Alphabet soup

In “researching” my last blog post, I came across two of the worst acronyms that I have perhaps ever seen. (And, remember, I’ve seen TdLL.) Unsurprisingly perhaps, they both derive from the same organization, namely the Netzwerk Nachhaltigkeit Niedersächsischer Hochschulen (Network Sustainability Lower-Saxony Universities; and, yes, the German name is similarly devoid of prepositions and therefore just as stilted as the English one).

The first acronym is that for the organization itself, namely HochNiNa. Sorry, but aren’t the full names and the acronyms supposed to be in the same order or since when did Germany start outsourcing its acronym production to the Middle East? And did the person fall asleep before reaching Netzwerk? You do have to admit, HochNiNaNe is unquestionably that little bit catchier than just HochNiNa. (Even better would be NHoch3, which gets the order going back the way it should be while throwing in a geeky pun on top of it, with hoch being German for “to the power of”.)

The second acronym derives from one of HochNiNa’s major programmes, namely the taxpayer-funded project Standardisierung, Weiterentwicklung und Kommunikation von Treibhausgasbilanzen niedersächsischer Hochschulen (Standardization, further development, and communication of greenhouse-gas balances of higher-education institutions in Lower Saxony). Now, exactly why it takes 210 000 EUR and three years to develop an Excel spreadsheet is beyond me. However, when one of the major milestones you advertise for your project is the addition of two new universities one year into it, you know how low the bar for success is: trivial for the high jump and impossible for the limbo.

Anyway …

If there was ever a name in dire need of an acronym, this is it. This one will put even admin types to sleep. That fitting acronym here, of course, was COUNTS. Much shorter, a lot punchier, and infinitely more memorable insofar as it has almost nothing to do with the name of the programme, either in terms of the subject matter or the letters it uses. In either language. And in either direction. To help everyone along, I’ve highlighted the official derivation of COUNTS in the figure to the left. Now, I can understand that you sometimes have to grab some letters from the middle of the words in the full name to make an acronym work. Like with HochNiNaNe, for example. But then those letters usually either directly follow another, leading one that has already been tapped in the acronym (or at least start an important syllable) and are usually in lower case as well. And you definitely don’t do it for most of the letters in the acronym.

And, seriously, what is the point of so desperately, awkwardly, and almost randomly jerry-rigging a highly generic, English-language acronym for a highly localized German-language programme? Admittedly, SWKTNH doesn’t really have the same zip as, say, HochNiNaNe (or, even better, HoNiNaNe), but it’s still on the same (low) level as TdLL and you can at least tell where it’s coming from. (If not what you should be running from.)

Instead, maybe they should try REASON, which “counts” both as a valid acronym following their apparent method as well as something generally helpful for the future. Even STRETCH is an improvement because it’s at least honest about how they go about generating acronyms.

Created by ChatGPT using the prompt "A photorealistic image of an automated machine that looks like an oversized meat grinder. Multiword names of fictitious organizations should be fed into the top of the machine on individual strips of paper. At the bottom, one word acronyms should be spit out of the machine on separate pieces of paper." In the public domain.

On the other hand, if the acronym is clearly so important, why not come up with it first and then derive the name of the programme from it (AKA backronyming)? It’s often much easier. For instance, from COUNTS you could get:

  • COmmunication among UNiversities for Tree-hugging Sustainability,
  • Coordinating with Other UNiversities for Thermal Savings,
  • Carbon Overload Ultimately Neuters The Stratosphere,
  • Concrete Overall Underfoot? Now That Sucks!,

or even

  • Creating Objectively Uninformative Names This Saturday.

QED …

Disdainability

As I’ve mentioned more than too many times in this blog, the University of Not-Bielefeld has taken to increasingly bludgeoning us with its new-found environmental conscience. The latest foray here is in promoting the existence of numerous “sustainability markets” on campus.

Now to those of us lacking spin doctorates, these markets are nothing more than simple, second-hand bazaars where old, unwanted furniture and even lab equipment are offered up for free to whoever needs them among the university community. And they’ve been around since before I joined the University over 15 years ago. True, these markets (regardless of what they’re called) do indeed contribute to sustainability, but it’s primarily of the economic kind. As is the case with universities worldwide, funding is tight at the University of Not-Bielefeld, so anything that still does its job for free is sought after. That it also helps the environment is more thought after.

But nothing like a bit of quick rebranding to provide that veneer of progress, right?

