This voice sounds very familiar to me. Very shini.

I find some of the best introduction to the whole jazz ethos is to go old-school with Big Band and '20s jazz in general. You can get people started down the path to radical improvisation by the tighter, more constrained forms of that era and then guide them toward the more … ah … challenging stuff.

I’m in the “little bit of both” camp here.

1. By definition if you’re a malicious manipulator you’re being a bad person. (Disagree? Look up what “malicious” means…) And bad people really should be punished. (But that’s not the end-all, be-all of things: good people should also be rewarded!)

2. On the other hand, you live in a world where bad actors exist. At some level you have to watch out for yourself instead of dumping that burden on literally everybody around you who in some form or another cares about you.

Where things get complicated for me is when the people who are victims of malicious manipulators have been manipulated through their own desire to be, well, malicious. The victims of 419 scams, for example, are sucked in by malicious manipulators through a desire to benefit through what amounts to malicious manipulation. They wanted to be scammers themselves; it just turns out that they were incompetent at it and got scammed instead. Here my feelings are mixed.

There’s layers of hilarity for me.

1. The introduce German vocabulary, like the “Wesen” that are at the heart of the show. It’s the right word, note: it means “creature” or “being” or other such words. But they pronounce it like “VESS-en”, instead of the proper way of saying it which sounds more like “VAY-zen”. Thus they’re pronouncing what is arguably the core word of the show as if it meant “whose” instead of “creature”. This makes me laugh. Constantly.

2. There’s a whole host of comical errors in the “German” words for the “VESS-en”(🤣):

• Blutbad: The name for werewolves, translates to “bloodbath”. So far so good. Perhaps a poetic name to show the deadliness of the creatures. But in plural they call them “Blutbaden” which would mean “bathing in blood”. The word they were actually looking for was “Blutbäder”.

• Jägerbär: This is a werebear and is intended to mean “hunter-bear”. Which is fine. Except when it shows up in writing it’s spelled “Jägerbar” (and it’s pronounced that way about half the time too), meaning “hunter’s bar”. As in the place you get your drinks if you’re a hunter. (It also sometimes shows up as “Jagerbar” which … doesn’t seem to mean anything I can figure out.)

• Ziegevolk: Supposed to mean “goat people” but it should be “Ziegenvolk” (plural: “Ziegenvölker”).

• Fuchsbau: Supposed to mean “foxhole” but this is not a word that has any supernatural connotations in German. It’s literally the word for a fox burrow. (It’s telling that the rarely-seen German dub of the show changes it to Fuchsteufel: literally fox-devil.)

• And a cast of thousands. Most of the “Wesen” names are wrong. They’re what happens when someone comes up with a “cool name” in English and translates it word for word into German with a German-English dictionary, unaware that other languages aren’t just one-for-one mappings with English vocabulary, grammar, and idiom.

3. The real comedy sets in, however, when they started introducing real German speakers (and “real” German speakers) into the story. In the first two seasons or so, the only foreign languages they inserted for any length of time were French and Spanish. (I can’t judge the Spanish except peripherally: it seemed fine, but the French ranged from competent to exquisite.) But in the third season they set some things in Germany and had “native” (and native) German speakers talking. Some of these “German speakers” spoke such a badly-corrupted German it was impossible to work out what they were actually saying; it was somehow worse than the “Chinese” in Firefly(!). But the true comedy gold is when real German speakers had to speak the lines. Because for consistency’s sake they had to mispronounce words and misuse words that were already in canon … and you could SEE in their faces how uncomfortable it all was to say “VESS-en” for “Wesen”. (I suspect there were a lot of reshoots because the actual Germans kept screwing up their lines using correct German pronunciation, vocabulary, and syntax.)

Now don’t get me wrong here. I like the show. I’m enjoying watching it. I just find the cringeworthy German to be a layer of unintentional comedy gold atop a series that’s pretty entertaining in its own right. It’s just the victim of what commonly comes from unilingual writers in any language (though anglophones have a far higher proportion of unilingualism than most other language groups).

See, this is what happens. The writers come up with a neat turn of the phrase or a cool vocabulary item in their native language. (Fair enough. It’s literally the language they think in.) Then they ask the wrong question:

• How would I say <phrase/word/whatever> in <language>?

And they’ll go to a native speaker and ask that, without context. Or they’ll go to a language dictionary and translate it manually. Or they’ll go to Google Translate. Or these days maybe to ChatGPT. And what comes out is a literal translation (that might even be an accurate literal translation!) … that is nonetheless gibberish in the target language. (Pronunciation is another thing entirely, and I cut some slack there because actors are not going to always be polyglots; indeed rarely are.)

