It suddenly jumped out at me that you, as you say, keep some pretty eclectic company (it's "eclectic", right, not "egalitarian"?). I don't know if you go out of your way to meet colorful people or maybe it's just chance... I've got to confess, in the Russian knock-off Facebook that I'm on, I've only got 6 friends, and 5 of those only out of politeness - and all of them Russian, often quite stubbornly.

Also, that Wolfgang Hohlbein is hammer, as a German would say. I really haven't been so drawn in by any book for a long time... The only problem is I can't decide which store to buy the book in: Kindle or Google. They, or rather, their apps are both terrible, in different ways. Kindle relies on Bing for translation, which apparently is both slower than Google and sometimes doesn't make any sense. Whereas the way Google's text selection is implemented makes me not want to use it. And both of them, even though they have the information on the store, are constantly confused about which language the book is written in. I'm especially annoyed at Google which owns both the book app and the translator, so should have all the necessary tools... I mean, I know the language well enough so it doesn't hurt my understanding if I miss a word here or there. Still, I'd prefer the process to be both fun and educational...