Arrow logo by By Clker-Free-Vector-Images (https://www.needpix.com/photo/169243/)

Of course, the environmental movement, like most human endeavours, is not immune to linguistic overkill. For instance, think about just how moronic the word “recycle” actually is. The most common definition of a cycle is that of a repeating series of events, like a life cycle or a sleep cycle or even the lunar cycle. So whereas consumerism, by design of the bottom line, is a cycle (produce, purchase, use, trash), and an increasingly shorter one at that, what happens to the products and the materials that they are made of is not. Instead, it’s only through recycling that they begin to enter something resembling a cycle. But given that the prefix re- also means to repeat, what does it mean exactly to repeat something that is already itself inherently repeating, especially when it wasn’t in the first place? With this kind of logic, women can be happy that they only have menstrual cycles and not menstrual recycles.

But then what do you expect of a word that was coined way back in the 1920s by the oil-refining industry? (Betcha most environmentalists didn’t know that …) Next thing you know, organ transplants are going to be referred to as being both organic and sustainable as well.

Ultimately, however, all this kind of newly-branded sustainability has to be unsustainable and will lead to the downfall of human society faster than AI will. The way I figure it, you can either love the environment or humanity, but not both. Think about it. The more people start buying “sustainable” goods out of the goodness of their ecological hearts, the less demand there will be for new products. That means that less people will be employed to make those products, forcing the rest to buy even more “sustainably” out of the necessity of their empty wallets. And then the whole thing spirals increasingly out of control (also not a cycle) until only Elon Musk has any money left but nothing to spend it on.

Or, in other words, the ecological version of DOGE.

But, back to that veneer …

A few weeks ago, in an e-mail inviting members of the University of Not-Bielefeld to take part in an “information event on potential parking-space management” (or, in plain English, a public meeting about on-campus parking), the urgency of this “event” (originally scheduled for last autumn) was underscored by the surprising, and surprisingly honest, announcement that despite the University’s greenhouse-gas emissions having fallen slightly over the past two years (by 5.3%), they are still 1.3% above the baseline values from 2019. (I had to dig for the actual numbers, which were not in the e-mail. No point in ruining some vague adjectives with hard data.) And this despite the numerous, innovative, and high-impact countermeasures put in place by the University recently: insect meadows, a Tiny Forest, million-Euro bicycle racks, solar panels, and that yet again delayed on-campus parking policy. (Bonus points for those spotting the outlier there.) Someone needs to tell the University that simply amassing a climate fund has much less positive effect on the environment than actually using it.

A chief culprit in the University’s size-14 ecological footprint was identified as “mobility”, which included such environmental evils like day-to-day commuting (28.7% of the total annual footprint), business trips (4.6%), and even semesters abroad (1.5%). How spending semesters abroad even deserves to be mentioned explicitly here is a mystery to me, especially given its meagre contribution toward destroying the planet compared to its important potential of fostering young minds, something that I thought was what universities in general were for.

Created using ChatGPT using the prompt "I need a photorealistic image of an information stand at a European University. The table before the stand should be loaded with hundreds of copies of reports, each of which is about 100 pages long. The panels in the background should refer to sustainability with various vague charts and diverse environmental pictures. Hanging from the front of the table should be a banner reading "Saving the environment one tree at a time"." In the public domain.

But these data also tend to reveal the true nature of the University’s environmental policy: grab as many headlines as possible while trying not to piss too many people off. (Or spend too much of that climate fund.) Again, take a look at mobility as an example. Four years into its much ballyhooed, 140-page Integriertes
Klimaschutzkonzept (Integrated Climate Action Concept) and all the University of Not-Bielefeld has really achieved to green up mobility is to put an eco-tax on the business trips of a small subset of its population. This stands in stark contrast to the enormous amount of foot dragging over commuting, an area that coughs up 6x as much greenhouse gas but where any solution would disadvantage a much greater percentage of the university population. I mean seriously. How difficult can it be to start charging for parking on campus (stick) or to subsidize public-transportation costs (carrot) to encourage university members to seek out more environmentally friendlier ways of getting to work? However, as this ex-pat Canadian learned very quickly, it is much more dangerous to get between a German and their car than between a mama grizzly and her cubs. And thus, even after four years of information events, committee meetings, and plain ol’ plena, every option regarding on-campus parking officially still remains on the table, especially more information events, committee meetings, and plenty of plena. And somehow forgotten in all this is that remaining 63.0% elephant in the building in terms of the environmental costs of running the buildings themselves.

Instead, perhaps the most interesting but completely ignored stat of them all was how the University’s greenhouse-gas emissions hit a low of 68.0% of their 2019 baseline values in 2021. Now there would seem to be a real sustainability solution there worth exploring, doesn’t there? Oh, wait. That was in the middle of the pandemic, wasn’t it?

