Happy 80th birthday to the wonderful Tim Curry, who has given the world the gift of laughter for as long as I have been alive.

Chicken in a roasting dish with rosemary, rice, Amalfi lemon, green asparagus, and Tony Chachere's Creole Seasoning.

Time to get this dinner show on the road. We are doing the Ketchem Sunday classic, roast chicken à la Chachere, with rice and green asparagus on the side.

I splurged at the grocery store yesterday and got a fancy gourmet Amalfi lemon (two clams!). This lemon is going up that chicken's ass, pronto.

Soviet soldiers in occupied Germany, of course, got better rations than even the Tier 1 ration German civilians, including a 100ml daily vodka allowance (in order to "maintain morale", as the orders put it).

But I mean just think about that--in 1990, years into HSR networks like Japan's Shinkansen and the French TGV, the East German railway network was still running and refurbishing train consists that had originally been deployed in the 1930s. And this was on their flagship intercity services.

(The savvy Soviets gave intellectuals and artists Tier 1 ration cards, Tier 2 was heavy laborers and the "rubble women", with the lowest tier going to women unable to work and the elderly, thus the nickname "Cemetery Card" as the lowest tier of rations were below long-term survival level.)

Trümmerfrauen (lit. rubble women,[a] singular Trümmerfrau German pronunciation: [ˈtʁʏmɐˌfʁaʊ̯]) were women who, in the aftermath of World War II, helped clear and reconstruct the bombed cities of Germany and Austria. Hundreds of cities had suffered significant bomb and firestorm damage from aerial attacks and ground war, and with many men dead or prisoners of war, this monumental task fell to a large degree on women. 3.6 million out of the sixteen million homes in 62 cities in Germany were destroyed during Allied bombings in World War II, with another four million damaged. Half of all school buildings, forty percent of the infrastructure, and many factories were either damaged or destroyed. According to estimates, there were about 500 million cubic metres of rubble[3] (a volume of over 150 Great Pyramids of Giza) and 7.5 million people were made homeless. Removal of ruins Since the first Allied bombing raids in 1940 the Germans had become used to clearing up the resulting devastation, but most of this clearance work had been undertaken by forced laborers and POWs. However following the end of war they were no longer available and so the Germans had to do the work themselves.

Postwar Berlin's "rubble women" (Trümmerfrauen) were able-bodied women between 15 and 65 who were conscripted to remove the bombing debris from the city's streets. They were paid a daily rate of 12 Reichsmarks per thousand bricks (how this was counted who knows), and got a Tier 2 Soviet ration card.

Südende station is on the Anhalt Suburban Line in the former villa estate (Villenkolonie) of Südende in the suburb of Steglitz in the Berlin borough of Steglitz-Zehlendorf. It is served by S-Bahn line S25 and S-Bahn line S26. Its entrance is on the street of Steglitzer Damm. Südende station was opened on 15 August 1880 on the Anhalt Railway. It was called Südende-Lankwitz between 1882 and 1899. The railway line was lowered in 1901 to run below the Steglitzer Damm and the station was rebuilt with an island platform. This and the station building are located to the southwest of the bridge of the Steglitzer Damm. Since 2 July 1929, the electric trains have operated on the 750 volts DC system of the S-Bahn. Following the takeover of the S-Bahn by the Berliner Verkehrsbetriebe (BVG, Berlin Transportation Company) on 9 January 1984, the route from Priesterweg to Lichterfelde Süd through Lankwitz was shut down. Südende station was reopened after renovation work on 28 May 1995.

It turns out the wooden canopy and ironwork of my commuter rail (S-Bahn) station is original to the 1901 reconstruction of the station to move the tracks below the street grid.

The station itself is a modern building that has only existed since 1995, when service south of the Ringbahn was restored.

This means that southbound S-Bahn trains will pause for a few minutes at my home station of Südende to wait for the northbound train to cross the bridge. The next station south, Lankwitz, remains single-track also, creating a brief bottleneck on the line. Literally because of WWII...

The Red Army was advancing from north and south in a giant pincer movement, with some of the southern formations following the route of the Anhalt railway toward the city center. The Wehrmacht blew up the bridges, and after the war the S-Bahn bridge was rebuilt to be single track, which it still is.

(Mitropa was the rail catering company Germany and Austria-Hungary introduced during WWI, as previously dining cars had been provided and staffed by the "enemy" Compagnie Internationale des Wagons-Lits, famous for running the legendary Orient Express from Paris to Istanbul.)

