Pölen

I have a text message invitation for tomorrow evening, encouraging pölen. This is a word unknown to Germany's finest dictionaries, and is apparently only used in the area around Essen, Bochum and Dortmund. In case you haven't guessed, pölen means to play football, and Torpedo Entenhausen have begun their summer training regime.

The geographical limit of this phrase has been somewhat found here (you may wish to put on your sunglasses before opening the link), and a quick discussion in the U-bahn revealed that the term was unknown to test subjects from Stuttgart and Mecklenburg-Western Pomerania.

Pölen has, oddly enough, a second slang meaning. The german word for oil is Öl, and oil from plants can be called P-Öl, or Pöl for short. Sticking -en on the end creates the verb pölen, meaning to run a vehicle with vegetable oil, which is apparently all the rage in Germany due to a generous tax break.

Strawberry, Cherry, Cream and Custard flan.

I keep coming to Erlangen with the intention of moving out of my old room, but as soon as I arrive I get drunk and am then too hungover to go and get some packing cases and move my stuff out. This time the drunkenness was predictable: my housemates had organized a big garden party with 40 crates of beer, three large punch bowls and a chili-con-carne so large that it could only be stirred by a length of 2" by 1" wood.

After several hours of partying, I decided it would be a good idea to bake a cake, so I went to the market to buy the ingredients at 5am, thinking that this would allow me a nice lie in. When I woke up I found that I had acquired a punnet of strawberries, a bag of cherries and half a watermelon. This evening I finally got round to baking a cake with the ingredients.

Strawberry, Cherry, Cream and Custard flan

(There is no real need to buy the ingredients while drunk, but it won't hurt).

Base: Shortcrust Pastry, about 5mm thick. Find a suitable recipe and make enough to fill the base of your container. Bake at 200 deg. Celsius until done.

First Layer: Custard, I used Bird's custard powder, which thickens nicely when cooled. Pour the custard on the base, and place in the fridge.

Second Layer: Strawberries and cherries. It is OK if they sink into the custard, but they don't have to.

Top Layer: Whipped cream. I used just enough to cover the top of the fruit.

This recipe is rather vague, but is based on the hope that anything involving strawberries, cherries, cream and custard is going to taste good, even if it ends up as a collapsed mush in your fridge. By some miracle, my flan had a good shape at the end, and was swiftly devoured by my flatmates, who were admittedly quite hungry.

Hocheschwindigkeitsaufnahmen

The jumble of letters in the title is almost a german word. Only almost, for, believe it or not, it is missing a letter! This word was the title of a slide during a student's talk which I was listening to today. If you insert a 'g' after the second 'h', then you have the german word for high speed photographs.

When the talk was finished, the assembled students and supervisers were asked for comments as to the style of the talk. I immediately pointed out the spelling mistake , and followed up with a tirade against the german language, which is full of words so long that a spelling mistake somewhere within the word approaches a statistical certainty.

I am worried that most of my co-workers fail to see anything odd about words with 29 letters in them. It's like english people who think that 5 days for a game of cricket is most reasonable; you can only see these things from the outside. Having grown up in a country where 28 letters is enough to make a word notorious, it is worrying to work with people who can happily throw around 29 consecutive letters without any sense of guilt or humour.

I later received a minor ticking off from a colleague who explained that the idea was for the students to do most of the analysis, which I guess was a polite way of saying to stfu. The poor student hopefully went home crying and will be emotionally scarred enough to check her slides more carefully in the future. Let this be a lesson to her: there will always be at least one annoying pedant in the audience.

The perils of wearing a cricket helmet.

or

A good excuse to write dislodged lots

Today England beat the West Indies in the Old Trafford test match. The oddity of the match was Kevin Pietersen being out, "Hit Wicket", due to his helmet being dislodged by Dwayne Bravo.

This wouldn't have happened 25 years ago, as players then played without helmets, despite the rather hard ball being aimed at their heads often enough. Here is Ian Botham showing how to do this successfully and without bothering to look at the ball, and here is Brian Close facing a much more dangerous West Indian fast bowling attack than the current one with a lack of protection.

When I started this post, I thought that this danger started with helmets, but having read the wikipedia article for hit wicket above, apparently the weight of a cap is enough to dislodge a bail, and caps can be removed from heads by either the ball or the wind. Several such incidents are recalled here anecdotally, including one of being out "hit wicket" via a dislodged toupee.

Blasphemy

At the end of a disappointing football season, the usual excuses are rolled out: injuries, suspensions, poor refereeing decisions, the state of the pitch, etc. I present my excuse for Torpedo Entenhausen's low league position: Herbert Fucking Grönemeyer.

Today we should be playing a "basement duel" against Megolomaniacs Herne, but crucial members of the squad are watching Bochum's favourite son in a live concert, so we had to concede the match.

I'm feeling a bit down, as these matches are usually the highlight of the week. I'm not getting anywhere fast with my job, and none of the publications or theses I'm told to read make any sense to me.

Today I managed to go through an entire lunch break with my colleagues without uttering a word. They were deep in conversation about abstract rating scores and conference hotels, something I don't care about. So I just ignored them all for 45 minutes. They probably now think I'm a boring fucker too.

Football hooligans ain't what they used to be.

Last night Torpedo Entenhausen took on the Bochum Ultras. These are the hardcore fans of VfL Bochum, and I thought that they would be a bunch of violent thugs. It turned out that they were very well behaved. They told the ref not to give them a corner he was going to award, and left their dressing room in perfect condition. The only slightly annoying thing they did was to take the three points with them.

We played the cunning trick of starting with 10 men and bringing on the 11th after 15 minutes, and at times we played some good football. I scored a header direct from a corner; the ball flew into the net and the keeper didn't even bother to dive for it. Somehow we conceded 6 lucky goals and lost by the even 2 goals in 10.

Today we had a meeting at work. The only topic of discussion which generated any debate was the plans for the car park. It is possible to spend lots of money on new electronics without anyone disagreeing or asking questions, but any discussion of parking places causes uproar. The car park for our institute is going to be flattened (don't ask) to build a new building. I made no friends by suggesting that a brisk walk across campus from the other car park wouldn't do anyone any harm. I was tempted to say that this development may delay the point at which the number of chins in the department double the number of employees, but I refrained.

PhD Hat

It is traditional to grant students who complete their PhD a souped-up mortarboard. My department in Erlangen went for relatively simple yet personal and loving designs: mine had a red lamp, a green lamp, a cricket bat with some ashes, a bicycle, a crossword, a union jack and franconian flag, some alcohol labels, a broken glass tube, a high-frequency solenoid and another glass tube filled with little red balls.

The department in Bochum, being electrical engineers, seem to favour the major electronic approach. I spent most of Thursday helping to solder 30 Diodes and 160 Resistors onto a circuit board. The hat itself is in the mechanical workshop, and the ultraviolet LEDs and fluorescent foil should arrive on Monday. I'm not quite sure what this hat should do when it is finished, but it should be impressive.

Apparently some hats in the department have been considerably more complicated than the work for which the PhD was awarded, and this devotion could explain why it takes so long for anyone to finish their PhD.