1. The Imperial castle
2. Albrecht Dürer’s birthplace
3. The Nazi party rally grounds
4. Schwurgerichtssaal 600, where the Nuremberg trials took place
5. Executioner’s bridge
6. Beautiful fountain
7. St. Elisabeth
8. St. Johannis cemetery, a medieval cemetery, containing many old graves (Albrecht Dürer, Willibald Pirckheimer, and others).
9. Way of Human Rights
10. Craftmen’s courtyard
11. Marriage Roundabout
12. Nassau House
13. Medieval Dungeons

Click on the image below to view a photo album of all the sights (all images from wiki commons).

To give you a taste here are 13 examples…

• Aalst (n.) One who changes his name to be nearer the front
• Oystermouth (n.) One who can kiss and chew gum at the same time
• Nazeing (ptcpl. vb.) The rather unconvincing noises of pretended interest which an adult has to make when brought a small dull object for admiration by a child
• Malibu (n.) The height by which the top of a wave exceeds the height to which you have rolled up your trousers
• Margate (n.) a margate is a particular kind of commissionaire who sees you every day and is on cheerful Christian-name terms with you, then one day refuses to let you in because you’ve forgotten your identity card.
• Loberia (n.) Unshakeable belief that your ears stick out
• Lochranza (n.) The long unaccompanied wail in the middle of a Scottish folk song where the pipers nip round the corner for a couple of drinks
• Glud (n.) The pinkish mulch found in the bottom of a lady’s handbag
• Falster (n.) a long-winded, dishonest and completely incredible excuse used when the truth would have been completely acceptable.
• Dunino (n.) Someone who always wants to do whatever you want to do
• Bradworthy (n.) One who is skilled in the art of naming loaves
• Cafu (n.) The frustration of not being able to remember what an acronym stands for
• Zagreb (n.) A stranger  who suddenly clutches an intimate part of your body and then pretends they did it to prevent themselves falling

Oh, and a German example so you can see that it works just as well…

• Hilter (n.) Political agitator the masses are not happy with since he always misspeaks

To see what other T13ers are writing about please go to Thursday 13.

Image by firexbrat on flickr

Today I’ll show you some lovely book items I found on Etsy and other similar shops…

• Sony Reader cover. I bought one of those in February last year and still love mine. Those make your Reader look so much nicer.
• Library button or magnet
• Cute “I love books” zipper pouch
• Print: “Today a Reader, tomorrow a leader”. Awesome, I want one of these for the kids’ room.
• I like the idea of giving a book as a gift in this gift box.
• Whale book plates…too sweet! Great for kids.
• Romantic book cover
• Silver bookmark with nice dolphin and beads
• Book marks Origami style Learn how to make them yourself. It’s easy!
• If you have a Kindle or Nook you might want to have a look at these covers.
• Customize those modern looking book plates
• And customize those awesome book stamps
• Super cute book charm bracelet.

That’s it for today, but I could have continued this list for quite some time….

See what other T13ers blog about today!

Street of human rights and its languages

Here you can find more Thursday 13 participants.  

If you ever are in a situation where you only have some paper at hand and feel the need for let’s say a box or a medal (for whatever reason) those instructions might come in handy.

• A bookmark with a heart
• A CD case
• A crayon box
• A frame
• A photo album
• A bowl
• An envelope
• A box with lid
• A fan
• The alphabet
• A medal
• A checker board and pieces
• A basket

Have a look at what other Thursday 13ers are blogging about today.

Since I am working in the hotel business I was most interested in the hotel section of the book, but there are many more. Here is a selection of the hotel related “misadventures”.

1. Suggestive views from every window. (Amalfi, Italy)
2. Welcome to Hotel Cosys: where no one’s stranger. (India)
3. Guests are requested not to smoke or do other disgusting behaviours in bed. (Tokyo)
4. It is our intention to pleasure you every day. (Hamburg, Germany)
5. Measles not included in room charge. (Seoul)
6. If there is anything we can do to assist and help you, please do not contact us. (T’aipei, Taiwan)
7. The concierge immediately for informations. Please don’t wait last minutes. Then it will be too late to arrange any inconveniences. (Sorrento, Italy)
8. It is defended to promenade the corridors in the boots of the mountain in front of six hours. (Switzerland)
9. Not to perambulate the corridors in the hours of repose in the boots of ascension. (Austria)
10. If this is your first visit to the USSR, you are welcome to it. (Moscow)
11. If you want just conditions of warm in your room, please control yourself. (Japan)
12. You are invited to take advantage of the chambermaid. (Japan)
13. We highly recommend the hotel tart. (Torremolinos)

To see what other Thursday 13ers write about today, visit Thursday 13.

