Oh, Gee - Ostalgie

More a spelling error than a portmanteau, Ostalgie comes from the German word Nostalgie (nostalgia), cleverly missing the N to begin with Ost, the German word for East. Ostalgie thus refers to a nostalgic attitude towards former East Germany.

As with many formerly Soviet-led countries (including Russia), people yearn for the perceived ease of life under communist rule. State-owned industry meant that everyone could have a job and everyone could have food (when the country wasn't stricken with famine, anyway). In times of high unemployment and with the vestiges of bloc architecture slowly fading from East German cities, Ostalgie has developed into a defining characteristic of East German culture.


The Road to German Reunification

After World War 2, Germany's borders not only shrank, but the Allies split the nation into occupied zones - one each controlled by the UK, the USA, and the USSR (later the US and UK would split their zones and give one to France). Eventually in May of 1949 the western allies (UK, USA, France) unified their occupied zones into the the Federal Republic of Germany (Bundesrepublik Deutschland in German). As a response, the Soviet Union had their zone formalized as the German Democratic Republic (Deutsche Demokratische Republik). For 41 years the FRG and GDR existed as separate nations.

In August of 1989 Hungary (a member of the Soviet-led Warsaw Pact) opened its border with Austria (not a member of NATO, but pro-West). East German tourists then flocked to Hungary in September...to escape to the West via the opened border. Subsequently, East Germany decided to open its borders, resulting in the fall of the Berlin Wall on November 9th, 1989 and a flood of people to the west.

With free elections in March the following year, East Germany started on the rocky road to unification with West Germany. Despite resistance by many NATO members (most famously Margaret Thatcher), eventually German diplomats secured the reunification of the country. The final step being the formal institution of 5 German states at midnight on October 3rd, 1990 (October 3rd is subsequently celebrated as reunification day istead of November 9th due to some unfortunate implications with that whole Nazi thing).


Who Loves a Trabant?

Ostalgie materializes in a love for the Ampelmännchen - the little traffic signal man. With a hat and powerful strut he adorned many of the Walk/Don't Walk signs in Eastern Germany (vintage signs can still occasionally be seen today). Due to his former ubiquity on every street corner (with a stop light, anyway), the Ampelmännchen has become the dominant symbol of Ostalgie today.

The Trabant from the title of this section is also a prime example of Ostalgie. By far the most prominent car in East Germany, the Trabant was designed and created solely to be a cheap, working man's car. A small two-stroke engine gave the car little power, but the flimsy Duroplast chassis and small frame gave it enough power to push 4 adults around at modest speeds. When the checkpoints to the West opened in the '90s waves of Trabants streamed out of East Germany since few people owned any other brands. To the casual viewer a Trabant looks like a heap, but, the Trabbi remains beloved for its simplicity and its part in history.

Many stores in East Germany mark certain goods with an Ostprodukt label, indicating they were manufactured in (former) East Germany. Ostalgie all but revived Vita-Cola (a sort of citrus-cola mix). Due to import bans on much of what the West had to offer, local products reached a rather large consumer base in the East. The government demanded a non-alcoholic drink to serve the masses, so they had a chemical company whip something together. So East Germans drank Vita Cola instead of Coca Cola or Pepsi (whose products are still very uncommon in Europe, but particularly East Germany).


Old ladies reminisce about how great it was that everyone had work and how the trains ran on time. And in some ways these memories prove correct. In the GDR unemployment ran at nearly 0% thanks to a state-run economy the handed out work details. East Germany exported a large amount of industrial and engineering equipment. By the 1980s they had begun to dabble in computers (essentially the Soviet's equivalent of tech-savvy 80s Japan...except much more expensive and not as successful).

But by the late 1980s the East German government was running a large deficit. In order to maintain the standard of living and import necessary raw materials for the industrial sector, East Germany began amassing large debts.


Black and Blue Tinted Glasses

Soviet-controlled East Germany was no picnic. Understandably upset at the loss of millions of Soviet citizens the Soviet Union was not kind in its occupation of East Germany. After Germany surrendered to end World War Two (in Europe, anyway), the Soviet Union proceeded to take any heavy machinery that wasn't bolted down. And some that was. The GDR (East Germany) came out with a crippled economy, a puppet government and - most notoriously - a brutally repressive secret police.

East Germany had to contend with large amounts of unrest as the population suffered prolonged depression with their weakened industrial base. Party loyalty got you employment much faster than ability, so skilled technicians were often relegated to lower tier jobs. A severe brain drain further stunted the economy as the intelligensia and youth attempted to flee to the West for greater personal freedom and the potential for a higher standard of living.

The GDR eventually attempted to stymie these developments by integrating East Germany into the economic interdependencies of the Soviet Eastern Bloc. As mentioned the GDR became the focal point for the bloc's machinery and computer manufacturing. The GDR erected the Berlin Wall to prevent flight into the West (less famously they also built a barbed wire fence along the entire East Germany-West German border). But the Stasi represented the GDR's efforts to curb unrest in much more brutal ways.

