Steins 2016

I apparently forgot to take photos of my steins for the past two years of Steinfest, but last year I did measure the volume of my steins, and they each comfortably held 24 ounces. That's about .7 liters--way more than my 2013 Prohibitionist steins held, of course, with ample room for a Hoibe Bier, but not quite enough room for a Maß. Someone told me they needed to be bigger, so this year my steins all hold a full liter and then some. I stuck with the zigzag design but switched from white-on-black to blue-on-white. I didn't make them with Bavaria in mind, but blue zigzags recall blue diamonds, so I'll pretend the Bayerisch flair was intentional. Prost!

The incredible shrinking newspaper

We are all vertical and able to breathe through our nostrils again, following a particularly evil manifestation of the common cold. Incidentally, there is no point trying to get used to brand new bifocals when you have a cold, as you can't tell the difference between a world distorted by profusely watery eyes and a world distorted by that irritating line in the middle of the glasses lenses.

We've been back in the U.S. for almost three weeks now. One aspect of reverse culture shock that still hasn't gone away is the apparent narrowness of the Triangle newspaper, The News and Observer (a.k.a. the N&O). I'm referring to its size as opposed to its news coverage, although the latter seems pretty slight at the moment as well.

When we moved to Freiburg, we immediately noticed that the Badische Zeitung (BZ) was wider and shorter than the N&O--no doubt measurable in some nice round sum of centimeters rather than inches. Nonetheless, coming back to Durham, I wasn't prepared for the startling difference in paper widths.

So today I finally pulled out a late 2008 edition of the N&O that just happened to be lying around inside our secret Important Documents and Mementos hiding spot. I put it on the floor above this past Friday's unmemorable Real Estate section. Eureka! The newspaper looks narrower than I remember it because it is narrower than I remember it.

The narrower width doesn't really diminish the quality of the N&O, for McClatchy has already handled that task by significantly cutting local reporting, reducing staff, and yielding most of the available print space to advertisements. But in conjunction with these other money-saving measures, the disturbing weight loss suggests a bleak prognosis: the newspaper--an invention with a 320-year history in North America--is wasting away before our very eyes, heading inexorably toward a 21st-century demise.

The mall

Through a combination of jetlag, a quicker than expected oil change, and a need for a new duvet cover, I found myself at a mall at 9:50 this morning. I walked past the food court, drawing suffocating breaths of vaporized sugar and frying oil into my lungs, nodded at the happy, aging mall walkers in their sweatsuits, and arrived in front of Macy's. There, nine other people were already assembled, gazing beyond the closed glass doors into the still dark store. It suddenly dawned on me that for the first time in my life, I was one of that special class of American shoppers who wait, salivating, outside consumer meccas until the first-shift manager slides the doors away, turns the lights on, and beckons us in.

While I waited for the clock to strike 10:00, I read signs. Outside Macy's was a sign warning people they could be kicked out of the mall if they didn't follow the Mall Rules. The first dozen rules were sentence fragments, such as Rule 1: Behavior that threatens the safety or well-being of other mall shoppers, and Rule 7: Illegal drug use and drug paraphernalia. The grammar police clearly have their work cut out for them.

The Mall Rules sign stood near the now-quiet remains of a Santa photo-op display. Artifical trees decorated with starched handknit balls grew on astroturf next to Santa's little hut, surrounded by giant drifts of polyester stuffing and sparkling plastic fluff. In the spirit of holiday cheer, a laminated sheet of paper taped to the white picket fence barked, "NO LEANING ON THE FENCE," then, as an afterthought, added, "NO TOUCHING THE SNOW."

The local Macy's has much in common with Freiburg's Karstadt, but rather than noticing similarities this morning, I noticed differences--in the color palette, in the clothing sizes, in the sprawl of perfume and cosmetics, and in the territorialness with which brand name corporate giants hold sway in different parts of the store. While my needlessly wide automobile with its pudgy steering wheel sat outside in a generously large space on the surface parking lot, I was inside Macy's, riding up an escalator wide enough for a healthy family of three.

The only duvet cover I found was the single floor model. Americans do duvet covers about as often as Germans do top sheets. So rather than buying locally from a national chain, I went home and bought online from Land's End.