Reply #149: OMG! someone actually gave a considered reply to my request!!!

[RainDog]

this is a first! and so, of course, I am now having a "deer in the headlights" moment.

...and am revealed as a poseur, a wannabe adventuress, a Walter Mitty Thurberette. Because the person you mention is a good friend, I wouldn't want to inflict myself upon him - *I'm* too much of a humanitarian for that. However, it's good to know you keep stray males in stock if I were ever as brazen in action as I am in words. :)

"green card" or "tax shelter" are concepts that are sooo much simpler than "relationship." sigh. I guess I'll have to go back to sending out my resume to academic libraries. :/

I'm familiar with the similarities between Dutch and German... the sentence structure, verb placements... I was in Hamburg and Berlin last year with some friends and could figure out some written advertisements, etc. if they were fairly simple. When I studied Chaucer, I was amazed to see that Flemish is so like early English - in Chaucer they still shared some of the same verbs. "Weren" comes to mind. When my friends and I were in Berlin we went to the flea market. I found a little 12mo of Sterne's Sentimental Journey. Not an extremely valuable book, but valuable to me as a keepsake.

I'm putting together a project about books as objects.

The German television show sounds like art imitating life because I am, of course, a skilled detective. I read all the Nancy Drew novels, which, of course qualifies me as a junior sleuth. I'm not familiar with German tv. My taste in German media runs to Mephisto or Run Lola Run - the Fassbinder trilogy - Europa Europa - Wim Wenders' work... Goodbye Lenin was funny. I thought The Lives of Others was devastatingly good. The Damned is a little too overwhelming for me. The U.S. isn't very good about distribution of foreign language films, of course, beyond the biggest titles. "M" is still one of the greatest, to me. Peter Lorre... what more could you want from a film!

What are you doing in Germany? (now that I've propositioned you for pimpitude, it would probably be nice to actually know you. lol.)