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One Fest for the Beery

I've got good news and bad news for you today, site fans. And then some more good news, hopefully, but that will have to wait a bit.

First, the good news. Fresh off the presses and days ahead of schedule, the latest installment in the Zolton Does Amazon series over at ZuG.com is now live and ready for perusal. It's dubbed (Food) Safety First!, and it's laden with enough innuendo and multiple entendre to last you for a week.

The bad news is: ration that entendre. Because that's all you'll get (from me, anyway) for said week. For this afternoon, I'm off to merry old Deutschland, and my very first trip to the fabled Oktoberfest. The missus will be joining -- to share in the festivities and smooth out any legal wrinkles I might find myself in -- and in addition to the brew bashing in Munich, we'll be jaunting over to Berlin for a few days to see what's what over in that part of lederhosenland. Because we never know when we'll get back that way. Or when we'll be banned from returning that way. So we're packing in the fun like pig parts in a bratwurst. Just the way Frau Nature intended.

"If we somehow get lost and wind up in an area where English isn't spoken -- and history, karma, Murphy's Law and the second law of thermodynamics all conspire to dictate that THIS IS EXACTLY WHAT WILL HAPPEN -- then we're screwed."

I should point out -- if it's not already patently obvious -- that this trip has a very high probability of going south at some point. My wife and I are flying across the Atlantic to two cities that we've never visited, in a country where we don't speak the language, for the express purpose of drinking copious amounts of alcohol, and relying on forms of transportation over which we have no iota of control. We're approximately as likely to make it back home safe and on time as we are to wind up being fatted on gingerbread shingles and baked by some warty old emo hag who's into black gowns and broomsticks.

(Or in my case, 'further fatted'. Or possibly 'trimmed'. Maybe witches have gotten health conscious about nutrition, too, for all I know.)

Anyway, it's a bit of a crapshoot. I'm jetting to Germany armed only with "gutentag!", "bier, bitte!" and "hasenpfeffer fahrvergnugen!" in my repertoire for communicating with the natives. If we somehow get lost and wind up in an area where English isn't spoken -- and history, karma, Murphy's Law and the second law of thermodynamics all conspire to dictate that THIS IS EXACTLY WHAT WILL HAPPEN -- then we're screwed. Or arrested. Or fattened and baked. Whichever takes the longest and hurts the most, probably.

And that's the other good news -- for you, at least. When -- *ahem*; IF -- I return, I'm sure to have lots of tales of misadventure, miscalculation and mispronunciation. And I'll gladly share anything of note that I can manage to remember.

(And which doesn't weaken any legal defense I might have to mount. Those Germans are real sticklers about their laws and such over there. I hear they can be a real bunch of Na- ...nah. I'm not gonna go there. Not until after a few biers, anyway.)

So have a great week here stateside, or wherever you happen to be. Chances are it'll be October-with-a-'c' before I'm able to update again, though if I can slip onto a network near the Fest-with-a-'k', I might surprise us both with a look-in. Or a lederhosen-in. Though I'm pretty certain nobody wants that.

For now, I'll simply say 'auf wiedersehen', 'gesundheit' and 'ich bin ein Oktoberfester!'

At some point, I'm hoping some friendly drunk German person will tell me what all of that means. Or at least hand over some of that gingerbread. I'm not so picky at this point.