• The Lord of the Rings trilogy
  I don’t know how often I have seen it, I’ve seen it in the movie theatre and at home, the regular version, the director’s cut, with background comments of about every person thinkable and the making of. Love it.
• Misery
  About the only film after a Stephen King book that works, at least of the ones I have seen. Kathy Bates alone is worth watching it.
• Pride & Prejudice, the BBC mini series
  Well, Colin Firth is Mr. Darcy. I don’t need to say more, do I?
• Why didn’t they ask Evans? 
  A lot of Agatha Christie books have been turned into films that work, but I especially like this one. No Poirot, no Miss Marple, not even the Beresford couple, but two other sleuths. I could watch it again and again for its nice atmosphere, the landscape, the fashion, the clever plot and Leigh Lawson as Roger Bassington-ffrench (what a name!).
• Young Frankenstein
  I know, it is not exactly like the book (not quite), but it is so funny. Come on, who doesn’t like the scene with Abby Normal?
• Bram’ Stoker’s Dracula
  You know, the one with sexy Gary Oldman. My husband keeps telling me that Dracula is NOT a romance, but I don’t believe him.
• A room with a view
  The first film I saw Daniel Day Lewis in. Loved him. Oh, and the Italian setting and Julian Sands, of course. And the gorgeous Helena Bonham-Carter. James Ivory can do no wrong.
• A clockwork orange
  Malcolm McDowell as Alex – perfect.
• Dangerous Liaisons
  The book is great and so is the film. The cast is incredible. I loved John Malkovich as the Conte de Valmont.
• The unbearable lightness of being
  Book by Milan Kundera and Daniel Day Lewis in the film. This had to work for me. And it did.
• The Princess Bride
  Another Rob Reiner film. Who does not love The Princess Bride? And Cary Elwes as Wesley. Did you know that William Goldman who wrote the Princess Bride (book and screenplay) also wrote the screenplay for Misery?
• Rosemary’s Baby
  I loved the atmosphere in that building and Ruth Gordon as Minnie Castevet. Exactly like I pictured her when I read the book.
• The name of the rose
  Impressive castle, great cast, wonderful story. I think this was the first time I saw Christian Slater. But the character I remember best was Ron Perlman as Salvatore.

To see what other Thursday 13ers blogged about, go here.

Image by dropowtt at sxc.hu

1. How to read ‘Harry Potter and the Sorceror’s Stone’? Why, very quickly, to begin with, and perhaps also to make an end. Why read it? Presumably, if you cannot be persuaded to read anything better, Rowling will have to do.
Harold Bloom

2. Am reading more of Oscar Wilde. What a tiresome, affected sod.
Noel Coward

3. I have been reading a translation of Goethe’s ‘Wilhelm Meister.’ Is it good? To me it seems perhaps the very worst book I ever read. No Englishman could have written such a book. I cannot remember a single good page or idea….Is it all a practical joke? If it really is Goethe’s ‘Wilhelm Meister’ that I have been reading, I am glad I have never taken the trouble to learn German.
Samuel Butler

4. His work is evil, and he is one of those unhappy beings of whom one can say that it would be better had he never been born.
Anatole France about Emile Zola

5. A hack writer who would not have been considered fourth rate in Europe, who tricked out a few of the old proven sure fire literary skeletons with sufficient local color to intrigue the superficial and the lazy.
William Faulkner about Mark Twain

6. I am reading Proust for the first time. Very poor stuff. I think he was mentally defective.

Evelyn Waugh

7. Have you ever heard of anyone who drank while he worked? You’re thinking of Faulkner. He does sometimes — and I can tell right in the middle of a page when he’s had his first one.
Ernest Hemingway

8. I grow bored in France — and the main reason is that everybody here resembles Voltaire…the king of nincompoops, the prince of the superficial, the anti-artist, the spokesman of janitresses, the Father Gigone of the editors of Siecle.
Charles Baudelaire

9. He is a bad novelist and a fool. The combination usually makes for great popularity in the US.
Gore Vidal about Alexander Solzhenitsyn