Mitropa (stylised in all caps) was a catering company best known for having managed sleeping and dining cars of different German railways for most of the 20th century. Founded in 1916, the name "Mitropa" is an abbreviation of Mitteleuropäische Schlafwagen- und Speisewagen-Aktien-Gesellschaft. The railway carriages displayed a distinct burgundy-red livery with the Mitropa logo. Since a 2002 reorganization, when the onboard catering branch was taken over by DB Fernverkehr, the company only provided stationary food services for rail and road customers. The remaining business was sold to Compass Group in 2004 and merged into the Select Service Partner (SSP) subsidiary in 2006. History The company was founded during World War I on 24 November 1916, as Mitteleuropäische Schlafwagen- und Speisewagen-Aktien-Gesellschaft (lit. 'Central European Sleeping and Dining Cars Incorporated'). Its founders included different railway companies of the Central Powers, i.e. Germany and Austria-Hungary, who discontinued the service provided by the 'enemy'-owned Compagnie Internationale des Wagons-Lits (CIWL). From the establishment of business activities on 1 January 1917, Mitropa held the monopoly on cross-border dining and sleeping car services, including the Balkans Express from Berlin to Constantinople, introduced to replace the CIWL Orient Express trains.

Fun facts to know and tell: The East German railway system (bizarrely still called the Reichsbahn, to preserve its rights in West Berlin) ran dining cars on its City Express services that were all refurbished pre-WWII Mitropa cars, right up until reunification. You can see one at Berlin-Lichtenberg.

Trees leafing out fast now, and we are getting some desperately needed rain just in time. We will soon be at the moment when I can no longer see the trains on the Anhalter Bahn mainline anymore (fun fact: the bridge over the canal just past my street was a big defense point in the Battle of Berlin).

"I'm a GOOSE! Open the goddam door!"

I mean it was something. I was lucky because they didn't board our car (we were already standing room only with Easter daytrippers) but I could watch the altercation with the police on the platform. The conductor must have called ahead because they were waiting for us. I mean those guys were LIT.

making America decent again

Countdown to Trump announcing a major new peace deal with Iran 30 minutes before the Monday market open, and then walking it back after market close.

We are now on the fourth or fifth round of this obvious market manipulation. He and his cronies are making millions selling oil company stocks short.

History buff | Nate Bargatze YouTube video by Standup station

www.youtube.com/shorts/zPZMK...

There's a straw man waiting in the sky
He'd like to come and meet us
But he thinks he'd blow our minds

Rightwing media is claiming that because Orbán and Fidesz ceded power without violence it proves it was never an authoritarian regime to begin with. Yet nobody has made this same argument about the Communists in 1989-90. As back then, opposition was just too massive and beyond their control anymore.

My Favorite Streaming Service Is a DVD Player and My Library Card A small, affordable DVD player can be an easy way to make use of once-beloved discs sitting around your apartment.

This exactly. Every Friday I stop by the library to get my weekend watches. (a challenge I have is a lot of older US movies are only available in Germany streaming in the dubbed version. Yesterday I checked out Erin Brockovich and Defending Your Life for that reason).
www.nytimes.com/wirecutter/r...

I got the Otis Elevator one wrong, I was way, way off. The Hobbit one I knew already from having watched a JRR Tolkien documentary a few months ago.

Flashback: Your Weekly History Quiz, April 18, 2026 Can you sort 8 historical events?

Eek. The date of the one I missed genuinely surprised me.
Flashback for April 18, 2026

25 points
🟩🟩🟩🟩🟩🟩🟩🟥

Play here:
www.nytimes.com/interactive/...

People who understand the Fidesz rigging better than me have explained that Orbán increasing the number of "mandated" seats was designed to amplify the margin for the winner of the election, giving even a slight overall win for Fidesz a potential supermajority. Except in this case it backfired.

Holy smokes, with the final tallies and a few recounts in, Tisza won 141 of the 199 seats in the Hungarian parliament. That is just a staggering result and a deep repudiation of Orbán and his Fidesz party.

And Magyar is going to make full and good use of this decisive constitutional supermajority.

Over the Easter break, I did a little day trip north of Berlin and regrettably took a train that soon quickly filled up with thoroughly drunk Hansa Rostock fans--at 10 in the morning. Things got so bad the police boarded the train and one guy got kicked off. Soccer hooligans are such a Europe thing.

I remember him. He was Clinton's ambassador to Germany and the guy who reopened US embassy services in Berlin in 1999 after they had ended in 1941 (not counting the US embassy to East Germany that was a few blocks northeast of the original Pariser Platz site).

Opinion | JD Vance’s Very Bad Week

"Vance is heir apparent, and he has been faceplanting. He’s got all of the toxicity of Trump and none of the charisma. It’s charisma that I don’t understand. But one thing I do know is that Vance doesn't have it. The man can’t order a donut without alienating people."
www.nytimes.com/2026/04/18/o...

And for the most part, openly and nakedly partisan, based on the justices' preferred policy outcomes and not the law, as the disclosed Roberts memos now show.

The FBI Director Is MIA Kash Patel has alarmed colleagues with episodes of excessive drinking and unexplained absences.

"Patel’s drinking has been a recurring source of concern across the government. He is known to drink to the point of obvious intoxication while in the presence of admin staff. Meetings and briefings have to be rescheduled as a result of his alcohol-fueled nights."
www.theatlantic.com/politics/202...

OMG this exactly. I can just see Jared sitting in a boardroom in Doha saying, "Tamim, bubbe, I'm your white knight!"