Thank you, Bettina, for your wishes. Three nights and three days of pain (breaking more and more frequently through the Demerol barrier), and the eagle has landed. I received plenty of advice from many people, but in the end, what helped was the good old German cure-all, taken for everything from toothaches to flu and bad haircuts: warm beer, or “Bier mit Heizung.”

I hope that the pain and kidney swelling will now go away, and I will take in the stone for analysis tomorrow. Remember when all else fails: Bier mit Heizung.

It started Thursday afternoon around 2:30 pm and felt like indigestion. I tried to ignore it, but it got stronger and stronger. The pain was in the back and front, no position would relieve it. When I thought it could not possibly get worse, it kicked it up a notch. I was sweating. I felt terrible. By 6 pm I drove myself into town to the ER of Boone Hospital – with a number of stops on the way to catch my breath. Ashley skillfully (and without causing a bruise) put a catheter into my arm even though I couldn’t sit down or stand still. By 7 pm I was lying on a bed and had a drip in my arm. Demerol made the world whole again. The blood tests came back, they did a CAT scan.

more…

Ryan Coleman (Found in Translation) shows a visual look at the translation process: how do translators interact with the various elements of the process. Hint: If you need to make the image larger, try the link in the comments.

Die Süddeutsche bietet (auch grafisch) eine Nachlese der Trendwende im Deutschen für 2006: „Erschütternd ist das neue geil“. Daß Saarbrücken das neue Bielefeld sein soll, finde ich als ehemaliger Saarbrücker, nun ja, im alten Sinne erschütternd – und es erinnert mich an den Bielefeld-Urlaubs-Sketch von Hanns Dieter Hüsch.

Ein gutes Beispiel übrigens, wie ein Link zum andern führt: Der Eintrag „X ist das neue Y“ im Language Log führt zu diesem Artikel der Süddeutschen, die in den Verweisen am Ende des Artikels wiederum den Eintrag „On the trail of ‘The New Black’ (and ‘The Navy Blue’)“ des Language Log verlinkt.

The kind of headline I like to see:

Can red wine help you live forever?

My new iPod is playing the title below. Wasn’t that on the soundtrack of the (let’s say around) 1968 movie Ich bin ein Elefant, Madame? Over the stretch of time I seem to remember a dialog snippet that went something like this: “Können Sie mir beweisen, daß ich kein Kiwi bin.”

Kansas was the cheerless gray of lonesome clouds, empty windows, and lost hearts.

Neil Gaiman: American Gods