The Ministerium für Staatssicherheit (Ministry for State Security, colloquially abbreviated to the Stasi) was created for counter espionage and monitoring unrest amongst the population. Loyalty to the incumbent communist party was paramount and dissenters were brutally repressed. The Stasi had a presence in nearly every town in East Germany (Magdeburg even had a Stasi prison). The Stasi routinely held and interrogated citizens and kept them for prolonged periods in prison-like conditions. Making jokes about the government could keep you there indefinitely.


In My Day We Were Oppressed Only Once or Twice a Day!

For many people Ostalgie just means remembering the good parts of the past.

But for others Ostalgie remains not just a focal point of nostalgia, but a representation of an authentic desired destination. The east still has a lower standard of living and higher unemployment than the west, which breeds resentment. And as the older generation sees the new youth grow up to outrageous modern fads and Western culture they yearn for days of simplicity and respect. Just as they often do in the USA and elsewhere (stress of imminent nuclear war? I don't know what you're talking about).

Every once and a while people yearn for the good ol' days. When behatted men helped you cross the street and your car was made out of plastic and plant fiber.



So, Good Bye, Lenin; hello...Merkel?

The Succulent Succession of Swine Side: A Brief History of Bacon

Although not the most popular animal in the US, the pig remains a "wonderful, magical animal" and has become a staple of the American diet (and internet memes - some more NSFW than others). It is, in fact, even more popular in Europe. Of course, if you happen to eat the pig it becomes pork - like transubstantiation. Pork just happens to encompass a wide swatch of carnivore favorites, including ham, fatback, soki, porkchops, and - arguably most important of all - bacon. While consumption of pork in general hasn't changed much in the last 50 years, bacon has become more popular than ever.

Depending on how you define bacon, of course.


Defining Deliciousness

Bacon in the US comes from the pig belly, which gives it the distinctive parallel stripes of light fat and darker meat (coincidentally, 80s movies often mention pork belly futures, which seems like an outlandish trading commodity, but is actually a means of alleviating risk for meat packers by helping to stabilize the price). In other parts of the world this bacon takes up the name American bacon or breakfast bacon. The USDA even appetizingly defines bacon as the "the cured belly of a swine carcass." But this is a bit backwards, as etymologically bacon comes from the Old French and Germanic words for "back."

In order to preserve the meat and give it its distinctive flavor, it has to be cured - usually by sitting in a smoke house or in a barrel with a heavy brine. Curing defines bacon, but location on the pig is also important (in fact, the only thing initially separating ham from bacon was that ham came from the legs and bacon came from almost anywhere else). Bacon in general often refers to any portion of meat (non-organ) cuts rear of the front legs and excluding the rear legs. Although modern consensus limits bacon to the belly, sides below (or behind, if you don't want anthropomorphic pigs) the ribs, and the fatty portion of the back.

As noted, American-style or streaky bacon comes from the belly. The back portion is usually called Canadian (or Irish) bacon in the US (when it's not ham) and tends to have much less fat. Side bacon represents a mix of the fatty and meaty American and Canadian associations. The Kevin Bacon tends to have a lot of Golden Globes and SAG awards and isn't considered very edible. These distinctions between different cuts of bacon - and even the difference between ham and bacon - have not existed for long.


A Brief History of Deliciousness

Pigs were one of the earliest domesticated animals. Human diets have included various types of pork for quite a while. Chinese historians often claim the first ancestor of bacon in the form of pickled pork bellies around 1500 BC. While whole animals became the focus of feasts and banquets, armies used cured cuts of meat as a marching staple. Unlike the American association with long strips of smoked pig belly, most early forms of "bacon" likely came in chunks and were heavily salted to prevent decomposition and to remain edible.

The Romans issued soldiers rations with pork (about 2lbs of grain and 1lb of meat when possible, augmented with what was available nearby). They distinguished pig by two types: perna (hind-quarter/ham) and petaso (fore-quarter/shoulder bacon). Soldiers were often given petaso (often just called bacon in English); a contubernium (squad of eight) had its own frying pan to bake bread and fry meats.

During their occupation of Britain they brought numerous Roman foods to the Celtic populace - including soldiers' bacon. Subsequent generations of immigrant Angles and Saxons enjoyed using bacon grease (and pork) in their cooking. Distinguishing bacon from other type of pork has happened in numerous countries recently, but for much of the last few centuries the culinary distinction existed primarily in the Anglosphere.

But the Roman invention of specifying different parts of pork mostly disappeared after the empire collapsed. In the centuries afterward etymological ancestors of bacon simply defined cuts of meat. By the 12th century in England bacon was being used to refer to cuts of meat from the back - initially adopted as a synonym of flicche or flitch (this corresponds to adopting an abundance of Old French words as the Normans came in).

Subsequently, the famous story of the Dunmow flitch has helped solidify bacon's place in history. Supposedly the tale spawned the phrase "bring home the bacon" because a married couple could bring home a flitch of hog (i.e. side of bacon) if they had not quarreled for twelve months and a day. Supposedly the custom was so widespread that Chaucer referenced it. Bacoun (Middle English compared to Old French bacon above) soon referred to any cut of pork.

