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?

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?

Don't Nuke the Fridge Just Yet

My adventures on university buses and having to listen to people talk on their cellphones present me with innumerable stories. I could, for instance, mention that: D&D nerds don't like it when they're DMing a game and their players use anime as a basis for their avatars' archetypes; that Algerian-born Americans still require a visa and an American passport at least six months old in order to visit Algeria; and that someone got a job as an exotic dancer to get money to bail her boyfriend out of jail. Another conversation, coupled with the relatively recent release of Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull on DVD, has led me to a more subjective topic. One scene in the movie considered too far out there for suspension of disbelief and the setting of Indiana Jones for many people...


That's right, the Witch and the Wardrobe the Nuke and the Fridge. And because internet culture isn't content with the euphemisms of old (even if they're very young), "Nuke the Fridge" has partially taken up the mantle of "Jump the Shark".

Now, "Jump the Shark" is supposed to indicate that something has passed its prime, but it specifically refers to an episode of Happy Days, where Fonzie literally jumps a shark water skiing. Despite the episode airing on September 20th, 1977 the coinage of "jump the shark" didn't happen until around 1985 - and only entered normal parlance around 1998. Never mind that 1977 involved the fifth running season of Happy Days, which continued on for another 7 years. Aside from pointing out the fact that drawing parallels between "jump the shark" from Happy Days and "nuke the fridge" from Kingdom of the Crystal Skull may lead to some dubious conclusions indicative of another four or five IJ movies, I'd like to illustrate a few reasons why nuking the fridge wasn't so bad.


The Fridge, Reality, and Physics
The movie's scene is an effort to replicate the discomforting nature of the US government's Operation Cue and its preoccupation with discovering how nuclear weapons affect residential infrastructure. Like the movie, the real bomb site was a short distance away from Area 51 in the Nellis Air Force Range (a bit northwest of Las Vegas). The actual detonation site is visible via satellite (the bright circle with the 1.5 mile diameter in the middle of the map below...unless the map is centered on the wrong place - in which case the FBI will be at your building within the hour (and you're probably using Google Chrome)). The small collection of 'roads' and 'structures' on the right are actually a collection of craters.


View Larger Map

Comically enough, put Area 51 into Google maps and you'll end up with a rather large airstrip, bomb testing ground, and collection of hangars about 15 miles northeast of the Operation Cue detonation site. On a completely unrelated note, it seems that the USAF pays a few million in taxes on the area for its contractors, but won't allow a tax assessor on to the secret military testing grounds to corroborate the assessment.

More importantly with regards to the movie, the small collection of buildings would have been out of the bomb's most devastating blast range (the closest housing was put outside the 0.75 mile immediate blast radius in the actual test). The most unrealistic facet of the scene is that the refrigerator is thrown an appreciable distance from the blast in the first place (it would have been knocked over or pushed a few meters). On the plus side, the air-tight nature of the fridge would protect him from the drastic changes in overpressure that results in a shock wave (and consequently, popped eardrums, bruising, and potential lung collapse - among other things). It would also protect him from the intense thermal radiation (the kind where dark clothing may cause the heat to 'bleed-through' and burn the tissue underneath).

Despite the unrealistic nature of the refrigerator's trajectory, it's still not the worst situation. From a physics standpoint the refrigerator comes to a gradual stop, which is related to the concept of impulse. Impulse is the change in momentum over time (or the change in velocity over time with regard to mass). The longer a collision takes the less force is applied at any individual instance (this is the reason cars have crumple zones, but you're still more likely to survive in a car rolling down a hill than one that smashes into a concrete barrier). The material inside the fridge makes a difference too, but maybe Jones' hat isn't just for show.


Audience Perceptions and Presumptions
People tend to expect certain things in action movies. Survivability in a nuclear blast usually isn't one of those things. The middle ground of nuclear destruction lies somewhere between Duck and Cover and vaporizing every bit of matter within the blast zone. Tangentially: if you ever do find yourself outside in the midst of a nuclear holocaust, ducking and covering your head while hiding behind the tallest immediate sturdy obstacle between yourself and the explosion is the best way to go.

Many of Indiana Jones' previous stunts are arguably more deadly, but the association with nuclear weapons as the ultimate destructive force in the world can blur judgement. There are far less survivable things than a rolling refrigerator and a nuclear explosion.

Freefalling from a plane in a raft.