Like I said, you can either love humanity or the environment. Take your pick …

Un-vital signs 09.01.2026

It’s finally happened! After literally years of being promised that the appropriate signs would be coming “very soon” or told that such signs were not necessary in the first place, the University of Not-Bielefeld finally put up signs on my campus late last year indicating that all dogs must be on a leash.

By fogBlogger. Modified from original on the University of Not-Bielefeld campus. In the public domain.

Ok, signs is a bit of an exaggeration. It’s really just one sign located smack dab in the middle of the campus. Granted, if you only have the resources for a single sign (possibly because the sign budget was exhausted because of the multiple signs they needed to highlight all their insect-friendly meadows or that they don’t clear this particular path in the winter), the middle of the campus is probably the best place to put it. It does mean, however, that many people will unknowingly be walking their dogs illegally for half the campus.

Apart from the actual message that any sign is meant to convey, this sign also includes a meaningless platitude meant to justify its message, something that is becoming increasingly common generally. Apparently doing so reduces annoyance while increasing enlightenment. For instance, signs announcing roadworks in Germany have carried the slogan “We’re building this for you” (Wir bauen für Sie) for decades now. Well, gee, who else would they be doing it for? And, to be honest, who really cares so long as they do some actual building instead of just blocking long stretches of the road for long stretches of time for no apparent reason?

Of course, the granddaddy of all slogans is “Your safety is our primary concern” because you can use that to justify almost anything (cf. Trump vs. Venezuela). The University of Not-Bielefeld, however, saw fit to lay on a warm fuzzy guilt trip with a touch of finger pointing as their justification instead: Für ein rücksichtsvolles Miteinander, which roughly translates out to “To foster coexistence.” But not just any kind of coexistence, of course, but considerate (rücksichtsvolles) coexistence. So I considered it …

… and, once again, was left bewildered as to why all the social unrest in the world today seems to come from dogs and their owners. Live in northern Germany and especially Not-Bielefeld for any length of time and you’ll quickly realize that bicycles, not dogs, are what plague society today because bicycle riders, not unlike dogs, can’t read signs either. Nor can their upscale, lazy, but environmentally holier-than-thou cousins the e-scooter riders. I mean, stop signs or right-of-way signs? Pffft. Although I’ve seen signs warning pedestrians of oncoming bike traffic, before moving to Not-Bielefeld I’ve never seen them within sight of another sign forbidding bike riders from travelling in that oncoming direction.

One sign in particular that this bunch can’t read is that there is a universal 10-km/h speed limit on the campus of the University of Not-Bielefeld. For some perspective, here are some examples to illustrate just how fast 10km/h isn’t:

Created by ChatGPT using the prompt "a photorealistic image of a Jesus Christ Lizard. The lizard should be lying face down and half submerged in a shallow pond. Nearby in the pond should be a speed limit sign on a post. The speed limit is 10 km/h and the sign should be formatted for German roadways. In the background, a European university campus should be shown. The campus should be slightly out of focus to indicate that it is in the background." In the public domain.
  • world-class ironman competitors run the marathons at the end of those triathlons at 15 km/h or better;
  • for us remaining mortals, the boundary between jogging and running is at about 10 km/h;
  • the various species of basilisk (AKA the Jesus Christ lizards) generally hit speeds in excess of 11 km/h to achieve their water-walking miracles; and
  • without me doing anything, my car putters along at about 10 km/h in first gear all by itself (and 17 in second), meaning that I am (well, should be) continually applying the brakes when I’m on campus although all my driving instincts tell me otherwise.

Now, together with their inability to ride and read simultaneously, I think it’s obvious where the bigger threat to campus coexistence lies when you consider that leisurely bike rides are generally considered to start at 10 km/h and that the average speed of entry-level e-scooters starts at 16 km/h. And not just the bigger threat but the more numerous one as well given that the University of Not-Bielefeld provides bike racks for over 4000 bicycles and hundreds of meters of sidewalk to block with unused, idle e-scooters.

At least I walk my single, unleashed dog well under the campus speed limit …

The Emperor’s unused clothes

I did a bit of clothes shopping the other day and it was only after I got home that I discovered that one store had cynically charged me an extra 15 cents for the paper bag that they had put my clothes in.

But wait. Why is the store the cynical one here? Shouldn’t I be happy doing my part to help save the environment from unnecessary waste?

Well, for starters, the store never mentioned the surcharge, meaning that they took my contribution to save the planet while also simultaneously advertising their store for granted. I was never really given the choice whether I wanted to help offset my ecological footprint with cash or by renouncing that bag completely. And I never really understood how paying for a bag that used to be “free” suddenly helps the environment so much as the store’s bottom line. Call me skeptical (once you’re finished calling me cynical naturally), but I somehow really doubt that those 15 cents are going directly to Greenpeace. Also, considering that I had just given them over 200 EUR, you think that they could spot the environment the spare change.