By the 1600s, bacon referred to a cut of pig meat cured as a single piece (back when slices (or rashers if you're British) were called flitches). By the 1750s bacon was synonymous with the cured side or back of a pig (close to the current general definition now). Northern England (not Scotland) had pickled pork - a close equivalent to modern bacon. By the late 1700s, ranchers and industrialists bred pigs to emphasize particular portions and flavors of the meat (even breeding them for bacon that could more easily be cured).

Although most bacon was heavily salted or smoked in a chimney, more refined curing processes began to develop. Wiltshire curing, one of the oldest styles of modern bacon, developed in the 1860s. As ice became more common, ice houses developed. The cold temperature let butchers cure meat over longer periods of time, requiring less salt - allowing for sweeter, more flavorful bacon.


Now let's see some petaso lingerie.

Which Came First: The Stick and the Egg

Media featuring WW2 have a flare for the dramatic. Americans wield iconic M1 Garands and invariably drive around in jeeps. Germans sleep at MG42s and will inevitably scrounge up a tank. In movies and video games there is a satisfying duality between the Axis and Allies; not only ideology separated the two, but a dichotomy of technology as well. Americans throw "pineapples," Germans throw "potato mashers" (what Damian Lewis is holding in this picture).

Undoubtedly this is because the Stielhandgranate (stick hand grenade) is a recognizable piece of military equipment from the Second World War unique to the Germans (that whole Eastern Front thing? I don't know what you're talking about). It's unfamiliar design and curious operation evoke a very foreign feeling towards Wehrmacht soldiers. Americans (and - when pictured - British and other Allies) invariably appear with grooved, fist-sized grenades like the Mk II "pineapple" grenade. Never mind the fact that the US had copied the basics of this design from the British Mills Bomb during the First World War.

Depicting Germans exclusively using Stielhandgranaten a convenient avenue of influencing the audience's perception that the Germans were vastly different in culture. The truth, however, is that the favored German grenade was very similar to the Allies' design, with a funnier (yet still food-based) name: the egg hand grenade.

German military production favored two types of grenades: the Stielhandgranate (stick hand grenade) and the Eihandgranate (egg hand grenade). Mass production of the Eihandgranate began in June of 1940 and soon far surpassed the production numbers of the iconic potato masher. Even including production numbers from 1939 and 1940 (before the "egg" grenade came into use), 9 million more egg-shaped grenades were produced during the war (84.2 million to 75.4 million stick grenades). In fact, the only modern movie or video game to actually display the Eihandgranate is The Pianist (where they are never used).

Aside from potential identification errors by the audience, there's a reason Eihandgranaten aren't usually depicted in movies and games. They don't appear in historical photographs as prominently as their stick-y counterparts. This has little to do with their actual prevalence on the battlefield; the grenades tended to be kept in a soldier's pockets until needed (unlike American Mk II grenades, which tended to be clipped on to assault webbing). This gives them much less visibility than Stielhandgranaten, which tended to be tucked into the belt.

Here's another chance to catch a glimpse of these elusive eggs.


In case you're wondering why all these eggs and sticks seem to have roots: explosive German grenades used a friction-based fuze. The soldier would yank on the bead, pulling a cord attached to a wire coated with abrasive, which scraped through the friction-sensitive compound in the detonator...similar to lighting a match (or pulling a stick of sandpaper through a tube of match heads). Like a Rube Goldberg machine, except it explodes. Generally the cord was secured inside the grenade's housing, except when they would need to be used on short notice (instances of exposed cords getting caught and prematurely detonating the grenade happened occasionally).

The Eihandgranate consisted of a fuze and detonator in one convenient package. So convenient in fact that by 1943 the German army had essentially changed its stick grenades to be Eihandgranaten with attached handles. Originally, the stick grenade's detonator was housed in the handle of the grenade. This meant the soldier had to unscrew the handle and insert a detonator into the head of the grenade and then screw the handle back on before the grenade could be used, prompting the famous text on the side of the charge: VOR GEBRAUCH SPRENGKAPSEL EINSETZEN, reminding the soldier to unscrew the handle and insert a detonator before taking the grenade into battle.

(If you think that implies soldiers are incredibly aloof, you probably don't want to know what's printed on the M18 Claymore mine)

Both types of grenades favored concussive force over fragmentation - and for this reason are often dubbed "offensive grenades" (as opposed to passive-aggressive grenades, maybe?). That is, German grenades relied on the raw force of the explosion to incapacitate enemies, allowing soldiers to more safely use the grenades at shorter distances (such as charging an enemy trench). Although the German army had developed fragmentation sheaths for use on stick and egg grenades, it was really the Allies' that preferred fragmentation (the Mills Bomb mentioned earlier had an effective range farther than any soldier could throw it, thus the idea of a "defensive grenade," one a soldier would only want to use in cover). They tended to use a smaller charge of explosive to blast apart a shell of metal, which would break apart into high-speed fragments.

So the next time Band of Brothers is on TV, just imagine that the German soldiers have some Eihandgranaten nestled in their pockets for warmth.



"Speak softly and carry a big egg" just doesn't have the same weight...unless your antagonist has ovaphobia.

