viewings.
What are your political leanings?
Since I am in turmoil over my possible transition from Republican to Democrat, I decided to seek out some help in the shape of Internet Quizzes!
According to the World’s Smallest Political Quiz on the Advocates for Self-Government Website, I am a Libertarian:
LIBERTARIANS support maximum liberty in both personal and economic matters. They advocate a much smaller government; one that is limited to protecting individuals from coercion and violence.
Libertarians tend to embrace individual responsibility, oppose government bureaucracy and taxes, promote private charity, tolerate diverse lifestyles, support the free market, and defend civil liberties.
According to the quiz on The Political Compass website, I am just slightly to the right and slightly more libertarian than the Dalai Lama, but am still in the left/Libertarian quadrant. Warning: I would be careful taking this quiz, it uses a lot of double negatives in the questions.
The quiz written by Victor Kamber and Bradley S. O’Leary that appeared in the October 28-30, 1994 issue of USA Weekend puts my political beliefs between those of Bill Clinton and Colin
Powell.
And finally to add some spice to the mix, there is the very cool Belief-o-Matic at beliefnet.com, which has proclaimed that my religious beliefs most closely match with Unitarian Universalism, with Liberal Quakers, Mainline to Liberal Christian Protestants, and Theravada and Mahayana Buddhism following.
I’m a loser baby… so why don’t you kill me?
Saturday night, I got to visit yet another German emergency room. Embarassingly, I was coming down some steps after exiting a restaurant (Kaminstube - not so good) and I missed the last step. I sprained my left ankled badly and hurt my back. I have just in the last hour been able to put weight on my ankle. Man, my boss is gonna be super pissed. Maybe I’ll be able to walk by tomorrow morning? I feel just a bit stupid now.
On ‘Moral Values,’ It’s Blue in a Landslide
Perhaps there’s hope…
In a piece by Frank Rich in the New York Times, Rich states that, “it’s blue America, not red, that is inexorably winning the culture war.”
Quotes and summaries of key points:
Those whose “moral values” are invested in cultural heroes like the accused loofah fetishist Bill O’Reilly and the self-gratifying drug consumer Rush Limbaugh are surely joking when they turn apoplectic over MTV
Fox News, owned by Rupert Murdoch, is the leading source of news for the “Moral Majority.” Other Murdoch holdings include:
- Recent books like Jenna Jameson’s “How to Make Love Like a Porn Star” and the Vivid Girls’ “How to Have a XXX Sex Life,” both promoted on Fox News by willing hosts like Rita Cosby and Bill O’Reilly. There are “real fun parts and exciting parts,” said Ms. Cosby to Ms. Jameson on Fox News’s “Big Story Weekend,” broadcast on Saturday at 9 p.m., assuring its maximum exposure to unsupervised kids.
- “Married by America,” which was fined $1.2 million (more than twice the punishment inflicted on Viacom for Janet Jackson’s “wardrobe malfunction”) because one episode in this heterosexual marriage-promoting reality show included scenes in which “partygoers lick whipped cream from strippers’ bodies,” and two female strippers “playfully spank” a man on all fours in his underwear.
- Paris Hilton’s “The Simple Life”
- The wife-swapping show “Trading Spouses: Meet Your New Mommy”
Illinois Senator-elect Barack Obama, was assured victory once his pious Republican opponent, Jack Ryan, dropped out of the race rather than defend his taste for “avant-garde” sex clubs
As a congressman, Tom Coburn, the newly elected Republican senator from Oklahoma, attacked NBC for encouraging “irresponsible sexual behavior” and taking “network TV to an all-time low with full frontal nudity, violence and profanity being shown in our homes” in response to NBC’s showing of “Schindler’s List”
If the Republican party’s next round of leaders are all cool with blue culture, why should Democrats run after the red?
- Rudy Giuliani, John McCain and Arnold Schwarzenegger are supporters of gay rights and opponents of the same-sex marriage constitutional amendment
- McCain calls himself pro-life, and he’s never made abortion a cause
- None of the three support the Bush administration position on stem-cell research.
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