From Adalbert Stifter to plastic dowels, from Sebastian Brant's "Ship of Fools" to the alarm system that the author's wife wishes for Christmas, from holy relics to unholy devotees: Alois Brandstetter approaches the details of everyday life and the big questions of existence with equal curiosity, sharp insight, and irony. Encounters with strange contemporaries or zeitgeist concepts become opportunities for reflections filled with knowledge and wisdom. The "certificate of life" that Brandstetter must submit annually to the German pension service inspires him to create one of the most vigorous and subtly humorous "signs of life" in this wonderfully entertaining volume.