Go, Goodman, Go

I tend to listen to Pandora whenever I happen to be building chainmail, filling out job applications, or if I happen to play a video game with a sub-par or repetitive soundtrack. One of my Pandora channels features the misleading title "Comedy." Originally developed from a Todd Snider song featured on Bob and Tom, a song by Steven Lynch, and a much less well-known song by a much less well-known artist, Cheryl Wheeler (so unknown in fact, that I almost misspelled her name). Pandora works by assessing the musical qualities of songs that you approve to find similar songs. The channel has since developed to favor "folk influences," "melodic songwriting," and much more nebulous things like "major key tonality" and "acoustic sonority" that music majors might be able to explain (as far as I can tell "acoustic sonority" is the equivalent of "sound-like sound").

Regardless, the channel ended up introducing me to an abundance of artists with interesting, lyrically-driven music that tends to feature lots of singer-songwriters playing a guitar. It's also introduced me to John Williamson and Spectrum - a means of letting me talk to Australian women by pandering to their love of 30-year-old Australian music. It also brought me Steve Goodman, who's likely the far more interesting find. He gets a spot on my site because of his sublimely timed birth. Also he died of leukemia in 1984.


Pandora introduced me to Steve Goodman through a medley he spontanteously created, which happened to be recorded during a live concert. During concerts he would ask for a cowboy hat before singing a semi-satirical country song he wrote with John Prine. When no one could produce a cowboy hat, an audience member shouts, "You want a motorcycle helmet?" The result was Goodman playing a medley of "vehicular songs" including 3 wikipedia-dubbed teenage tragedy songs with a humorous edge as he improvisationally plucked away at his guitar (while wearing the motorcycle helmet).



Goodman was well-known for connecting with the audience and keeping a friendly, personable atmosphere. A master of the guitar, he would often play so furiously and so long that a string would break mid-song. Without missing a beat he would continue singing and replace the string.

Goodman sung an abundance of humorous songs like Leroy Van Dyke's The Auctioneer (here for a tenuous YouTube link) or Shel Silverstein's Three-Legged Man - along with his own rendition of I'm My Own Grandpa (without the past-nastification of Futurama). But he also wrote many of the songs he sang, such as Talk Backwards and the afforementioned You Never Even Called Me by My Name.

Despite Pandora's inclination to give me many of his humorous songs, he was also a skilled lyricist. In years past he was actually more well-known as a writer than a singer-songwriter. His best-known song City of New Orleans refers to a 20-hour passenger train route that still connects Chicago and New Orleans (often dubbed "the least glamorous overnight train" due to the fact the majority of its passengers don't travel between Chicago and New Orleans so the train has very few luxury cars). Goodman took a sentimental look at a vanishing piece of Americana: the now-defunct rail network. Even today, it is often considered one of the best train songs ever written (again, here for a ephemeral YouTube video). I guess if we can have "dead girl songs" and "vehicular songs" we can have train songs too.

As a native of Chicago he wrote numerous fan songs for the Chicago Cubs - for the downtrodden team that has not won a World Series title in over a century (In contrast, the Brewers' franchise has been around since 1969 and managed to snag a pennant in the 1980s, something the Cubs last managed in 1945). The most famous of these songs remains Go, Cubs, Go due to its modern resurgence during winning Cubs seasons in 2007 and 2008 (and the fact it has more uplifting lyrics than his other well-known Cubs' song A Dying Cubs' Fan's Last Request).

Unfortunately, Goodman died of leukemia in 1984 at the age of 36. Mere days later the Cubs clinched their division in 1984. In a stroke of posthumous honors, he also won a grammy for songwriting for Willie Nelson's rendition of City of New Orleans.

And they called him Cool Hand Leuk. No, wait...that's what he called himself.

Vituperating Thesaurus Diving with Scurrilous Excoriations

My desktop houses a rather unassuming file called words.txt. The file - without the fluff on Microsoft Word documents or even WordPad - functions as my own personal dictionary and thesaurus. At fewer than 40 words it's a poor representation of the English language, but it is a great cross section of strange words that have entered my possession through others' misuse or my own curiosity. Unfortunately, It seems lots of people like to finger through thesauruses without double-checking to make sure the words work. I have a great disdain for these thesaurus divers, even if their salvaged treasures fill my dictionary.

Thesaurus diving involves making a piece of writing pretentious ("grandiloquent" if you really will) by replacing common words with longer, rarer or obscure words. There's no problem using a thesaurus to sound a bit more poetic; sometimes blue is just a bit too blue and you need some azure or navy. The problem arises when blue heedlessly becomes something like beryl (beryl is a mineral, which is clear in its pure form, but can take on a multitude of colors).

So I'd like to share a couple of my words and their provenance as part of my dictionary ...No, not scurrilous words (don't ask me why I have so many synonyms for "using abusive, insulting language").


alimentary [al-uh-men-tuh-ree] - adjective
1. concerned with food, nutrition or digestion.
2. providing sustenance or nourishment; nutritious.

This one is fun because it works as a pun for elementary. "Why did the mouse die of starvation, Holmes?" - "It's alimentary, my dear Watson!" (never mind that Conan Doyle never had Sherlock Holmes say "elementary, my dear Watson" in 40 years of stories).


esurient [ih-soor-ee-uhnt] - adjective (esurience - noun)
1. craving food in great quantities; extremely hungry.
2. (often followed by "for") ardently or excessively desirous; greedy.