So to illustrate, let’s take a common English expression: “Who gives a shit?” I’ll translate it into three languages literally:

• Qui donne une merde ?
• Wer gibt eine Scheiße?
• 谁给一坨屎？ (Shéi gěi yī tuó shǐ?)

All three of these are 100% accurate translations of the expression. NONE of them have any meaning in their target language. French, German, and Chinese speakers, if they didn’t know the English expression, would blink uncomprehendingly at you trying to figure out if you’ve just had an aneurysm or something. See, the proper, idiomatic translation is more like this:

• On s’en fout. (Literally “we don’t care” but used in the space that “who gives a shit?” is placed.)
• Wen interessiert’s? (Literally “who’s interested?”) / Mir doch egal (“I don’t care anyway”) depending on which way “who gives a shit?” is being used. (Recall what I said about one-to-one mapping…)
• 谁在乎？(Shéi zài hū?) / 我才不在乎呢。(Wǒ cái bù zài hū ne) depending on how dismissive you want to be in Chinese. The first means “who cares?” and the second, far harsher, means “I don’t care at all”.

So for a show to not become an unintentional comedy like Grimm became for me, the writers would either have to stay in their lane and not try to introduce German, or they would have had to actively collaborate with a German native-level speaker to find out how actual GERMANS would say things.

You understand this is something you might have to research, right? If you dig deep enough you’ll get %caffeine by weight ratings for different types of coffee (or tea), %caffeine extraction, etc.

But, get this, I’m not your research department. You haven’t paid me a single 分 to go do your research for you. You’re going to either have to do a bit of digging yourself or you’re going to have to pay my consultation rates to do it for you. ($200 per hour, minimum two hours, paid in advance.)

Grimm.

It’s not technically a comedy show, but the various attempts of people in it to speak German convincingly have me rolling on the floor.

There’s coffee snob sites out there that will go into incredibly gory detail of roast levels and brewing mechanism and caffeine measurement. Like this one. And a myriad of others. (I just took the first hit off a search here, but the search terms were “detailed caffeine breakdown in coffee by varietal, roast, and brewing mechanism”. There were many, many, many more hits if that one’s not suitable. Like this one.)

Because the “global” news/politics communities are filled to the brim with Americans mouthing off American talking points?

Cinnamon is the bomb in non-sweet foods too. A Chongqing hot pot has dried chili peppers (OH SO MANY!), Sichuan peppercorns (red and green), star anise, cassia cinnamon (as opposed to Ceylon cinnamon), bay leaves, Chinese black cardamom, Doubanjiang (a peppery bean paste), fermented black beans, garlic, ginger, scallions, onion, and coriander (cilantro).

If I haven’t made people cringe with at least one of those ingredients, I’ve found someone with a very broad palate! 🤣

Caffeine is very stable, yes. But you’re not adding much if you’re adding just the dregs post-brew. Most of the caffeine is gone by the end of a normal brew. (This is quite unlike tea where you need several brews to get all the caffeine, so despite teas having more caffeine by weight than coffees most of the time, brewed tea has less.)

I’m with you there. I used sliced and dried finger peppers in my breakfasts.

I agree with the first two and sometimes the last (though I tend to go for stocks instead to get the umami). I’m really not a fan of the onion and garlic powder, though. If I need onion and garlic I get onion and garlic. Don’t like the powder forms.

Parsley is fine in things like tabbouleh (and indeed it’s perfect in that) but that aside, yeah, I’m not a fan of parsley in most things.

Definitely. Also Chongqing hot pots.

Incidentally here’s a guide to help you distinguish between the flat-leaf parsley and cilantro/coriander:

The cilantro is the leaf next to the parsley.

There’s two kinds of parsley (not including coriander/cilantro which is its own headache):

1. The flat-leaf stuff that has a mild flavour but no texture and is better replaced with coriander if you’re not one of the mutants who tastes soap when eating coriander.
2. The frizzy-leaf stuff that has a stronger flavour and a texture, but the flavour is bitter and the texture is kind of like eating hair.

Yeah, cinnamon (“true” and cassia) bark is a great spice!

Black pepper. Chili pepper. Sichuan peppercorns …

… you might be spotting a pattern?

We’re heading into hot season, so right now undies and a ratty tee.

No. I would not wear these outside.

Π (Pi) males: covered in a crust and baked. Smoke a lot of weed.