And, given that this shopping bag is now essentially a product, is it possible to return it for a refund if I’m unhappy with it? I’m pretty sure that this would be the case with any other bag I bought there. I still have the receipt and reusing the bag would indeed be environmentally friendly, which is what this is all about in the end. (Isn’t it?)

Created using the Jetpack AI using the prompt "Create a photorealistic image of a mountain of brand new clothes in the middle of a landfill." In the public domain.

Finally, what right does the fashion industry in particular have to lecture anyone about environmental awareness? After all, we are talking about a segment of the economy where estimates are that anywhere between 80 to 150 billion articles per year are produced and of which 10 to 40% are never sold. (At the risk of being obvious, the reason that these numbers are estimates, and such vague ones at that, is because the fashion industry is not very forthcoming about the real numbers for some strangely unknown reason. To me, this is a clear sign that the real numbers are likely pushing the higher end of the estimated ones.)

Nevertheless, it remains that I am the cynical one for wondering how the end user paying for a bag that prevents five articles of clothing from ending up in a landfill is the vital cog in guaranteeing a future for our children …

Un-vital signs 02.10.2025

A few weeks ago, the following sign popped up on the garbage bin on campus that I pop my dog’s poop down every morning forbidding this practice in the future.

Original photo by fogBlogger. In the public domain.

Someone in Not-Bielefeld must be very proud of themselves. They need to work on their punctuation a little but did manage to use the genitive (possessive) case correctly. More importantly, they astutely identified a serious (first-world) problem and acted swiftly upon it! A little grass-roots action to save us from the stuff that kills little grass roots. Too bad that the solution was equally first-world. Instead of actually addressing the fundamental issue of smelly dog poop in a garbage bin, it merely shoved the problem to some other place where the person didn’t have to deal with it anymore. (You know. Like how most people use a leaf-blower.) By contrast, a real solution would have been to appeal to the University to empty the garbage bins more often.

Now, were I to actually pay attention to the sign, the dilemma for me would be what I should do with my dog’s poop. There are only three outdoor garbage bins on the entire campus and I’m pretty sure that using one of the many, many indoor ones would raise a bit of a stink. Leaving the poop where my dog leaves it is illegal and leaving the bag on top of the bin like in the picture obeys the sign, but is probably illegal too.

No, the solution for me in that case would be to adopt the passion Germans have for separating their garbage for recycling. The raw poop and its unleashed smell would go into the organics bin (something that is allowed by the city of Not-Bielefeld) and the poop bag would go into the plastics one.

By fogBlogger. In the public domain.

Hmm …

Not only is this a much more environmentally responsible solution, something that the University is increasingly droning on about of late, but it’s also absolutely in keeping with the tagline of the company whose truck I saw on campus only today: “Everything that is left over after eating”. After all, ignoring the incredibly moronic name of the company (something that is incredibly hard for me to do), if shit isn’t the ultimate leftover tied to eating, what is?

Let’s see how serious they really are about everything …

Orna-mental health

World Mental Health Day is on the horizon (October 10th), something that, quite frankly, is stressing me out a little. Not the day itself, of course, just the attempts of the University of Not-Bielefeld to capitalize on it.

The background to this is a survey that the University recently conducted asking how its employees evaluated their own working situation. About 50% of the employees filled out the survey and the University got generally good marks across the board. The notable exception was that about 50% of the respondents indicated that work left them so emotionally drained that it was difficult to wind down afterwards. (Their words, not mine.)

Time to act and the University sprang into action, sending around an e-mail this past week that started with the following sentence:

“Leveraging its solid expertise, the University of Not-Bielefeld is committed to creating healthy working conditions for its employees by providing a wide range of heath-related classes.”

Vice President for Administration and Finance, University of Not-Bielefeld

Generated by the Jetpack AI using the promt "A photorealistic picture of the Greek philosopher Archimedes standing next to a large pile of manure in the Pantheon. He should be holding a small garden trowel and looking frustrated." In the public domain.

One sentence in and I’m already cringing …

Actually, make that one word in. I simply have come to hate the word “leveraging”, which is an important-sounding but nevertheless meaningless, go-to word for PR people that don’t know what else to write. Poor Archimedes. He might have been right about being able to move the world given a long enough lever, but I bet he never foresaw also being able to bury it in bullshit given a big enough shovel.

