All of the joy! Less of the hassle!

Thanks to our friend Jurevicious who provided me the link to FeedBurner. Now, all of you who are tired of checking and re-checking waiting for our next insightful post can Subscribe via Email.

Genau.

That's right, no more refreshing your browser every 30 seconds to see if we've published another delightful issue! Now you can just sit back and wait and let the computers of the world do the work. What a novelty!

I know, some of you are a little skeptical about this new-fangled technology thingy, but we've tried to ease some of your worry with a list of (soon-to-be) frequently asked questions:

Q: Won't the government know that I'm looking at your site? I mean, they read all of our emails, right?
A: Yes. They read all of your stupid forwards with the dancing baby.

Q: What if I can't find this archive when i finally decide to subscribe?
A: Look to the left. See the linky? Good. Click it.

Q: You haven't posted your Oktoberfestbier review yet? When is that coming?
A: This FAQ is about subscribing, not posting.

Q: What about the hornets? What ever happened with them?
A: That, too, will be another post, but this is about subscribing.

Q: You started out at such a quick posting pace, what happened?
A: I wasn't working then. Don't you have anything to ask about the subscription?

Q: What about Berchtesgaden? Was it nice?
A: You're getting on my nerves....

Q: Is there any way you'll actually post something useful for those of us considering traveling to Germany?
A: No more questions!

Q: Will Lou Piniella take your beloved Cubbies all the way next year, or will they just collapse again?
A: ...hmph.....

Bringing Sexy Back

In honor of Justin Timberlake's hit song and his official title as the new King of Poop, we at FassmeisterWiesel are bringing sexy back. No, not in music video form, but in the best form possible: a blog about a beer fest! And not just any beer fest, the Fest of All Fests... Oktoberfest.

Twelve hours a day, people from all over the world gather in a park in Munich to: drink beer, socialize, drink beer, sing, dring beer, eat half chikens, drinc again, singl, drank bier, soshializ, drinc brrr, ride roller coasters, drk br, zing!, dfdsfaf... drool.

Anyway, you get the point. And when I say twelve hours, I mean it exactly. They open the fest halls at noon, and they absolutely positively close at 12:00 midnight. They actually stop serving beer around 11:15 or so. I couldn't believe it. We're not used to that being from the states. I was stunned, surprised, excited and relived all at once. The last thing I needed at 11:30 was another MaB. What I really needed was to eat another half chicken, but none of those were available either. Everything closes.

Because of the sheer magnitude of such an event, we felt it necessary to present the sights of Weisn with flair. Thus, we are bring you, our loyal fan (Jurevicious), our memories (yeah, memories) of Oktoberfest in exciting Grammy style! Das Fassmeister and das Wiesel: Bringing Sexy Back!

I Was Sexy, When Sexy Wasn't Cool...
The historical German dress is called Tracht. For the men, this means lederhosen (leather slacks) and funny hats. For women this is, quite simply, one of the greatest outfits ever. EVER. The women all look like St. Pauli Girl. Short skirts (or sometimes dresses) with pushup tops. Truly spectacular. The Fassmeister will not allow me to comment any further. Since ths was our first trip to the Weisn and we live in this country now, we felt we needed to fit in.

The MaB. OK, the B is pronounced like a double s and the a is pronounced like ah. So, it's mahss. They are liters of beer that cost a measely 7,50 Euro. That's all. Every single person is drinking one, all the time. They're heavy, they're glass, and by the way the Germans slam them together every time someone says Prost!, they must be unbreakable. They are not, I can vouch for that. In fact, if you Prost! them just right, they shatter quite spectactularly, dousing your closet neighbor in the process.

I Like Beer! It Makes Me a Sexy Good Fellow!
Ein Prosit! Ein Prosit! Der Gemutlichkeit!
This song is sang every 1.392 seconds in München during the Weisn. Essentially is means "Good cheers to all!" with a subtitle of "Drink up you lush!" under your breath. Everytime you sing it, everyone drinks. You can do the math. By German law, if you don't drink at the end of this song, they deport you.

