To lighten the mood (after having to give my Skype rules), I want to play a German song which was made a few years back by comedian Elmar Brandt called "The Tax Song". It prompted the then-German chancellor Gerhard Schroeder to totally freak out and call Brandt a "parasite". I personally think the song is just great.

One of the best ever TV shows has to be "Whose Line Is It Anyway?" and the best feature is by far "The Hoedown" where contestants have to make up spontaneous songs on subjects suggested by the audience. The following clips are two classics I found on YouTube. This is my kind of humour!!!

As you may or may not have remembered, yesterday was April Fool's Day. Google has had a history of celebrating April Fool's Day with elaborate hoaxes and this year was no different.

This year, they did two gags. One was Google TiSP where you can get free broadband internet service by feeding your fiber-optic internet cable down the toilet bowl. The other was Gmail Paper where you can request free paper copies of all your emails from Google.

I personally did no jokes this year as I was uninspired humour-wise. Obviously Google doesn't have that problem! You can see a brief history (with links) of Google's past April Fool's jokes here. I personally like the "Google Gulp" one.

I am still laughing over a story related to me by an English student friend of mine and I can't resist sharing it here. This story highlights some of the differences between British English and American English. I'll keep all names out of it so not to embarrass anyone.

An American colleague of my German friend / student of English is over here in Germany for 10 days for business meetings, kicking ass and so on. His braces were broken so he decided to go to a big department store here in the town for new ones. Now note the following - in British English, it is braces, in American English, it is called suspenders (what you use to hold up your trousers.....oh sorry....pants with). But in British English, suspenders are a "garter belt", what women use to hold up their stockings. Right, I'm guessing you can see where this story is headed....!

So the American chap walks into the department store with my German friend, goes to the menswear department and asks in English for a pair of suspenders. Here is the ensuing dialogue as told by my friend :

American chap : "I'd like a pair of suspenders please"
German saleswoman : (eyebrows raised) "I don't think you'll find them here. They're in the ladies department"
American chap : "Really, why? Do German women wear suspenders?"
German saleswoman : (looked a little taken aback) "Some do, some don't"
American chap : (thinking this is a quaint little German tradition) "Well I want a pair of suspenders for myself"
German saleswoman : (shocked) "You wear suspenders?"
American chap : "All the time. I find them comfortable and they're quite fashionable in the States. Lots of American men wear suspenders"

At this point, a light-bulb went on in my friend's head and he remembered what "suspenders" were in British English. So he whispered in his American colleague's ear what he was really asking for and the guy was apparently so embarrassed that he ran out of the store!

My friend can't decide if that is better or worse than the time he needed a pencil eraser and he asked another American colleague for a "rubber" (in British English, a rubber is another word for a pencil eraser but in American English, a rubber is a condom!).

This has got me in the mood to resurrect my International Dictionary Project. I just have to list all these lingustic differences!

At the moment, I am in the middle of cleaning up in my little home office and doing the mountain of filing that seems to have accumulated during the past year or so. I have to get my 2006 tax paperwork together so I am up to my eyeballs in little receipts and invoices.

At the same time, I am managing to unearth past attempts at writing, old unfinished dusty manuscripts, articles that I wrote but never managed to get published and so forth. Most of the unfinished unpublished stuff is pretty crap though which is the main reason why it is unfinished and unpublished in the first place!

So when I saw this cartoon, I had to laugh out loud because it sums up exactly what I am finding in my filing cabinet at the moment!