According to Erikson, this blog is now at a crucial stage: At age three, it is beginning to develop a sense of initiative, while at the same time, if this tendency is squelched either through criticism or control, it will develop a sense of guilt.

Working on some tax software (I am relieved that it will be checked by a subject-matter specialist – at least that is what the agency is telling me). Found this website:

Steuer-Lexikon 2005

The same site has links to Gesetzes-Texte (in German only) and BFH-Urteile.

Here a few resources I found on the Web over the last weeks:

DROW Wissensdatenbank Werbung und Marketing. A German glossary of advertising and marketing terminology. It is helpful to me as a translator who does not live in Germany to gauge just how saturated with English terminology advertising and marketing speak has become. But: “Leporello” is defined as “das Prospekt”? Perhaps this usage is what Duden calls “landschaftlich.” After all, in Saarbrücken we call it “der Butter.”

Lexikon der Suchmaschinenoptimierung. SEO is a subject that appears more and more in translations of marketing material and it is difficult for translators to make the call where to translate a term into German and where simply to use the English. Websites such as this one help me to make this decision. For questions not answered in this glossary, users are referred to the Internet und e-Commerce Lexikon (notice the absence of the, strictly speaking, mandatory hyphens) at www.at-mix.de/lexikon-0000.htm.

Extra-flauschige Frottierwäsche zu traumhaften Preisen!

Die diversen Filter beim Mail Server und im E-Mail-Programm halten mir die meiste Spam-Mail vom Hals, aber manchmal bricht doch noch was durch – wie dieses Angebot von frottierpakete@wanadoo.es.

Wer nun aber auch die letzten Schlupflöcher für Spam abgedichtet hat und ab und zu mal wieder so richtig in Spam-Mail wühlen möchte, braucht nicht zu verzagen: Es gibt Gott sei Dank das Museum of Spam!

Sometimes I read sentences in the newspaper that end completely differently than I expect. Like the one one today’s Columbia Daily Tribune about anthropology professor Mike O’Brien who has been appointed dean of the University of Missouri-Columbia’s College of Arts and Science: “He received national recognition for an article on the discovery of some of the oldest shoes ever found in the New World in Callaway County.” What an unexpected turn.

Hunter Museum of American Art

Last week I drove the 600 miles to Chattanooga and landed, unexpectedly, in the middle of the that city’s annual River Bend Festival. Lots of music and way too many people! The festival was not the reason I went to Chattanooga, but I still had a chance to catch a few bars of some of the musical acts: Blueground Undergrass, The Zen Tricksters, and The Lovell Sisters. The food I had was surprisingly good. We all had dinner one night at St. John’s Restaurant on Market Street and at the 212 Market Restaurant near the Aquarium the next night. Breakfast at the City Cafe Diner was a good way to start the day.

On the way back I finally made it to Cape Girardeau, Missouri. I always had been curious how a place in a land-locked state or, in the words of the author Augusto Roa Bastos, on “an island surrounded by land,” could be called “Cape.” The seawall that protects downtown from the Mississippi depicts 45 famous persons who were born in Missouri or achieved fame while living in the state – the Missouri Wall of Fame. They range from President Harry S. Truman, to outlaws Frank and Jesse James, and Cape Girardeau’s own contribution, the national radio personality and pain killer addict Rush Limbaugh.