Other tunes the Germans love to rock to when drinking heavily:

• Summer of '69 - Bryan Adams
• Hearing a German say "Me and some boyz from shkool" is sexy
• Country Roads - John Denver
• Yes, that West Virginia. Mountain Momma, take me home, please, before they play it for the 17th time.
• Anything by ABBA
• It is uncanny the popularity of ABBA songs in this country. I've always hated Dancing Queen and was willing to let it go at that. Now I hate a lot more. I think it's healthy.

You Can Loosen Up My Sexy Baby, But You Keep Fronting Me
At the Fest grounds, ther are around 20 or so "tents" set up every year. Using the words "tents" is like calling a MaB a beer. It started as one, in thought, but then blossomed into some inhuman drunk senior project for some over-worked civil engineers. The tents are massive. At least 600 feet long and 300 feet wide. They each contain a bandstand with a 50-piece orchestra. OK, orchestra may be a stretch, they have 20 horns, 20 accordians, a guitar or two and some drums. Oh, and a head accordian.

We somehow got tickets into the Wienerwald tent. It seemed more like a trailer at first, compared to the big boys, but it was loads of fun. I believe it was right before we got here that the cell phone went on the lam.

You could be my Flamingo, ´Coz Pink is the new Sexy Lingo
At Oktoberfest, funny hats are a necessity. I picked up mine at the fest. The hat looks less funny when you have the outfit on, then it just looks sexy.

We saw the flamingo on Lake Erie in Ohio this past spring, and just knew it would come in handy at some point. Don't ya love the pig-tails?

At Wienerwald (by the way, that means Viennese Forest, or wiener world, whatever), we met some Austrians that absolutely loved the Flamingo. We have some great pictures of them all drunk with this thing tied around their heads. I won't post those, though, cause I'm pretty sure one of them was running for Congress, and it's best to hold onto those types of things until you've been in office for 40 years. Right Floridians?

Roll Out the Sexy! We'll Have a Barrel of Fun!
Ammer would bring their beer to the tent via horse-drawn cart. I think this picture sums up a lot about Oktoberfest. This is almost too sexy to post. Just look at Klaus' reaction (left) to my outfit.

Him singing:
"I see by your outfit, that you are a German."
Me singing:
"I see by your outfit you are a German, too."
Us singing to obvious non-German on the right:
"We see by our outfits, that we are both Germans. If you get an outfit you can be a German, too!"

Some other Sexy hits:

One O'Clock, Two O'Clock, Three O'Clock, Sexy!
We did actually make it into Munich on day two. This picture was taken sometime after the loss of the cell phone but before the loss of the wallet.

We're standing in front of the famed Rathaus-Glockenspiel. Apparently, twice-a-day the characters at the top spin around to tell two stories from the 16th century. Neither of these times worked for us. One of them was before we got up, I believe, and the other was in prime Fest time (And for those of you saying we could have taken some time out from the to come see this wonder of 16th century art... um, the Fest is only open until midnight, remember?)

Besides, we're planning on going back to Munich next year. Genau.

Of course, we must include the photo de resistance:

Sexy Back

Answer: A handy, a wallet, and a computer power supply

Question: Name three things that didn't survive the round trip to München.

Carnak was always one of my favorite characters on the old Johnny Carson show. (For those of you that are old enough to remember Carson. Oh, and for those of you still young enough, like our friend silversurfer, to still be able to access those memories.)

We are back from a wonderful trip, but when we got back our computer's power supply had died, so we've been trying to get that fixed. Simple enough it would seem, if we spoke the language, and understood why they don't sell dual voltage P/S in Germany, and could figure out what size screws we need to mount the thing back in the case. None of these are obvious to us. Thus, we have been behind in the blog.

However, like I said, the trip to Oktoberfest was great The first night we met up with some friends or ours and ended up losing the cell phone. The next night I lost my wallet, presumably on a ride, but who knows. We had prepared the wallet for just such an event, so only about ten bucks was lost.

The next post will include some photos and a summary of our Oktoberfest events, as soon as we get our computer fired up again.