Very few people have survived a freefall at terminal velocity. Vesna Vulović is one of those select few. She survived a 10km freefall above Czechloslovakia when a bomb detonated and broke apart her plane in midair. She survived because the wreck landed on a steep incline that allowed for a gradual change in acceleration instead of an abrupt stop. Additionally, the -60°C air outside at 10km caused hypothermia, which - coupled with her chronic low blood pressure - prevented her from bleeding to death and suffering brain death before she could be rescued. Indiana Jones (along with Shortround and Willie) survives freefall approaching terminal velocity unsecured on a raft...twice (remember impulse from earlier? Jones' raft hits so hard it bounces).

Leaping from a tank as it drives over the edge of a cliff.

Heroes always seem to be saved by dried-out roots laying casually over the side of a cliff. This trope is so common that people tend to instantly ignore it whenever it pops up in movies. Apparently soil is best at holding dry desert weeds after it has been compacted by a tank...I guess?

Boarding a diving submarine in rough waters.

Swimming in the ocean isn't all that dangerous (German submariners in WW2 would often be granted time to swim when they were in the middle of the Atlantic, out of Allied aircraft's range). Swimming in choppy open ocean tends to be a bit more dangerous. Now, boarding a diving submarine is downright impossible, considering the fact that submariners trained to accomplish this maneuver in a matter of seconds. Turns out Indiana Jones is a time traveling Michael Phelps with a PhD in archeology...and a cloak of invisibility because where the hell did he hide once he got on that submarine?

Stopping a speeding mine cart with flat-soled shoes.

I'm not sure what kind of description this one merits. Perhaps this cat sliding in a box can exemplify some of the properties of friction forgotten here. At the very least the cat sliding in a box is a cat sliding in a box.

That should cover some aspects from all the previous movies (doubly so for Temple of Doom and its craziness). These two aspects all pale in comparison to the big Indiana Jones kicker.


Parody and Satire
One of the hallmarks through the series is the parody of conventional expectations of contemporary events, culture and attitudes. From the rocket engine test site to the lead-lined refrigerator, the parody is far more consistent than the original three movies. At first this might seem strange, but if you've got a keen eye for history, you'll notice that many of the same satire and parody is present in the earlier IJ films as well. From the luger that manages to shoot through an entire line of Nazi soldiers (this one is partially ironic as well, since some SS officers in various camps tried expeirments of seeing how many people could be killed with a single bullet); to the Middle Eastern royalty more impressed by a car than gold; to Nazi experimental aircraft (a decade early); to apathetic British occupying forces in India; to "I'm an American!" - the satire and parodies are everywhere, they're just less apparent because it's more expected. Nazis are evil - it's amusing when they're shot and fall over. Indian people are strange - a boy emperor and monkey brains for dessert fits right in with our expectations.

There are quite a few satirical elements at work here, some more subtle than others (and we've already covered "Duck and Cover" and nuclear testing). For instance: did you know that death by refrigerator was alarmingly frequent from the 1950s to the 1970s? Turns out many of the models couldn't be opened from the inside...and apparently refrigerators were child magnets. The fridge Jones climbs into happens to be lead-lined, which is a convenient way to avoid having your protagonist die of radiation poisoning. But it also happens to coincide with the '50s fascination for lead-based everything. From paints to toys, lead was everywhere (along with other dangerous things, like dagger-tipped lawn darts). Lead was known definitively to be a poison since at least the 1800s, but recognized by some Roman scholars as a source of maladies (and occasionally noted as a poison). Maybe people in the 1950s figured it'd be an easy way to weed out some of the dumb ones.

These sorts of things are present throughout the movie, but particularly in the first half (maybe this is a subconscious reason why many people thought the first half was better). From greasers and socs to CIA spooks, the film covers a vast variety of 1950s culture. I think one of the reasons people are willing to associate more with the first three IJ films is the fact that the 1930s presents a clear dichotomy - the Nazis are the definitive historical villain (this is also likely a reason why Temple of Doom sees a bit of a dip in popularity too). The 1950s are bit more blurred. High School history classes tend to have two things to say about the 1950s: they came after World War Two and before the Civil Rights movement (okay, they probably mention the baby boomers, too).


So what have we learned? The refrigerator isn't any less plausible than some other insane stunts in Indiana Jones movies. The monkeys though... I cannot reconcile the monkeys.

We've also learned people shouldn't talk on their cellphone on the bus.