Monthly Archives: May 2016

What is Fair Trade?

  • good working conditions on producers’ farms
  • transparency and accountability with regard to the whole supply chain
  • fair prices paid to producers
  • independent markets (guaranteed prices)
  • no child labour
  • respect for the environment
  • provide opportunities for development
  • no discrimination because of gender, colour of skin etc.

A better trade agreement

What would you change about TTIP, and what would a better trade agreement between then EU and the US look like?

Yvette, Martina, Steffi, Jana

  • reduce tariffs on essential items such as medical equipment and drugs

Nina, Celine, Stefan, Julian

  • reduce tariffs on cars, pharmaceutical and agricultural products
  • preserve Germnan standards of consumer protection

Anna, Cindy, Maria, Kim

  • maintain tariffs to avoid competition of cheap foreign products with local ones
  • maintain consumer protection laws, especially with regard to pesticides in agriculture

Alexander, Nga, Nadja

  • fair prices
  • keep EU standards on cosmetics (no testing on animals)

Strange creature

smiley with handsHere’s a puzzle:

What has a face and two hands but no arms or legs?

(Obviously, the answer is not ‘a smiley with two hands’.)

The lumbersexual

Would you like to be as free as this man?


All you have to do is grow a beard and join the ranks of the lumbersexuals, a new fashion and lifestyle trend for men. (If you’re a woman, there may still be hope even without a beard). Its typical exponent has been described by GearJunkie as

macbook-axeHe is bar-hopping, but he looks like he could fell a Norway Pine. He looks like a man of the woods, but works at The Nerdery, programming for a healthy salary and benefits. His backpack carries a MacBook Air, but looks like it should carry a lumberjack’s axe.

The commercial, by the way, was made by Urban Beard, a Canadian cosmetics company that sells organic beard grooming products.

My question to you: is this a real thing or just an invention of marketers? Does it appeal to you?

Quirkology

Today we talked about the word stunt, which is used differently in English than in German. Here’s a video about party stunts:


Richard Wiseman, a psychologist from the UK, also runs a blog with more interesting videos about optical illusions and the power of imagination.

By the way, Quirkology (the name of Richard’s YouTube channel) is a made-up word (from quirky = weird, eccentric and a standard Latin suffix). So quirkology is the science of the weird and eccentric.