Not all of my words deal with food, I promise. Anyway, this word fell into my posession from a Monty Python skit involving a cheese shop. The main character played by John Cleese is a bombastic wordsmith and apparent cheese afficionado, and he brings up this rare synonym for hunger almost immediately - along with the more British-sounding "peckish," which makes a nice double entendre since it means hungry and/or irritated. Speaking of double meanings...


excoriate [ik-skawr-ee-eyt] - verb
1. to strip off or remove the skin from; to abrade (scrape off) skin or hide.
2. to denounce or berate serverely; to flay verbally; to censure scathingly.

Who says you don't learn anything watching sports? This word came up during the olympics, when one of the announcers mentioned a hockey coach was excoriating the team for their poor defensive maneuvers. This word is a bit strange etymologically. The core of the word is corium (that's right, I used core just before corium - take that, clarity!), which is Latin for "skin" so the first meaning is apparent, but the figurative meaning requires a bit more imagination.

(Alright there's food again, but that apple snuck into this picture, I swear!)

Double (and triple and quadruple) meanings are the great benefit of a diverse vocabulary. I've enjoyed them ever since mortally wounded Mercutio's pun in Romeo and Juliet: "Ask for me tomorrow and you shall find me a grave man." Even if Shakespeare's puns were originally an indulgence granted to the humors of the lower classes visiting the theatre. In case we're getting too low-class, next up we've got one of them, whosawhatsits...that's right, $10 words.


pulchritude [puhl-kri-tood] - noun
1. physical beauty - especially of a woman; that quality of appearance which pleases the eye; comeliness; grace; loveliness.
2. attractive moral excellence; moral beauty.

This pops up more often as my favorite word: pulchritudinous (a fancy, long way of saying beautiiful). I hear you say, "I've never seen it before, how much more often could it pop up?" Well, because most spam filters target things like "hot" or "beautiful" or "sexy," pulchritudinous tends to be the generic thesaurus treasure that comes in subject lines like "pulchritudinous Russian virggins redy 4 u."

Beautiful comes from Middle English and Old French, but pulchritudinous derives from fancy, civilized Latin. So how about some more Latin-derived words that are less nice?


scurrilous [skur-uh-luhs] - adjective
1. grossly or obscenely abusive language; vituperative.
2. given to the use of vulgar or coarse language; foul-mouthed.
3. characterized by or using low buffoonery; coarsely jocular or derisive; given to undignified joking as only a buffoon can warrant.

Okay, I lied when I said they weren't scurrilous words. One of the words is literally scurrilous.

I stole this from dinosaur comics, which uses it quite often. Whether or not it's actually being used correctly is arguable (T-Rex hadn't actually said anything mean or vulgar or jocular to warrant the devil's response). This one has fun double meaning since you can clandestinely imply someone is a foul-mouthed buffoon with a single word.


I believe that puts the site 2 years ahead in our "Word of the Year" program. Plus more people will hopefully use pulchritudinous, so my spam inbox won't seem quite so exotic.

I forgot to make a Thesaurus Rex joke, didn't I?

The Importance of Auxiliary Verbs

The United States officially entered World War II on December 7th, 1941 after the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor. Often considered a terrible strategic blunder, Hitler subsequently declared war on the US on December 11th. These actions dragged the United States in the Battle of the Atlantic against Germany's commerce raiding navy - primarily submarines. It also brought us the rhyming phrase "loose lips sink ships." However, the original poster adds a very important auxiliary verb to the mix: "might."


Battle in the West (Atlantic)

Between the fall of France in June of 1940 and the loss of numerous u-boat aces in early 1941 (most famously Günther Prien and his magic torpedoes (like magic fingers, but half a meter wide and explosive instead of tingly)), German submarines and commerce raiding ships proved frighteningly successful. In the four months after the Fall of France German submarines sank 282 Allied merchant ships totalling nearly 1.5 million tons of shipping. Their success was so great that after the war Churchill commented that, "The only thing that ever really frightened me during the war was the U-Boat peril...It did not take the form of flaring battles and glittering achievements, it manifested itself through statistics, diagrams, and curves unknown to the nation, incomprehensible to the public."

Ever increasing British anti-submarine efforts resulted in wanning commerce raiding opportunities for German submarines in late 1941. However, Hitler's declaration of war allowed u-boats to hunt new targets off the coast of North America ("Canada? What's Canada?"). The first wave of long range Type IX submarines departed as part of Operation Paukenschlag (Operation Drumbeat). For the next 8 months, German submarines saw a resurgence of success (hence the Wikipedia article title "Second Happy Time," from German commander's referring to a period of success as "glückliche Zeit" (meaning "happy time" or "fortunate time").

Germany only had 12 available Type IX boats, so commanders of smaller (more famous) Type VII boats suffered more cramped quarters and meagre rations to risk the journey to hunt down fresh American vessels. They proved so successful that a newly created American Office of War Information began a campaign of information control by mid-1942.