10. If it were thought that anything I wrote was influenced by Robert Frost, I would take that particular work of mine, shred it, and flush it down the toilet, hoping not to clog the pipes….a more sententious, holding-forth old bore, who expected every hero-worshipping adenoidal little twerp of a student-poet to hang on his every word I never saw.
James Dickey

11. I am at a loss to understand why people hold Miss Austen’s novels at so high a rate, which seem to me vulgar in tone, sterile in artistic invention, imprisoned in their wretched conventions of English society, without genius, wit, or knowledge of the world.
Ralph Waldo Emerson

12. To me he is an enormously skillful f#*&-up and his book will do great damage to our country. Probably I should re-read it again to give you a truer answer. But I do not have to eat an entire bowl of scabs to know they are scabs…I hope he kills himself….
Ernest Hemingway about James Jones

13. Paradise Lost’ is one of the books which the reader admires and lays down, and forgets to take up again. None ever wished it longer than it is.
Samuel Johnson about Milton’s “Paradise Lost”

Go to Thursday 13 to read what other participants wrote about.

1. “yuputka” (Ulwa, Nicaragua) means “having the sensation of something crawling on one’s skin”
2. “nggregeli” (Indonesian) means “to drop something due to nerves”
3. “’alo’alo kiki” (Hawaiian) is “to dodge the rain by moving quickly”
4. “ngetem” (Indonesian) means “to stop (a bus) longer than necessary at unauthorized points along the route to the terminus to look for more paying passengers”
5. “kopuhia” (Rapa Nui, Easter Island) means “someone who disappears instead of dedicating himself to work”
6. “nglayap” (Indonesian) is "to wander far from home with no particular purpos"
7. “umudrovat se” (Czech) means “to philosophize oneself into the madhouse”
8. “guzuguzu” (Japanese) is “to vacillate, procrastinate or stretch out a job”
9. “pandir” (Indonesian) is someone who is stupid, but innocent and honest
10. “seka seka” (Bemba, Congo and Zambia) means “to laugh without reason”
11. “uttori” (Japanese) means “to be enraptured by the loveliness of something”
12. “tadlis” (Persian) is “to conceal the faults of goods on sale”
13. “cazar” (Spanish) means “to kick one’s opponent and not the ball”

All words are from “The Meaning of Tingo and other extraordinary words from around the world”. I am somewhat doubtful that verything is 100% correct, since some of the German words in the book are slightly off. But nevertheless, they are fun.

Image from Hkuchera at flickr

Check out more Thursday13 participants!

1. The quick brown fox jumps over a lazy dog.
We all know this one and I’m sure everybody already speculated about why the fox (are foxes brown at all? I always thought they were reddish) jumps over a lazy dog. Why the fox would even get close to the dog after his experiences with fox hunting I don’t know. Maybe simply because the dog seems to be lazy. What if this is a feint? His goose will be cooked then.

2. Forsaking monastic tradition, twelve jovial friars gave up their vocation for a questionable existence on the flying trapeze.
Can’t say I blame them. However, from a monastic existence to the dangers of circus life in general (being eaten by lions, being trampled over by elephants, the ever present clowns) and the ones of the trapeze in particular is a big change. This proves without a doubt that living like a monk befuddles your mind in such a way that you can’t trust your own judgement anymore.

3. No kidding — Lorenzo called off his trip to visit Mexico City just because they told him the conquistadores were extinct.
OK, I thought people went to Mexico for sun bathing and jumping off cliffs. Not so Lorenzo. He obviously wanted to to meet some adventurers (also read: greedy bastards, in this case) and when he found out he is about 600 years too late he cancelled the whole trip. Bummer for him at the time of booking he was so determined that he forgot to pay for a travel cancellation insurance. Now he’s stuck with a 100% fee.

4. Jelly-like above the high wire, six quaking pachyderms kept the climax of the extravaganza in a dazzling state of flux.
It took me a while to even figure out what all those words mean. But now I got it. The quaking pachyderms on the high wire are a circus act (see no. 2). Every time the audience thinks that the last trick was the culmination of their unmet skills they go and do something even more astonishing, thus keeping the audience at the edge of their seat, never to be fully satisfied.

