Now that my daughter is doing an internship at BBC TV in London, I’d better find out what they are talking about. BBC America’s British American Dictionary to the rescue.

Video der „Arbeitsgemeinschaft für Bildung im Erziehungswesen“: Die Kunst des Spickens. Interessante „Dokumentation“ über das Spicken.

Bin auf die Wortwarte von Lothar Lemnitzer und Tylman Ule gestoßen. Mit Quellen und Häufigkeitsangaben. Vielleicht hilft das mir, mich zwischen meinen Deutschlandbesuchen über Wortneubildungen auf dem Laufenden zu halten. Empfehlenswert.

During my hard-core science-fiction period in the 60s I was fascinated by Stanisław Lem’s books. I couldn’t wait for Andrei Tarkovsky’s movie Solaris to come to the theaters in Germany in the early 70s. Today, Stanisław Lem died in Kraków.

There is more of Lem’s writing available in German in Germany than in English in the U.S., hence my favorite quote in German: “Die erste Voraussetzung für Unsterblichkeit ist der Tod.”

Now I will go and reread some of his books.

03/28/06: Just found this article on Lem in Die Zeit of July 28, 2005 (via Mario Sixtus).

After a long day of flying I am waiting around in Lambert airport for the shuttle home. The meeting point is opposite “one of the world’s largest airport murals, ‘Aviation… An American Triumph,’” depicting the significance St. Louis had (has?) in the nation’s aviation history. You can admire it on-line here. One of the panels (picture 2 on page 3 in the on-line version) shows a map of the world in a rather unusual projection: St. Louis as the Center of the Earth.

Delta flight 79 from Berlin to New York City. In the bathroom, I am looking in vain for soap. Instead they have “Lemongrass Wasabi Wash.” Will that get them out of Chapter 11? This is a loo, for crying out loud, not Asian Fusion cuisine. For a while, my hands smell like menu item 36 in my favorite Zehlendorf Thai restaurant, Good Time.

Time to exhale. Research in Motion will pay $612.5 million to NTP, a patent holding company, to end a protracted legal battle which, at one point, threatened to shut down the e-mail functionality of my smart phone. It’s quite a bit less than the billion or so that was expected and saves us from Windows-driven Microsoft cell phones – at least for now. (Come to think of it, there aren’t really cell phones anymore, so what to call them?)

I’m a bit late on this, but I just saw that DailyIndia.com reported in early February about a preliminary Department of Justice inquiry into SDL’s acquisition of Trados. The Common Sense Advisory picked up the story as well. Anything to this?

Have to get back to Trados and continue with my translation…

Ist mal wieder Zeit, Deutsch aufzutanken. Im letzten Jahr war es am Aschermittwoch, in diesem Jahr wird es der darauf folgende Dienstag. Ich fliege diesmal direkt von New York nach Berlin, kann man ja jetzt. Diese Nebeneinanderstellung der beiden Städtenamen klingt irgendwie so nach den 20ern, nach Luftschiffen und nach Hans Dominik. Ich fand seine Bücher so toll damals im Internat, genauso wie die Ubique-Terrarum-Serie von Herbert Kranz. Eine Woche wird es werden, und der Computer kommt mit. Letzter Berlinbesuch war sage und schreibe vor zehn Jahren.