Wednesday, April 26, 2017

"What Do Germans Think of the Juicero?"

It's come to this, the Germans are making jokes, JOKES, at Silicon Valley's expense.

From The Awl:

Deutschland über us (now almost as strong as two human hands).
Despite the recently accepted honor of most important country in the world, Germany is a small place. Geographically, it is not even the size of Montana; its population (80 million very stern people) is about twice the size of California. At the same time, German speakers are very obsessed with the news: in parts of Germany and all of Austria, for example, the $7 price of a cup of coffee at a Kaffeehaus is justified because patrons can sit and nurse that coffee for ten hours while they read literally every single page of every single newspaper to which the Kaffeehaus subscribes precisely for that purpose. The result? When they run out of their own news (which they always do), Germans and Austrians keep up with news from all over the world — even when (prepare to spit out your breakfast cupcakes, Amis) that news doesn’t necessarily concern them.

And this means that even in a week when the Head Debutante of the West Wing shows up at a German women’s event and touts her daddy’s agenda (and gets reacted to extremely appropriately), there is still space in the German press for the most pressing issue in the world. (That was a pun, which is a German’s favorite method of humor, which is why Heidegger is so hilarious.) And the reason for the employment of that pun (explaining jokes is a German’s second-favorite method of humor) is that the German press still managed to weigh in on a certain American press…a juice press, that is. (GET IT? TWO USES OF THE WORD “PRESS.”)

What, pray tell, does the Teutonic media have to say about a certain $400 wifi-enabled kitchen gadget, one that squeezes juice out of pre-packaged packages of slightly thicker juice, with a unit of force that only people in Silicon Valley are meant to understand (despite it sharing a name with an actual unit of scientific measurement that measures something entirely unrelated to fruit juice) — a unit that, it turns out, is roughly equivalent to slightly less than the gripping power of two journalist hands? HAS THE JUICERO MADE THE GERMAN NEWS? HAS IT? HAS IT? HAS IT?
The answer is ja! First let’s check out jetzt (“now”), a Cool Young People’s Blog operated by the Süddeutsche Zeitung, aka the New York Times of Germany.
https://cdn-images-1.medium.com/max/800/1*ezfszFlWTwc1vM0QxG4Xjg.png
Screengrab: JETZT
This headline translates, loosely, thus: “The hipster juice press is all out of juice,” with juice having the same double meaning here that it does in English, GET IT? Why they didn’t go with the double meaning of press, which is also the same in their language and given our own media’s evisceration of the contraption, don’t know, but there you have it. Literally what it says is closer to “[With] the hipster juice press, the juice is turned off,” which, if you say it to yourself in a thick German accent, is indeed very funny. The piece itself is, as German humor tends to be when not punning, sandpaper-dry:
Anyone who quickly checks their pocket calculator to see just how much a glass of this juice costs will probably come to the conclusion that even Til Schweiger’s Hamburg tap water (at EUR 4,20 a liter) is almost a bargain. On the other hand: Normal juice presses don’t have WiFi — the end-all be-all argument of the Juicero’s adherents.
The best things about this paragraph, other than its reference to a pocket calculator and sick burns on Tils, the ill-fated bottled water venture of sexy German actor-man Til Schweiger, is lost in translation: the German word for “juicer,” Entsafter (ent-ZOFT-ur) literally means “de-juicer,” which, of course, is much more accurate; and, even better, the German expression I’ve translated to “end-all be-all” is Totschlag-Argument (TOTE-shlog-ar-goo-MENT), the first word of which literally means “death blow,” something I am betting Juicero founder Doug Evans would like to deal to the valiant hand-squeezers at Bloomberg that first broke this story.

Meanwhile, the Osnabrücker Zeitung — the functioning local newspaper out of the small Saxon town of Osnabrück — dispenses with both subtlety and puns, and wonders, simply:...MUCH MORE
All i can say in response is: Rocket Internet.
(note the subtlety symbolic use of red ink)