Category: cultural oddities.

castle frostbite. cultural oddities. food and drink.

Achtung! Kein Kinderlakritz!

“An acquired taste is an appreciation for something unlikely to be enjoyed by a person who has not had substantial exposure to it. It is the opposite of innate taste, which is the appreciation for things that are enjoyable by most persons without prior exposure to them.”  –Wikipedia

I explained the concept of acquired taste to my kids as flavors that you generally have to grow up with to find them appealing. Salmiak is a great example of acquired taste. It’s licorice (which in itself is a polarizing taste–people tend to either love it or absolutely hate it), but not the sweet form you can find in grocery stores everywhere. Salmiak licorice cranks the flavor dial up to 19 because it is flavored with ammonia salt (ammonium chloride), which gives it an extremely intense astringent taste.

Salmiak is only common in Scandinavia, the Netherlands, and northern Germany. It’s pretty much impossible to find outside of those areas. People who love salmiak flavor almost invariably grew up with it, and I’ve never met anyone that liked it who wasn’t from one of those countries. Everyone else usually finds it disgusting. In Germany, salmiak licorice has to be labeled “Erwachsenenlakritz-Kein Kinderlakritz” (“Adult Liquorice – Not Children’s Liquorice”). Even my son, who’s the only other person in the house that likes licorice, will not touch the salmiak licorice. It’s pretty much the only candy I can buy for myself and just leave sitting out in the kitchen somewhere because I know it’s in no danger of being pilfered by teenagers in search of a snack.

The little baggies in the picture are salmiak-flavored Fisherman’s Friend menthol drops. I usually carry one of those with me when I am out of the house in the winter because let me tell you, that ammonia salt in combination with menthol will clear your sinuses right up. My daughter came down with COVID a few weeks ago, but nobody else in the house got it. I know it’s likely because she was mostly isolated in her room and we’re fully vaccinated and boostered with the new bivalent shots, but I’d like to think that the virus didn’t find a foothold in my nasal passages because it smelled the ammonia salt from the salmiak and went all, “Nope, nope, nope. I’m out.”

 

cultural oddities. digital housekeeping.

in the eye of the husband of the eye of the cow.

Comment spam–usually annoying, but occasionally amusing, in a “Cylon hybrid random stream of consciousness babbling” sort of way. Here’s the latest:

What i don’t realize is in reality how you are now not
really a lot more neatly-preferred than you may be now.
You are so intelligent. You recognize therefore considerably when it comes to this subject, made me in my view imagine it from so many various angles.
Its like men and women are not fascinated unless
it is one thing to do with Woman gaga! Your personal
stuffs nice. At all times deal with it up!”

I will endeavor to use “Your personal stuffs nice!” and “At all times deal with it up!” as motivational commentary more often.

cultural oddities. movies. this monkey house.

mul-ti-pass.

So I found myself at the K-Marts yesterday to procure some kid shoes and some mothereffin’ Cold Water Tide laundry detergent LIKE A BOSS, when I walked past a life-sized poster display of THIS:

1474699-nicki-minaj-GL-Wood-617-409

And I swear to you, my first thought was “It’s official. We’re living in the Fifth Element future.”

cultural oddities.

my american decade.

Ten years ago today, I walked into the federal courthouse in Chattanooga, Tennessee as a German citizen, and walked out a newly-minted American. The first thing I did when we got home to Knoxville was to take my shiny new Certificate of Naturalization to the town clerk’s office, to register to vote and file the paperwork for a U.S. passport.

It has been an eventful decade since then. We had two children, moved to New Hampshire, and I got to start a full-time writing career. Sometimes I wish I could go back in time to 1988 and show about-to-graduate-high-school teenage Marko his life in 2014. I mean, literally every single item on young Marko’s “Things I Want To Do When I’m A Grown-Up” list has come true, and a whole bunch of goals besides that he didn’t know to put on his list back then. What a lucky-ass kid young Marko turned out to be.

I’ve lived here for the majority of my adult life now. I moved to the U.S. when I was 24, which means I spent six years as an adult in Germany, and eighteen in the United States. In another five years, I will have been in the U.S. for half of my total life. With the way things have been changing on both sides of the Atlantic in the last 20 years, the country of my birth and upbringing is a foreign country to me now. (This is also true in the legal sense. When I got naturalized, I lost the German citizenship. Now I can’t stay in Germany, the place where I was born and where I served in the military,  for more than 90 days without a visa, which is a little weird.)

When the subject of my personal story of immigration and citizenship comes up, I like to joke with my friends that I was an American all along, just one born in a German’s body. There are many laudable things about Germany and its culture, and it will always be the place where I was born and raised, but American culture is a better fit for me, and always has been. There’s a tradition if individualism and self-sufficiency here (along with a healthy streak of “you’re not the boss of me” distrust for authority) that isn’t very common at all in Germany. Having lived in the U.S. for almost twenty years now, I like going back to visit the family in the old Vaterland, but it always feels a bit too stifling and crowded and over-regulated, and I’m always glad when I’m back home where I have elbow space, both geographical and mental.

And even with the annoyances of air travel and customs and immigration kabuki, I never fail to feel a thrill when I walk back out onto the street in front of the arrivals hall at the airport, and take in all the familiar sights and sounds. This is America. This is home.

(Of course, everything I wrote in this post up until this paragraph is just a ruse, a public facade, to mask the fact that this is merely part of the master plan of OUR INEVITABLE WORLD DOMINATION:

Step 1: Go to America and become a citizen.