5. Ebenezer unexpectedly bagged two tranquil aardvarks with his jiffy vacuum cleaner.
John gave me a hint about this one. I’m no film buff and Dracula I only watch if it is done as a romance with a sexy Dracula (now you know I’ve never watched the one with Max Schreck). With his help however, I was able to pin the meaning of this one down. Ebenezer, the studio cleaner at Universal’s, was in charge of the tidying up of the set after filming Dracula with Bela Lugosi. By accident he vacuumed the aardvarks up (they had two, one the original one that appeared on screen and another one as a back-up). They were lying around dozing and he never thought to watch out for them. Thus their promising career came to a sudden and bitter end. So was Ebenezer’s when Universal found out their prize aardvarks were gone. Thankfully seven years later he found another job at RKO Radio Pictures as a leopard caretaker.

6. The explorer was frozen in his big kayak just after making queer discoveries.
What could he possibly have discovered that he was frozen in the kayak? Was he frozen because it was so cold or was he frozen because he was so stunned about his “queer” discoveries? I don’t want to go into that anymore, I’m afraid what I’m going to find out.

7. Jaded zombies acted quaintly but kept driving their oxen forward.
I know that zombies are all the rage at the moment, so I can’t resist having a few on this list as well. I know my fair share of zombies, after all I’ve read some Anita Blake books. Never have I heard of zombies harnessing oxen. Why would they need them? Zombies don’t eat veggies, so they wouldn’t need to plough the fields, would they? They only eat brains, as far as I know. On top of that, even quaint zombies would probably recognize the comfort of modern machines and use a tractor.

8. Amazingly few discotheques provide jukeboxes.
And why would they? Nobody in their right mind can be amazed about it. Jukeboxes are for ice cream parlours and diners of the fifties, not for modern clubs. You wouldn’t hear the jukebox music anyway over all that noise.

9. Pack my box with five dozen liquor jugs.
The person is obviously planning for an outing. Over here it was father’s day only recently. I don’t know whether other countries have that same excuse for the men to go out with their buddies and get pissed. It is an old tradition where they take a handcart with a barrel of beer or two and wander through the countryside only to call their wives in the evening to tell them to pick them up from God knows where. The pangram is the original request for his wife to prepare his provisions.

10. Painful zombies quickly watch a jinxed graveyard.
Zombies and graveyards just belong together. I suppose the zombies are watching the graveyard to make sure they can still go back into their graves once they are done above the ground. I wouldn’t be surprised to hear that Anita Blake has something to do with pain the zombies are suffering from OR / AND the jinxing. That woman can screw up anything!

11. Bored? Craving a pub quiz fix? Why, just come to the Royal Oak! 
Give the Royal Oak a wide berth! A pub quiz doesn’t sound like entertainment at all. It probably wouldn’t provide the necessary thrill to get you out of your funk. To give you an idea what to expect I found some pub quiz questions that might be asked.

From what book are the following first lines and who is its author?

It was love at first sight. The first time Yossarian saw the chaplain he fell madly in love with him. Yossarian was in the hospital with a pain in his liver that fell just short of being jaundice.

What year was “Carry on Doctor” released?

What song and which artist won the Eurovision song contest in 1976?

Now, isn’t that fun? Didn’t think so either.

12. All questions asked by five watched experts amaze the judge.
There was this show when I was a kid where self-proclaimed “experts” had to answer questions to prove how well they knew their subject (however obscure it was). This is a different take. The experts ASK the questions and someone totally unknowledgeable has to answer them. The most original answer (it doesn’t have to be necessarily true, but rather original and imaginative) wins the prize.

13. The last one is a famous German pangram, which also leaves a lot of room for speculation.
Franz jagt im komplett verwahrlosten Taxi quer durch Bayern.
(Franz chases in the completely run-down cab straight across Bavaria)

I can imagine a couple of scenarios:

• Franz is a bank robber and an old shabby taxi is the only one he could hi-jack to escape. He robbed a bank in the North of Bavaria and now tries to get to Italy (a popular hide-away country for Bavarian bank robbers) as soon as possible.
• Franz is a taxi driver and a slob. He owns his taxi and has never bothered to clean it up properly. The taxi association has investigated after a number of complaints from passengers about the poor state of the vehicle. To evade a fee and other penalties he is getting out of the city as quickly as possible to settle down somewhere else (preferably Italy, a popular retirement country for cab drivers on the run).

Check out more Thursday 13 participants!

If you want to find out the answers to the intriguing pub quiz questions, turn the page upside down.