Look at that Ess (c)ar gee-oh

Ironically, the US likely started the campaign to prevent Americans from learning about sinking ships instead of preventing Germans learning information letting them sink ships.

Similar to other propaganda from the period, a large company created the "Loose Lips Sink Ships" (LLSS) poster to aid the war effort. The poster came as part of a series of eight drawn in 1942 by the art director at Seagram Distillers' branch in New York (think Pepsi Co., but with more alcohol). Seagram printed the posters for placement in taverns. Apparently they felt bad for liquoring up all those intelligence officers ready to provide vital war information to German spies. Loose lips might sink ships, but lots o' sips loosen lips.

Obscurely signed as Ess-ar-gee, the poster's artist went without much recognition, despite creating one of the most recognizable phrases from World War Two. Ess-ar-gee enigmatically disguises the initials SRG, which refer to the Seymour R. Goff Jr. (some places slip a Henry in there...we could probably throw in a John or William to cover some other common turn-of-the-century names - or maybe he just didn't like hens).


What Might Sink Ships

The American navy and coast guard were initially unprepared for the waves of German submarines that came. The British immediately recommended switching to the Commonwealth's convoy system - the American navy eschewed the perceived burden of the system. The British recommended flying constant reconaissance and sending out available ships for escort duty (sick of that 'fishy' smell, the British had commandeered many fishing trawlers for anti-submarine duty in 1940 and 1941) - the American navy again abstained, unwilling to seize civillian vessels and lacking available destroyers. Ships leaving American ports suffered heavily between January and August 1942. The British recommended blackouts in coastal cities - and yet again the American navy refused the suggession.

At the height of the "Second Happy Time," German submarines were operating within sight of American harbors - identifying ships' silhouettes against illuminated cityscapes and sinking them as they ventured out to sea. The British tanker Coimbra was sunk within 30 miles of Long Island; residents who spotted the wreck's burning load of oil called the authorities. Due to light air patrols and a lack of available escort ships (many having been "lent" to the British in 1941 in Roosevelt's Destroyers for Bases program), occasionally German submarines sank ships during the day as well - such as the Dixie Arrow sunk 12 miles from the Diamond Shoal anchored light buoy off the coast of North Carolina.

Loose lips might sink ships, but a poorly prepared navy, obstinate leadership and an aversion to adopting proven strategic decisions do sink ships.


"Negative Buoyancy Sinks Ships" just didn't rhyme well enough.

Controlled Internet Anarchy

The internet remains an unregulated sea of anonymity and randomness (even if some politicians would like to revoke Internet neutrality). Internet culture has adopted numerous aphorisms to explain and predict net behavior.

The most prominent of these are:

Rule 1. Do not talk about /b/
Rule 2. Do NOT talk about /b/

Immediately apparent is how these rules were stolen from the rules of Fight Club. Also apparent is how no one adheres to these rules...which is fitting, since /b/ itself essentially has no rules. /b/ refers to the "Random" forum at 4chan (I really recommend you do not visit this site at work). Wikipedia has a brief history and numerous quotes of what mainstream publications have said about /b/.

/b/ is famous for protests against scientology in a spontaneously created movement called Anonymous, creating the rickrolling meme (along with its predecessor - duckrolling), copious amounts of porn (you were expecting a link to porn, maybe?), Boxxy, "trolling for lulz," caturday (which grew into LOLcats), and probably half of the strange things you've seen on the Internet.

The content on /b/ remains ephemeral. It functions as a forum, except only the most recent posts remain active - the rest are purged (never to be seen again...except in the form of screen captures). Although this hasn't stopped other websites from archiving 4chan material.


Rule 34. If it exists, there's porn of it.

As Avenue Q (tangentially) points out, a vast amount of content on the Internet consists of porn (or pr0n, for the uninitiated). However, the Internet's breadth combined with anonymity results in bizarre creations of porn that you're bound to find at least one example either hilarous or disgusting (...or both). Porn itself isn't that surprising; until chaste Victorian society came along there were no qualms about having nudity everywhere (ironically, Victorian society also produced an abundance of nude paintings...but we all know that if you're tastefully nude you're not really naked, right?). The Romans in particular really loved them some nudity; and true to their throwbacks to Roman culture, Renaissance artists embraced the nude...figuratively (...usually).

If you'd like to see a list of typical Rule 34 examples without risking grievous injury to your psyche (or to your internet priveleges at work), I'll recommend TVTropes' list of examples. Relatedly, there's (less common) rule 36.


Rule 36. If it exists, there's a fetish for it.

From coprophilia to vorarephilia (that's scat porn to vore - but more scientific sounding) there's an incredible breadth to the number of fetishes out there. Since the Internet allows people with like interests to easily connect, rare and strange fetishes tend to develop their own communities.

If that's too unsettling, true to its schizophrenic nature the Internet has an alternative Rule 36 for you.


Rule 36. There will always be something worse than what you just saw.

In the low bandwidth days of yore, trolls relied on shock images to harass or disgust potential viewers. In time some websites developed to cater specifically to these sorts of vulgar pornographic or gruesomely graphic shock images.

In a bizarre twist of Internet trends, rickrolling has displaced shock images as the "bait and switch" prank of choice. This doesn't violate the rule, however.