Look at that quote closely to single out the doublespeak. How exactly does offering classes create a healthy work environment on the part of the University? At best, it only changes how the employees react to the shitty one on offer. And, in this case, those classes amounted to goal-directed, mental-health workshops to coincide with World Mental Health Day.

Workshops, of course, are the perfect pendant to leveraging: an important-sounding but nevertheless meaningless, go-to solution for management who don’t know what else to do. They make it sound like the organization is doing something proactive for its workers but in reality lets it largely maintain the status quo while shoving the responsibility for any problem onto the implied self-deficiencies of its workforce. In saying all this, I fully admit that this is a two-way street. Employees have to accept that there can be highly stressful periods in their jobs and have to be able to deal with them. But employers also have to ensure that these stressful times remain periods and not an unbroken line of ellipses.

In any case, let’s break these workshops down a little bit …

Of the 10 on offer, two of them provide pupillography examinations (a technique so obscure that even Wikipedia hasn’t heard of it) and another two electromyography measurements. Or, in other words, four workshops that don’t have anything to do with improving the workspace at all but merely ascertaining how much stress it’s currently causing for a select number of employees.

On top of that, all but one of the workshops are being farmed out to people outside of the University of Not-Bielefeld. And even that one exception is dubious because the person running that workshop is actually officially associated with the Student’s Union, which, although affiliated with the University, is not officially part of it and also serves other universities in the area. So much for the “solid expertise” on the part of the University, although, to be fair, they never actually mentioned what that expertise was in. At all. The phrase was just thrown out there with even less meaning and a hint more pretentiousness than “leveraging”.

Generated by ChatGPT using the prompt "Can you please make me a photorealistic picture of a psychiatrist's office. The couch should be in a classical Freudian style and should be occupied by a patient who is laying down and wearing a academic gown and a mortarboard. The psychiatrist should be an Australian Shepherd sitting in an armchair." In the public domain.

Finally, despite everything revolving around mental health, none of the remaining six workshops are being led by trained psychologists or therapists but instead by professional coaches. Admittedly, those coaches could indeed have some training in those areas but they don’t have to because, curiously enough, except if it’s in the context of sports, coaching is one of the few professions in Germany where no professional training or certification whatsoever is required. Selling books in a bookstore? A three-year apprenticeship. Becoming a therapy dog? Three to six months of training plus an exam for the certification. (All of which means that therapy dogs are officially more qualified to deal with mental-health issues than any coach is.) Aren’t skilled enough to hold down a real job? Just declare yourself to be a life coach and join one of the few parts of the work sector I know of that outperforms German civil servants in terms of salary but underperforms them in terms of value to society.

Generated by the Jetpack AI using the prompt "A photorealistic image of an embarrassed person covering their face with one hand while offering 100 EUR with the other." In the public domain.

Ok, probably a little harsh on my side. I’ve gone to any number of doctors where I could only wonder how they ever got their qualification. But then, every coaching session I’ve ever been to has left me wondering if the coaches had any qualification whatsoever beyond being able to point out the obvious. Now there’s nothing really wrong with reminding someone about the obvious in those times when it gets forgotten. However, most people will gladly do this simply to enjoy the look of embarrassment on the other person’s face instead of charging them at least 100 EUR an hour for the pleasure.

A personal example here speaks volumes. A few years ago I was feeling particularly stressed by work and proactively made use of the counselling service offered by the University of Not-Bielefeld to find a potential solution. After two hourlong sessions with one of the head coaches, it was recommended to me that I needed to delegate more of my responsibilities. Again, the obvious, although this suggestion would indeed create a healthier work environment for me, albeit by making someone else’s that little bit less so. However, it simply wasn’t practical, with anyone that I could delegate work to being just overworked as I was. And pointing this little fact out immediately got me chastised as being “overly confrontational” and “not open to help when it’s offered”.

In summing up, two last details are necessary to point out. First, this is the same office that is organizing the upcoming workshops. That’s scary enough on its own. But, second, the results of that survey have been known since June of 2024 and it is now September of 2025, meaning that it took them well over a year to put something (embarrassing) together to address a pressing need (remember, we’re talking about mental-health issues that are negatively affecting about half of the University’s employees) that would’ve taken anyone else a couple of weeks at most.

But, then, we wouldn’t want to cause those coaches to have any stress in their work, now would we?

BCD 10.09.2025

As happens every couple of weeks or so, I got barked at again today for letting my dog walk off-leash at the University. The person complaining was new, but much of the conversation wasn’t. What was new, however, is that he volunteered the reason why all dogs on campus should be on a leash without me asking for one. The reason was new too as well as one of the stupidest things that I’ve heard in a long time, namely that free-running dogs distract service dogs from doing their work.