Step 2: Con a smart, beautiful American woman into marriage.

Step 3: Have children and raise them to be well-read, smart, functional, and responsible people.

Step 4: Start a great new career and pay lots of income taxes.

Step 5: ???

Step 6: WORLD DOMINATION!

Oh, crap. Did I just disclose the master plan? Scheisse. Merkel’s going to be pissed.)

Anyway, my ten years as a U.S. Citizen have been the best ten years of my life, and I have no reason to doubt that the next few decades will be even better. Take it from someone who was born and raised elsewhere–despite its warts and imperfections (and every culture has those, believe me), this is still the best place to be if you have even a little bit of Browncoat in your blood, and I’m thankful for the opportunity to be a part of it.

 

 

aminals. asshole of the month. cultural oddities. in the news.

on dogs, chickens, and suburban sensibilities.

There’s a WaPo article in our local fish wrapper about the law regarding dogs who kill poultry. Current law allows for farmers to shoot dogs caught in the act of killing their poultry, and the article had a decidedly…oppositional slant. It tells the story of one Alan Taylor, a real estate developer who brought his two dogs to a farm with him on some business. He let his dogs roam free while chatting about planting grapevines (the article calls the dogs “pups”, even though the accompanying picture shows two fully-grown setter-type dogs in the 40-50lb. range), and they got shot while killing some farmer’s chickens. Both dogs survived, but the vet bills ran over $3,000. The author of the article is very sympathetic toward the dog owner, referring to laws that allow farmers to shoot livestock-killing animals as the “doggie death penalty”.

What really ticked me off about the article was the following quote from the dog owner:

“The simple solution for a rational person is to pick up a phone, but what this law allows people to do is to pick up a gun.”

Mmm-hmmm.

Look, I own dogs, and I own chickens. I understand that your dogs are your companions, and I’d never shoot someone’s pet unless it was in the act of chewing on my kids or killing my animals. But you, sir, are an irresponsible asshole.

The simple solution for a rational person?

Let’s see here and take this simple solution step by step.

There’s a ruckus outside, and when I go to check, I see two dogs in my chicken coop, killing my laying hens. (Two dogs of any size can kill the entire flock in moments. Chickens don’t have much in the way of martial prowess.)

The simple solution (rational person and all that) is for me to run out there, try to separate two riled-up dogs in a killing frenzy from my birds without getting bitten in the process, then check for the tags they may or may not be wearing, keep them away from surviving chickens while I call the number on the tag, hope that someone picks up, and then secure two strange dogs until their owner can show up and collect them?

In other words, the onus of dealing with the situation falls squarely on me, and I should deal with it in the manner you deem rational, despite the fact that it’s your irresponsibility that caused the problem? You are responsible for your animals, and if they run free without supervision, anything that is done by them or to them is squarely on your head, not mine.

“Oh, but they’re just chickens, you stupid trigger-happy country bumpkin. You can just get new ones.”

Even assuming that you’d actually be willing to own up to your dogs’ trespassing and livestock killing instead of just going “Nuh uh! Wasn’t mine! Hank and Boo wouldn’t harm a fly!”, those chickens represent a higher dollar value than even that vet bill you had to pay. Sure, the chicks were maybe two bucks a piece, but I had to build them a coop ($1,000), a covered run ($1,500), and then feed and take care of them daily for months and years. (Care to add up the labor and feed costs for our flock of seven after two years?) And you can’t just replace them on the spot because you can only get new chicks or pullets in the spring, so I’ll be out my investment and the money for all the eggs the hens would have laid in the future, had they not ended up as Hank and Boo’s chew toys.

I love dogs, and I’d be very, very hesitant to shoot someone else’s companion animal and would never do so without severe emergency. But letting your dogs roam free in farm country and then getting pissed off at others for dealing with the results of your irresponsibility in the most expedient and least expensive manner is not rational.  The rational thing would be to keep your damn dogs under control. I love my dogs just like Mr. Taylor loves his, but if I allowed them to escape the property, and some farmer down the road killed them while they were busy slaughtering his laying hens, I wouldn’t blame him in the least for shooting them to prevent thousands of dollars of damage to his poultry. I certainly wouldn’t get all in a huff and cry to the newspaper lady about rational people and the “doggie death penalty.”

cultural oddities.

name-related puzzlements.

There are two issues with my name that pop up with astonishing regularity.

The first is the number of people who read my first name as “Markos”. I don’t know where they get that extra S at the end, but it happens a lot, and it’s genuinely puzzling to me. Is it because Marco is not a very common first name in the US, and that most of the wearers of that name spell it with a C? I suspect that a lot of people read Marko and have their brain’s autocomplete spit out Markos because that’s a somewhat common Greek name.

The second is the annoying reliability of someone saying “Polo” whenever some barista or fast food counter person calls out my first name to let me know my order is ready. 75% of the time, someone will go “POLO! Nyuk nyuk.” Fifty percent of the “Polo” people at least have the presence of mind to notice my pained smile and say something like “I bet you get that a lot.”

NO SIR, I’VE NEVER HEARD THAT ONE BEFORE AND OH MY GOD IT’S HILARIOUS.

I swear, it happens so often that I have started giving fake names to the counter people. I’ve even stopped using my Panera loyalty card because it puts my name right on the receipt and undermines my attempt to squeeze by as “Mark” or “Mike”.

I really need to get an easy-to-remember pen name with maybe some added stud cachet. Like “Thorn Magnum”, or “John Ringo”.