travel, travel, chicken of nations

Now I know what you’re thinking, that the line above is a reference to “The Red Wheelbarrow” by William Carlos Williams. Nope! Keep reading and all will be revealed. Three of the things I’ve been spending an inordinate amount of time pondering this week are connected by the word “rise”. Please allow me to explain. Or don’t, I’m doing it anyway. Strap on your boredom belts!

Seamen’s Delight
One of my guilty pleasures (ugh – I hate that phrase. sorry) is the band Rammstein. I like many of their songs, but more the ones that don’t seem to be about sex... and 80% of them seem to be on some sort of weird East German S&M tip. People bending over and bleeding and so on. Not my cup of tea.

Also, I suspect that if I were a native German speaker, the lyrics would sound unbelievably goofy, like bad high school poetry. I have this theory that when it’s not in your native language, bad poetry sounds just fine. Which might explain the international success of certain bands. But either way there are usually two or three tracks on a Rammstein album that aren't so much about sex but are on a perverted Brothers Grimm/Goethe vibe. Those I really like. The best examples are the songs “Mein Herz brennt” and “Sonne” from Mutter.

Anyway, one of the Rammstein albums I missed while I was trying to ignore them for a couple of years was Reise, Reise. I recently acquired it and this one has a higher than usual Grimm Brothers-to-S&M ratio, and I like it. But the title of the album and title song seemed sort of Hallmark-card-ish to me for such a violently testosterone-filled band – The (rockin) title song goes “reise, reise, Seemann, reise”. Travel, travel, sailor, travel? OK, I thought. Sort of lame. Obviously, the band must just be getting old and boring because “reise, reise" means “travel, travel” in German (or DOES it? read on for the Shyamalan-style twist).

Some Internet research later, and I find that reise reise Seemann is an old Low German naval wake-up call, and that “reise, reise” doesn’t mean travel, but it’s a dialect phrase that means “arise, arise”! As far as I know this meaning of “reise” doesn’t exist in standard German, where to wake up is “aufwachen” or “aufstehen”. Whether they knew it or not, Rammstein’s album title is closer to English than German. The seemingly warm and fuzzy title was actually a burly seamen’s call to action aboard a rough tough sailing ship. As the German pirate says, that’s just friggin wunderbArrrrrrr.

It honestly made my week. The fact that there are connections like that to be found in the words we use every day really cheers me up.

(Real-)Time (Strategy) Machine
The second thing that’s been obsessing me this week is Rise of Nations. Kim can attest to the fact that I’ve been glued to my MacBook since the moment I got it earlier this summer, and aside from downloading music what I’ve mainly been doing is booting it up in Windows and playing old strategy games on it. Rise of Nations is a GREAT game.

I don’t want to get into a long description of it, it’s all there on their website and if you like strategy games you’ve probably already played it years ago, but basically as you go through the game your cities and soldiers progress (rapidly) from the Stone Age to the Information Age. The buildings change styles, the spear-throwing infantry turn into musketeers, and eventually you’re assaulting your foe with tanks, bombers and ICBMs. The reason I like it so much? Like Civilization but only more so, Rise of Nations is an interactive version of one of my favorite books ever, A Street Through Time. Something about seeing the same city change over the ages is deeply interesting to me. London was perfect for this, with its Roman ruins etc. Munich didn’t really have that pre-medieval background, so I spent a lot of weekends going out to the countryside to look at wheatfields that the map said were the remains of Roman roads and scruffy mounds that were supposedly Celtic forts.

Meatwad get the money, see/ Meatwad get the honeys, G
The third “rise” going through my brain this week is the line “Arise, chicken! Chicken, rise!” from the fourth season of Aqua Teen Hunger Force. It’s the episode called Video Ouija. They’re trying to raise Shake from the dead, and the witch doctor that they hire mainly specializes in resurrecting chickens, so they all hold hands and stand around chanting “arise, chicken”. That show cracks me up. I’ve been watching it after Kim hits the hay.

And that’s the story of my triple obsession with the word “rise” this week. I hope you enjoyed that long pointless string of mind-numbingly tedious trivia I just typed. I know I did. No, wait, I actually did. Maybe this blogging thing isn’t so bad after all.