quick transplant from Facebook...

German Spätburgunder is fascinating, in that, at its best, it is simultaneously unburgundian while remaining solidly Olde Worlde.

try Künstler, Münzberg, Lingenfelder, Meyer-Näkel, Fürst Löwenstein, Bernhard Huber, August Kessler—these should get you started...

—here, shown riding NJ Transit, is Rainer Lingenfelder, looking even more like Thomas Mann than he did this time last year... ~

...what in a name is ~

this entirely superb 1955 recording has been pretty well stuck in my CD player most of the summer—

Dexter Gordon is most dextrously accompanied by Kenny Drew on piano, Leroy Vinnegar playing double-bass, with Larry Marable on drums.

Vinnegar figured among the prominent bassists on the west-coast scene in his day, developed his own distinct style of slapping the doghouse—

but the kicker is, this Bethlehem Archives CD release was remastered by a chap named Rick Essig.

Essig is the German word for vinegar.

ach du lieber ~

¡!¡ lost and found in the translation ~

... this handsome image was newly captured by my friend and foreign correspondent Aaron Sing Fox, who covers Brooklyn, Italia, and The Mysterious East, during his recent visit to Tibet.

no further explanation necessary ~

...but it starts me musing about other instances in my own experience where the language shows itself off in fine form:

once upon a time in a retail wine shop, I was stacking boxes of Cava, that Spanish sparkling stuff which provides good and inexpensive bubbles to the Thirsty.

on the box was printed in Spanish something like ‘Vidrio Con Cuidado’

in English, directly translated as ‘Glass, With Care’

in French, ‘Manutentioner Avec Soin ’ which means “handle with care—”

but then, in German, ‘Bitte Nicht Werfen’ = “please don't throw...” (!)

but das allerbeste example of an observation gaining in the translation had to be printed in the introduction of a Zen-on edition from Japan of Georg Phillip Telemann’s sonatas for the recorder, or Blockflöte, which I encountered in a music-shop in Boston back in the 1970s...

and I quote:

“...a recorder is like unto a flute, except that it has no tampons.”