Right …

I might be mistaken on this, but I always thought that service dogs were specifically trained to deal with these and other kinds of distractions. It would be kind of counterproductive if the dogs kept dragging their blind owners across busy roads just to sniff some butt on the other side, wouldn’t it? Admittedly, that butt could cross the road to come and molest the service dog but this would seem to be a fairly general problem for service dogs everywhere (who can resist a butt in uniform, right?) and not one at all specific to the University of Not-Bielefeld.

New argument or not, the thinking here seems to derive from the desperate belief of many people that a leash is the only difference between a good dog and a bad one. But, put an idiot on the other end of that leash and their dog will still be distracting that service dog.

Generated by the Jetpack AI using the prompt "A photorealistic picture of a chihuahua on a university campus. The dog should be in an army uniform. The dog should also look crazy with bugged eyes. The dog should be sniffing a bench with people sitting on it." In the public domain.

But, more to the point: what service dogs?

I’ve been at the University for getting on close to 20 years now and have not seen a single service dog in all my time there. Definitely no guide dogs and nary even an emotional-support chihuahua. And, running the numbers, chances are good that it’ll stay that way.

It’s estimated that there were about 2134 service dogs of all shapes, sizes, and duties in Germany in 2023 serving a human population of about 83.5 million. Assuming that the University of Not-Bielefeld is representative of something other than itself (I know, just go with me on this one), that works out to slightly less than half a service dog spread among its roughly 18 000 staff and students. Rounding to the nearest dog yields a final estimate exactly in line with my observations, namely zero.

Nevertheless, thank God for the University and its foresight to provide a safe haven for non-existent service dogs of all kinds to carry out their responsibilities without fear of distraction.

Welcome to the bonehead comment of the day …

Un-vital signs 05.09.2025

A hallmark of the University of Not-Bielefeld is how invested it is in teaching. Not in real teaching, of course, because that costs real money and if you want to build 1.4 million Euros worth of bike racks, something’s got to give, right? Instead, the University’s emphasis here lies much more on promoting its commitment to teaching rather than actually following through on that commitment. As a result, we get bombarded every other year or so with yet another new program they’ve dreamed up that is invariably focussed around the “classrooms of tomorrow”.

But what happens when tomorrow is already yesterday?

By fogBlogger. Modified from original on the University of Not-Bielefeld campus. In the public domain.

A case in point is the sign pictured on the right advertising the Tag des Lehrens and Lernens (Day of Teaching and Learning) with the meaningless tagline of “Classrooms of the future. Design the campus of tomorrow together!” Again, instead of this unrelenting focus on the future, how about a little bit more attention on the present for a change? More to the point, June 2024 has long since come and gone but the sign still remains. (Although, to be fair, it is only the next year and not the every-other one for the next bombardment. Substance like this requires thought.) Hell, even the magnets have long since lost interest and the whole poster is starting to sag southwards. Now if this isn’t literally a true sign of the University’s commitment to teaching, nothing is.

But what always amazes me about these campaigns is that the University of Not-Bielefeld loves coming up with names for them for which the mandatory acronyms are utterly unpronounceable. TdLL? (Bottom right in the picture.) Phonetically it sounds like TGIF. But on a Monday. (Or TTFN on any day.) Much better would be to flip the two Ls in the program name around and then use the English translation of it. That acronym—DoLT—is both eminently more pronounceable as well as probably much more representative of those people running these programs.

However …

Undoubtedly the greatest acronym to ever come out of the University of Not-Bielefeld was for their Schulische Hochschulinformationstag (School Universityinformationday), an open-house day intended to introduce graduating high-school students to the University. Unusually, the acronym for it was not only easy to pronounce, it was also highly memorable as well as being incredibly informative and honest about what it was standing for. All of which meant, naturally, that its days were numbered and it soon had to give way to the “acronym of tomorrow”, the literally punchier but less honest HIT to match the more parsimoniously renamed day (Hochschulinformationstag).

And the best part was that it took the University years to realize why they should make the change …

BCD 31.08.2025

I’ve been living in the internet Stone Age for some time now, having never gotten around to upgrading my 16 MBits/s DSL hookup. (If you want to know how slow that is, put it this way: I can type these blogs faster than I can upload them to the web.) A lot of people today probably won’t believe this, but you can actually make do with a connection like this so long as you’re not uploading a bunch of stuff all the time or can somehow find inner peace with anything less than zoom chats in Ultra HD. (And have broadband at work.) The real problem is the price. Despite being the slowest connection on the market, 16 Mbits/s is proportionately the most expensive. By far. In fact, it’s the only connection speed where you pay more in EUR/month than you get Mbit/s in return for.

