Thursday, September 24, 2009

Lunch break

Dude! Where did that week go? (I guess the best answer would be "trapped in the library basement".)

My brain's not quite functioning in English right now, and so you get some fragmentary observations about the sort of research I'm doing right now:

a.) I'm super-pumped because I found a newspaper article from 1930 that compared a bird flu outbreak (in the city's parrot population) to the economic crisis that Berlin was experiencing. I'm going to talk about parrots in my dissertation! (Where aaare you Styleygeek?)

b.) Thanks to the research I'm doing, I'm well-versed in the German words for "shot," "hanged," "poisoned [usually by gas]," "murder," "jewel thief" and "suicide." Also, apparently every time there was a murder-suicide in Berlin, this particular newspaper would write an article entitled "A Family Tragedy." I have more than ten such articles now, and I've only covered about six months' worth of newspaper. Messed. Up.

Okay. I've finished eating my hamburger and it's time to return to the dungeon. Maybe I'll go for a little walk first, since it's so nice and sunny outside now.

4 comments:

The Blog Fodder said...

You'll be reading German murder mysteris with that vocab.

Queen of West Procrastination said...

I've already read one! I was really happy when one of my primary source novels turned out to be a murder mystery. I can handle that a lot more than "melodrama where a woman kills herself and a child, because her alcoholic son has wasted all their money." Too much of that.

LynnieC said...

Baha. We did a show for Crime Stories that was in Swedish, so by the end of it I totally knew the words for "gun", "murder", "killer", "manhunt" etc.

We are awesome and weird all at the same time.

Queen of West Procrastination said...

Indeed we are, Lynnie. Indeed we are.