Melantrys’ Page

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… to - hopefully - keep my faithful readers entertained.

Admittedly it’s not really new, but most of you won’t know it.

There’s this black lady who is a regular customer at the store. (No, this is not another boss story! )
She always does these weird things with her hair, like piling that incredible mass up or tying it up in a scarf of the American flag.

Anyway, she always smiled at me when seeing me at the store or elsewhere. Really friendly lady.
Only, since… er… two years ago she’s smiling even wider. Well, ok, not as much as the first few times, but I feel it’s still a bit more than it used to be.

The reason? I don’t know!

I was just returning from an annual festivity 30km from here. As I couldn’t have the car, I was going back by bus. And when I got on, there she was, riding home as well, giving me the widest smile ever and greeting me.

I am sure her reaction was totally unrelated to the fact that I happened to be wearing a mildly medievalish blouse, leather pants and no shoes and was carrying a sword and dagger….

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This is what it looked like this morning.

I want summer back…..

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… it’s been snowing.

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(*listening to “In taberna” by Corvus Corax*)

Apparently some misguided small child has lost his little fluffy Teletubby dolly in the store yesterday. When we started work this morning it was lying on a table near the register.

My colleague K., who was doing the till this morning, took some other stuff from the table to put it away and accidentally knocked the doll off.

Now, dear readers, please guess what I said to her!

“Ooooooah, Teletubby aua!”

If that looks like “Awwww, Teletubby ouch!” to you…. you are right. Isn’t this sad? But then again, the only appropriate way to comment on a “hurt” Teletubby, innit?

(From medieval music to noise: Disturbed - The game)

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See title.

Listening to Oomph! again. (For those who care: “Nichts (ist kälter als deine Liebe)” at the moment. “Nothing” up next.) Singing along as well. Lucky neighbours that it’s winter and the window is closed.

Drinking my favourite poison V+. All non-Germans, please don’t throw up; it’s Veltins beer with coke. Yummy.

As I already told the Muffin Man, I was pinked at work today. How can a woman wear light pink winter boots (dirty), white woolly pants, a light pink down jacket, an even lighter pink jumper, very likely also pink underwear I am sure and pink lipstick?! And she was not 12, but more like 60.

Anyway, just went and made a few more enemies on the Mad Canuck’s blog I’m afraid, but what the hell, Programmer Craig hates me already anyway. (And seeing how he acts towards other people I’m not sorry about that anymore but wear it with pride. YES, I am proud to be “the abusive German person”, yay!!!)

What is this world coming to if people consider “anti-war” to be a curse word? When did we take 100 steps back in terms of liberty, democracy, peacefulness and freedom of speech?

Still Oomph!, “Tief in dir”. Am I the only one who doesn’t quite get what Dero is singing about…?

Sorry, folks, that’s it for today.

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I felt like posting some random concert pictures, so here we go:

Clawfinger live in Belgium, April 2004:

Zak (left) in his favourite singing pose.

Jocke (above), for once not clowning around, but playing keyboard like a good boy

Bård. Why do guitarists always make faces like that???

And the live band:

André…. just being André

and last but not least: Henka

I remember this gig with particular “fondness”, thanks to the mad stagediver stepping onto my left hand with his full weight, skinning part of one finger and leaving behind some very persistent pain in the knuckle of another, which took almost a year to disappear.
Sint-Lievens-Houtem, your audience is way too enthusiastic….

2004 also saw me at the Wâldrock Festival in the north of the Netherlands:

Fear Factory

Monster Magnet

My Dying Bride

Cradle of Filth

Then I rushed back to the middle of the Netherlands to see Static-X:

The last festival of that year took me back to Belgium, but that time no-one felt inclined to mutilate me, which was a bit of a relief.

The setting of the annual Graspop Festival is slightly ominous, to say the least, but it’s a very friendly festival with equally friendly “natives”.

To make up for its friendliness the festival is spectacularly loud, so that the first band - In Extremo - already made KrankImKopf’s ear pop.

Yellow Pfeiffer doing some tricks

Dr Pymonte not wearing much more than his bagpipes…..

and of course das letzte Einhorn (the last unicorn)

Welcome to the asylum, erm, Oomph!

Festivalwise this year only got me up north again, this time within Germany.

Ladies and gentlemen, the Wacken Open Air:

I wonder where that sign went missing….

aaaah, finally Apocalyptica live!

Yes, this post is utterly senseless, but I felt like posting those pictures.

This is my blog, and I can do what I want, mwahahahahahahahahaha!

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Winter can come now (although I’d prefer it to stay away, thank you very much); I changed the car’s tires. Well, they predicted snow, so we figured it might be wise to be prepared.

To survive the cold of winter I bought the ingredients needed for brewing up some gløgg / glögg. Don’t think I’ll do it this weekend already though, but I wanted to be prepared here as well. Thank you Susie for sending the spices and the recipe. Oh, and if this Danish brew sucks I’ll give you a ding around the ear next time we meet!

On a more serious note - I followed a link from somewhere to a US soldier’s blog which I found rather disturbing. Both the fact that the half-Iraqi person linking to it seemed to find the author concentrating on tanks and guns the only thing that people might have problems with and what the soldier writes about when not describing tanks, guns or tasteless pranks amongst the soldiers.
Out of piety and respect he does not describe how fellow soldiers come to their death on their mission in Iraq. The same courtesy is not extended to dead Iraqis though. I read some very sick descriptions of soldiers having fun looking at a mutilated corpse and a soldier jumping off a tank on a bet to originally turn a dead Iraqi over but - being ordered to stay clear of the corpse in case it was rigged up with explosives - settling for straddling and humping the corpse from a safe distance which all his fellow soldiers considered to be roaringly funny. Even if these dead Iraqis were indeed insurgents… dead people deserve a certain amount of respect. Allegedly civilized people should know this and live up to it.

