I miss my microwave, Germans love Obama

Yesterday, while I was heating up my oatmeal in the morning, my microwave spontaneously stopped working. I've never known of a microwave to go from perfect working conidtion to completely dead like this. Usually when you hear about these things breaking down, people talk about them not heating as effectively as they used to, and eventually they give it up altogether. Not so with my microwave. Perfectly fine Wednesday morning, suddenly broken Thursday morning. I suspect the problem is electrical. You plug it into the wall and it does absolutely nothing. The clock display doesn't even light up. Yes, I did plug it into a different outlet to make sure that wasn't the problem. I also checked where the power cord goes into the back of the unit to see if anything was loose, but no dice.

Now, this microwave came with the apartment, which is a good thing and a bad thing. It's a good thing because I won't have to pay to replace it. But it's a bad thing because I have no idea how long it's going to take my landlords to fix this problem. I left them a message yesterday before I went to class, but they didn't call me back. I was halfway hoping that when I got back from campus last night there would just be a working microwave in my apartment, but no such luck. Considering I do not have an oven/stove in my place, the microwave is a fairly vital piece of equipment (I do have a Foreman grill and a hot plate, so it's not like I'm helpless, but it's still inconvenient). So far I've had no complaints at all about my landlord, but we'll see how this episode turns out.

I'm not going to write much about this now, although I'll talk about it again later (maybe when I get back from class tonight and I have more time). But I was watching the morning news and felt compelled to say something about this. If you've been following the news at all this week, you're probably aware that Barack Obama is currently doing a tour of countries overseas, and has been received very well. But in Germany the reaction to Obama was remarkable. 200,000 people showed up to see him give a speech in Berlin. Stop and really think about that for a minute. This is a guy who MIGHT become President of the United States in a few months, speaking to a crowd of Germans. I could obviously point out that even though Obama is known for drawing very large crowds by the standards of political events, 200,000 Americans are not going to go to an Obama speech. But that is not even an accurate comparison. Imagine if Dmitry Medvedev had made a speech in the United States when he was running for president of Russia, or Gordon Brown when he was trying to become England's Prime Minister, and 200,000 people showed up. We are talking about a candidate for an election in a foreign country. Can you even imagine that happening? I can't.

Now I'm trying to figure out what this means, aside from the rather obvious observation that the Germans must really like Barack Obama. I want to understand what this says about America, or about the election, or about Obama himself. I have a feeling the answer is going to be either completely irrelevant or very important.