John Gabriel's Greater Internet Fuckwad Theory
(Hey, that's the name, don't look at me)

A normal person when provided anonymity and confronted with an audience will turn into a jackass.

This theory was created by Penny Arcade creators Jerry Holkins and Mike Krahulik in 2004. As illustrated in its original conception, this theory has managed to prove itself many times over. Anyone who has played on Xbox Live can attest to its truth. Relatedly, you'll come across plenty of 11 year olds playing M-rated games ready to teabag your corpse while yelling racial slurs into a microphone.


Godwin's Law

"As an online discussion grows longer, the probability of a comparison
involving Nazis or Hitler approaches one."

Created by Mike Godwin originally for USENET in 1990, Godwin's Law (or Godwin's Nazi-Corrolary) exists because anonymity allows us all to call other people Nazis with impunity. This trend exists because Nazis are generally considered the worst, most evil thing around. So what other insult could be greater? Subsequently, once someone has been called Hitler or a Nazi, a thread has been "Godwin-ed".

The more recent version of this (or the 1950s version) is to call people Stalin or communist. FOX News and other right wing political institutions like to cover all their bases and call people fascist socialists. Apparently they missed that whole "Soviet Union fighting Nazi Germany for 4 years with 30,000,000 casualties"-part (along with numerous political and economic ideology clashes). So pick one or the other; someone cannot be Nazi-Stalinist.


Poe's Law

"Without a winking smiley or other blatant display of humor, it is utterly impossible to parody a Creationist in such a way that someone won't mistake for the genuine article."

Eponymously coined by user Nathan Poe on the Christian Forums in 2005, Poe's Law has evolved to mean that parodies of extremist views are indistinguishable from serious posts without some blatant, transparent indication. It originally related to discussions of evolution, but has since branched out to cover fundamentalist and outlandish conspiracy theorists, as well.

Now all you need to do is to fomulate a post on 4chan about how liberals are like Nazi-Communist-Fetishist porno-junkies via a shock photo and you'll have all your bases covered.

Milwaukee Trivia Collection - Back to the Future Edition

People clamor for shorter articles, so I present the first in a series of Milwaukee-oriented trivia collections randomly organized into arbitrary themes. Today: I link Milwaukee's history with Back to the Future because of a note listing the time and date a building was struck by lightning.


Ten Years Early; One DeLorean Short


Flux capacitor not fluxing and out of plutonium? The Wells Building on Wisconsin Avenue was struck by lightning on July 9th, 1945 at 3:45pm. Unfortunately old ladies won't be handing out fliers asking you to save the clocktower; there aren't any clock faces on the building.

Thinking of speeding down Wisconsin Avenue in order to hit a metal wire at 88 miles per hour? Milwaukee's mass transit might have something to say about that. Not only would you have to contend with an abundance of streetcar wires, you'd also have the streetcars themselves, which would still be around for nearly a decade.


"Tab? I can't give you a tab unless you order something."

Putting aside the fact that Marty orders a drink marketed towards women, Tab did not exist until 1963. Coincidentally (in the realm of missing beverages), Milwaukee didn't have any taverns on record in the 1920s. Still want to wet your whistle? The Milwaukee city directories can point you to page after page of soda fountains.


Road names? Where we're going we don't need... road names.

There's plenty of dispute over the origin of the city of Milwaukee's name. But many of the streets have unique stories as well. Some changes came through convention, some came through history, and some came because urban planners like trying to confuse Polish immigrants.

As mentioned previously, Milwaukee went through many street renaming phases, but the most extensive happened in 1930. Almost every East-West street in East Milwaukee had a different name before the 1930s. Directional indicators were appended to street names (making something like Wisconsin Avenue into East Wisconsin Avenue and West Wisconsin Avenue - or something more fun like changing Aldrich Street into East Bay Street and South Bay Street). Unfortunately, they also decided to move the numbered streets as well.


View Larger Map

The city of Milwaukee does not have a Main Street (although Brown Deer Road becomes Main Street in Waukesha County). Broadway was formerly Main Street, before the name was changed in 1871.


The only reasonable explanation is that it's the main street to use to get out of the city, right?

Gravity Gone Ballistic

Some of my paternal grandfather's war stories involved his time in the army. The most action-packed involved a time on patrol when a spent round bounced off his upper chest, and simply fell to the ground because it had effectively lost all of its kinetic energy. More action-packed than stories of siphoning gasoline out of military vehicles, anyway. Strangely, the story has propagated disagreement among people who doubt its veracity. I can't vouch for the authenticity of the story, but I can vouch for its viability.

However, it wasn't enough that people simply believe me on my birthday, so I was forced to break out the W/t of SCIENCE (If I can have a dogion joke I can have a power = energy/time joke). Unfortunately, this led to a point of contention involving the physics of gravity.

Some people are surprised to know that the Aristotelian view of gravity is not true (despite how cool Aristotle is). Heavier objects do not inherently accelerate faster than lighter objects. This belief persists because lighter objects tend to be more buoyant and have more air resistance, and hence drop more slowly on Earth.

