Striking: Too much espresso damages the heart. Sometimes also the brain.

Striking Too much espresso damages the heart. Sometimes also the brain. Regular, so-called lavazzians are particularly at risk. The fact that their number is increasing every year is proven, among other things, by the success of the "Espresso & Fun" calendar, which photo artist David LaChapelle produced this year on behalf of the Italian coffee brand. The 2002 edition contains gaudy, phallic, oil-smeared and colorful impressions that say a lot about the needs of homo sapiens, vulgo macho. A sample of La-Chapele's photos appeared these days in Le Figaro magazine in the form of an ad. Want to see more? Click on www.espressoandfun .com and drink a Lavazza beforehand. For the purpose of expanding the coronary and, psst!, the cerebral vessels. Chandra Kurt
Column

Liz Sutter imagination
Movies on celluloid have been around for a little over a hundred years. Movies in the head have been around ever since people started dreaming. And ever since people have been able to buy books, people have been promoting reading because it allows them to make their own head movies. Why so many film critics are emphasizing this well-known fact so strongly during the release of "Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone" is hard to understand. Even less so why some are downright offended by the fact that the images Chris Columbus serves them do not match their own ideas.
Sometimes the images in your head can fool you: For an article about improvised sun hats, I was looking for a drawing of a man wearing a handkerchief on his head. I had seen it, but where? Sure. In the magazine, in an essay by Thomas Hürlimann about Gottfried Keller. Feverishly, I flipped through the magazine. Nothing. Only somewhere in the text a waiter making fun of the guest on the terrace: "Gezipfeltes Nastuch auf dem Grind!" I had simply imagined the appropriate image. Hopefully, I thought, I'll never have to give a witness statement.
"Take his gun away! Get the police!" I heard from the street. I rushed to the window, saw two men wedged into each other, blood on the asphalt. "Please, come quickly!", I cackled into the phone. The statement I later put on record was completely wrong. To me, the superior man was clearly the bad guy. I had not seen how the victim had managed to overpower the attacker. I had assigned the call for the police to the wrong person, that is, I had placed the speech bubble incorrectly. Obviously, you have to distrust not only all printed, broadcast and imagined images, but simply everything you see. So: Close your eyes and get through.
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Liz Sutter is a journalist.
Language Observer

It
It is cold. It's almost over. It's time to go. - When writer Yoko Tawada moves from Tokyo to Hamburg to learn German, she notices a little word that doesn't exist in Japanese: Es.
She looks it up in the textbook, and there it says that it doesn't mean anything, that it just fills a grammatical gap, since without it the subject of the sentence is missing, and since there are no sentences in German without a subject, it just jumps in.
For the rest, it is a pronoun. Example: "The house was so small that it could hardly be seen from this distance." Here it clearly reveals itself. It stands as a placeholder for the house, for a noun, which is why it is called a pronoun. But in a sentence like "It was just before eleven when the stranger arrived at the station."? What does It stand for here? For the time? Or, "It looked like it was about to rain." What does the first It stand for? What does the second one stand for? Does the second stand for the first? Or do they stand for different things?
When someone says "it is raining," there is something that causes water to drip onto the earth. When "someone is doing well," there is something that contributes. "It is possible that you will die tomorrow." Who created that possibility? God? Chance? Fate? Life in its inscrutability? The laws of physics?
We quickly arrive at the ultimate questions when we think about the little word that lives so modestly in its grammatical gap. It vegetates unrecognized under numerous names, it officiates as a conscientious placeholder, as a variable, as an unknown, as the X of innumerable equations. It is always in search of its solution, its value, its destiny. In the process, it transforms into something else in every sentence.
The creation story says, "Let there be light." And there was light. According to the Bible ("In the beginning was the Word"), it stands for the Word that transformed itself into real things on each day of creation, thus creating reality on earth: "There was evening, and there was morning..."
Whether in the beginning was the word or the power, the big bang or the chaos, deed, power or sense, reason, coincidence or divine providence: There was light. Up to this small word we can think in German, behind it the speculation begins.
Sigmund Freud must have suspected this when he divided the human psyche into superego, ego and id. The superego is determined by the moral laws of civilization. The ego is the subjective and therefore always sandwiched. The id is formed by the primordial, the instincts, the animal, the unclear, that which we cannot know - and perhaps do not want to know.
How is it possible for a language like Japanese to get by without the little word "it"? Beat Gloor, www.textcontrol.ch