It seems the Bundeswehr (German Armed Forces) is so shockingly underequipped these days that they are now even resorting to confiscating the letter Y in the word “Germany“ from random websites for reuse on their vehicles’ licence plates…
They were allotted that leftover letter back in 1955, as no German city or county starts with Y (except a Black Forest village named Yach, which is way too small, though, to have its own licence plate letter combination) and the obvious BW was already taken by the “Bundes-Wasserstraßen- und Schifffahrtsverwaltung“.
(I kid you not! This tongue twister and spelling monster terrifying learners of German translates as “Federal Waterways and Shipping Administration“, in the unlikely case you wanted to know.)
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Specially for you,
@Bravo, here is a picture of a feline Bundeswehr pet called Puma, which means “cougar” in English (and has no negative double entendre in German).
Yup, that’s exactly why the sportswear company of the same name has one of those mountain lions as their logo. And lest anyone should accuse me of camouflaged advertising, I’ll also quickly mention its biggest domestic rival, Adidas, which - believe it or not - is headquartered in the same Bavarian town named Herzogenaurach (near Nürnberg/Nuremberg actually)! The reason being, the companies’ founders were brothers - their lifelong feud is quite an interesting story that has also been made into a movie.
en.m.wikipedia.org
Little did the Dassler brothers know that one day their businesses would be eclipsed by an American company named after the Greek goddess Nike, the personification of victory. Doesn’t that strikingly resemble the story of two American tech giant rivals that each had developed a neuromorphic research chip, until a third company with a Greek chip name comes seemingly out of nowhere, joins the race with a commercial (!) chip in hand as their baton, swooshes past them, takes the lead and succeeds in maintaining it?! Awesome story, I hear you say? Well, let‘s better not take this analogy too far, though, as it doesn‘t bode well for Brainchip once we’ll find out that in Greek mythology the goddess Nike was a frequent attendant (or sometimes even considered just an attribute) of … Athena!
To calm our nerves, I’d suggest a rooting-for-the-underdog story of disruptive innovation instead: the biblical tale of David and Goliath, in which coincidentally a humble slingshot plays an important role…