Current scientific thinking links gravity with the curvature of spacetime. Unfortunately, quantum mechanics disagrees (but quantum mechanics is like that frizzy-haired uncle no one likes to talk to because he seems to only speak gibberish). Despite all that, most situations still work fine with Newton's "simple" Law of Gravity. Here we also see that laws are meant to be broken, even when they're scientific, since relativity and quantum mechanics have proven that Newton's law does not apply to all possible scenarios. Basically, given a vacuum (to negate air resistance and buoyancy) and objects of negligible mass (relative to a planet), objects will fall to the ground at the same rate (both would fall at approximately 9.8m/s² on Earth).

Astronauts make everything better, so fortunately the concept was illustrated by our good friend Commander David Scott during the Apollo 15 mission.

Transcript for people without video: "Well, in my left hand I have a feather. In my right hand, a hammer. I guess one of the reasons we got here today was because of a gentleman named Galileo a long time ago, who made a rather significant discovery about falling objects in gravity fields. And we thought, 'Where would be a better place to confirm his findings than on the moon?' And so we thought we'd try it here for you. The feather happens to be appropriately a falcon feather...for our Falcon. And I'll drop the two of 'em here, and - hopefully - they'll hit the ground at the same time. [hammer and feather hit the ground simultaneously] How 'bout that? This proves that mister Galileo was correct in his findings."

Returning to our opening statements: people also tend to believe that horizontal motion negates gravity. If an object is shot horizontally and another object dropped simultaneously from the same height, both objects will hit the ground at the same time. Gravity's pull is uniform regardless of horizontal motion. This too, is illustrated by crazy science teachers around the world. Exhibit A:

(I apologize in advance for the lack of more astronauts)



...There is no Exhibit B.

Edit for 2013-2-06: There is an Exhibit B; I've since become aware that the Mythbusters have also performed this experiment using actual firearms with a result that is well within margin of error (basically the only improvements you could ask for is better timing on the drop/shot simultaneity and doing it in a vacuum).


Randomly teaching people about gravity since 2003; just another reason not to follow me when I walk home from school.

This Old House on 1 That Street

I generally don't drive, which often means that my knowledge of specific street names is limited to my immediate vicinity. My navigation relies much more on landmarks and directions, since I don't bother looking for street signs (I generally don't see them, anyway). But recently I've needed to accustom myself to the lay of the streets a bit more.

So if you're from Milwaukee I'll ask you this: do you know about where in Milwaukee this house was from?



Here's a hint: its address was 519 Astor Street. Not helpful? It's from near the intersection of Biddle Street and Astor Street. Still not helpful? That's because all of Milwaukee's urban planners aspire to be Hunter S. Thompson. The house's description may prove useful in figuring out this problem.

Milwaukee has gone through a series of street name changes, but the largest happened in 1930. Some streets were renamed, but most simply had a direction appended to them. Astor Street became North Astor Street. In addition, people couldn't pick whatever wacky address number they wanted (do you really want to live on 1 Bay Street next to 1 Aldrich Street?). Numbers were assigned according to a property's frontage (every 15' had a new number, every new block increased this number by 100). This house's address changed from 519 Astor Street to 913 North Astor Street.

Unfortunately, even having an address number and street name doesn't help us with this house. Keen visitors that click on my fancy links will already know the other problem. This house neighbored the intersection of Biddle and Astor. The problem being that Biddle Street became Kilbourn Avenue when Cedar and Biddle were widened and connected by a bridge over the Milwaukee river. The intersection of Astor and Biddle now encompasses the intersection of Kilbourn, Prospect and Astor.


View Larger Map

You know what will teach you streets pretty quick? Poring over fire liability maps of a city. Unfortunately, half those streets may not even exist anymore - like Biddle Street. The Sanborn Fire Insurance Map Company (talk about knowing your target market) created detailed, scale maps of thousands of American cities between 1867 and 1970. You can view black and white versions of these maps for Milwaukee online, but you may want the key.

Physically they're giant bound volumes about two feet square. With a scale of 1 inch to 50 feet, this means one page can show about 1000 feet on each side. Milwaukee is a rather large city, and the maps from 1910-1926 come in 6 volumes (about 20 giant bound books of maps). New volumes were ordered for expansions of the city limits, but the index map remains the same (which makes finding page numbers for modern streets not listed on the index that much more fun).

Aside from being unwieldy in size, the individual pages are a bit strange. Directional north is not explicitly at the top of the page; each page has its own compass rose to denote which way is north. Unlike the online versions mentioned above, the actual maps are color-coordinated with the key. Each color indicates a specific building material (and therefore a building's status as a potential fire hazard). And finally, in order to provide up-to-date fire hazard information, the company provided new versions of buildings and streets that could be pasted into the volume on hand. This kept the maps current, but isn't so helpful when you're looking for an older demolished house, since it's bound to be under 3 layers of pasted revisions. In older versions of the map the presence of gas and electrical lines is often marked as well (if I had been around in 1910 I'd get an electrical line to my house just so some lazy surveyor has to pencil in "Electric Line" on some giant map).

So where was that house from? It was located in downtown Milwaukee, where Kilbourn Avenue starts and the Regency House Condos now stand.


And maybe it's still there, like some sort of Morlock house.