Swedish babes and German babies

What a busy birthday weekend! I saw a movie (''Sweeny Todd''-- meh.); I had a mini-dinner party (and got a sweet house plant out of the deal); I proved to be the victor in a bowling match (they have ''Cosmic'' bowling here, too); and last night I saw Jens Lekman at the Mousoun Turm.

Jens is a Swedish indie rocker, but he sings in a beautifully pitched colloquial Ami English (he peppers lyrics with phrases like ''Here's the thing,'' and subsitiues ''O'' for zero. That's real fluency). He performed with a five-piece backing band that was comically über Swedish. All the girls dressed like Debbie Harry if Debbie Harry shopped in an Amish discount store. In other words, they were the type of blonde babes who drink a lot of tea, dabble in acrylics, and manage to pull off geometric haircuts. Jens rocked the house but couldn't manage to coax more than a few shy handclaps from the Germans. And when poor Jens tried to get everyone to snap on the beat, it was like he asked them to find the square root of 1,879,365. I understand that Sweden is in a mini- Baby Boom right now, and after seeing the babes in the band I understand why. The Swedes seem lighthearted enough (not to mention stylish enough) to want to reproduce. But not the Germans...

It's been widely reported that the German birthrate is in a ridiculous decline. People aren't having babies, and thus the government tries to persuade them to have children with cute advertising campiagns and loads of social services if a couple does reach the desired state. I now have new insight into this birthrate problem. On Saturday I tutored a young, unmarried couple in English. To give a contemporary spin to my vocab lesson, I made them read a People magazine article on Sarkozy and Bruni's wedding. It was easy enough, but when we got to the sentence ''Some are reporting that Bruni is already expecting,'' they looked at me blankly. ''Expecting what?'' they asked. I explained that it was short for expecting a baby, and they stared. ''Schwanger?!''I mimed a big belly. They nodded. I asked if they had a similar phrase in Germany, and they said they did, something about a women expecting a kind. ''But,'' my tutee said, ''We very rarely see that!''