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Due to recent events a huge German political magazine wrote a long article about ID. Actually they wrote about this subject in September already, which might have been the reason why CDU politician and Minister President of Thüringen Dieter Althaus cancelled his invitation to micro biologist and author Siegfried Scherer to speak at a political discussion forum next year.
Scherer is the most famous German follower of ID, although he claims not to be any more.
Up until 2003 he was a member of the Discovery Institute in Seattle. Now he renounces them, and distances himself from their plans to force ID into the schools’ lesson plans. On the other hand he is busy with sowing doubt against the Theory of Evolution in his role as chairman of the Studiengemeinschaft Wort und Wissen (study community Word and Knowledge). He is convinced that the Fall of Man caused our mortality. Had Eve not made Adam eat that apple we would still be immortal. Oh, and all the animals too.

The magazine also published the results of a poll:

13% of the Germans believe that God created Man and the world in 6 days

23% believe that God or another higher being guided evolution along its way

60% believe in evolution without any divine influence

Results by region, creed and school type:

God created Man and the world:

14% in West Germany
8% in East Germany

14% of Protestants
17% of Catholics
5% of people without creed

28% from Hauptschule (lowest level of education)
14% from Realschule (medium level of education)
4% from Gymnasium/Hochschule (highest level of education)

God or similar helped evolution along:

25% in West Germany
14% in East Germany

26% of Protestants
29% of Catholics
11% of people without creed

22% from Hauptschule
19% from Realschule
27% from Gymnasium/Hochschule

Evolution without divine interference:

57% in West Germany
73% in East Germany

54% of Protestants
50% of Catholics
80% of people without creed

43% from Hauptschule
63% from Realschule
67% from Gymnasium/Hochschule

And at the end let’s go back to where it all came from: America.

In Pennsylvania the mother of a 16 year old girl is suing the school.
Her goal: Nothing but her constitutional rights. The American constitution bans religion from schools (separation of church and state).
Her reasons: Growing uneasiness about the changes at her daughter’s school, climaxing in utter dread and terror when her daughter came home from school, screaming at her: Why do you believe in evolution? What kind of Christian are you? Why did you teach me all those lies? Evolution is a lie!
This she had learned from her friends and - yes - in school.

I call that brainwashing. They’re brainwashing the children, so that the new generations will all be followers of ID.

And they don’t want to stop just there. (As if this wasn’t enough already.) Here’s some other things they’d like to get rid off:
- sex education right along with Darwinism and Theory of evolution
- homosexuals
- abortion
- atheism
- materialism

I only hope the judges will rule in favour of the plaintiff.

I’m not having very high hopes though. If even the funny monkey, er, President of the United States is violating the constitution by supporting the teaching of ID at schools, what is there to expect, really…?

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I must have added up wrong last Saturday when getting the cash drawer all ready for Monday as my colleague K.’s count on Monday morning came up 1 Euro short.
In the afternoon Şişko was at the register; I was elsewhere in the store. I heard K. informing her of the missing Euro.

Şişko has this odd habit. Of course we don’t carry wallets when working at the till. But when buying something she always already rings it up, keeps the receipt and puts it in in the evening when she’s counting the money up at the office.

Now, I do know that she also occasionally puts money in when she didn’t shop and there’s money missing. Which is damn silly; we don’t have to. But not always anyway. Most of the times she just leaves the drawer like that, without even putting a note in, so that if you don’t count the money yourself in the morning you’ll think you lost the money yourself during the cause of that day… not that a note would really help in most cases because she frequently counts or adds up wrong.
And often when she has bought something and put the money in after the evening count, the drawer contains the standard amount of money in the morning. Which, sadly, is odd for her.

Well, on Monday evening she counted the money while I did the connected comp work. When she was done and had put in money from her wallet she announced that K. had been right indeed, and that the money came up 1 Euro short. I put the Euro in from the “petty money” in the safe.
So you can imagine my surprise this morning when I counted the money, and there was 1 Euro missing!
I only meant to find out where our counts of the different coins were off, and checked the paper she had done her adding up on yesterday. And guess what I found?
The total came up 1.32 short of what’s supposed to be in the drawer. Then she added what she had to pay for her shopping: 1.32 = standard cash drawer amount of money. Only…. she actually shopped for 1.35. I checked. Apparently she then remembered that there was supposed to be a Euro missing. So she crossed out the Euro on the paper and changed the total accordingly. And of course only put 0.32 Euros in.
Being the brilliant mathematician that she is she had also miscounted the 1 Euro coins by one. (That check I originally went up to the office to do showed that.) Had she not done that I’d never have wondered about the still missing Euro, but then of course she’d also have cheated the boss by “only” 3 Cents instead of 1.03 Euros…

I really don’t know what to do now.
The boss’s wife was shocked just last week upon finding out that Şişko had 8.03 Euros too much in the cash drawer without her noticing that in her evening count. Mrs G. kept brooding on that the whole day long and told her husband. Did anything happen? No.
Plus, Şişko is a world class liar. She already lied to my face about something that was concerning me, so she must have known I damn well knew that I was right.

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Yes indeed, faithful readers, today he was at the store again.
He passed behind me in the cosmetics’ aisle and said hello.
Oh, and he was wearing a Slipknot jacket, so he escaped getting spanked.

Oh, and I installed Site Meter yesterday, so beware! I might know now when and how often you visit my site, mwahahahahahaha.

So, Hassan, is it nice living in Sachsen? lol