Unfortunately, my options for upgrading to even the Bronze Age aren’t great. According to the people managing my building, the Deutsche Telekom, in the spirit of free enterprise, apparently limits other providers to using a maximum of 16 MBits/s of its phone lines in my building. Furthermore, the promised land of fibre-optic technology is matched only by how fast the many promised deadlines for its installation have come and gone over the past couple of years. So, if I don’t want to pay monopoly tariffs on a faster DSL line, that leaves cable, which promises fibre-optic-like speeds but with already existing infrastructure.

Tired of paying too much for too little (another canon in the spirit of free enterprise), I decided to take the plunge two weeks ago and go for a 100 MBit/s connection. Might as well get some bits for the buck: 6x the speed at 1.3x the cost. The installation was pretty simple but came with this all-important but nevertheless extremely bizarre warning about avoiding possible sources of interference:

Generated by the Jetpack AI using the prompt "A small, cramped kitchen with a large metal fridge, a large flatscreen TV, and an internet modem. It should be lit by a single, naked incandescent bulb hanging from the ceiling." In the public domain.

“Do not place your cable modem next to a baby monitor or large metal objects like refrigerator or flatscreen TV.” (Translated from the original German, obviously.)

For starters, metal? Is there anything really made out of metal anymore? I don’t think that my car even counts as a large metal object anymore.

More seriously though, the question of where I can put the modem is determined primarily by where the cable outlets in my apartment are located. This isn’t North America where there’s one in every room and there definitely isn’t one in the kitchen so that I can cook along with the Food Network. I’m also past the baby-monitor phase in my life and, even if I wasn’t, the baby monitor means that kid should be sleeping and not surfing the web.

But the TV? Let me repeat: this is a cable modem using the exact same cable that the TV does. Where else am I possibly going to put it? My Apple TV, which receives WiFi, seems perfectly happy right next to my TV (and, given the length of its supplied HDMI cable, doesn’t have much choice) so why not the modem that actually sends it out?

But, by far, the strangest part of the warning is that crappy grammar at the end of it where the articles for refrigerator and flatscreen TV are simply MIA. And, remember, we’re talking about German here, a language so obsessed with articles that it tortures foreigners with 16 forms of the word “the”. Even my Croatian wife who grew up without knowing what an article was could immediately recognize that the sentence was severely disarticulated. (My best guess is that the articles gave way to aesthetics because the warning could only be three lines long for reasons of symmetry. Again, however, I will point out that we are talking about German here, a language more renounced than renowned when it comes to aesthetics.)

Generated by the Jetpack AI using the prompt "A caveman trying to use the internet.". In the public domain.

In the end, it all didn’t matter anyway. Existing infrastructure or not, it sucked. In testing the connection, the new provider found that it wasn’t getting anywhere near the 100 MBits/s it should have been. The technician who came around to look for the problem wasn’t exactly sure why, but also saw that my building has only eight cable hookups for 12 apartments and guessed that I was one of the lucky people sharing a hookup with one of my neighbours.

So still stuck in the internet Stone Age thanks to the Bonehead Cable of (the) Day.

Oh Canada, the sequel

I’ve recently returned from a trip to Canada to visit family and wanted to take a few seconds to share a few of the new absurdities that my home and native land has come up with while I’ve been away.

By fogBlogger. In the public domain.

As most people know, Canada is officially bilingual, with English and something vaguely resembling French as the two languages. (Ask someone from France what they think of Québécois. You’ll understand. And probably more than the French person will the Québécois.) Practically, however, it’s a different story and you’re really only threatened with both languages on packaging, Canadian airlines, and anything to do with the federal government. For instance, a quick look at the sign on the right from a local bank in my hometown makes it very clear that they speak every language except French.

So if you get annoyed with all those in-flight announcements in one language (who cares what city we’re currently flying over and that you can’t see through the clouds anyway), it’s officially annoying in two. The same goes for trying to call any Government of Canada hotline where their automated phone tree has that extra branch to climb from the start: “Press 1 for service in English. Appuyez sur 2 pour un service en français.”

Created with ChatGPT using the promt "A photorealistic picture of an English Oak. It should be a single, isolated tree placed in a typical English landscape. The season should be summer and everything should be green and lush. The tree should be bearing fruit in the form of telephone receivers." In the public domain.

Imagine then my bridled joy when I discovered that the Government of Canada office I needed to call had separate, dedicated English and French phone numbers. (Sounds sad, I know, but anyone who’s spent most of their formative years invariably grabbing the wrong side of the cereal box will know exactly what I mean. The scars run deep.) My joy, however, was short lived, with the very first branch of this supposedly English Phone Oak (Quercus telephonus anglicus) being the inevitable “Press 1 for service in English. …”.

