Morning Stories

Fair warning — that was a pun. And it only really works in English. Which is precisely why this version exists. In German, the same line collapses into something flat: "Ach, vergiss es, Gapminder." That's the curious magic of language: meanings drift, shift, or simply fall apart in translation. Still, I found the sentence funny when I woke up, and even funnier once I was fully awake.

Motion is pure physics. Emotion is purely human. E-Motion is an electric vehicle. Anyone who has emotions — and occasionally shows them — has more than just trace elements of humanity to offer.

The elegant living room has always been an aspiration — ever since civilization, and interior design, were invented.

A sentence heard often and understood rarely has burned itself into memory. Precisely because it was blown into the air — the hot air — so many times. What could the underlying motivation have been, to push those four words plus exclamation mark into a small boy's ears?

Oh no! There he is again – popping up out of seemingly nowhere, without warning. When a word gets dissected into its parts, the original meaning starts to crumble a little. But the variants that emerge are all the more revealing. More often than not, the man – or, well, the man – steps out from the shadow of the word combination and makes himself at home. Again. Or maybe he never left.

Well, another word has nestled itself into the conversation — one that carries this particular, wake-you-up quality: Hopeium. A blend of hope and some metallic-sounding suffix, -ium. Hope is metallic? No. Hope is magnetic.

Two-edged? Isn't that just standard in the production of a sword? Anyway, the comparison doesn't limp — because the sword hasn't been used yet. Or so I think.

Either it was a one-time thing, a two-time thing, or maybe it happened several times—but “former” just sounds sad. Because that means it’s over, gone, vanished, extinguished. No—ended. Was that really the idea all along? When someone, in a moment of careless inspiration—probably over a beer—blew this notion into the void and then into law?

Does intelligence need a PhD? Or is it enough just to be inventive — to find solutions where others see walls?