And then there are the commercials on Canadian TV …

Unusual for someone used to German ads is that lots of commercials are for prescription medications of all shapes and sizes. Even more unusual, regardless of what country you get deluged with your commercials in, is that many of those ads never tell you what the medication is for. For instance, a pair of commercials I saw have a series of adults happily hopping, dancing, and otherwise excitedly jumping across the screen to some upbeat music, all for some medicine X that I “should ask my doctor about if it is right for me”. Forget asking. Whatever it’s for, I want some! As a white male over 50 now living in northern Germany, I could definitely use just a hint of the rhythm all those people seem to get from the stuff.

(For the interested, the two medicines weren’t for arthritis or depression, which seemed to me to be the most obvious candidates, but for extra-strength varieties of Ozempic designed for weight loss. Now although prescription weight-loss drugs like these probably have name recognition for North Americans, it still strikes me as extremely odd when a commercial doesn’t tell you what a product is actually good for. At all. Imagine how stupid I’d look if I asked my doctor if terconazole was right for me based solely on a commercial filled with happy, smiling, loving couples.)

Created by ChatGPT using the prompt "Make me a parody image of Dali's "The Persistence of Memory" where all the melted clocks are instead cheap and disgusting looking pizzas." In the public domain and with no infringement toward the original intended.

Nevertheless, the one commercial that I still can’t get over, if only because I saw it several times a day, was one for a frozen pizza. Not just any frozen pizza but apparently some sort of deluxe variety. And to highlight that very point, the commercial features a symphony orchestra on a platform that is being hoisted up by a crane outside the panorama windows of some glamorous woman eating said pizza in her penthouse. What’s really unbelievable, however, is that the word “dramatization” explicitly appears at the bottom of the screen during this scene and only during this scene. Not before when a huge ball of pizza dough falls onto a table covered in flour so as to spray the flour in all directions in slow motion (which apparently is how all frozen pizzas are made), nor when an absolutely perfect looking pizza comes out of the oven (and not the dried-out hunk of cardboard that comes out of mine), nor for the very idea of there being such a thing as a deluxe frozen pizza (cf. oxymoron). Nope, only the scene featuring the orchestra was a dramatization and I’m guessing not because of the crane hoist but because of the female conductor. (Note to the lawyers and activists out there: the percentage of female conductors worldwide barely scrapes into the double digits, hence the sarcasm.)

And, more to the point, what commercial isn’t a dramatization from start to finish? I think we’re long past the point where we believe that those two old guys on the porch really were Bartles & Jaymes or that there really was some guy in a boat cruising around in our toilet tank.

By fogBlogger. In the public domain.

Finally, there’s this warning sign that I found pictured to the left in the local supermarket. Sorry, but way too apologetically Canadian. First: well, duh. Second: the use of the word “may”. Now, I could be one of those grammar police everyone hates by pointing out that it should be “might” (which indicates probability) and not “may” (which indicates permission), but we’re all sick to death of those smart asses who tell us how to use “your” vs. “you’re” correctly, right? Nope. Instead, I’m going to be pedantic in a completely different direction to say that neither may nor might actually belongs there.

By means of comparison, think about the stark contrasts posed to this warning sign by those found on Canadian cigarette packaging, one example of which unrepentantly declares that “Smoking causes lung cancer.” (Et “Appuyez sur 2 pour fumer cause le cancer du poumon.”) Ok, true. But so does coal mining, asbestos, choosing the wrong ancestors, and just plain ol’ dumb luck. The undoubtedly purposeful invocation of causation, however, makes it sound deterministic: smoke and you will get lung cancer. Instead, the reality is that smoking only increases your risk of getting lung cancer compared to if you didn’t. Even smoking asbestos in a coal mine on Friday the 13th is no absolute guarantee of an early death from lung cancer. It just increases the odds. Hell, my mother is 88 years old and without any sign of lung cancer despite smoking for the last 65 years or so. Her doctor even told her that there was no real point in quitting anymore because if the lung cancer hadn’t dropped her already, chances are that it never will.

And, it’s the same in reverse with this grocery-store sign. Eating undercooked seafood is not a case of might / may / possibly / maybe / conceivably / perchance / perhaps increasing your risk of getting food poisoning. It absolutely does compared to if you didn’t. How big this increase exactly is, is another question, perhaps dependent on which grocery store I took this photo at …

Or, as one stand-up comedian whose name I now forget so beautifully put it, “I don’t play the lottery, which makes my chances of winning only slightly smaller than for those people who do.”